by Tanya Allan
She positioned her self behind the door and waited.
The locked door was unlocked from the outside and slowly opened. Both men walked in, silently and quite confident that they could affect their purpose.
“Get the girl,” whispered one.
Michelle closed her eyes and focussed on this man’s brain. She found what he feared more than anything else in the world, and as he drew the covers back, she made him see the largest and most aggressive snake she could imagine.
The man screamed in real fear and ran from the room, leaving his colleague panicking and running after him. She made them run out of the hotel and across the road.
She then forced the second man to draw his pistol and shoot the first man in the back of the kneecap. The driver came up to see what was happening, and she made the gunman shoot him in the knee as well. Then she forced him to shoot himself in the foot.
Using all her will power, she imprinted on them an overwhelming desire to remain where they were, despite the pain, and to tell the police everything.
She then carried Gordon back to bed and placed him exactly how she remembered. Then she stripped off and was in beside him before the sirens arrived.
She released the deep sleep and allowed him to wake up.
“What the hell?” he said.
“Mmmm?” she said.
“Bloody sirens,” he said.
“What?” she said, feigning sleep.
He got up, going over to the window and looked out. Several police vehicles arrived and there was shouting.
“It looks like there’s been a shooting. There’s blood all over the snow.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” she said.
“Neither did I. Probably some gang warfare.”
They went back to bed, so he snuggled against her. She reached out and felt he was aroused.
Smiling, she gently stroked him, and within moments he had mounted her, with her gasping with pleasure.
The next morning, they were having breakfast in the hotel dining room, when two men came over and identified themselves as police detectives.
They spoke very little English, so Michelle had to translate.
“Mr Fenwick. We have detained three men who were involved in an attempt to kidnap you last night.”
“Kidnap us, why?” asked Gordon, shocked.
“It seems that the plant manager of your factory is heavily involved with some criminals, and has been diverting funds from the company into his own pocket for many months. Fearing you would discover his activities, he planned to kidnap and kill the pair of you, burn the plant, sell the machinery and equipment, and then claim it was destroyed in the fire and make a huge profit.”
“My God. How did you find all this out?” asked Gordon.
“It seems that the men who were paid to kidnap and kill you became involved in a very confusing incident, and for some reason one of them shot the other two, and then shot himself in the foot. They made no attempt to evade police, and have made very detailed confessions. It is very unusual.
“We have detained the manager and some of his staff. Five addresses have been searched and a lot of equipment and cash has been seized. We need you to identify the equipment to establish that it has been stolen from the plant.”
When they arrived at the plant, they found it shut. With a police guard on the main gate, several of the employees were baffled and upset. No one had told them why the plant was closed, and no one knew when it would reopen.
They went up to the office, to find several officers searching through the manager’s desk.
Michelle sat back, closed her eyes and sought out Dimitri. He was in a police cell some ten miles away and was very worried. She delved and discovered many things that he was terrified of the police discovering. Gordon was asked to wait as they looked for someone to take him to identify the stolen machinery.
They left Michelle alone in an office with a computer.
She quickly switched it on, created several documents, and downloaded Dimitri’s memories into typed format, typing with fluency in the Cyrillic script. She pressed PRINT, and then came out, leaving no saved copies. She switched the computer off again.
The paper copies printed out, so she simply collected them and carried them through to the police.
“Excuse me, but are these important?” she asked.
The Captain came over and took one look at the names dates and amounts, and almost kissed her.
“Where did you find these?”
She took them back into the office and pointed to the filing cabinet.
“They were at the back, I saw them just showing and wondered if they had been hidden on purpose.”
The Captain was suddenly filled with enthusiasm, so Michelle watched in quiet amusement as he told his subordinates that he was now in possession of key information incriminating some important criminals in the region.
She and Gordon were taken to an old farm, where, in a barn they were shown a pile of computer equipment, all of which was on the company stock list. He formally identified as belonging to the company, so the police photographed, bagged and tagged eveything.
As Gordon was busy listing all the items seized by the police, Michelle sat back and focussed back on Dimitri who was languishing in the cells. She managed to imprint a direct command on the man to confess to everything, and to literally tell the police everything he knew.
They were finally taken back to the plant, to find a large and angry crowd gathering. The factory had given the local people hope of a decent future, and now that future was looking doubtful again.
With many of the managers gone, there seemed little hope of opening up soon. Michelle persuaded Gordon to try to recruit managers from the shop floor.
She went out and faced the crowd. She explained what had happened and asked them for their patience as they tried to get everything running again. She and Gordon interviewed thirty hopefuls and they selected a temporary management team.
It was a long day, but by eight in the evening, the systems started up, and although running at a quarter capacity, the plant was operational again. The workers cheered, and Michelle and Gordon were suddenly the heroes of the town.
Fearful of losing a day’s wage, the workers worked until midnight, and managed to catch up a little on the back orders. Meanwhile, Gordon discovered the order books, and worked out how much was needed in order to bring the plant up to full capacity, and then to reach optimum efficiency.
Michelle found herself suddenly the personnel/welfare officer, and had a line of people with dreadful problems who needed help and advice. It was gone two a.m. when she finally managed to see the back of the last person.
She found some blankets, and the pair of them settled down to sleep on the floor of the office.
They were woken at seven, when the workers turned up, and work was started again. Tired, hungry and feeling she needed a bath, Michelle dragged herself back to her little office and found a deputation of the local women.
“Hello, can I help you?” she asked.
One of the women stepped forward.
“We wanted to come and say thank you. We appreciate how much you have done to get the factory operating again, and it means a lot to us. You see without the factory, we should have no food, no clothes, and the school will close. We brought you some food.”
She handed over a tray, and on it there was a freshly baked loaf, some cheese and a bowl of local stew, a bottle of what was probably a lethal home brew, and some home made sweets.
Michelle was so surprised, and so tired, she sat down, and simply cried. Without being asked, the group of women, fifteen of them, just appointed themselves tasks, and helped clean up. Windows were washed, floors swept and cleaned, desks were dusted, and tools sorted.
There became a carnival atmosphere within the plant, and without any warning singing broke out. Gordon, who was on the phone to England, trying to get some urgent supplies sent out, came out of his office in some alarm. The
singing was so loud he thought it was a riot.
He found Michelle sitting on a table surrounded by a crowd of people singing. Considering she had had as little sleep as he had, and neither of them had had a shower this morning, she looked fantastic. He felt a familiar surge of desire, as she waved him over and handed him some food.
“Have some breakfast. I recommend the cheese, it’s very tasty.”
He sat with her, and was handed a steaming mug of bitter coffee.
“How’s it going?” she asked, between mouthfuls.
“Not bad, I’m surprised how well they are managing with what we have. That bastard had bled us dry, and then lied in all his reports.”
“I think we might have upset a few people by uncovering this little scam,” she observed.
“I’m bloody upset, so stuff them,” he said, with some feeling.
They spent a week at the plant. Gordon hadn’t anticipated spending so long there, but refused to leave until things were running efficiently. Much to the surprise of local chief of detectives, all the detained persons confessed so completely, that the police thought that they were being fed a red herring.
The facts were checked, and another seventeen arrests were made. Property, weapons, cash and drugs were seized, and the police were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of property that they recovered.
Having signed an agreement not to sell or dispose of any of the items, Gordon was delighted when the police returned all the stolen property, so it was returned to fulfil the functions for which they were originally intended.
They returned to the hotel for one last night before flying back to London the next day. Michelle was exhausted, so she collapsed and was asleep in no time. Gordon followed suit shortly afterwards.
Michelle awoke suddenly, and for a moment was disorientated. She immediately realised that there was a threat, and rolled out of bed as something was thrown through the window. She screamed and dived into the bath.
There was an enormous explosion and she passed out.
When she came to, she was completely deaf. There were men everywhere, firemen, paramedics and police. Someone helped her to her feet, and tried to talk to her.
She shook her head and pointed to her ears.
Then she saw what was left of Gordon being zipped up into a body bag.
“NOOO!” she screamed, rushing over to the gurney.
A police officer pulled her away, so she knelt on the glass-strewn floor and wept as the body was removed.
She was still wearing her nightdress, and someone managed to find some clothes that hadn’t been destroyed. They took her down the hall to a vacant room, where she dressed. She was shaking so much that the never thought she’d manage to get her bra done up.
She kept seeing the vision on the lump of meat that had been her fiancé. Tears just flowed, and she still couldn’t hear.
They helped her to an ambulance, as she had a large gash across her forehead along the hairline, and it took her to the local hospital.
There were about six people injured in the blast, with only one fatality - Gordon.
Armed police, looking more like Special Forces, were everywhere, so after she was given a few butterfly stitches, she was whisked to the police HQ.
Gradually, her hearing returned, but the shock had not subsided. It was like a surreal nightmare. People spoke to her, and perhaps she replied, she was not sure. The police chief was sympathetic, and told her that it was for the best that she was leaving Russia.
She stared at the man.
“I cannot leave now.” she said.
“What?”
“I must stay until the men who killed Gordon are caught.”
He had laughed at her.
“You must leave it to us,” he said.
She stared at him.
She probed his mind and found a petty bureaucrat, but not too corrupt, even by Russian standards.
She did, however, detect a mind with guilty knowledge, and close by. He was a policeman, but of low rank. She probed and found that he was in the pay of someone known as Big “I”.
She shook her head, and told the chief that she would take a few days to recover first.
They took a full statement first, and then arranged for her to be taken to another hotel, this time with a police guard. It was only five am.
Telling the guard that she was not feeling well she retired to her room, so he took up his post outside her door. She then changed into her black slacks, jumper and a leather jacket. She put on her stout pair of walking boots and slipped out of her window. This room was on the fourth floor, so she simply shinned down the drainpipe to the snow laden ground below.
She focussed her mind and sought out the man whom she had touched in the police station. He was in a vehicle, on the other side of town. The vehicle was stationary.
She turned and started to jog in that direction, keeping to the side streets and in the shadows as much as possible.
The car was outside a block of flats, and the policeman was alone. He was smoking a cigarette and was obviously waiting for someone.
Michelle was across the street, so she watched.
She probed the vicinity and was not aware of any other person whose mind obtained the awareness as this one.
She looked up and down the street and, seeing no one, she crossed the road, opened the car’s rear door and slipped in behind the smoking policeman.
<
She found he was a minor pawn, used to keep his masters informed of police activity well in advance. He knew little about the attack, only that he had to make sure that police patrols were kept away for sufficient time for the bomb to be launched.
<
She kept low in the rear as they passed a couple of cars on the way. As she realised they were getting close, she told her slave to stop. He did so, and then she told him to drive back to where she had collected him, with an embedded command to forget the whole episode completely.
The location was a sawmill, just outside the town. There was one large structure, housing some of the larger machinery, and several other buildings, which only amounted to shacks. There were a couple of Nissen huts that contained trucks and other tree felling vehicles.
She approached very cautiously, as she sensed that there were about fifteen individuals here.
Three immediately stood out.
They were directly responsible for the attack on their hotel room, and were at this moment reporting back to the large man who was obviously their leader.
Almost too late, she walked round a corner and suddenly found herself just behind a man in a long coat, carrying a hunting rifle on a sling over his shoulder.
He was cold, tired and bored, and had his back to Michelle.
She reached out with her mind, so the man slumped onto the ground unconscious.
She found three more sentries, all equally ill-prepared, and just as easily dealt with. She explored the nearest shack, which proved to be an office of some kind. There was a telephone on a desk. She picked up the receiver and dialled for the police.
“There has been a shooting at the sawmill,” she said, in a heavily accented voice. She also left the receiver off the cradle.
She then approached the building in which she sensed the group were located. For a moment she hesitated, wondering how best to deal with these people. The last thing she wanted was to have any witnesses at all, so she simply tucked herself away in a cranny, and focussed her mind on the people in the building opposite.
There were three women, and none were more than sexual playthings for the leader and his lieutenants, so she induced irrepressible fatigue to come over them. This was neither unsurprising nor unexpected, so as they left and fell asleep, it was not even noticed.
There was a man by the door with an AK 47. She got into his mind and made him simply raise the weapon and start t
o shoot as many of the others as he could.
This caused others to turn their weapons on him and returned fire, so within a matter of seconds, he was dead, and she took over another, and so on.
The large boss, whose name was Ivan, ran out of a rear door. Michelle watched him go, and calmly and methodically finished up all that were left. The three men who had killed Gordon died, so she left her hiding place and quietly followed Ivan.
He had run to one of the vehicle sheds, and was now sitting in a Mercedes 4x4, turning the ignition over.
She walked into his line of sight, so he looked up and straight at her. The headlights were on, and he stared at this tall blonde woman with a scar across her brow.
She sensed his fear and confusion.
She caused a split in the HT lead, so this car was not going anywhere.
He realised it, so got out of the car, drawing a black self-loading pistol from his waistband.
“You! You bitch. Why?”
<
He fell to his knees, dropping the gun and holding his head with both hands. Thin trickles of pink fluid appeared from both ears, running down his thick neck.
He was an ugly man, swarthy and bull headed. He was about forty five and she was repelled by his mind, and all that he had done.
She played back everything to him. In moments, he was screaming and writhing in the snow.
She stopped and in the brief respite, he looked up at her. Her face pale and eyes very cold. This was not the face of mercy; it was the face of death.
Real fear gripped him.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am the Avenging Angel, and you are going to die!” she said in fluent accent free Russian. The first words she had spoken.
He was kneeling on the ground, so she walked over to him.
She looked down and their eyes met. Ivan lost bladder control, so a large dark patch grew at his crotch, and the white snow between his knees turned yellow.
She raised one finger on her right hand and pointed it at his head.
He frowned and almost smiled.