This woman was now fixated on me rather than on my parents’ supposed spying. How could I deflect her attention?
“I did not.” My face filled with fake concern. “Most women I’ve met over the years do not like being pursued or stalked. I figured Mercedes had found someone else she preferred to be with. Isn’t that what you do in your personal life?”
Brief irritation flickered through Van Groot’s mind, then her professional manner took control. “Mr. Webster, my work assignment concerns adult children of lab workers like yourself. My personal life has no relevance. Tell me, is there some reason you have for not dating any women? Your REI colleague Billy Jackson said you don’t date. Why is that?”
♦ ♦ ♦
Janet waited for Webster’s response. As she waited, she wondered how much of the emotion he’d shown was real and how much was fabricated. It was very clear this young man was being very guarded in what he said about his parents, and even more guarded in what he said about himself. Why? What was he hiding?
The dark blue eyes speared into her. “I’m not ready for marriage or for a relationship,” he said, his voice tone evenly modulated with no hint of anger, as would be normal. “I have limited income and very little in savings. I live in this small apartment to save money for the future. I’d like to travel overseas on my own, maybe tour India. I’ve attended some sessions at our local Buddhist temple and learning more about Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha appeals to me.” His lips pursed as if he were being thoughtful. “You look almost too young to be an FBI agent. Aren’t you working on building your career, before you decide on whether to have some kids?”
She took a deep breath. The verbal counter from Webster was too close to her own feelings. The attack almost made her forget her intention to ask him about other matters. Matters that her friend Beverly had raised.
“Mr. Webster, you are entitled to your private life as you choose to live it, as am I.” She gave him her ‘remote cop’ look. “Tell me, do all natives of New Mexico have the sing-song accent that I hear in your voice? Is there a Southwest accent?”
His face moved from neutral to guarded. “I talk the way I heard everyone else talk, when I was growing up in Los Alamos. Lots of folks there are native to this state. Whatever you are hearing in my voice is normal to this state.”
She understood that. What struck her most forcefully was how similar his voice and speaking cadence were to the words she had heard spoken by the Green Mask intruder during his rescue of the Gateway Arch hostages. Beverly had downloaded to Janet the agency’s full video and audio file of what their security cameras had observed. That file supplemented the public video uploaded to YouTube by the two women who had smartphone recorded the entire rescue event. Another thought hit her. The way Webster had walked since she’d met him was also similar to the way the intruder had walked. Webster shared other factors in common with the intruder. He was the same height, had straight black hair and blue eyes, looked to be about 160 pounds heavy, and was just 23, in the age range she and others had guessed for the Green Mask intruder. Plus this man worked for REI, which appeared to be the source for the hoodie and tennis shoes worn by the intruder during the Empire State Building rescue. Course there were thousands of young men like him in the Four Corners states. Including one she had met at the REI store and three she had seen while walking through the Railyard complex. Tall, lanky and black-haired seemed to be common among young men in the parts of New Mexico she had visited. Still, the similarities intrigued her. Time to bring out her surprise.
“Perhaps so, Mr. Webster. But would you tell me why you dye your red hair to black? Early photos of you from elementary school show you with red hair.”
Brief irritation crossed his face. She counted it as a victory hard won against the man’s tight emotional control.
“I don’t like to stand out. I learned in elementary school that kids who are different are bullied, harassed, made to feel bad.” He paused, his expression going neutral again. “When I was younger I never cared much about football teams or baseball RBI scores. While I competed in races in junior and senior high school, I never learned the names of famous athletes. My lack of interest in those things made me different from other kids. My red hair added to my differentness.” He paused and looked her over from her black pumps to her jacket collar. There was no hint of sexuality in the look. It was more like the look one gives to an unknown person who passes you on the sidewalk. Thoughtful and guarded was the look. “No one likes being an outsider. So when I started high school I began dying my hair black. It fit the hair colors of my parents. That matters to me.”
She could tell that from the irritation in his voice. What else did she need to know about this mystery who called himself Jeff Webster? It seemed the proper time to bring out her bomb.
“Tell me, Mr. Webster, why are you meeting regularly with Valery Stockton? I gather she is a social worker who specializes in counseling.”
His face went utterly blank, not even neutral. The blue eyes looked at her as if they were spears aimed directly at her heart.
“I visit Ms. Stockton for counseling on the depression I have felt ever since my father died when a DWI driver killed him in a head-on crash.” The words stopped. His fingers, she noticed, gripped the ends of his armrests. Tendons stood out on top of his hands. “And if you share any detail of my private medical history with anyone at my work or with anyone outside of the FBI, I will file a complaint with your agency’s ombudsman alleging emotional harassment. Am I understood?”
She licked her lips. This Webster was a tougher interview subject than any trainer she had worked under at Quantico. He gave nothing away that was not intended and his emotional control was as good as her own, maybe better. While his IQ was higher than her own, she had approached this meeting with confidence in her ability to interview subjects and to verbally massage them in a way that would cause them to volunteer personal information not often given to a stranger. Webster had met her best probing and had now tossed it back onto her lap. She felt glad there was no video of this interview, just the voice recording. She felt sure Joshua Lederberg would use any video against her. At least her friends Beverly and Helen Watanabe were supportive to her. Most of the women in the agency had learned they had to support each other when trying to advance against the entrenched male domination of the agency. She drew on that memory for her response.
“Mr. Webster, your employer REI volunteered the medical information to me when I reviewed their employee files earlier today. The fact of your visits was present in your counselor’s billing to the health insurance company used by your employer,” she said carefully. “I have not accessed your personal medical files, which would be a violation of federal law. Is that understood?”
“It is,” Webster said in a careful monotone. His blue eyes looked on her very coldly.
Well, time to move on. She had gained data on his father’s visit with a suspicious researcher from Belarussia, a state closely allied with Russia and still connected to that nation’s successor to the KGB. That would help her report. While he had not said anything about the mother’s meetings with foreign persons while overseas, the mother’s work at the CIO building was less sensitive than the father’s work on weapons designs. Still, she could not get over how similar in appearance, tone of voice, stance, walk and manner young Webster was to the Green Mask intruder. She would keep an eye on his cell phone and its travels, including any outside of New Mexico. She might tune in tonight to the digital camera on the back of his cell phone and see what it showed her about what Webster did at night. Beyond sleeping. She grabbed the recorder, put it into her purse and stood up. She caught the attention of her suspect.
“Mr. Webster, thank you for speaking with me about your parents’ overseas travels. If you recall any further details of their conversations with persons overseas, please call me.” She put down her business card on the glass table lying between them.
He stood up but did not approach her. His inte
nse focus on her felt like an eagle circling above its prey. “I have no interest in further conversation with you.”
Janet could tell that. Too bad. He was an attractive young man and going out for a drink at one of Santa Fe’s musical night clubs might have been a pleasant mix of business and private enjoyment. She gave him a brief nod and headed for his door. Opening the door, she stepped out into the hallway. Behind her the door shut. Not with a slam but very firmly. She heard the deadbolt click into place. She turned and walked to the end of the hallway where stairs led down to ground level and the nearby parking lot. Idly she wondered where Webster kept his bicycle, which his coworker said he used to get to work. Dismissing the minor detail, she walked down the stairs, part of her wondering when the Green Mask intruder would show up again. And would anyone pull off his green bandana next time?
♦ ♦ ♦
The agent’s departure reminded me how often I felt ill at ease with strangers. All through elementary and junior high school I had had to be on guard to hide my abilities from other people. I’d held back on schoolyard chatter and when challenged to a foot race or arm wrestling, I’d either declined or pretended to lose to someone weaker than myself. The races I’d run as part of a team in junior high had given me moments of exhilaration as I used my levitation ability to push my body forward in space and time, while appearing to just run faster. Well, the visit of Special Agent Janet Van Groot had felt just like those early times when I had had to pretend weakness or act less capable than I knew I was.
Scanning her mind as she walked down the hallway to the stairs, I realized she had not given up on feeling puzzled about me and why I had no girlfriend or ‘real career’. She actually thought I was handsome and attractive. The image of me wearing my green bandana during the Gateway rescue flashed through her mind as she wondered if someone would pull off my bandana, thereby revealing the real me. Behind that thought lay memories of working with the black girl named Beverly on efforts by the FBI to track me down and figure out who I was. Those memories carried the facts that the agency had tied me to living in one of the Four Corners states based on the origin of the paraglider at the Denver REI store, my Southwest accent and, weirdly enough, the presence of chamisa pollen on the paraglider’s carrybag. That pollen said I lived in either Arizona or New Mexico. As I had expected, the agency was checking employee records for all REI stores in the four states, along with customer imagery of Men’s Wearhouse stores, based on the brand of my business suit. Damn. I had not counted on the feds being able to track my college graduation suit back to that store chain. Had I been photographed a year ago when I went into the Albuquerque store and bought the suit? Maybe the store had discarded their video records from that far in the past.
I locked the deadbolt and turned away from the door. Walking past the agent’s half-full water glass I sat in my recliner, reached down to the table, grabbed the National Geographic magazine and flipped it open to the section on India’s holy city of Varanasi. It was time to relax and remove all thought of Janet Van Groot and the FBI from my mind. Not so easy to do even with training in yoga and mindfulness meditation. And it was getting too dark in my corner of the room to read the magazine.
Looking over to the lamp that stood next to my recliner, I thought of the electricity running up the wire inside the pole of the upright lamp. The switch up top was broken and I had never bothered to buy a replacement. No matter. I mind focused on the ‘feel’ of the electricity running up the wire, hungrily searching for a way to link up with the other wire that ran down the pole and out to the wall socket. Electricity was almost ‘alive’ in how the current sought a way complete a circuit. Mentally I pushed on the end of the current, urging it to ‘flow’ through the air to the other side of the broken switch. Inside the lamp socket an arc happened. The circuit was completed. The lamp became bright.
Looking down at the magazine, I realized I could have rerouted the current to make an arc that would have given De Groot a bad shock, as if she had stuck a fork into a light socket. The manipulation of electricity through electrokinesis was something I’d learned to do in high school, when one of the school’s stadium lights had gone on the fritz. It had felt good, back then, to mentally locate the power line blockage, remove it mentally and then force the current up and into the stadium lamp.
The mental ‘feel’ of electricity was intoxicating. Doing that stadium thing had helped me realize I could also draw electricity to my body and let it run around and over me, with no harm so long as I had on rubber-soled shoes. My body’s natural electrical field would shield me even as electrical current ran over and around my body’s field. Once out at the meadow I’d called down a bolt of lightning just to see what it might feel like. It had felt even more alive than artificial electricity. Back in high school I had resisted the temptation to shock people by drawing down a lightning bolt from a stormy sky and then letting it flow off me and into a nearby rock or metal spike. People would have assumed I’d been ‘lucky’ to not be hurt. But the people watching would have forced me to go to the local Los Alamos Medical Center for a doctor checkout. Doctors I had learned to avoid years earlier. So I had resisted that high school temptation.
Just as I had now resisted a similar temptation to give Van Groot a shock. She already thought I was strange and unusual. Getting shocked at my apartment would only have added to the intensity of her determination to ‘figure me out’. Well, I had lived the years since I was four practicing how to avoid the curiosity of others. She would fail at her effort to figure me out. And I would continue to try my best to do what my Mom had wanted me to do. Which was to find a way to use my abilities to help other people. Shaking my head, I left behind parental memories and focused on the National Geographic article. The text included an essay about the location near to Varanasi where the Buddha had had his first enlightenment experience. Had this young Hindu prince been like me? Someone with unique abilities who sought to help other people? I didn’t know. But I hoped further research might show me the way to other people like myself. If they even existed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Andrew Steinbach sat stiffly in his office chair and looked across his desk at the three men seated before him. One was Mike Richardson from the SIOC office. A second was Leonard Ramsay, Richardson’s boss and the man in charge of the CIRG group. The third man was a new addition to the agency’s efforts at combatting the spurt in terror attacks within CONUS. He was Carlos Jackson, the new chief of the Terrorist Screening Center in the National Security Branch. The NSB man and the other two from the Criminal and Cyber Branch were the people in charge of analyzing the living and dead terrorists captured by agents and local police. They were also the people tasked with tracking down the Green Mask intruder. It was Friday morning and the three had arrived in response to his demand for an accounting of field intelligence and interrogation results. He fixed on Jackson. The man wore a full black beard, something unusual among most male agents. Beards could no longer be forbidden now that there were gas masks with adjustments for being worn over beards. Those new masks were also adjustable for the more slender faces of most women, which meant his agency had to redouble its recruiting efforts among recent women college graduates. Putting routine administration issues aside, he poked.
“Chief Jackson, what’s the story on the two jihadists captured in the Gateway Arch?”
Jackson’s gray eyes did not look at the view from Andrew’s seventh floor office. Nor did they look aside to Richardson and Ramsay. They focused on him.
“Deputy director, the jihadist slammed against the wall by the intruder is still unconscious and in hospital in St. Louis. Doctors report he has a badly fractured skull. They will perform surgery on him to relieve pressure on the man’s brain.” Jackson paused, lifting his smartphone and showing it to Andrew. On it was the image of a swarthy man with a short beard. “However, the other jihadist is conscious. We fingerprinted both men on site and used the local QCP laptop to identify them. Fractured skull is Mohammed K
han, a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, whose family heritage is Egyptian. He was born here. This man,” Jackson said, waving his phone, “is Omar Alkoury, an Afghan native and resident of Dusseldorf, Germany. He arrived here five weeks ago through the visa waiver program that applies to German citizens and residents. Alkoury is refusing to talk with us. The St. Louis field office told me this morning that Alkoury is now represented by a lawyer paid for by the Council on American Islamic Relations.”
Andrew felt sourness on his tongue. CAIR was an activist group that spouted the line that Islam was never violent. Yet the agency had known for years that its senior members and board of directors included known advocates of violent jihad. Despite newspaper articles to that effect, CAIR was still sought out by national media whenever they needed a spokesman on Islamic issues. “Understood. What do their mobile devices tell you?”
“Lots,” Jackson said, his manner intensely focused. “The two phones that were set up to send detonation signals to the TATP explosives also contained records of calls made since the phones were purchased. Plus the Nashville field office obtained Khan’s personal computer at his Memphis residence. Analysis of the phones and the computer by the Counterterrorism Division of the NSB documented seventeen calls made by Alkoury to a fellow jihadist in Dusseldorf. There were also three calls made to Raqqa in Syria.” The NSB man paused, then looked over to the other men in his office. “I asked for message analysis help from CIRG Chief Ramsay and from agents specialized in decrypting digital signals in Special Agent Richardson’s SIOC unit. All three of us concur that an Islamic State handler gave Alkoury the order to mount an attack on the Gateway Arch. Khan’s name was included in the IS message packet. That fits with an overseas trip record for Khan that records him flying to Istanbul in Turkey, then disappearing for a month before flying back to Memphis.”
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