by Fiona Quinn
As we moved through the hallway on my floor, the buzz in the air stood the fine hairs on my body at full attention. It sucked the oxygen from the space. Gater was right. There was an element of anger – more than anger, vengeance and hatred—to this vibration.
Jack sat calmly on a stool outside of the Puzzle Room, leaning into the wall and telling an animated story. Axel and Randy helped Gater slide the Zen artwork into a transport case. Blaze rested his hand on another box, which I assumed was the Tsukamoto that had been hanging out here in the hall across from Striker’s and my offices.
I vibrated with the sensation and moved forward. As a science experiment, I sidled past Gater and put my hand on his back. He arched back like he was being burned. Your house is on fire, the knowing screamed through my brain. Your family will burn. I whipped my head around and stilled, staring at a translucent blue light in the vague form of a human. My hand gripped into Gater’s shirt. Gater spun toward me, and I pointed to the light. He turned in the direction my finger indicated.
It was exactly like the glow I had hallucinated when I was in prison. I had asked both General Coleridge and Major Trudy about the blue light, and both seemed surprised. They didn’t say it couldn’t happen — that the energy of a remote viewer couldn’t be visible to some people — I reminded myself. But they didn’t seem to think it was likely. When I was locked in the cell, I was so desperately afraid that I was going insane while held in solitary that seeing the blue light made me feel even more crazy and vulnerable. Especially since I could have sworn that the light recognized me. I thought when I was in the prison cell, it might have been an angel or a guide, but that hadn’t seemed right. Here and now, I knew there was nothing benevolent or holy about this thing. Right now, it felt damned angry – just the way Gater had described the energetic pulse he felt the morning before we went to visit General Elliot.
Gater reached around, winding his arm around my waist. The rest of our bewildered team stared down the seemingly empty hallway. We moved quickly to the Puzzle Room.
“Oh, man.” Gater washed his hand over his tightly cropped sun-kissed blond hair. “I should never be surprised by what happens when I’m around you. But that’s a first for me, ma’am. To tell truth, I’d rather go bare knuckles with grizzly than. . .” He put his hands over his face and arched back with a groan. “Alright, what kind of psychic craziness is happening? And does this have something to do with the art?”
“This has nothing to do with being psychic.”
Gater cocked his head to the side, his hands planted firmly on his hips.
“You and I have psychic sensibilities. That’s why we can see and feel what the others cannot. But what we are experiencing is not psychic in nature. Has nothing to do with being psychic. This is science, pure and simple. No, I take that back. This is science at its most impure and complex.”
Gater stuck a hip onto the tabletop and folded his arms. “There’s no buzz in here like out in the hall.”
He looked up to where I pointed at the bird-scares dangling from the ceiling.
“You want to explain why you’ve put up enough bird repellant to protect an orchard? Have you been watching too much Hitchcock?”
“I can’t tell you, Gater. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with this. Do you have your notes with you? Can I take a look?”
He pulled out the sheet of paper and handed it over.
“Looks like you’ve been moving up the scale. You hit an eight last night before you came to dinner.” I pulled out my phone. “Actually, you hit an eight just before you texted me. Where were you? What happened right around that time?”
“I was in Striker’s office. Nothing much was happening. I updated Striker on my search for Brody, which means I was telling him I’d found nada. It was a thirty-second conversation that included my directive to find you and keep Vine tangled in the weeds. The numbers were budging up the whole time but Striker ran out, and that’s when I got hit by the eight. Things calmed down to zero when I found Vine and invited her to go to the cafeteria with me to get something to eat while Striker threw his duffle together.”
“And this morning?”
“Since you said something about the art changing on the wall, and you asked me what happened next, I’ve been thinking that through, and I think you landed on something. About the time the art changed, is when all hell started breaking loose around here. Elliot went down for the count. Iniquus has been taking hit after hit. We know our success rate has sunk so low the operatives are walking around with their tails tucked between their legs. Morale’s in the dumpsters. Rumor has it our ledgers are bleeding red ink from having to take assignments that are sure to show up as financial losses on the books.”
“And why would we think of doing such a thing?” I mimicked his stance—arms akimbo, legs wide, my brows pulled tightly together.
“Because without them, we’d have no assignments at all. Command seems to think if we can post a few wins, we’ll get our swing back. Here’s a big problem with that—Iniquus needs to keep expenses to a minimum. The men aren’t getting everything they need as they need it.”
I absorbed these extra pieces of information. Striker told me about Iniquus’ spiral downward. But hearing it again reminded me how much was at stake. I thought back to Spyder’s and my flight on the Iniquus jet to see General Coleridge and felt a little uneasy about the others tightening their belts while we did not. As a matter of fact, Spyder told me I had whatever budget and resources I needed to get this job done. And since Iniquus very existence depended on our success, I planned to use them.
Spyder had sent word that he had collected all of the data from the necklaces. He was focused on swinging his sword at Omega, Sylanos, and the Assembly, but my target was Indigo. If I couldn’t decapitate him and bury his head, still chomping away, into the hole and cover it with a massive boulder, then beheading the other parts of the monster only bought us a bit of time. Indigo could regenerate those aspects. The more I thought this through, the more dire I found the consequences. And to be truthful, I couldn’t see a way to stop him. I needed to talk to Spyder.
I blinked and brought my attention back to Gater. “That puts our guys at risk in the field. Did that have any bearing on Fuller Mine and the D.O.A?”
“There’s a mole. Gotta be. I cain’t figure any other way around it.” Gater’s nostrils flared. “General Elliot’s gonna be some kind of ticked off to have left everything thriving and come back to this crisis if and when he recovers.” He pushed his weight onto his knuckles and leaned across the table, closing the space between us. “So is the art change a coincidence? Why the mad rush to get everything hung again?”
I pursed my lips.
“Other than laying eyes and ears around while removing the pieces, why would art have anything at all to do with our success and solvency?” he asked.
This must be what it was like for Striker when I hammered him with unanswerable questions—darned frustrating. I so wanted to lay everything out for Gater and get his perspective.
“Well, we know that’s not the case.” Gater continued. “Echo Force crawled the whole building, searching for bugs. Everyone’s saying it’s a mole. Just the thought that one of my best buds could be ratting us out sucks the joy out of working here. Used to be I wanted to breathe, drink, and eat this job. Right now, it’s a chore to come in.”
I reached out and squeezed Gater’s arm. “I’m so sorry this is happening, Gater. You will see improvements after today. I’m certain. There is no mole in the classic sense – but that’s between you and me, and no farther.”
“And this is science? That blue vapor in the hall was science?”
“Constructed in a laboratory, heavily researched for decades,” I said. “And I have probably seriously overstepped by telling you that. You, however, have a unique gift, and your notes over the next forty-eight hours are extremely important to my mission.”
A knock sounded at the door. I opened it for Deep.
“Hey, the picture’s back up, the teams moved on to their next piece, and I’m all yours.” He looked over at Gater. “Unless you need privacy.”
“We’re done.” I focused on Gater. “Getting the art back in place, it’s not busywork. It’s mission-specific and the sooner it’s done, the better.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Gater stood and left the room, looking like he’d eaten a fistful of sour grapes.
Deep went over to the computer. “Ready. What’s my first search?”
“Can you find contact information on Colonel Nelson Scott, US Army Retired?”
Thirty-Three
Nelson Scott was dead. He died in a car accident two days after he packed his desk up and walked away from the newly-defunded Galaxy Project’s office. That left only one US military-trained remote influencer alive. The day Nelson Scott wrapped his Honda around a tree was the same day that Allan Leverone went to see Dr. Laura East, the psychiatrist from the project who monitored the physical and mental health of the remote viewers. Leverone had been complaining of severe and recurrent headaches. She wanted him to check into the army hospital for testing. Once there, he was quickly transferred to the psych ward.
According to Deep’s hacked records, Leverone went on a course of drugs that basically put him into a stuporous state — hmmm. Like General Elliot. Leverone was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and they kept him medicated and out of commission for a year and a half before his wife accepted the ODPMC – Other Designated Physical or Mental Conditions discharge — on his behalf and was able to get him released and put into a private clinic to clean his system of the drugs.
Home again, Leverone had a visit from the Secret Service, who thought his mental health put the president at risk. If you read between the lines of that report, really, it was national security at risk. Even discredited by his seemingly fabricated diagnosis, Leverone wanted the world to know all about his work in influencing and that he had trained others. Others? How many others? Who were they? Did he really, or was this a ploy?
I remembered back to the Wyoming campfire when General Coleridge said he was protecting himself from wannabes, looky-loos, and influencers, but then said there were only two people who were chosen by the project to train in influencing, and they were chosen for their altruism. Altruism. It seemed Leverone experienced a seismic shift at the mental health hospital and became Indigo, the Puppet Master.
I was sitting on a rock near the water. The November sun glittered its doorknobbing protection across the surface. I picked up pebbles and threw them into the river, watching the concentric circles expand and multiply.
Deep had dug up 911 tapes from Leverone’s Maryland home. Paramedics and the hazmat unit deployed to find that someone from the Leverone household had shut the garage door with the generator running, following a massive electrical storm that left the area without electricity. Leverone had been awoken by his cat and managed to get the family out. I remembered General Coleridge telling me that one time, they almost took out one of our viewer’s whole family by setting up a generator in their garage and filling the house with carbon monoxide. It was Leverone’s. First sedated into oblivion, then attacked in his own home. My head spun with this new data.
A search of newspaper articles over the next few days found a warning about carbon monoxide and the dangers of using generators. The reporters held up the Leverones as the poster family for what could go wrong. Leverone’s wife and son died that night. He and his daughter were treated and released from the hospital in time to attend the funeral.
Who arranged for the funerals and paid for them if Leverone was hospitalized? I had asked. The funeral home listed General and Sandra Elliot on their receipt. Holy moly!
After the funeral, Allan Leverone disappeared and reemerged like Mr. Hyde in a new guise.
That could do it, I thought, tossing another rock into the river. I could go from altruistic to pure anger and vengeance if the government had killed to shut me up, and tried to kill me too. Major Trudy explained how it felt to wake up one day disowned by the country you served. Then to be hospitalized that way, removed from the service, name besmirched with a diagnosis that would cause people to discount every word spoken, then murdering his wife and son?
I have felt angry and vengeful for the things I have gone through over the last two years, and it was so miniscule in scope compared to what Allan Leverone had experienced. I let my mind wander, exploring how it would feel if I knew someone killed Striker because of me. The sensations that expanded out of my heart were so poisonous that I slammed the door on those thoughts. The lingering bitter aftertaste, though, told me I would turn over every rock and stone to find everyone involved, and I would crush them under my heel.
Boom. Gone. Leverone and his daughter. I would be, too. I’d disappear. That was a simple survival strategy.
Now Spyder and I knew that Leverone was called the Puppet Master, or Indigo. We didn’t know what legal alias he used for things like his driver’s license, housing and banking. Nor did we have anything on his daughter. There had been no follow-up. Deep couldn’t find a single entity–not police, not military, not any of the alphabets–who were keeping tabs on him.
Somehow the powers that be thought it important enough to drug him and attempt to kill him, but then, when he disappeared, he was out of sight, out of mind? That made no darned sense. Unless maybe he had used his specialized skillset to make this go away. Perhaps he used his influencing to make his name slip through the cracks of those who tried to find him so his file ended up shoved into the back of a dusty closet somewhere. Was that possible? Could someone energetically hide their name? It seemed to have worked on General Coleridge and Major Trudy. Of course, I’d need to verify, verify, verify. Right now I was thinking hypothetically, and this was all conjecture.
I needed information.
What I needed was my own remote viewer.
I swung by the grocery store and picked up a few bags of ingredients, then went to knock on Major Trudy’s door.
Major Trudy wore a clean shirt this time and his hair was professionally cut, unlike last time, when it looked like he’d hacked at his hair with a pair of round-nosed scissors. The pinched look around his eyes had eased a little.
“Yes, to whatever you want,” he said, opening the door.
I laughed. “So I can use your kitchen to cook up a roast?”
He swung his arm wide, directing me to his kitchen. “You’re buttering me up with cooking. You want more information.”
“You are a very smart man.” I grinned at him. “I thought I might put this in the oven to slow roast it, and while it was cooking, I could hire you.” I put the bags on the counter and started to unpack them.
“To read another list off?”
“I have a series of remote viewing tasks, and I’d like your input.” I reached out to wash my hands before I began. “I’m not trained to be a monitor, but I get the gist, especially about being careful not to lead you. I do have training in hypnotism, and that conversely has a lot to do with leading.”
Major Trudy handed me a roll of paper towels, and I trapped it between my elbow and body to tear off a couple of sheets.
He said, “The process, from the monitor’s point of view, has some aspects that are similar to hypnosis, especially record-keeping and monitoring the wellbeing of the person in an altered state. In hypnosis and remote viewing both, the goal is to gather information. In hypnosis, one can only gather information that is in the subject’s conscious or subconscious mind. In remote viewing, the information available is infinite.”
“Do you have a roasting pan?” I asked.
He reached into a lower cabinet and pulled one out, then laid out a cutting board and knife. “To monitor my wellbeing requires equipment, and I’m not set up for that.”
“Basic vital data, oxygen, blood pressure, heart rate? I brought that with me in my car.”
He scratched at his jaw, wiggled his lips, scrunched his nose, and lo
oked at the ceiling. Then he asked, “How much are you thinking of paying me?”
“One month’s mortgage for each of your sessions, as long as each session gives me actionable information. And, if I am successful on my mission, I will pay off your house completely.” That last sentence popped out of my mouth before I gave it full thought. How in the red was Iniquus? Did it matter? If I was successful on this mission, Iniqqus would have a renaissance and this money would be a drop in the bucket. If I failed, there would be no Iniquus.
He blinked. “You’re kidding.”
“No, sir, I am very serious.”
He blinked again. “You’re kidding.” He bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees, tears ran down his face. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
I respectfully gave him some space to deal with his emotions. I turned to the cutting board and worked on chopping up the onions and roasting vegetables. My roast should be big enough to feed him for a week. I hoped so. Major Trudy blew his nose in some paper towels, and splashed cold water on his face. General Coleridge said that being connected to the collective unconscious made stoicism impossible—emotions bubbled up too big and loud to hold them back. And I knew how embarrassing that could feel, especially for a soldier.
With Major Trudy lying comfortably on the blow-up mattress I had brought along, I hooked him up to the machines and reassured him that I was an EMT and knew what I was doing–well, as far as monitoring his vitals. He gave me a couple of pointers on how to conduct myself–mainly, I was to remain neutral, no matter what I saw or heard while he did the work.
I pulled out the first envelope. Deep had pulled up a random number generator and placed the number on the top of each. So even though I knew what all of the questions were, I didn’t know which one this was. It was a stretch, but I could still call it mostly-double blind.
Task number 9377269 (locate needed information)
HET – winking. I recognize this room. I’ve been here before.