by Fiona Quinn
If this was Spyder getting ready to release all of the necklace data to the public — all of the information that would implicate the felons from Omega, Sylanos’ cartel, and the Assembly. Wow, the Assembly held so many of the decision-maker and power-holder positions in all branches of our government. They were like stage four cancer in our body politic. What would happen when they were exposed? America was going to get rocked on its foundations. Did Spyder review this with the President? Surely… no, there was no surely.
When the enormity of Hydra going down and Striker missing hit me, it came with such velocity that I almost landed on my butt again.
Work. That was what Spyder would tell me to do. Take one step, then another. Keep moving proactively. Me huddling in a ball in the corner wouldn’t help Striker. Screw the Hydra — I needed to focus on what was going on for Striker, and that journey started with the why.
“CODE YELLOW. CODE YELLOW. CODE YELLOW” came over the intercom.
My team moved to the supply closet and handed out bulletproof vests, helmets with face visors, and rifles. I accepted mine with confusion.
“We stay on task,” Jack said, as he strapped his vest in place, then laid his helmet and weapon within easy reach. He shot me a look that said, spill.
“My partner, your superior, ordered us to the safety zone. The rest is classified.”
He nodded. “No man left behind. Our job is to find Striker.”
I blew out hard. “There must have been psych evals. Grace Hays can’t work for the Secret Service if she were insane, so we aren’t looking at an Annie Wilkes here. This isn’t Stephen King’s Misery with a serial killer.” I crossed my fingers as I said that. “She has to have an agenda.”
“NASA does a lot of psych evals, too,” Blaze said.
Jack shook his head, not making the connection.
“You remember,” Blaze continued, “about nine or ten years ago, that chick who gave every man with a crazy ex in their rearview mirror a shiver?”
“Lisa Nowac?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know her,” I said.
“Yeah, you do. She’s the psycho who put on space diapers and drove from Houston to Florida, only stopping for gas, so she could have a little chat with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend,” Blaze explained.
“Why do you know that she was wearing diapers? Is this a joke?” I asked.
“She confronted the girlfriend and had shit in her trunk like a rubber hose, eight-inch knife, duct tape, plastic bags, a hammer, a wig, and some kind of gun.”
“Crap and they caught her? That’s not funny at all.”
“No one’s laughing,” Jack said.
“Vine didn’t come after me, though. She took Striker.”
“She may not know what your name is. She obviously wants a relationship back. She’s hit replay. This assignment and her antics are almost identical to what happened before they started dating. Striker might have explained that he wasn’t interested in having a relationship with her now because he’s in love with someone else,” Blaze said. “That might have made her desperate. Desperate circumstances lead to desperate measures.”
“And she may need him to tell her who you are. Which will never happen,” Deep said.
If she was a remote viewer, why couldn’t she just look? I stared at the floor while I considered this line of thinking. Striker was energetically dense, and I’d guess I was too. I shook my head. I was only speculating. I needed to verify, verify, verify. I had to start with facts before I could make such wild leaps.
“Okay, show of hand — who knows about the Galaxy Project and remote viewing?” I searched across the room. Every single hand was up. “That is what we are dealing with here. Allan Leverone was a member of the project, and he was tasked with three things, as far as I can tell. He did remote viewing. He was able to hide information using a protocol he was developing, and lastly, he was one of two influencers who were testing the Stanford protocol and methodology. The other influencer is deceased. I believe that Leverone taught his daughter what he knows. Or some of what he knows. While this is absolutely not psychic in nature, some people are still more dexterous with mastering the techniques than others. Allan Leverone is also known as Indigo and the Puppet Master. He headed the Assembly, Omega, and Sylanos’ cartel.”
Gator let out a long, low whistle that seemed to sum things up pretty well.
“A remote viewer believes that Striker was taken away in a camper and is now on the move,” I said. “Our best bet is for you to start culling through the information I brought in. I’m going up to forensics. They have a phone I stole last night. Cross your fingers, they pulled something off of it that we can act on.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Iniquus was normally an industrious place. Quiet. Focused. Well-oiled. Right now, the halls were filled with chatter. Everyone had donned a bulletproof vest and carried their helmets and rifles slung over their backs. It was odd to see — especially for the women in stockings and high heels.
“What’s going on?” I asked the first person I passed.
“No word. Probably a drill.”
Probably not. I hustled to the forensics department.
“The phones are owned by Allan Hays and Grace Hays. There are no other contacts on this phone. The only calls and text messages go between the two.”
“Were you able to get any text messages off?”
“Yeah, sure. Here, let me print them.” The investigator pulled up the print command. “Darned good thing you pulled the battery out of the phone,” he said, shoving his feet into the ground and propelling his stool backward toward the printer to gather the pages shooting out. “There was an app in there that could be triggered from a remote location — so from his computer, for example — that would use any existing battery life to fry the phone itself. This is your basic pre-paid burner phone, so hunting down any evidence after that would be nigh on impossible. Know what I mean?” he asked, holding out the pages.
“Thank you,” I yelled over my shoulder as I headed back to the safety zone.
I walked into our makeshift office and peeked at the TV, where some talking heads debated. It didn’t look like they knew our political world was in the process of imploding. I hunkered down in a chair and did a quick flip through the pages to see if my eye caught on any word that was key. I stopped when I saw “Dense.”
Cat — Must be doing something wrong.
Dad — What’s that?
Cat — Working on the protocol for influencing thoughts like you did for Frith and Elliot. Getting nowhere.
Frith? Indigo seeded thoughts into Jonathan Frith’s freaking abnormal-psych freak show of a mind?
Dad — Too dense. Come to dinner, and we’ll talk about it.
“Who’s free?” My eyes searched the room.
“What do you need, Lynx?” Blaze came toward me.
“Vine was trying to seed thoughts — do remote influencing — and wasn’t getting anywhere. She mentioned Frith and Elliot. Frith should have been easy to manipulate — his mind was probably very open to the ideas Indigo wanted to place — but General Elliot? Indigo must have come up with some special means.”
“Indigo seeded thoughts into the general’s mind?” Jack’s brows came together into one rigid line.
“I believe that the general’s illness is caused by an influencer attack.”
“What the what?” Blaze asked.
“We don’t have time for thorough explanations right now. I’m sorry. I need to go through this data and see how they got to General Elliot. That might be how Vine is trying to get into Striker’s brain and influence him now.”
“But this is a small portion of the data, Lynx,” Deep pointed out.
“Major Trudy said the information that was most likely to help me came from the desk drawers, and these are the images I took from that area.”
“Everyone in,” Jack said and handed out stacks of papers to the team.
Two hours, five sets of eyes, a
nd a whole lot of weird notes put up on the whiteboard. I was reading through the log in the loopier, more feminine hand, and I was scared out of my mind.
I sent up a prayer of thanksgiving that the protocol for remote viewing included copious and thorough notes for training purposes. It meant we had a really good look into not only the tasks they worked but also into Indigo’s and Vine’s thought processes.
I assumed the heart shapes in her notes represented Striker. I’d started plotting a timeline. Deep sat to my right, tracing the same time period for the logs written in the angular, heavier pen.
According to this diary/logbook, the crazy-ass love story started almost two years ago, when the Secret Service wanted Vine to play wife on an undercover. Her Secret Service job was one that her dad helped her get through manipulating the Assembly. She had risen up the ranks by having an uncanny knack for solving cases (using information gathered by her or her dad with remote viewing sessions). This was to be Vine’s first field assignment, and she had been afraid she was going to be kissing a frog for the next month. But low and behold, it was her Prince Charming. She was sure that destiny had placed them in each other’s paths.
As I scribbled those notes out, Deep sent me a wide-eyed gaze and shook his head. “It’s every guy’s bunny-boiler nightmare on steroids.”
I couldn’t disagree.
After Striker and Vine finished the assignment, when conflict of interest and protocol were no longer an issue, they started a relationship that read like an XXX erotica when my eyes caught words here and there. I tried to skim past the details of pulsing pink flesh and body positions. You don’t know if you’re reading about Striker here. This could be anyone. And we don’t know how fantasy-driven this is. It could be wishful thinking, I reminded myself.
The remote searches seemed to inform her of a wedding a couple of years in the future. A home. Children. And then she started scribbling names that she liked: Bartholomew Rheas and Katarina Marie Rheas, Xavier Francois Rheas… Xavier Francois Rheas? Ew. Okay, so much for hoping this wasn’t Striker.
She remote viewed him on his knee in front of the White House, fingers presenting a ring. I stared at the drawing. I had seen this ring design on Vine’s finger when we were at the hospital the night Striker was shot. Had he proposed to her in real life? Was this man she was viewing Striker? Striker told me he had never said “I love you” to anyone but me, and I believed him. Still, believe him.
Christmas came, and Vine didn’t receive the rings she had expected from her remote view. She thought maybe New Year’s Eve: “A new year, a new life together,” she wrote. But it turned out to be more “End of year, end of relationship.” The next few pages were filled with a raw, raging, emoting horror show of crazy thought processes. It sent a chill through me. And worse, my research was accompanied by the almost subsonic hum, Your house is on fire. It moved through my body like thunder, sending static electricity along my nerve endings, making the tiny hairs on my body float away from my skin.
My eyes startled up when a knock sounded at our door. A cafeteria worker pushed his cart into the room. “My name is Tony, and I’m supposed to keep you fed and hydrated. I wrote down my cell number. You need anything at all, call or text, and I’ll snap to.” He wore his bulletproof vest under a white apron.
Without answering, I moved forward in the diary. Vine did another remote viewing, which again showed the same scene of a man kneeling with the ring. “See?” She noted. “Striker was probably overwhelmed by his feelings for me and needed time to adjust.” Then she noted that the jeweler had called — her engagement ring and their bands were ready to be picked up. She knew they were exactly what Striker would have selected and purchased had he not been downrange. And he must be downrange, or he would have answered one of her myriad texts, emails, and calls. “It’s so hard to see him when I’m viewing. It’s almost impossible to get much on him at all. I have to task things around him instead — Dad said he was dense. As solid as a rock. I love that about him,” she wrote with lots of high school-like hearts drawn in the margins.
I held this part out for Deep to read. I was getting nauseated and the warm meaty smells rising from the food cart weren’t helping.
The next section described how Vine ran into Striker in real life, at a company function. He nodded but didn’t approach. When she moved toward him to find out when he had gotten back into town, he disappeared. Her remote viewing attempts got her nowhere, and that’s when she asked her dad to help.
I nudged Deep. “Have you got the pages from end of December, beginning of January, year before last?” I asked.
He rifled his pages and pulled them out.
Deep showed me the unmonitored remote viewing tasks from Indigo. Sure enough, a man holding up the rings in front of the Capitol building. And then the series of remote viewing that put me in the picture. Forward and back in time. Indigo’s ability to transcend time and space made putting everything on a timeline difficult to document. Indigo was looking for my life events that would make me the most vulnerable to viewing when he would best be able to gather information. When my dad died. When my mom died. When Spyder went off-grid. (With a side note of: That son of a fucking bitch — I can inform his missions — he comes out successfully because of MY work, and then claims “black ops” so he can’t testify in front of the Senate about how effective and necessary Galaxy Project is to America? We can save his ass time and again, but he can’t save ours in return?)
Then there were Indigo’s notes saying he couldn’t tell his daughter about me. He was afraid she would kill me outright and would probably end up in prison. He needed to task someone else in his organization with my murder. My murder? Deep reached out for my hand and held it tightly.
“Tabby Cat needs to find happiness. I owe her that.” Indigo had scribbled.
Me. He had wanted to kill me to clear the field for his daughter. Holy shit, this guy and his little girl were freaking sociopaths. Sweat made my underarms sticky. I pulled my hand from Deep’s with a little thank you smile and wiped my palms down my pants’ legs.
I scanned down. Indigo picked Jonathan Frith, his special marionette who was already working to punish those people who had spoken out the most vehemently against the Galaxy Project, as my assassin. Then came the list of names — the daughters and wives of agents in six different groups. Checkmarks after their names, and a note: killed by Travis Wilson. My stalker. My name had no checkmark, but the list extended on. There were dozens of women whose names were on Indigo’s hit list.
My brain whirred, and I couldn’t think linear thoughts. I flipped back and forth between remote viewing searches and influencing tasks and general notes. This log seemed to be all about me and how I affected Tabby Cat:
“Influencing Frith with intense joy in watching others suffer was not at all a stretch. He simply needed a nudge to go from daydreaming to action.”
“I had lunch today with Frith and showed him the doctored files that said that it was India A. Rueben, AKA Lexi, who disrupted his gold deal. Of course, it had in truth been the girl — but without my adding in her phone number and the phone log, Frith would never make the connection. Frith immediately tried to deny the scam, but I let him know I thought he was brilliant and that I appreciated his brains and mindset on my team. He wants his revenge.”
“Lexi is now homeless and friendless — Frith exploded her apartment building. He is a textbook opportunity to test my abilities of planting seeds of destruction. It’s almost like actually having strings attached to the man. If everyone were this simple, then I would be God.”
“Lexi was married. But her husband’s vehicle will hit an IED. Shit — that would have solved this problem. Lexi and Angel are very well-matched and have an intense connection. Frith says Rueben’s new name is Sobado.”
“Found Lexi hiding from her stalker in NYC. I sent Frith on her trail. When Lexi communicates Frith’s mind games to him, Spyder will feel the full brunt of what happens when loved ones are on th
e line, the fucker. A funeral wreath showing up at her door? Priceless. Ah, to be a fly on the wall. I think I will remote view for the sheer entertainment value.”
“Frith using his stooge Wilson to attack. I viewed Wilson slicing her open and bludgeoning her. I’ll get to check another woman off my list tonight. There are plenty more who need to suffer to the extent I have when they took my wife and son from me. Frith and Wilson will still have plenty of fun ahead of them.”
“Lynx.” Deep’s stern voice broke in. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your HOUSE is on fire. Your house is on FIRE. Your family will burn.
“Keep going with your reading, Deep.” I glanced around at the other eyes that turned to see what Deep was pointing out. “Anyone got anything about influencing General Elliot? Work from the time frame of his vacation.”
Eyes focused back on their log pages.
***
Making sure everyone had the same information and was up to speed, Jack stood at the whiteboard, re-telling the story. “Tabitha Leverone — AKA Tabby Cat, Grace Hays, and Scarlet Vine — fell in love and thought that what she was seeing in her remote viewing sessions was Striker proposing and the two of them living happily ever after.” Jack’s deep voice filled the room. “But as her dad pointed out to her, this was not a double-blind experiment, so she went into the remote viewing session with an agenda on her mind. What she was seeing probably held elements of the truth, but she was defining it along her desired parameters, or, as they termed such viewings during the Galaxy Program, ‘wishful thinking.’ She — wanting so desperately for Striker and her to be married — tainted the outcome of her remote viewing tasks,” Jack said, underlining the date on the timeline when Indigo got in on the picture.