Signus 1’s triangulation was underway on A2 in northwestern Netherlands. They were close to isolation, the target now responding to tracking measures.
That was the good news.
People were missing. Austin Bakken first, though there was no question as to who intercepted him. The wiped shuttle bus – their way of protecting operatives. Austin’s girl and the agent, Payant, had gone on the run. G2 teams would track them shortly unless the priests were dabbling there, too.
The picture of Austin stared back from the screen. Over twenty-four hours since they’d taken him and the predictable had not occurred. Recover physical assets and determine what the subject knew. If nothing, release. If exposed, eliminate. Neutral notification in either case. The communication hadn’t arrived, which meant either they still had custody of him or had run into a problem.
Or some kind of opportunity.
• • •
Darkening gray skies churned. Anki sat bundled up in heavy blankets with Johan on the roof. Nightfall descended and the lights of the port city ignited like miniature bonfires. An empty bottle of wine and a box of crackers lay next to their glasses. In the distance a cruise ship pulled away from the port of Den Holder, billowing steam into the wind.
In the hours since they made love Johan grew more concerned they might be tracking him through his thoughts. When he peaked with Anki, the familiar sense of otherness loomed, as if people were stealing from his senses, trying to get a look around him. While weaker than the stormy night in Oostendorp, it felt more intimate. To further complicate things, a feeling of unease had taken hold, subtle yet persistent. Perhaps it stemmed from Anki not making her decision or not sharing it if she had. Or maybe it was just a vulnerable feeling being outside the shell of the apartment. Whatever it was, it made time with her less enjoyable than it should have been.
“Where would we go, Gregor?”
“First to Elburg, my house there. I need my kit to become Max Dosch. I know people in South America. My associates. But...”
“What?”
He hesitated. “Anki, they will fabricate more murders. Uncover the Dosch identity. Make it harder to travel. They have my DNA now. Given what they can do, I don’t know all the dangers ahead. I can only do my best and that is also to say I may not escape.”
Her eyes held his. The wind tossed her hair about. A low groaning from the channel signaled a vessel getting underway. She breathed deep.
“I need to go with you. I’m compelled beyond all reason.” She smiled with puzzled and pained eyes. “I can guess at the danger and it’s enough for me to want to run the other way. Yet... and this sounds crazy, but I know history well, Gregor. We need great change. The world does. Something is driving you towards it, I can feel it. You need someone to face it with. You just do. I want to try with you, to push the change forward. As far as it can go.”
He felt the same imminent change and was validated by her words. He reached up and touched her hair. “I don’t want you to have regrets.”
She held his gaze. “No regrets.”
He held her tight, seizing the moment. A world of possibility spun around them. With a mental nod, he acknowledged their place in it and committed to the changes ahead.
Johan pulled the roof hatch shut and secured the bolt. He stepped off the ladder and padded to the closet to fold the blankets. Anki stored the crackers and checked the refrigerator.
“Ach. No eggs for morning.” She peeked out the window and down the street. “Baba’s is still open. I’ll run and get some. Shall I move your car again?”
“Good idea, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll be back in a few.” Anki slapped his butt and smiled on the way out. She grabbed his black box remote for starting the car and descended the stairs.
He stood in the empty apartment overwhelmed with gratitude for their alliance, for being led to her. Everything happens for a reason. He fell onto the couch and searched for a news channel on the television. There would be more on Mrs. Shulz’s murder, some indication on how close to tracking him they were, if at all. He found a news program and watched a story before a commercial break began.
The phone rang. He crossed to the base unit and waited for the machine to finish its announcement. He heard a noise from next door – or was it downstairs?
The tone sounded. “To the roof, now!” Anki’s voice was urgent, winded. “Stay low and meet me on the east end of the building, alley side. There’s a ladder there. Move now! Don’t forget your laptop!”
In seconds he grabbed the laptop and was fumbling with the hatch’s sliding bolt. Each step to the roof took an age. In the dimness he dodged roof vents, antenna guy wires, and skylights before finding the ladder. The Volvo approached in the alley below. He banged his knees in the rush to get down the ladder and ducked into the rear passenger door. It shut as Anki pulled forward.
“What’s happened?” Johan asked.
“Get down. Two cars in front of the shop. Four men each. They went right in.”
“It was locked! The alarm...?”
“It’s remote accessible by the service in case of fire. I saw them pull up and knew they were your seekers.” He slid down when two police cars flew past with lights flashing. “Gregor, those men, they were like dead men. Cold, like stone.”
“Fuck. How did they find me? What am I missing?”
He forced calm. The getaway to the coast had become a getaway from the coast. He had to learn how they were tracking him.
“Where to?” Anki asked. “This takes us past the airport.”
“No good.” He recalled the map he’d studied. “Take the coastal road to the N9 at Schoorl. We’ll decide from there.”
Anki drove silently, carefully. He laid down in back and breathed.
As he sought calm and emptied his mind, it struck him – the pressure, that sense of unease he’d been feeling... wasn’t his. Even now, heart thumping with fear, the uneasy emotion was there, a drab monotone anxiety clearly out of pace with the moment. The seekers were close enough to insert the emotion. He pushed at the connection by means of the pressure. As if in response, the pressure grew.
A live connection. Like a fish with a hook in his mouth.
Insane! He tried to reject it but the tension remained, leaning against his psyche. Stressed, uneasy, and not coming from him. Just as the video suggested, they were able to evoke and manipulate emotions in others. He had detected their manipulations amidst a storm of emotions: a small victory. It was time to take advantage, to take control of his experience. It might be a last chance.
Something tied him to them in a roundabout way. With it, they could inject the emotion and through his experience of that emotion could find him. Like ripples in the pond signaling back, they must use it to triangulate materially. It wasn’t tied to his body unless they had chipped him somehow. In that case, the chase was soon over.
If not something in his body, then it had to be in the nebulous region of his thoughts. Ignoring it wasn’t enough as it was too strong. If they were using his thoughts to identify him then he had to think differently, become different.
He followed impulse. As if shrugging out of a coat, he began to tweak emotion and ranged into happiness. Shift. Down into sadness. Shift. Outward into anger. Then over to serenity. Shift, shift. Whatever felt familiar and constant, he flipped. Old identity struggled to keep its form. Shift. Morphing, rejecting, birthing new emotion, a new self.
The pressure sagged noticeably but not enough.
He drew on memories and dove into them like scenes from a movie. Shift. A street vendor selling leather wallets in Oslo in the spring, two years prior. The vendor’s story was found in his eyes, etched on his face; a hard past, a new start, trying to stay out of trouble. He’d bought one. The vendor’s thanks was sincere. Shift. The woman reading a book at a bus stop in Rotterdam, the day before Crosstalk’s email. With all his being, he was there, replete in his ignorance of the file, reading the bus schedule on the sign. Shift. T
he truck driver hitting his brakes to avoid the three laughing girls. Hammering the horn with all his might; anger and relief blended into one feeling.
Away from the file... far away. Shift.
Großvater Bartel, angry with Johan for smoking hash at age fourteen. The disappointment. Shift. The nurse at the hospital asking how he’d been shot, her concern and suppressed attraction betrayed by her every touch. Shift. A small boy trying to fly a kite, his mama too busy chatting to offer help. The wind blew like mad, taunting the boy’s failed efforts. He’d stopped to help him like a father might, the mother suddenly interested not for her son, but in the handsome stranger.
Memories flipped in and out, some fast, others slowly, continuously shuffling. Emotions flowed. He lost himself, engaged in endless identities and situations of the past, a schizophrenic symphony of experience. Running invisibly alongside was the understanding he had to keep going to escape those who would claim him. It became a manic dream of beauty in randomness and chaos.
“Gregor..? Are you okay?”
Her voice threatened to break the stream, a window thrown open to an unwelcome light. The pressure had diminished but it wasn’t enough. Shooting past the urge to respond, he went deeper through memories like a driven wind. A fisherman arrived at port, back from a long day at sea, his hand bandaged from a nasty cut; dark red stains on a white cloth. Pain. Duty. Accomplishment.
Shift. Slower, deeper.
A school teacher wondered how she was going to help the young lad move past his parents’ death. Gray hair in a bun, face wrinkled from a lifetime of emotion, hands gentle as a warm blanket, eyes of compassion and ears made for understanding. How she worked for his success, truly giving and utterly loving...
Shift.
The cock-eyed bastard had killed the cat. Pat’s silly grin as he dangled it by its tail revealed the monster within. In Johan’s eyes, the boy was the same as the murderer who’d taken his family. Rage boiled and blew out in a savage attack, catching the brute off guard and off balance. The older boy fell backwards off the deck, landing in an awkward pile eight feet below. The wind pressed his face as he stared at the motionless bully.
Shift!
Abruptly, he was in the car again. The uneasiness had fled, leaving a familiar sense of control but also a sense of them, searching.
“That’s it... I’m clear.”
“What do you mean?” Anki asked.
“I think I’ve done it. They can’t find me and I think I see them. I’m sensing them. Where are we?”
“Groet. The N9 is a few miles ahead. Are you okay, Gregor? Why can’t they find you?”
“My vibe. However I made it onto their radar, I’m a different reading now. For the time being anyway. I need my laptop to get a map up.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror. “You are amazing, you know that?” She added, “But the incredibly bad news is that I’m cut off from my home, my business, my everything. My accounts! I need to pull out something, anything.”
“Anki, no. That would get you a few hundred euro only to put us on a pushpin map and give them a cordon area to work from.”
“Damn, you’re right. Gah!” She slapped the wheel. “It’s all gone then. I had imagined making plans.”
He paused. “You don’t have to do this. I can let you out and–”
“That’s not what I want.” She drove in silence for a time. “I’m okay. I want to help. That is what I want. To help.” She added, “But I want your real name. Your first name at least. I don’t like talking to an alias.”
“Johan.” Not his birth name but it was his own.
“Thank you, Johan. I love that name.”
“Money won’t be a problem if we can get clear.” He positioned the laptop on the floorboard and dimmed the screen’s brightness. “Where are we?”
“At Schoorl, coming up on the junction. I don’t think we’re being followed.”
“Let’s be sure. Hang on.” The map software loaded. He zoomed in. “Turn left when you reach the N9. Take the first right and tell me when you go over the bridge. In the meantime, take inventory of the cars behind you.”
“Understood.” She drove carefully, typically. The light ahead stayed green and she turned left onto the N9.
“Watch the cars.”
“Two came with me.” She turned right towards the bridge and watched the mirror. “One took the turn.”
“Lower the front windows completely. Rest your arm on the door, elbow out. Pass over the bridge then take the two next rights. The street will be named Sluisweg. Go slow there and pull over at the second house on the right. Tell me what you see.”
She made the first right turn and glanced in the side mirror.
“It’s there.”
He unzipped a side compartment of his laptop bag.
“I’m onto Sluisweg now. Second house? There’s a lot of light here, a street lamp. Is that okay?” The car slowed to a stop. “Here we are. What do I do?”
“Off the motor, leave the keys in the ignition. No dome light. Read your phone. Keep your elbow at the window.”
“Oh hell. It’s pulling in behind us.”
“Easy. Tell me who approaches and how.”
“My side, one woman. She’s got something behind her back.” She whispered, “She’s at the bumper...”
Positioned behind the driver’s seat, he relied on the jet-black tint of the windows to shield him. Fear flickered like lightning.
“Anki Raymer?” The woman bent to make eye contact.
Anki turned to respond, only to see a burnt red hole erupt next to the woman’s eye, accompanied by a single loud clack! Dark spray bloomed behind her blonde hair. The woman crumpled to the ground under the street lamp’s glare, her eyes searching listlessly.
“Drive, Anki. Go. Now.”
She started the car and pulled away.
“Turn right. Back on N9. Head south.”
Silence strained, uncomfortable and dark. He unscrewed the silencer from his Glock. “You know that I–”
“– had to, I know. I saw her gun. I’m just... It’s all happening too fast. Much too fast.”
He slipped the handgun into the bag. The pressure returned, an unwelcome train approaching. He reached up to touch her shoulder.
“The woman, what kind of feeling did you get from her? Same as the men at your place?”
“Yes. Closed off, shielded.”
“Okay. Relax, Anki. Find your center, your normal. Imagine it fully. Settle into it. The night is ours now, we are safe. Keep traveling south. Tell me when we approach Alkmaar. I have to meditate again.”
The odd tracking tension signaled clearly. Once more he began a journey away from the car and the memory of killing. He went with survival in mind, an intense focuser, and found the second time easier.
Memories flushed out became more meaningful, seen through eyes older and wiser. Without intention he visited the day, the most painful day he knew.
The city was elaborate and spanned his entire room. Mama let him leave them out as the last week of summer ended. An empty box was evidence of her support for his passion – another box of wooden blocks she’d purchased earlier in the afternoon. The church, the constable’s yard, the school, the three factories, the rows of houses, and the centerpiece, the king’s castle and moat filled with strips of a paper bag and plastic alligators. With utter concentration, he finished the castle’s tower, pleased to see he still had over a dozen blocks left over.
He rose carefully and tip toed around his wooden metropolis to fetch mama and papa. They would be so proud. He halted just shy of the den, listening. Their voices were urgent, hushed... something was wrong.
“... it shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it. It just is.” His father sounded worried, something he’d never heard before.
“Then why did he go to them? If he knew beforehand? This doesn’t add up, Vincent. We have to go, now.”
He hurried back to his room, afraid of being caught eavesdropping. He almo
st fell into his city as he stepped back into its midst. His parents’ footfalls sounded in the living room and then a loud crash shook the house. The tower of his castle toppled and Johan shrank in fear.
He heard his father’s command to stop followed by a metallic cough, then two more. His mama screamed and pounded down the hall toward his room.
She made it to the doorway and locked eyes with him before her chest opened up once, twice, accompanied by coughs and the air rushing from her lungs. She mouthed the words ‘I love you’ and fell into his city of blocks.
So surreal was the scene; he squatted in shock and stared at the small dark holes in her back. Her arms lay forward as if stretched to reach him. A pool of blood spread on the wood floor. A part of him knew what he’d just seen but the rest was lost, still gripping the previous moments of normalcy.
A man appeared in the doorway with a long pistol. He leveled it at Johan.
His deep voice filled the room. “Do you know anything, little boy?” The accent was thick and strange.
Johan could only shake his head.
“No, you wouldn’t yet, would you? Here now, your mama and papa are dead. They won’t be coming back. Do you want to be with them, too? Are do you want to stay alone here without them?”
In a moment of confusion, Johan wanted to be with his parents, of course, but could he? This man seemed to know more about death.
Something told him, no! He wanted to be alive.
“Could I live, please?”
The man smiled. The trigger finger twitched before the pistol lowered.
“Then you will live, little boy. Not a bad choice.”
The man left, closing the battered front door behind him. In the silence that followed, realization set in. Johan began to sob, then to cry with abandon. Neighbors eventually found him in his room, covering his mother’s body in wooden blocks – a burial of both his mama and of his life’s innocence.
Shift.
A burial service, two rectangles cut in the ground, and two caskets. It lasted so long, too many words that didn’t mean anything from people he didn’t really know. Only when his grandpa spoke did he take notice.
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