But Patrick was insistent. He wanted it known that he wasn’t a stalker, that it was all a big misunderstanding.
Finally, Mrs. Biederman thought she would settle the matter once and for all by sitting him in a room with the office secretary and the instructions that he was to come find her once she put in a call to the office to say she was ready, a silly game of hide-and-seek to prove a point, she’s said.
When she called, Patrick gave it some thought for a short moment, and he pictured Mrs. Biederman’s face and her billowy blouse until he had her image clearly in his head. Immediately he knew where to go. He got up, followed by the office secretary, and went directly to a classroom in a side-building of the school that wasn’t in use and where Mrs. Biederman sat waiting at a dusty student desk.
A fluke, she said. But she tried it again and again, and each time, Patrick followed through until Mrs. Biederman moved from doubt to a point of testing him to see how far it went by having the secretary drive him places around town. Each time, Patrick located her. They discovered that it worked with objects too. All Patrick had to do was be able to picture the object in his mind, sometimes aided by a photograph, and he intuitively knew where the object was located.
For a while, Patrick went back to his school life. His school work began to improve again, even though there were plenty of students who thought it was funny to pick on him. Still, he was confident in the knowledge that at least someone in his school believed him, even if it was only an eccentric high-school counselor and a few of the office workers who became involved in testing his skills.
But then, one day, a man found him in the hallway of his high school, a man who only introduced himself as Thomas and said he was a “government official.” He stood with Mrs. Biederman, dressed in a black cocktail-type dress that had some sort of red-lined cape attached to it to give it some flourish, her hands folded in front of her as she smiled down at Patrick, pleased as peach tea. This man, Thomas, wanted to see what Patrick could do for himself.
“He’s a friend, Patrick,” Mrs. Biederman said, and she nodded and put a hand on his shoulder to give him a little push.
Patrick showed him. Thomas tested him even further than Mrs. Biederman had, putting his skills to the test in remote places around the town of Florence, near the Siuslaw River in Oregon. Patrick tracked Thomas deep into the forest, using only his sense and ability, and that’s when the man said he wanted to take Patrick away to a special school. Thomas sat down with Patrick’s parents, along with Mrs. Biederman, and together, they persuaded his parents to let him go. In the space of a month, he was packed away and taken to a new school in a rural part of Virginia.
The school, it turned out, was sponsored by the US government. Alongside his algebra homework, Patrick learned the ins and outs of espionage and how to be an agent in the field. He wasn’t even the youngest in the school. From that day on, school was just a formality. He was an employee of the US government, as all the kids at this school were, working specifically for the CIA. When he turned eighteen, they sent him overseas for his first assignment abroad.
This ability is what made him so valuable to a strike team with the Navy SEALs. Soon, not only was the CIA and his SEAL team counting him for his seemingly sixth sense but other military commanders he encountered were requesting his assistance on missions too. Once he was even given a special assignment by the President himself through the US Ambassador in Afghanistan to locate a team of kidnapped Israeli Mossad agents working in Kabul. That was Patrick’s primary job: tracking and locating targets.
With practice, his skill grew too. After some time, he found he was also able to get a sense of how many were in a location. He was trained to perform a myriad of other duties, duties of a military nature, sometimes even on par with the skill of the SEALs he was embedded with, but anytime somebody or something needed to be found, it was Patrick who took point. No matter if it was a target in the wild or someone hiding in a crowded city, Patrick had the unique ability to get the job done. He had real value. In the military and in the CIA, nobody questioned him about his ability. They were just happy he was capable of doing his job.
And he was capable. His talent worked. Until it didn’t.
But this job was going to be an easy one, he told himself. All he had to do was find this kid, and his team would be freed. A simple prospect for a man of his skill.
But his failure had sewn doubts. He’d come to believe his talent would never let him down. But it did—and at a time when it mattered most, when his team was captured. Something blocked him and made it impossible for him to get a sense of where the four guys he’d been in embedded with were located. These were guys he’d known for two years, guys that it took nothing to call up an image of each of them, right down to the weird way Pepper’s facial hair grew on his face, the ragged scar across Mick’s nose, the way Hawk’s grin always looked like he was about to lay a string of expletives across someone’s back, or how Hollis’s simple stare could make a grown man piss himself. His failure to find them shook his confidence.
He believed his big failure was the reason it took him longer than usual to get a feel for this kid’s location, even though he stared hard at the picture until he had every swoop of his hair memorized and imprinted on his brain. But nothing came to him when usually he had a sense of a general location in a matter of minutes. When he put his feelers out—that’s what he called it when he had to give a name to his process—nothing returned back to him, no stimulus to tell him which direction he needed to turn down mentally.
He stood up and walked to the open sliding-glass door and stepped out onto the balcony. The city of Chicago stretched out in front of him, the tall buildings of the John Hancock building and the Willis Tower and a variety of others. With the wind whipping at his hair, he closed his eyes and tried again. He concentrated hard, a mental push and pull, to get some sense of where his target, this college kid, waited for him to find.
“Liam Coyle?” Patrick whispered to the wind. “Where are you?”
His senses rode the wind. He imagined it like casting a net over the city below, down into the streets where cars honked and people walked. Somewhere in this city.
He was about to give up when he felt a familiar mental tug. It was faint like knocking through a thick wall, but it was there. Patrick turned and faced back into his room. The feeling came from the north. As he stepped back into the room, he didn’t let it go. He gripped onto it mentally until he felt his link with his target grow stronger. He resisted the urge to sit, a flood of relief as his talent took hold. It was only a matter of time now.
Patrick grabbed his jacket on the way out and hurried down the elevator to the lobby where he hailed a taxi.
“Where to?” the driver asked him.
“North,” Patrick said.
The driver looked at him with a frown. “I need an address or a cross street or something, buddy.”
“I’ll tell you when I know,” Patrick said, and he got into the back seat and closed the door.
“It’s your money,” the driver said, and he pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
Traffic was thick in the city, and it took them quite some time just to get a couple of blocks. But Patrick kept his focus on the pull of his target. With each slow roll of the cab’s wheels, the pull grew stronger. This was why he took a cab instead of walking. For one, he wasn’t sure where he was going, but more importantly, he was able to relax and let his mind reach out to his target, this kid, and work on chipping away at the thick block that was there before. It was almost as if he had to shove through it with brute force.
But it was working. It was working!
“Turn here,” Patrick said once they crossed the river and drove a little further out of Chicago’s Loop. The traffic thinned enough that they were able to pick up a little speed. “Left.” The driver did as commanded. He was definitely getting close now. “Stop!” he said, finally, and the cabbie pulled over. “I’ll get out here.” Patrick paid the
driver and got out onto the sidewalk.
There were several shops, clothing stores and a couple of restaurants. But Patrick turned and faced a café in a direct diagonal from where he stood across the street.
Patrick jaywalked across, weaving his way through cars and causing one driver to honk a long horn as he jogged over to the other sidewalk. The feeling drew him toward the plate-glass window of the café, and he stopped to peer inside. Somewhere in the café was his target. There was no doubt. The feeling was so strong that it almost made him break out into an excited kind of sweat.
Then, Patrick saw him. He stood behind the counter, making a coffee drink, completely oblivious to Patrick standing there and watching him. There was no question that it was Liam, the one he was sent to find. Even with the difference in years, the face he stared at bore a strong resemblance to the picture provided in the packet he picked up from the man in the diner. The other part was the sense he’d grown more than accustomed to, an internal sense that rang like a struck tuning fork in his head when he got close to the one he was searching for.
But there was something else, a new kind of tug in his mind, a pull that he wasn’t used to and wasn’t prepared for.
This is where I am supposed to be. Patrick understood this to the core of his soul. This guy, Liam Coyle, was somebody Patrick was meant to know.
He wasn’t sure how the realization made it into his mind, but there it was. Seeing this guy, Liam, was like being born in one country only to live outside of it for most of his life, then, upon a return to the birthplace, knowing, this is what home feels like.
Liam Coyle was the hand grasping toward Patrick’s own outstretched hand.
As if he felt Patrick’s eyes on him, Liam stopped what he was doing behind the counter, a look of confusion on his face as he peered out over the café customers. Then he turned and looked directly at Patrick.
Patrick’s pulse raced and he gulped down a surprising sense of excitement. When their eyes met, it only confirmed what Patrick sensed already. A door opened onto a bright, sunny world. He was supposed to see Liam. It made no sense and maybe it wasn’t supposed to. Wasn’t that how these things worked? Seeing Liam was like the answer to a question he never knew to ask. It was quite possibly the most important question of his life.
A guy bumped into him on the street. The guy turned around as he kept walking. “Watch it, asshole.” As if it was Patrick who had bumped into him.
It was enough to snap him back to his task. He turned and moved from the view of the café window where he stopped and stood against the brick facade of the building like he expected at any moment for Liam to come tearing out of the café door. It didn’t happen, and maybe he imagined the whole thing. Maybe there wasn’t some sort of mystical connection he felt in that moment. Maybe it was a simple glance out the window during the boredom of a tedious job.
Regardless, he was there for a purpose, and he had a mission to complete, one that would save his team from certain torture. He turned away from the café and walked down the street to figure out his next move.
Chicago, IL
After his shift, Liam flopped down into a chair next to Nina and shoved his backpack beneath the table to lean next to his leg. He had a wrapped sandwich he pulled for himself from the bakery case. Justin sat in one of the nearby arm chairs with a book open in his lap, but he’d fallen asleep with his cheek squashed into the palm of his hand. Nina had her laptop open on a table. Liam leaned over to read what was on her screen as she scrolled through social media.
“I must have missed the Facebook class on the spring schedule,” Liam said with a bemused expression.
“Hush,” she said. “I’m in between study sprints.”
Liam unzipped his backpack. “I don’t know how you can study here. It’s too loud and distracting,” he said.
“To you. I find it relaxing.”
“Try working here for a day.”
Nina quickly typed something on her laptop, then she reached up and closed the lid. She turned full on to Liam and fixed him with a stern expression. “Okay, spill. What’s up with you?”
Liam turned his attention to the sandwich he had planned for lunch. “Nothing’s up. I’ve just had a weird couple of days. That’s all.”
“So I hear.” Emphasis on hear so that Liam felt appropriately chastised yet again. A flush came into his cheeks.
“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you. I didn’t really want to talk to anybody right after.”
She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. I’m not really mad.”
He shrugged and unwrapped his sandwich. “I didn’t figure you were. I had to get it right in my head first before I talked about it.”
“I thought group therapy types liked to talk first to work things out,” she said.
Liam shot her a look, one that said it was close to his turn to be mad.
“Kidding. God.” Nina knew about his attempts. She knew pretty much everything about him. “What did the cops say?”
“That it was an unfortunate accident.”
“And that’s all it is,” she said. “You can’t be responsible for another person’s crazy.”
“I know,” Liam said, and he took a bite of his sandwich.
Nina leaned forward and watched him for a moment almost to the point that Liam began to feel self-conscious. “Can I see the rock?”
He sighed. “It’s weird that you want to see it.”
“Why is it weird?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s tied to a man’s death. It feels almost morbid in a way.”
“It’s just a rock.”
“Exactly.” Liam tried to pretend that’s all it was even as he was intimately aware of how close he was to the stone right then. He could sense it like it was right next to his ankle as if the stone had somehow moved in the bottom of his backpack so that the only thing separating them was the millimeters of fabric between the bag and Liam’s pant leg.
Nina stared at him some more until Liam finally put his sandwich down on the wrapping paper.
“Fine,” he said. He grabbed his backpack and dug around inside. When he found the stone, he was surprised at how warm it still felt, almost like it had been sitting in sunlight. He pulled it out and showed it to her.
It was an ordinary stone as far as Liam could tell. It was smooth and squared off on one side so it could stand on its own. The size of it was a little larger than the palm of Liam’s hand, small enough for him to grasp, but big enough that he couldn’t quite reach around the whole stone. It wasn’t just any type of rock that the homeless guy picked up off the ground, though, but something that had the appearance of being carved or shaped in some way. Maybe a piece from an old building that had fallen off.
“What do these mean?” Nina asked. She reached out and pointed to a side of the stone. Liam pulled the stone away before she could touch it. He wasn’t quite sure why.
But he knew what she was referring to. Earlier in the day, in the light of morning shining through his dorm-room window, he’d leaned closer with the stone in the palm of his hand, much like it was currently. Symbols marked up both sides of the stone, an ancient form of writing he guessed. Or something that made it appear ancient. “I don’t know. Maybe it was somebody’s art project.”
“It looks old,” she said.
“It’s rock. Of course it’s old.”
“No, I mean it looks like someone made this a long time ago.”
“Okay, Indiana Jones. Whatever you say.” Liam laughed a little. Then he felt guilty for laughing. A guy just died giving him this carved stone.
“Give it to me,” she said. She held out her hand.
“No.” Liam was serious in the way he said it. There was no play in his voice.
“I just want to hold it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nina said. She reached for his wrist and got a hold of it. “Like you said, it’s just a rock.” With
her other hand, she touched the stone.
Nina yelped and jumped back. She let go of Liam’s wrist and stared at him like he’d actually hit her himself. People in the café stopped what they were doing and stared. Justin even stirred and muttered something in his sleep.
After a long moment, Nina let out an uncomfortable laugh. “It shocked me,” she said.
Liam gave an apologetic smile and shrugged. “I said I didn’t think it was a good idea.” He put the stone back into his backpack and zipped the bag closed again.
“How is that possible?”
“Like I have answers. I’m not a scientist or archeologist or whatever.” Liam turned to his sandwich and continued eating.
“Geologist,” Nina said, still holding her hand close to her chest.
“Whatever.”
They spent some time in silence. Liam ate and Nina checked her phone. The shock seemed to zap her interest in the stone, though she glanced periodically at Liam’s backpack still on the floor next to him like she was considering something. She never verbalized her thoughts, which was unusual. And Liam didn’t push it.
Music from the café’s sound system played between them and filled their sudden silence, some eccentric guitar stuff that the owner liked to keep on loop. This was an independent coffee shop, so the owner forced them to listen to his own choice of music. It came off as pretentious café crap to Liam. It’s not Starbucks, the owner often repeated, even if a lot of the drinks were pretty much the same as any Starbucks. But then that was the case in pretty much any café across the country. Still, Liam liked the idea of working someplace that maintained its individuality, even if it was only in some small way.
“Hey, did you see a guy standing outside earlier?” Liam asked Nina.
She looked up from her phone. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 7