by Dan Jolley
Stillwater brought the car to a stop beside the house. Vessler took a deep, silent breath and opened his door.
This arrangement was, without a doubt, the weirdest and most frustrating he’d ever dealt with. All the security measures, all the backups and teams he would normally have assigned to someone as valuable as Scott Charles had to go out the window. He knew that was necessary, but still didn’t like it. If Vessler had had his way, Scott would still have been sequestered, but in the middle of a company-owned property, with a decent perimeter guard and at least fifty employees on constant call.
After a knock on the solid oak front door and a brief wait, unnaturally heavy footsteps approached from inside, and Ned Fields opened the door and greeted them. A small, mousy-looking man, Fields gave Vessler no real clue whether he felt bored, relieved, or happy to see them. Fields said, “Come in.”
Vessler kept his face neutral as he nodded at Fields and moved past him.
Behind Vessler, Wong and Stillwater gave the smaller man a subtle but respectful berth. They’d heard more than enough about Ned Fields, and Vessler figured they’d keep their contact with him as polite as possible.
Fields moved away from the door, and the floor joists squealed beneath him. He went back and sat down in a specially reinforced chair near the front window. Vessler glanced around briefly; the interior was just as drab and unremarkable as the exterior, furnished as any other such home might be. Sofa, chairs, fireplace, television. Bookshelves.
Brenda Jorden walked out of the kitchen and greeted him. She wore a subdued dove-gray suit and looked twice as beautiful as the last time he’d seen her. She didn’t smile. That helped; twenty-seven years of uncompromising, professional self-control let Garrison Vessler deny himself virtually anything, but he still found Jorden a temptation.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Morning. How is he?”
“Just fine.” The trace of a frown passed over her face. “He picked something up last night, as I reported, held it for about an hour. But of course you know that, that’s why you’re here.” She paused. “It strained him. He complained of muscle cramps when he woke up, and I found a few spots of blood on his pillow.”
“You’ve attended to that?”
“Yes, sir.”
As he talked, Vessler started down the hallway, leaving Stillwater and Wong in the living room with Ned Fields.
Jorden fell in behind Vessler. He stopped outside the last door on the right, took a deep breath, knocked, and opened the door a second later.
Scott’s room had once been two rooms, but Redfell had had one of the walls knocked out. Now Scott lived in a long, rectangular space, one end devoted to his own comfort, the other dedicated to company business.
In the company’s half sat three desks, two computer workstations, and a portable fMRI machine equipped with a skullcap-style sensor cluster. The other end of the room, Scott’s end, had a bed, a TV, a dresser, and another computer. His own personal one. Scott sat in front of it, playing a video game, but stopped and swiveled around to greet Vessler.
“Good morning, sir,” Scott said. “How long are you staying?”
Vessler didn’t reply, but came into the room and sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair near the door. “A day or two...maybe longer. We’ll see.”
Scott’s eyes brightened, and Vessler felt about an inch tall, that even a bone that meager thrown to the boy could mean so much.
Redfell had classified Scott Charles as a “remote viewer.” A few different government agencies in a few different countries had tried to cultivate remote viewing specialists for decades, with a tiny bit of unpredictable success here and there. Scott was, as Derek Stamford had called him, “the real deal.”
The ability came with a heavy price. Scott’s fragile mental well-being depended on a tightly controlled environment. Thanks to careful training, Scott could pick out other augments, but he couldn’t abide the presence of large numbers of people, augmented or not. And so Redfell had placed him here, in the middle of nowhere, with at most a half dozen people around him at any given time. It was inconvenient beyond measure, but Vessler felt the benefits outweighed the costs.
Scott turned away from his computer, leaned back in his chair and stared at Vessler with huge, hollow magenta eyes. So thin, Vessler thought, a pang in his heart. He didn’t let it show on his face.
“How are you?” he finally asked.
The question made the boy laugh: a weak sound. “I’m all right, I guess.”
On some days Scott could display an acidic wit, but it didn’t look as if this were one of those days. Still, Vessler felt immense pride in Scott’s speech. The boy had only learned to talk about four years ago.
From the doorway Jorden said, “I’ll be in the living room.” Vessler paid her no attention, focused on Scott.
Scott Charles suffered from a severe pigment deficiency that left him extremely sensitive to sunlight—which didn’t matter, since he never left the house. Scott had a tendency to go into seizures if exposed to the mental presence of more than six other people at once; in addition to that, he carried inside him a tightly packed bundle of phobias—a Freudian psychoanalyst’s dream case—intense agoraphobia foremost among them. All windows in the house bore heavy, opaque draperies.
Scott’s fears were numerous and varied: spiders, cats, knives, needles, darkness, automobiles, as well as several other, more esoteric terrors, such as white-haired men and sheets of heavy black plastic.
Scott was actually something of a success story among the behavioral therapists and research technicians on Redfell’s payroll. When Vessler first brought him in, the white-coat types agreed unanimously: not viable. Don’t expect him to last, they said. A month, maybe six weeks at the most. Too many problems, too many complications. Too many recessive traits, expressed all at once. But Vessler believed in him, took some leave time to stay with him, and together they changed the prognosis.
Scott wasn’t normal, no, not by any standards, but after eighteen months of intense therapy, the child began to make real progress.
Away from the general population, Scott remained calm and focused. Now, sitting on the uncomfortable chair in Scott’s room, Vessler could hardly believe he was looking at the same boy he’d pulled out of the rotting house in New Jersey.
“Did you bring me anything?” A pause, then, hopefully: “...Doughnuts?”
“Sorry,” Vessler said. He reached into his inside coat pocket, brought out a video game and flipped it to Scott. The boy’s face lit up.
“Shadow Viscount 3! Cool! Have you played it?”
Vessler shook his head wearily. “My brain’s not geared right for those things.”
Vessler recalled the end of his last visit here, when Scott had accompanied him to the living room, creeping along the wall of the hallway like a ghost. He remembered the sudden change in the boy as the door swung open and shafts of sunlight speared into the house’s gloom.
Scott tried to stay, tried valiantly enough to make Vessler sick at heart, but his feet backed him away from the door. When the driver pulled Vessler’s car up in front of the house, Scott disappeared with a yelp down the hall, into his room. Vessler couldn’t get him to open the door, and had had to leave without saying goodbye.
The company fed Scott’s fears. Vessler knew it, participated in it. Hated himself for it.
He knew that, with proper therapy, Scott could probably overcome those fears, learn to live a totally normal life, walk outside in the sunshine and drive cars and visit zoos and doctors. But no one knew how precarious Scott’s abilities were, and since they functioned now, the company at large wanted him here, in its house, doing its work—especially now, since it looked as though he might become truly productive. Vessler wanted nothing more than to tell Scott, tell him everything about what they were doing.
Tell him why he had no reason
to love or trust anyone like Vessler.
But he didn’t.
Not for the first time, Vessler wondered when he had so profoundly lost control of his own company.
Scott popped open the game and tugged out the booklet.
As he read it, Vessler said, “Still in the book-of-the-month club?”
Scott didn’t look up. “I’m in three book-of-the-month clubs. They can’t keep up with me.”
Vessler sat and watched Scott read for a few moments before reluctantly shifting to business matters.
“So. I hear you found something for us?”
Scott nodded. “I wanted to ask you something, first, though, if that’s okay. Uh...sort of a private thing.”
Vessler shifted on the chair. He thought he recognized the tone in Scott’s voice, and didn’t know whether to feel happy or scared. He settled on apprehensive.
Scott got up, went to the door and looked down the hall. Apparently satisfied, he closed the door carefully and sat down on the edge of the bed. It took him a while to get the words out.
“Do you...do you ever...um. Look at. Uh...gir, ah, girls? ’Cause, um, the bathroom door doesn’t always close, I mean, it closes but it doesn’t always latch, y’know, and I was going to the kitchen a couple of days ago while Miss Jorden was in there, in the bathroom I mean, and the door had come open just a little, and she’d been, um, in the shower, and…”
Scott trailed off.
Vessler took a deep breath. Oh God. I am so unprepared for this. “And you saw her?”
The boy nodded, eyes on the floor. “I thought about asking Agent Fields about it, but, well, I...I wanted to talk to you. First, I mean.”
Vessler ran one hand over his face and squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds. “Tell you what. The company needs results from this trip, fast results, and I’ve got to get some answers right away. But as soon as we get this business taken care of, you and I will sit down and have a long talk, all right? Get all your questions answered?”
Scott’s eyes were like finely worked crystal as he looked up. In a tiny voice full of confusion and shame and curiosity and fear and everything else Vessler remembered from his own distant adolescence, Scott said, “Okay.”
“Okay. Well then.” Crisis averted. No...crisis postponed. Shit. “On to business, yes?”
“...Sure.”
Vessler’s muscles relaxed a notch or two, and while he tried to think of someone to call concerning advice to give to a socially non-functional teenager, he made a small mental note: Get the lock on the bathroom door fixed. Immediately.
Business. All Scott had done up to this point had been tests. Accurate tests, tests on which he’d performed unbelievably well, but tests nonetheless. This was real, and Vessler knew Scott felt eager to prove himself. Scott said, “Let me show you,” and opened the door to call to Agent Jorden.
Scott was so thin, thin and colorless.
This is wrong. This is so, so wrong.
Jorden came in and joined them in the end of Scott’s room devoted to company work.
She sat at one of the desks, flipped through screens on a tablet, and tapped a button on the keyboard in front of her. Looking at the monitor, she said, “Another body fitting the description turned up three days ago in a little jerkwater town in western Alabama. We made calls, put a lid on the local establishment before anything got out. As usual.” She paused, leaned back in the chair. “We’ve got detailed reports and files from each of the police agencies involved. It has all the signs of an augment, a powerful one, but we weren’t entirely sure until day before yesterday when Scott saw something.” She glanced at another sheet of paper. “If our hit is the same guy leaving these bodies around, we’re pretty certain his name is Simon Grove. If not, we’ll take the leash off. Let the Alabama state troopers have him.”
She handed Vessler a photograph taken from a Facebook page. Simon Grove, pale and dark-haired, didn’t look very happy.
Vessler’s normally grim expression didn’t change. “The mobile units are ready.”
Jorden said, “That’s another thing. The mobile units may not have to be so mobile. It looks like he’s headed here. To Atlanta.”
Vessler’s eyebrows went up. “Really. Here. Well. Scott?”
Scott sat down, cleared his throat, and rolled his chair over to the larger of the computer setups. He picked up the fMRI skullcap and slid it on with a familiarity that made Vessler’s stomach clench.
After a few seconds, Scott’s eyes lost focus—became what Ned Fields had referred to as the “thousand-mile stare.” The monitor in front of him flickered, turned gray and grainy, and slowly resolved into a series of shapes approximating Scott’s vision. Vessler stared at them until he realized he was looking at a gas station. A door on the rear of the building opened, and an orange-red vertical waveform moved out of it.
Scott’s talent registered inanimate objects more or less as they were, but that wasn’t the case for people. Instead of their bodies, Scott saw humans’ “signatures”—the distinctive patterns of energy that made each person unique. Ordinary people showed up on the fMRI monitor as thin, wavering lines, like an EKG readout turned on its side.
Augments, on the other hand, were impossible to mistake, their signatures much brighter, the waveforms heavier and more intense. And an augment had just walked out of that gas station restroom.
Vessler and Jorden pressed around him and watched the screen intently.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later Brenda Jorden left the house and drove into Marietta, ostensibly to buy groceries. She still saw the monitor whenever she blinked, filled with the grainy, static-distorted energy signature that represented their target. The new target resembled a blood-red bolt of lightning, dancing and flickering, and grew in intensity with every mile closer to them. Jorden drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she thought about it.
The one remaining pay phone in the area was at a Hardee’s. She stopped there and dropped several quarters into it.
The line only rang once before it picked up. Jorden didn’t wait for a greeting.
“When does he go back to Chicago?”
“Soon.” A man’s voice. “Maybe tomorrow. It depends on the results he gets from the kid.”
She paused. “I’ve got an idea. Can you hold off till I say?”
The voice tightened. “What idea? No one gave you clearance to modify anything.”
Clearance. She smiled. “Just follow me on this. I’ll give you details in a day or two.” She closed her eyes and imagined the energy signature, growing stronger. “If this pans out it’ll do your job and mine, with a lot less cleanup. If not, everything else is still in place.”
Hesitantly, Derek Stamford said, “All right. But I want a full briefing by Friday.”
“Not a problem.”
She hung up, got back in her car, and headed for a nearby Kroger.
CHAPTER FOUR
Zach Feygen took yet another swallow of coffee and ran his fingers across his smooth, deep-brown scalp. He hadn’t slept in thirty-nine hours, and his eyes felt as if they’d been sandpapered. He sat in front of a desk in an office on Spring Street, across from a small, slender white man with gray hair. Feygen felt exquisitely uncomfortable.
The gray-haired man was Lieutenant Burton Jenks, and despite his diminutive stature he could intimidate the hell out of anyone he chose to. Feygen was no exception.
“She disappeared,” Jenks repeated flatly, staring.
Feygen squirmed.
Cops started calling Jenks “The Monster” after his third week on the job, and at first Feygen laughed about it. Until Jenks called him into his office one morning, after Feygen had rendered a piece of evidence inadmissible by overlooking a typo on a form. The evidence, a big syringe with the word “pecker” written on it in permanent marker, wasn’t absolutely essent
ial to the prosecution, but it would have saved them a chunk of time. When Feygen came back out of Jenks’s office, both his ego and dignity were three sizes smaller. Jenks, with his deadpan stare and frosty voice, garnered enmity from a lot of cops, but got respect from all of them.
“I’m not saying she vanished into thin air,” Feygen said plaintively. He swirled his coffee around. “What I’m saying, my point is, she grabbed this guy, Krago, and dragged him back where I couldn’t see either one of them. And then everybody came in, and they weren’t there.”
Jenks breathed out slowly. “I don’t think you’ve made a point yet.” He flicked his eyes around the room. “Let’s review, so I don’t sound like a cretin when I try to explain this to my boss. Maurice Tell made you. So instead of selling you drugs, he decided to kill you. A couple of his boys pulled out shotguns, and you and your pal with the odd-numbered chromosomes stood there sucking your thumbs until somebody, you don’t know who, attacked Tell’s men. Am I right so far?”
Feygen didn’t respond. He thought about the bursts of heat he’d felt, and could predict what Jenks would say if he mentioned them. Jenks went on.
“Okay, now this woman, this ninja warrior, grabs one Bryan Krago and makes off with him. In a mostly enclosed space, surrounded by cops. Except a few minutes later, the woman comes back, tosses Krago onto the hood of an ambulance and disappears again. And not one man out of twenty sees her.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Jenks sighed and started drumming his fingers on the table. “I don’t know whether to fire you or put your ninja on the payroll. This has got to be the most blatant display of incompetence I’ve seen so far this decade.” Jenks’s voice remained at conversational level, but the room seemed to grow cooler as he spoke. Feygen sagged. “This female, this masked woman, takes somebody right out from under you, puts him back, and you don’t know how she did it, where she came from, or where she went. That is simply amazing.”