On one hand, she killed me, and she kept me from ruining any of her plans of rendering evil upon others. On the other hand, she saved me. She banished me into the distant future of time and space.
After she had spoken the words of banishment, I died. I awoke later, confronted by the curious eyes of an old man who looked down at me. It was Merlin, the magician. He poured ointment on wounds that were on my chest and smiled with great contentment.
As if he had performed a miracle, he told me to arise from my cot, with a grand gesture of both hands. Within minutes, I was able to both stand and walk, even though I had suffered mortal wounds in two very different places and times. I had replaced a dead body with the spirit of my own. I had stepped into one world from another. It was how I first met Merlin.
The only thing that I knew for certain was that I was in a new place and time. Merlin gave assistance to a dying soldier that day, during the reign of King Richard, long before the time of the kidnapping of Marian. He gave the soldier assistance, at the request of a dying father in battle, someone that he did not even know. He was just passing through the battlefield, on his way to free King Richard, when a dying man cried out to him, “Save my son!” But Merlin saved his son’s body but not his spirit. He used what Medraut had used, but for a good purpose, not evil. Merlin saved my life. I had a new existence.
It was not reincarnation—an idea that I never believed in. It was somehow an allowed or permissive magic—for all successful magic was permissive, so my father told me. Magic was never condoned, or sanctioned, but rather it was used, or its circumstances turned for goodness, even if evil had been its original intention.
Later, I took that same type of journey again. It was when Merlin and the others, around the tents of Medraut, fled their own time in order to save themselves from mortal danger, and to protect the royal stones. Fate placed me with the Guardians as a result of my mother’s banishment. I always thought and feared that it was probably her last good deed. From then on, after my rebirth, I served the same higher purpose that my father had served even until his death. I was a true Guardian. I was a Knight.
My second rebirth happened after an injected poison flowed to my heart and stopped it. It was around the campfire with the other Guardians. As the dawn broke, and our bodies lay around the dying fire of the cauldron, my spirit rose and was reborn. After that death, I moved far ahead in time and space, and I awoke and saw unfamiliar people and heard strange and complex noises.
I awoke in the body of a collapsed civil service agent in the streets of Egypt. He had just been shot and killed by sniper fire, by well-meaning but militant rebels of the local governments. In one place and time, I was a Mesopotamian, and in another, I was in the body of an African-American, a CIA agent who faced death but died. I was lying face down, but I frantically crawled to a place of safety in the streets of Cairo.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I awoke from my history dream as the plane landed in Charlotte, North Carolina. The brakes skidded on the cement. My dream was over.
I drove for about an hour until I reached Cooleemee, North Carolina. I went to see Sylvia Reeves, and I secured the stones of blue and white that she possessed. My explanation of my intent was sufficient, along with an expired CIA badge, a gun, and a fake warrant. I explained it was a matter of national security. I then drove to a safe distance away from her trailer and parked my rental car on a street that was on the other side of the trailer park. I was close enough and still had a good view of her car.
I followed Sylvia to the skating rink, and I waited until she left work. I then tailed both Peter and Sylvia back to her house. While Peter was inside the trailer, I left him a note to find on his car seat. I wanted him to know that I had the stones that he wanted. I wanted him to leave Sylvia alone.
I followed Peter to his hotel, after his visit with Sylvia, and I played a detective that night. I nodded off on occasion, but I kept him under surveillance.
I waited until Peter had left his motel in Cooleemee to search his room, and then I found and retrieved Sylvia’s diary discarded in the trash. After I had looked through the diary, I decided to return it to Sylvia.
A surprised but grateful Sylvia received the diary from me and asked me to keep her secrets safe, if possible. So before I left her, I vowed I would keep her secrets safe. I promised never to tell anyone that Sylvia was once madly in love with Mary “Mattie” Renee Madison. From that night on, I believed in my heart that Mattie might have experienced transference at one time. I decided from then on to remain silent. If true, Mattie would tell us, but only when she was ready to reveal the matter to anyone. What an interesting life that must have been, I thought.
Chapter 18
Jail Bait
Part Two
With haste, the sword was purchased, from a pawn store, and at an outrageous price. Tom brought it to David’s lab and found his companions in homemade lab coats. Mattie wore a white dress shirt backward over her T-shirt, and David had a pair of paint-stained overalls. There were no suitable coats found in David’s unused, neglected, and mothball smelling closet.
The laboratory had only one table and two or three burners at the most, along with a rusty supply cabinet in an unkept corner of the room. The converted small bedroom had patches of faded paint on the walls and spirals of cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, and the cold wooden floors were unpolished and rough. This was the laboratory for remaking the greatest sword in history.
With a look of distaste for his ambiance, Tom placed his new sword on the table and asked David if he had something to raise the sword with, such as a tripod, or a stand of some kind. David had none.
“Fine! How about a couple of tin cans in the kitchen?”—Tom’s head stirred with disapproval.
Mattie found some jars in the downstairs pantry, and David helped to carry them upstairs. With the makeshift lab equipment, Tom was able to raise the sword about twelve centimeters off the table, an unbalanced piece of furniture barely covered by a faded red tablecloth.
Tom placed the wobbly sword on the mismatched jars, and then he carefully opened the vial of David’s lively and metallic liquid. He poured the shiny substance onto the middle of the sword, which caused the sword to react. The sword started to wobble, and the liquid acted like an individual entity. It formed random bubbles and pooled in the middle of the sword, then it dissolved completely into the metal. It became one with the sword.
What happened next, to the amazement of Mattie and David, was the transformation of the pawned sword from a Japanese Katana Replica into a sickle-sword, or khopesh sword. It glowed through its transformation process with various colors of silver and gold, until it finally turned into a rather dull and dark brown sword. It was wickedly curved and jagged. It was an axe and a sword at the same time. It was a symbol of death.
“I thought that swords were supposed to be silver and metallic in appearance. What happened?”—David touched it with a light tap at first—as if he expected it to be hot.
“It’s just Cali! Being different he is! He’s been that way ever since we first melted him down.”—Tom was already starting to saunter out of the room, not as if he had succeeded in doing something great, but with an air of dismissiveness. To Tom, this was old news—been there, done that. “Oh, yeah,” he muttered back at them. “You two look ridiculous in those outfits! And, one more thing, you may want to talk to it occasionally!”
Mattie chimed in, “He’s kidding, right?”
Tom did not press David about the details of how he had obtained the silver liquid from a Utah prospector. Tom had a good guess about it, but he kept it to himself. The tale of the melted sword would have to wait until another day also.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The J & H plant headquarters in Holliday with its congested parking lot looked very different from its nighttime cousin, the one that Peter lured David to days earlier. It had a sense of normalness to it, and it did not blatantly speak of danger. It was an antiseptic building set in
a parking lot of procedure.
Mattie drove up to the gate and waited for the security process to begin. She hid behind obnoxious sunglasses, and her deceitful flirtation totally enticed the guard. A nearby David adjusted his internal earpiece and typed frantically into a handheld monitor. “Give me just a moment, Mattie. I’m almost done,” David told her—his voice flowed through a tiny earpiece in Mattie’s right ear. Tom and David were in a carpet cleaning van, right behind her.
Mattie gave her most sexual smile to the guard, and he returned the gesture with a flirtatious flicker of his left eyebrow. Then, as he walked back to the guard shack, he carelessly stumbled on the curb, just in front of a narrow doorway.
Nervous sweat slid down his brow and onto his greasy cheeks, and he moved his lunch and box of donuts away from the undusted and grungy PC monitor. On the screen were the morning schedule and the visitor’s list. A name suddenly showed in a slot that read, “9:30 am, Mary Smith, KXRA news.”
David gave a triumphant smile of confirmation to Tom. Mattie was in. As Mattie’s borrowed Cavalier entered the facility ahead of them, David’s van drove up to the guard shack and stopped at the closing gate. They too were confronted by the guard.
“What happened to the regular guys?” he asked them. About two hours earlier, Tom and David had secured the van with a little persuasion and a few hundred-dollar bills given to a much underpaid pair of industrial engineers.
“They got the flu.”—David reflected how predictable that sounded as the gate rose, and the van entered. They navigated the crowded parking lot until they came to the east side, where there were a few maintenance buildings, garbage canisters, and hazardous waste containers.
At the same time, somewhere inside the office complex, on one of its several floors of precision and order, a drugged Haj looked at his room. It was a box of white padding. There was little or no evidence that there was any seam, door, or defined corner. His T-shirt had stains of breakfast mush that had been lowered earlier from a ceiling cord. His feet were bare, and his black beard and hair were uncombed. Toxins surged through his system—as it sought to keep any guile subdued. He looked with bloodshot eyes toward the ceiling. He searched for some sign of life above. Then he collapsed down on the floor and closed his eyes. He slumped on his right side and faded into his usual morning slumber.
Several floors down, Mattie walked in a tight red dress and enjoyed her performance. She wore her visitor’s badge on her lapel and tapped the floor rhythmically with her plastic soles. The sandals had sexy black straps that curled upward above her ankle, and her chest slightly bulged as a diversion to her legitimacy. The black straps of her sandals wrapped around her feet, toes, and ankles in an odd mixture of knots. Her skin-tight vinyl dress squeaked as her tapping shoes announced her presence. Her clothes were louder than the gum she smacked.
A young and slender male employee escorted her in and led her into a waiting room, just past the lobby and the security station. He was a slightly bearded man, with black-framed glasses, and he wore oversized khakis and a constricting polyester tie. He awkwardly asked her if she needed anything, and then, after a coquettish answer from Mattie, he left. But he nearly hit his shoes against the door, when he nervously opened the door too soon. Men fell for her that day.
The waiting room had no receptionist. Mattie sat alone in a simple leather chair beside the door. There was another door at the opposite end, where there were two chairs and a couch. Mattie looked around the room and saw, out of the corners of her eyes, two security cameras on both sides of the rooms.
While Mattie sat in her room, observed on video by sexually frustrated security guards, David and Tom in their borrowed uniforms stepped into the cleaning supply room, just inside the building. Tom carried an oblong toolbox, and David pushed a wet vacuum. When they shut the door, they began their communication.
“Mattie! Can you hear me?”—David talked while Tom opened his suitcase and examined the contents.
“Yeah…loud and clear,” she said as she smacked her rigid chewing gum.
“Don’t worry about the room having sound. I wired it myself a few years ago. I’ll let you know when I’ve looped the cameras.”—David caught the annoyance of Tom’s smiling face.
“Don’t say it, Tom!”—David ignored Tom’s smirk because he knew what Tom was thinking. Tom was thinking that David should be glad that Mattie came along. David had previously thought that she would be too much of a distraction and liability, but Tom convinced him that he was wrong.
Before the trip, Mattie had disclosed to David her desire to be a modern woman. She wanted to feel valued, she had told him—she wanted to feel needed. Tom had overheard their argument and persuaded the indecisive David to bring her with him. David, not knowing if he should, sometimes unable to weigh the pros and cons of a situation in a timely manner, followed the strong urging of Tom’s advice, despite not being fully convinced.
David opened the fake vacuum cleaner canister, turned on a monitor screen, and raised an antenna on the back. Then he plugged a USB stick in on its left side and touched a keypad that awakened lights on the right side. They flashed purple and red alternately. It was less than a minute before David spoke to Mattie again.
“Mattie, once they have figured out that you have no actual appointment—and that Peter is not in the office today—you know what to do!”—David had ensured that Peter’s car was not in the parking lot before they started their plan. Had he been there, they would have taken a different approach—they would have entered from the roof. That was a plan that Tom had wanted to avoid.
In a few minutes, the same awkward escort arrived to tell Miss Smith that her appointment must have been in error. He had verified that she did not have an appointment after all. Mattie thanked him and asked directions to the restroom. In between her words, she annoyingly popped the gum bubbles in an open mouth then she stepped out of the room and walked back to the front security desk. The restroom was conveniently located inside the security perimeter and behind the security desk.
“I’ve really got to go!” Mattie blurted as she turned on her most nauseating and charming southern accent. It was aimed it the two guards that were about to change places and their shift at the front desk.
The timing of this raid had been planned extremely well. Mattie’s purse, with the effort of a slight flick of her fingernail against a small unnoticeable flap, discharged two tiny magnetic balls. They rolled casually toward the front metal detectors. They bounced several times, but a few loud taps from Mattie’s heels masked their sound. As they rolled toward the detectors, Mattie turned away from the desk after she placed her visitor badge on it. She walked to the restroom doors. She turned her head back just before she entered. As she gave one last wink, she entered and closed the door, and the balls triggered the loud metal detector alarm.
In another nearby section of the building, Tom exited the supply closet, seemingly alone, as he carried his toolbox and walked casually down the hall toward an elevator.
“Stay behind me, the floors will look awkward enough, with you being invisible and all!”—Tom was emphatic but whispered indifferently to an invisible David, who held the stones of invisibility that Tom had shown him in California. In David’s left hand, he held the green and gold stone, and in his right hand was Cali. It quivered with anticipation and excitement.
The guards at the end of the hallway saw Tom enter the elevator but no one else. Once inside the elevator, Tom cursed with a surprised gasp. He demanded that David separate the stones immediately and become visible because David’s invisible aura made the floor beneath him seem to be nonexistent. It made the appearance of a hole in the elevator. Tom could see straight down to a basement parking lot.
David reappeared, and the hole faded as he placed the stones into separate pockets. The floor became visible again under David’s feet.
“You afraid of heights? Glad we didn’t have to go to the roof?” David laughed as the sword began to shake wildly in his h
and. David looked at Tom for direction. “Talk to it?”
Tom nodded, “Talk to it. Like a pet.”
“Maybe you should hold it!”—David gladly took charge of the toolbox as Tom took the sword.
“That a boy! Just like old times, right?”—as Tom spoke, he caressed and held the sword against his cheek with affection while David looked at him with dubious and expressive eyes.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Mattie went to the back of the restroom and stood on a closed toilet seat, in the stall at the end of the room. She placed her left foot on top of the automatic lever and then reached down and unwrapped the sandal straps that were attached to her shoe and winded around her foot, ankle, and lower leg. The straps were, in fact, a type of stretchy putty that David had provided for her. After she had unraveled the black putty strap from her left foot and leg, she tossed her shoe’s plastic bottom on the floor. She then stuck the putty on the wall above the toilet. She switched the position of her feet and then unwrapped the strap on the right leg and kicked the other shoe down. Then she stood with both bare feet on the toilet seat. She rolled and mixed both putty straps with her hands. She formed a black ball of putty. She stretched upward, with the ball of putty in her right hand, but she found that she could not quite reach the ceiling. So she flung the ball up to the ceiling with her right hand. The force almost caused her to slip off the toilet seat. The ball somehow stayed. She cringed. She thought it might fall, but it didn’t. Mattie then stepped down and went to the sink. She washed her hands, per the prior instructions given to her by David. Her job was done.
It was true that David had invented fantastic exploding putty. It was one of the many reasons that David had thought that he was an employee of the government. He thought, who else but the government would want to hide the existence of this explosive. It was a mixture so harmless that it could be held by the hands of a child. But it was so powerful, after mixed, that it could cause an explosion that would make a three-foot hole in a concrete wall. The putty, after hand molded and mixed, usually took about two hours to explode, under normal circumstances.
The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1) Page 20