CHAPTER 4

Morning broke on a day of hazy sunlight.

On a badly-maintained two-lane road off 1-75, north of Atlanta, Garrison Vessler rode in the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car, simultaneously reading a newspaper and talking on a cell phone. Two men in gray suits and dark glasses occupied the front seats.

A front page story dealt with the “mysterious black-clad vigilante” who had allegedly prevented a couple of members of the law enforcement community from being killed in a fouled sting operation. Vessler set it down on his lap, distracted by the conversation.

“We settled this discussion at the meeting yesterday.” His voice allowed for no argument. “I don’t understand the point of your call.” He listened for a few more seconds. “No. I’m through with this.”

Vessler ended the call, slipped the phone back in his coat pocket, and stared out the passenger window. They drove through rolling pastureland, with stands of pine alternating on both left and right. The morning sunlight glinted off patches of dew.

Gary Stillwater, the driver, spoke without taking his eyes off the road. “More grief from Stamford?”

“Just more horn-locking,” Vessler answered, after a moment’s pause. “Stamford’s ideas didn’t do anyone any good when Stalin and Hitler had them. They won’t do anyone any good now.”

The man in the front passenger seat, Benson Wong, said, “Never much cared for Stamford. Bad knee or not, that silver-headed cane is pretentious.”

Stillwater chuckled. “Jesus, Ben, that’s the most I’ve heard you say in two days.”

Wong shrugged. “Jorden’s got me excited.”

While Stillwater laughed, Vessler thought about Brenda Jorden, the woman assigned as Scott Charles’ long-term caregiver. She didn’t seem to have too much imagination, which Vessler thought a shame. It kept her from achieving perfection, but only just. Something of a karmic weakness, he supposed.

Agent Brenda Jorden stood around five-six, maybe five-seven, and usually wore utilitarian suits in an unsuccessful effort to disguise the lush curves of her body. Long, wavy dark brown hair framed startling light green eyes, set above a perfect nose and generous lips the color of red wine. At first he’d balked at the idea of someone so...tempting seeing after Scott. But Scott could barely relate to people on a human level in the first place, and Jorden seemed to be the most qualified choice, among the limited selection, as far as skills and training.

If Jorden were an augment, now, that would be a different story. Then she’d have some chance of advancement. But she wasn’t. She’d volunteered to care for Scott just after he came out of his catatonic state, and had done so since then without a hitch.

Vessler’s thoughts shifted to Scott. Forty-five years had honed and burnished Garrison Vessler to a needle point, and in his presence people stepped out of his way and called him “sir” as they did it. Black hair, swept straight back from a widow’s peak, accented a leathery, long-weathered face punctuated by eyes like blue knife blades. Since appointment to his current position, seven years before, Vessler acknowledged only two chinks in his armor.

One was Derek Stamford, may he burn in hell, for challenging Vessler’s authority and slowly getting away with it.

The other was Scott.

When Special Agent Garrison Vessler discovered Scott Charles, six years earlier, Scott was a catatonic skeleton, starved to near-death by parents who’d convinced themselves their son’s convulsions and strange cries evidenced possession by demons. When Vessler arrived at their house, which crouched far back in a New Jersey pine barren, he found the parents busy making preparations to boil their son to death in a huge iron kettle.

Vessler shot them both, two clean head shots, snap snap. He took Scott, who’d been trussed like a hog on the living room floor, and put him in the back of his car, where Scott moaned and thrashed his emaciated limbs and bled from his nose and his eyes. Vessler dumped the parents’ bodies in the kitchen, set fire to the house and drove away.

Stillwater swung the car onto a narrow, unlined blacktop road. Within seconds Vessler saw the house. He hadn’t been to visit Scott in two months and felt guilty about it, but still he hated the sight of that house.

Ten miles from anything, the two-story frame structure looked to be a study in mediocrity. Off-white paint with charcoal-gray shutters, a half-dead ash tree in the front yard, acres of unused, grown-over pasture in back; the house was exactly the kind of place a motorist drove past without ever seeing, the essence of nondescript, decayed middle-class America. It reminded Vessler eerily of the house he himself had grown up in, outside of Houston, Texas, and for that reason he loathed it.

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 least conventional 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, yes, but in the middle of a federally-owned property, with a decent perimeter guard and at least fifty agents on constant call. Vessler often found himself cursing the group and its need to remain inconspicuous, even to the government that had established it.

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. 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-three years of uncompromising, professional self-control let Garrison Vessler deny himself virtually anything, but he still found Jorden a temptation at the very least.

“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, where they sat and tried to think of something to say to 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 the group 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 the group.

In the group’s half sat three desks, two computer workstations, and a large, bulky machine roughly the same size and shape as a Maytag washer: the filter. 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 World of Warcraft, 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 an inch tall, that even a bone that meager thrown to the boy could mean so much.

A metal band encircled Scott’s head, and just above his left ear a thick cable sprang out of the metal. The cable ran loose along the floor and disappeared into the filter. The band looked comfortable enough, as much as it could, but Vessler always found it disturbing. He knew Scott couldn’t ever take it off for more than a few minutes at a time, not if he didn’t want his synapses jumping out of control.

Even that depended on a tightly controlled environment. Scott could discern specifics about other augments, given the proper setup, but he couldn’t abide the presence of large numbers of people, augmented or not. Even moderated. Even through the filter. And so the group placed him here, in the middle of nowhere, with at most a half dozen people around him at any given time.

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?” Vessler finally asked. The question made the boy laugh: a weak sound. Scott readjusted the cable, draped it over the back of his chair before he spoke.

“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 relearned 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.

The strange, tether-like headgear he had no choice but to wear did nothing to help his self-image.

Scott was actually something of a success story among the behavioral therapists and research technicians tapped by the group. 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.

Then a fluke discovery advanced his healing even further: through careful application of a new technology, his particular talent could be focused, refined, and controlled. Filtered, so to speak. Without the department’s machine, Scott’s abilities would eventually give him a fatal aneurysm. With the machine, and away from the general population, Scott remained calm and focused—and answered the prayers of Vessler’s superiors.

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 computer-game jewel box and flipped it to Scott. The boy’s face lit up.

“Supreme Commander 4! 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 with the cable trailing behind him. 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. Then the driver pulled Vessler’s car up in front of the house, and with a yelp Scott disappeared down the hall, into his room. Vessler couldn’t get him to open the door, and had had to leave without a proper goodbye.

The group fed Scott’s fears. Kept him here, in the house, controlled. 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 group wanted him here, in their house, doing their 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 Scott why the boy had no reason to love or trust anyone like Vessler.

But he didn’t.

Scott popped open the jewel box 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—but said, “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... “

Oh God, Vessler thought. I am so unprepared for this.

Scott trailed off. Vessler said, “And you saw her naked?”

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. I just, I, I have some, some questions.”

Vessler ran one hand over his face and squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds. “Tell you what. The guys upstairs want results from this trip, fast results, and I’ve got to get them 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 so well from his own adolescence, Scott said, “Okay. Thank you.”

“Okay. Well then.” Crisis averted. No...crisis postponed. Crap. “On to business, yes?”

“...Sure.”

Vessler’s muscles relaxed a notch or two, and 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.

Without gusto, Vessler counted the years and months until his own retirement.

Jorden came in and joined them in the end of Scott’s room devoted to group work.

She sat at one of the desks, shuffled through a stack of papers, then tapped a button on the computer keyboard in front of her. Information flitted across the monitor.

“A body matching the conditions of the ones in Louisiana turned up yesterday 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. “This has all the signs of an augment, a very powerful one, but we weren’t certain until last night, when Scott picked up a blip.”

She glanced at another sheet of paper. “If our blip 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 high school yearbook. 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 filter. He pushed aside a catch and opened the LCD screen on its top, which displayed a topographical map of the surrounding two hundred miles, glowing in soft green. Vessler watched and waited for Scott’s perceptions to superimpose themselves over the image.

Scott touched a button, and state and county lines lit up in blue across the map. Another button produced streets and major highways in yellow. Scott gazed evenly at the filter and began to concentrate, and the machine started to hum.

“All right,” Scott said. “It’s working.”

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 filter’s screen whenever she blinked, with the round red blip that represented their target. Every other subject they’d had Scott Charles concentrate on, all of them augments registered and cataloged with the group, had shown up only as the tiniest of pinpoints, even at close range. Ned Fields’ signature showed up no brighter, right there in the house; yet the new target grew in intensity with every location, every mile closer to them. Jorden drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she thought about it.

She found a pay phone at a Hardee’s 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 D.C.?”

“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.”

She smiled. “Just follow me on this. I’ll give you details in a day or two.” She closed her eyes and imagined the red blip, growing stronger. Perfect. “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.


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