CHAPTER 42
Hours passed by in the darkness, and the skeleton of the Hargett Theatre stood silent. The nearby highway was practically deserted, and nothing penetrated the shadows where Matt flickered and stepped out. Immediately he crouched and scanned the wreckage, as he always did. Sometimes he had to wait for a drunk to stagger away or pass out.
He was about to flicker out again, down to the basement, when a tall, whip-thin man stepped out from around a corner and lit a cigarette.
Matt froze, watching. The man wore a rumpled white shirt and gray slacks. The night vision lit his features clearly; he looked to be in his forties, maybe older, with a brutally seamed face and deep-set eyes. His hair slicked straight back from a widow’s peak. He could have been made of granite.
Matt flickered, did a fast sweep of the theatre’s grounds. An old tan Jeep Cherokee with a crumpled rear bumper sat near the main entrance. Its hood was cold. Nothing else seemed out of place.
The weathered man had just touched his Bic’s flame to another cigarette when Matt stepped out of the shadows ten paces behind him, the Glock 17 fixed on the back of the man’s head.
“Hold still,” Matt said.
The man froze obligingly. In a deep, unhurried voice, with perhaps a touch of Texas in it, he asked, “May I put away my lighter?”
“No. Keep it in your hand. Raise your arms, and turn around very slowly.”
The man took direction well, but his eyes fixed on Matt as soon as his head had turned far enough. Matt’s eyebrows rose under his mask. The man was so blatantly unafraid that Matt felt a touch of annoyance.
“I hoped I’d find you here,” the man said. “It was a pretty long shot, but it felt right.” The eyes shifted to the Glock. “Solid firearm. I prefer Brownings myself.”
The pistol didn’t waver, but as the stranger stared at him Matt began to think his own voice might.
“Tell me your name and what you’re doing here.” That came out cold and dangerous, to Matt’s relief.
“May I put my arms down?”
“No.”
“Oh, c’mon, son, I’m old and tired. You want to frisk me? Make sure I’m not carrying?”
“No. You stay right there, and keep your arms up, and do what I tell you.” The stranger let one corner of his mouth twitch upward slightly in what Matt thought might have been approval. It made Matt twice as cautious. He began to suspect that the man could hold his arms up all night with little effort.
“My name is Vessler,” the man said. “I work for the government. And I need your help.”
Matt tilted his head. “Really.”
“I know what you are, son. I know you’re a lot more than a man in a suit. You are what is called an augment.”
Matt’s stomach tightened, and this time his words did emerge a little shakily.
“Wha —” He swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”
The man, Vessler, sighed impatiently. “It’ll take a lot less time if I just show you. I’m like you. Not exactly like you, but pretty close. Here.” He gestured to a small puddle a few feet to his left. “I’m going to walk over to that puddle, so don’t get nervous and shoot me, all right?”
Matt didn’t say anything and didn’t lower the gun, but he didn’t object. Vessler moved to the puddle and knelt beside it, and Matt’s eyes widened behind his mask as a faint fog began to roll off the man’s body. Vessler reached down and touched the puddle with one forefinger, and it froze straight through with a tiny brittle sound. The man wedged his fingers into the dirt to one side of it, pulled the chunk of ice out of the ground, straightened up and tossed it at Matt’s feet.
The fog quickly dissipated from around him, and his shoulders slumped a bit.
“There,” he said. “Take a look.”
Slowly and cautiously, Matt squatted and laid one palm against the ice, and tried to let it go as stabbing pain shot through his hand. It had frozen to the Vylar glove, and he had to hit it with the Glock to get it loose.
“I’m in the boat with you,” Vessler said calmly. “Or you’re in it with me, depending on your perspective. Either way, I need your help. I don’t think I have a lot of time.”
Matt tried to keep his thoughts straight. Next to Simon, this guy looked pretty normal. “I still haven’t heard how this concerns me.”
Vessler grew visibly irritated, but he controlled his voice. “How it concerns you involves an individual I think you’ve met.” He wiggled his fingers. “Funny hands? Big teeth? Unpleasant?”
Matt drew in a sharp breath. “Simon.”
“Oh, you’re on a first-name basis.”
Matt gestured with the Glock. “Move over against that wall.”
Vessler did it. Matt stepped up behind him and patted him down. “I’m going to take us somewhere private, and then you can tell me what you know. This is going to feel a little weird.” He put one hand on Vessler’s shoulder, and they flickered out.
# # #
Exactly five seconds after Matt and Vessler disappeared, a dark, bulky figure stood up from behind a ruined brick wall and turned a high-powered flashlight beam on the spot where the two of them had stood. It revealed nothing but dirt and concrete dust...and tiny sparkles of ice crystals on the ground and wall. He swept the beam side to side, but only lit up more dirt, dust, and a few sections of unbroken concrete flooring.
Zach Feygen clicked off the light, stepped out from behind the wall and surveyed the scene. He ran one hand absently over his smooth scalp.
Reflectively, he said, “I’ll be damned.”
The theatre was empty. Feygen walked over and clicked on the flashlight again, and saw the two sets of footprints, big as life there in the dirt.
With a chill racing around his spine and shoulders, Feygen pulled out a photocopy and shone the light on it. As if reading a treasure map, he turned and walked about thirty feet to his right, put away the photocopy and shined the light on a fallen slab of concrete, propped up at a slight angle by a twisted I-beam.
Feygen dropped to his belly, wriggled underneath the slab as far as he could go, and played the beam in front of him. Far back in the darkness, a metal ventilation grid was set into the floor. Feygen lay perfectly still, strained his ears and tried to filter out the occasional sounds from the highway.
Faintly, like the tiniest whisper, he thought he could make out the sound of voices.
# # #
Vessler blinked his eyes in the darkness. “We were inside your head.”
It was a statement, and Vessler’s certainty caught Matt off-guard as much as his accuracy. Matt lit a candle and didn’t say anything.
Vessler went on. “That’s the way it works, isn’t it? It’s psionic in nature. Like me. Like what I can do.”
Matt lit another candle and stayed quiet. “Like Simon Grove.”
Matt led the way to a couple of Salvation Army chairs in one corner.
“I can’t offer you much in the way of hospitality, but I’ve got some bottled water.”
“No thanks.” Vessler sat down. Matt perched on the back of the other chair and leaned against the rough concrete wall. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and Matt almost laughed at how absurd they must have looked.
Vessler gazed out into the darkness. “This is the old parking garage, isn’t it? Under the theatre? The one reserved for wealthy patrons?”
Startled, Matt thought about denying it, but finally nodded. “It got sealed off during demolition. I’m sure they planned to knock out the ceiling and fill it in, but they never got to it.”
“I think I parked here once, years ago. Came here to see Othello. Back when it was a real theatre, didn’t have in all these hack shows, magicians and whatnot.”
Matt bristled, but kept it down. “You said you needed my help. With Simon...what’d you say his last name was? Grove?”
Vessler nodded. “It’s not just him, though. Look, I’ve got to give you some background here, all right?”
“Go ahead.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m part—until tonight, I was part of a group within the government assigned to deal with people like you. Like us.”
“Deal with. What does that mean?”
Vessler grunted. “By my way of thinking, it means observing people, determining whether or not their abilities could be useful, and if they are, contacting them and inducting them.”
Matt’s eyes darkened beneath the mask. “Inducting them.”
“Offering them positions. Giving them jobs.”
“Like your job now?”
“Well...I’m an administrator, much as I hate to say it. We mainly train and farm out operatives. Very specialized operatives. You can imagine how much mileage the CIA could get out of your abilities.”
Matt could imagine it quite well, and chose not to. “A minute ago you said ‘by my way of thinking.’ Someone else doesn’t share your opinion?”
“That’s right.” Vessler looked old and tired for a moment. “Feelings in the group started polarizing a couple of years ago, and people with the wrong idea started to outnumber the rest of us. I became the spokesperson for our camp, so to speak, by accident more than anything else, but I...rub people the wrong way a lot of the time. And I guess I did some rubbing.”
Matt recognized that as a perfect opening for a smart remark, and couldn’t come up with one, and thought, Crap.
“Another agent—more than one, I found out tonight—got it in his head to get rid of me. So he and his cohorts set me up. Grove was my responsibility, you understand, it was my job to bring him in. Tonight Grove showed up at my hotel and killed two of my men. Tried to kill me. That was exactly what the other camp was waiting for, and now I’ve been...eh...sanctioned. Cut off.”
“Wait, I’m confused. Simon was already in this other faction?”
Vessler blew out a long breath. “Here’s where it’s good that you’re an augment. You’ll be able to accept this. One of our people—until tonight I believed she was not an augment—her name is Jorden, Brenda Jorden. She seems to be able to exert some sort of influence over people. I think it’s chemical, something her body produces, and she’s used someone very close to me, a boy named Scott. She’s done this thing to both of them, used this control. Now Grove’s still out there, and she still has Scott, and as long as she has power over both of them she can find us, either one of us. And send Grove after us.”
“This kid, Scott. He finds people?”
“Only people like us. He picked up on Grove for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and then the second time he tried it he found you, too. Of course, we didn’t know at the time we were looking at the world-famous Redeemer.”
“Wait, wait, if she knows where we are, she can tell anybody, right? The other people in your group?”
“Right—but I don’t think she will, at least not just yet. She enjoys hoarding information too much, waits to see how she can best use it. The point is, neither of us is safe as long as the situation stays the way it is.”
“Jesus...this is a lot to take in all at once. Before I saw Simon, I didn’t think there was anybody else like me. Then him, and now you, and you’re telling me there’s, what, hundreds? Thousands?”
“No. Dozens at most, at least in this country. We’re not as certain about foreign matters.” Vessler abruptly grew impatient. “Look, let me help you along. I got cut off from my group tonight. I don’t have any support. You have the means to put an end to this whole sorry mess, and you need to get off your ass and do it, Mr. Sinclair.”
Matt gasped.
“There’s a surprise for you, eh? Didn’t think anybody knew? Scott managed to clear his head enough tonight to contact me and tell me what’s going on. Saved my life. He knows who you are, he and Agent Jorden both, because of Simon Grove. He knows your name, where you live.”
Matt put his face in his hands. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah. Now I don’t know if she’s told anybody else who you are. Maybe not, she may be holding on to it, as I said, see if she can use it for something. But aside from making sure Grove doesn’t hurt anybody else, I’d say it’s in your best interest to do what I’m asking you to.”
“Well Christ, man, if you were going to blackmail me, why all this song and dance? Why tell me all this garbage?”
Tightly: “Because I’m not a total son-of-a-bitch. I thought I might try to convince you.”
Matt breathed slowly, in and out, in and out. After a few moments he said, “How do I know you won’t tell anyone?”
Vessler shrugged. “You take out Grove, get Scott back to me safely, I figure I’ll be in your debt.”
“That’s it? My debt?”
Vessler folded his arms across his chest. “That’s all you’ve got.”
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
With two pretty freaking important freelance jobs dropped in my lap in the last couple of weeks, I am currently in Intense Deadline Hell.
Sorry I was a day late. Again.
I'm going to go stick corks in my ears now in hopes that my brain doesn't ooze out of them.
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