At the Merest Glance

by M. L. Buchman

  Just outside the gate, opened and closed by a very watchful team leader, they were less than halfway back when Katie’s grip tightened hard.

  “Hold it.”

  “What?” He popped back into his body and turned to look at her.

  “No. Go back. I’ve lost it now.”

  Because he’d just left the spot outside Skewjack’s gates, he was able to slip out there again. The fast back-and-forth volley left him feeling a little nauseous, but he did it.

  “There!” Katie practically shouted in his ear.

  “Easy, girl. What’s going on?”

  “Walk back and forth a bit.”

  Anton looked around. Ricardo and Hannah had kept walking, never noticing his departure or return. But now Ricardo stopped and signaled Hannah to do the same. Michelle must have passed on that something was going screwy.

  Anton retraced his steps toward Skewjack’s gates. When Katie didn’t say anything, he walked over to join Ricardo and Hannah who were scanning widely for possible threats.

  “Off to…” Katie sounded as if she was grinding her teeth. “I don’t know. I can’t see anything. But I can feel it.”

  “What?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  Anton tried to picture what was happening. Katie was somehow feeling things through his wandering vision. She might doubt her own abilities, but he didn’t.

  “Okay, let’s try a game.”

  “A what?” Her voice would have been shrill if not for that lovely English accent of hers that made everything sound so charming.

  “Warmer-cooler. You know that one? Tell me if I’m getting warmer or cooler on whatever it is you’re feeling.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  Anton wasn’t going to argue the point.

  He strolled across the road to the west, and heard a groan before Katie mumbled out, “Cooler.”

  He turned and walked back the other way, past Ricardo and Hannah who were still on alert but didn’t react at all to his passage, and stepped through the low stone wall.

  “This can’t be happening! Warmer!”

  She jerked her hand out of his. He missed it right away. Could feel the chill night air replace her warm grasp. They were good, strong hands. It was easy to tell that she didn’t push papers for a living.

  “Wait. Now I can’t feel anything. Maybe I was making it all up.”

  There was a long pause, then she tentatively put her hand on his arm. “Ruddy hell! Warmer!”

  He kept going out into the pasture. “So there’s something about our physical contact that let’s you feel wherever I’m seeing.”

  Somewhere in the background he could hear Michelle explaining it to the others.

  “Wait. Go back a step. Now go side to side. I guess, whatever. I don’t know where you are.”

  Playing warmer-cooler led him behind a clump of five or six small trees. Wire mesh had been wrapped around each trunk to stop the pasture’s sheep from chewing them down.

  “Right here,” Anton turned to Ricardo and pointed at the ground.

  Ricardo didn’t move his mouth, but moments later he could hear Michelle repeat his telepathic words, with her own interpretation, of course.

  “Right where, you big ox? He can’t see you.”

  “Oh sorry. Twenty paces toward the water from where he’s standing.”

  Then Michelle spoke up, “There’s water in every direction from here, you dingus.”

  Katie giggled, she actually giggled, which had been the whole point. He wanted to see how that lit up her face, but he didn’t want to lose his place either.

  He described his location to Michelle. In moments, Ricardo and Hannah were on the move. It was actually fascinating to watch them move in on the point. They followed no direct line, actually swinging wide and quartering the area.

  “Tell them there’s no one here now.”

  The only change they made to their routine was Ricardo nodding his head when Michelle passed on the information.

  He had to step aside so that they didn’t walk through him—which he wouldn’t feel but was still weird—as they finally both arrived at the same spot from different directions.

  Ricardo turned and looked toward Skewjack.

  Anton followed his line of sight. If someone had lain here, they were in a perfect position to observe everything about the compound.

  “Any idea who it was?” Anton asked Ricardo, forgetting for the moment that Ricardo couldn’t hear him.

  Michelle was damned efficient as Ricardo shook his head just moments later. A Delta operator wouldn’t forget something as simple as Anton not being able to hear him.

  But Katie made an uncomfortable sound.

  “What?”

  When she didn’t answer, he let go of his vision and slid once more behind his own eyes.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “It felt like…” She buried her head against his shoulder. Her hair was even softer than he’d imagined as she mumbled against him. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this. It’s like I’m selling my soul to Satan or something. It felt like…that guy you threw out of the pub.”

  “Chas Thorstad?”

  She nodded silently.

  “Hang on.” He couldn’t send himself back to where the badgers had been last night. Over thirty hours was far too long ago.

  But under twelve hours ago he’d been standing with Katie when they’d all trooped past where he’d picked up her trail behind Land’s End Airport.

  That was far too long as well.

  But even as he had the thought, he was back to the exact spot where Katie had first taken his hand while standing along that trail.

  Maybe Katie’s presence beside him at that time had made the place sort of bookmarked?

  He’d worry about how later.

  He ran toward where the badgers had been—thankfully it wasn’t far, because it was like swimming through mud by the time he arrived. He stopped where he’d first seen Katie’s fine figure stretched out on the ground. Damn but she was a looker from every angle—the lovely English lass of cliché and song.

  She wasn’t here now and he didn’t bother looking at the badgers roaming freely over the hillside with no one around to disturb them.

  Instead he sat where Chas Thorstad had been.

  Then he turned in the direction that the man’s big camera lens had been pointed. Out of sight behind Katie’s back. It certainly hadn’t been at the badgers.

  He spoke aloud to Katie. “About a hundred meters from the badgers. Toward the damned water. What’s the white building off by itself? Without a barn.”

  “You’re not here, are you? This is going to make me crazy. Where are you? Oh the badgers? Sennen Cove? Of course you are. Looks like a slightly rundown farmhouse but with no cars or anything else you’d expect?” Katie was also smart as a whip.

  “That’s the one.”

  “It would be the terminus building for the Sennen Cove cables. They land there and then jump to land cables which are routed here to Skewjack. Why?”

  Anton let go the vision and sat up just as Ricardo and Hannah rejoined their group on the grass atop Bunker Cottage.

  “We got a problem, folks. This jerkwad who tried to stiff Katie for her scouting fee was using her to get close to the Sennen Cove cable landing points with a damned big camera. And he was here checking out Skewjack. It’s a good bet that he hit Porthcurno as well.”

  He didn’t need to have served ten years in the Army to know how suspicious that was. Neither did anyone else.

  Katie was the first to speak. “The only major cable site he’s missed in Cornwall would be Widemouth Bay near Bude. That’s two hours north of here.”

  “We can be there before dawn,” Hannah turned to walk down the grassy back of Bunker Cottage, heading toward the SUV as if everything was decided.

  “Let’s go.” Anton pushed to his feet and held out a hand to help Katie up.

  “No. I have a client tomorrow. I nee
d sleep. I need—”

  “Cancel ’em. Sleep later.”

  “No, Anton. I need the job. I need the money.”

  “There are three problems with that, Katie,” Anton took both of her hands and pulled her to her feet. They ended up standing so close together that he was tempted to continue the motion and just toss her over his shoulder to cart her away. He suspected that wouldn’t go over especially well.

  “What?”

  “First, you’re making far more money working with Shadow Force: Psi. The US government doesn’t stint when it comes to specialty contractors.”

  “I don’t work for you.”

  “Not yet. But you work with us, and in my book, we’re paying you.”

  “But—”

  “Number Two,” he turned her to face Skewjack just as four very official-looking vehicles raced up to the gate. Well-armed soldiers in camouflage uniforms poured out of the doors. “Unless you want to spend your next couple days trying to explain us to them, I’m thinking you’ll want to be coming with us.”

  “This is blackmail. I have a home. People who count on me to—”

  “Yeah, us. Three,” he’d led her most of the way to the SUV. “I have no intention of letting you out of my sight anytime soon.”

  When all she did was squawk in protest, he figured it was his best opportunity. He leaned down and kissed her.

  She didn’t hit him.

  Good sign.

  She didn’t even complain.

  Better.

  Then she kissed him back.

  Oh yeah.

  Chapter 9

  Bude was a long, frustrating day, and Katie was ragged by the time the sun was going down.

  Five cables from the US, one each from Canada and Africa, and one that stretched all of the way from India came ashore at Bude. They’d surveyed the landing points of the four at Widemouth Bay and the four more at Crooklets Beach as well as they could.

  It had taken much of the afternoon, but they’d even managed to locate the new landing point for the 2Africa cable that Ricardo and Isobel had been so interested in.

  Isobel had explained. “It’s the world’s newest major cable. It won’t go live for a year or so, but it lands right here. This was our secondary mission. Once we understood the FLAG cables, we were to very carefully assess the risks to 2Africa. The question is, are we the only ones interested in it?”

  Anton had peeked into all sorts of places they wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise…too bad he couldn’t see underground.

  She’d caught hints of Chas Thorstad, but nothing strong enough to trace.

  Throughout the day, the team had kept asking her questions to which she had none of the answers.

  Did her signals degrade with time, like Anton’s ability to return to places?

  Did repeated visits reinforce what she could sense?

  How far away?

  How certain?

  What if—

  She didn’t have the answers to any of their questions, though she could almost feel the tracks of them circling around and around in the car. Each question almost a living thing, piling on top of all of the ones she had herself.

  It just kept building and building until she felt as if she’d explode.

  Michelle held out a water bottle, “Want one?”

  It was one question too many and Katie felt as if her brain had just shredded.

  “Bugger off! Okay? All of you, just bugger the bloody hell off.”

  Michelle sat frozen in shock, still holding out the water bottle.

  The questions, piled on top of all of the marginal- to non-results, and the fact that she’d slept one hour of the last thirty-six—that with her head on Anton’s shoulder as they’d raced north from Skewjack to Bude with the dawn (which was it’s own weirdness)—had simply become too freaking much.

  There was a stunned silence.

  They’d been driving quietly from Crooklets Beach toward the Bude antenna farm where the cables were gathered together just like at Skewjack. In fact, Skewjack’s big cables were probably routed up to here.

  “Stop this bleeding car!”

  Before it had fully stopped she was out the door and on the move. She didn’t know or care where.

  Away. It was all that mattered.

  She could feel Anton close behind her.

  Katie spun on him and he nearly ran her down.

  “You especially. Just bugger off. And don’t be following me with your weirdo creepy vision thing.”

  She saw the flash of pain slam into him. Saw him swallow it down like bitter medicine that just sat there and burned, but she couldn’t find the words to take it back.

  Instead she spun and plunged into a sheep field, not caring what she did or didn’t step in. Sheep and lambs scattered before her like a bow wave, bleating in panic.

  She testing her own reaction like probing a stinging tooth with the tip of her tongue.

  She still didn’t care.

  The balance finally tipped between Katie’s need to get away and her need to collapse, as she passed a long copse of trees. She ducked under the verge and dropped to the soil.

  Southwest slope.

  Bluebells.

  Her eyes automatically tracked through the dim evening light, picking out the trail and the distinctive markings of a badger sett. Badgers dug long tunnels and the dirt had to go somewhere. Typically it created a defensive mound straight out of the tunnel. One of the proofs that it was a badger hole was their distinctive track—out of the hole, then a hard right or left turn to get clear. A more agile fox would come right over the top of the mound to look around.

  There were also multiple holes, just three rather than the big clan by the airport that had ten easily visible tunnels, but more than a fox would typically create.

  Sure enough, a black-and-white head peered at her from around the left side of a dirt mound.

  “Just ignore me. Please,” she begged it.

  After some further consideration, it finally did and continued about its business.

  “Sorry. That’s not going to happen.” Isobel had come straight up her path.

  “Please just go away.”

  In answer, Isobel sat down in the dirt beside her. Apparently the badger was even less worried about Isobel than it had been about her own arrival.

  “Was I so easy to find?”

  “When you’re radiating pain the way you are, it creates a beacon that I have a very hard time blocking out. But, like you, I have to get fairly close to feel those emotions. Once I do, then I can play Anton’s warmer-cooler game and follow the emotion’s intensity to its source.”

  “One more way of saying that you’re not going to let me run away.” Katie flopped back on the dirt and stared up at the leaves. The last of the daylight flickered through the canopy. The sun was low enough that the light never reached the ground, but it remained high enough to still dapple the beech leaves.

  Isobel offered one of her beatific smiles that made her so hard to dismiss, but Katie was definitely in a dismissing mood. Before she could do so, Isobel spoke up.

  “If you want to run away from us, I can’t think of a reason to stop you. The hours are nuts. We used to wait months for an assignment to come up that needed our special skills. Now they seem to happen too often. The last movie, I barely learned the script before I shot it. That’s not how I like to work.”

  Katie listened to the additional badgers starting to scrabble around the sett on the slope above them, but couldn’t find the energy to look.

  One, two, three…and four cubs.

  Except even Tom Brown Jr. wasn’t a good enough tracker to count a clan of badgers based solely on sound.

  She tipped her head back into the dirt to look upside-down up the hill. On cue, three big heads and four small ones popped out of the different entrances and set about cleaning the area.

  Katie flopped back to the ground.

  “Bugger all,” she murmured to herself.

  �
�Indeed,” Isobel agreed. “When there is a mission, the hours are awful and sometimes the dangers become very real, very fast. We don’t have two Delta Force operators, a Night Stalker helicopter pilot, another Army pilot, and a paramedic just for the fun of it.”

  “Then why are you here, lady? Because I’m most certainly running away from all that. I can hail a lorry to get me back home. Thanks so much for proving that all of my diligent training was utterly meaningless, by the way. Now would you very much mind buggering off?”

  Isobel pulled up her knees and rested her chin on her crossed arms.

  “I would think that we’ve proven that your skills are even more meaningful than you thought. Not only are you a highly skilled tracker for all of the reasons that have so impressed Ricardo and Hannah—which is not easy to do—but you’ve proven that you can reach beyond those skills. You’ve also shown immense adaptability today. But none of that is my point.”

  Katie blinked in surprise. “I think you just busted up your recruiting pitch.”

  “Do you know why I ended up in charge of Shadow Force: Psi?”

  “Because you’re a brilliant, beautiful, empath?”

  “Close. Because I can feel people’s feelings, I can help them find what’s best for them, even when they don’t know.”

  “Oh, so I should blindly to follow you? This isn’t some lark; this is my life.” Katie did her best to pay attention to the badgers and not to Isobel.

  “Precisely. So when are you going to stop running away from it? When are you going to face the shitty package that your parents handed you, make your own choices, and move on?”

  Katie jolted upright. “What do you know about my parents?”

  Isobel stood and walked back out from under the trees.

  Against her better judgement, Katie scrambled to follow.

  Out from beneath the trees, the sunset was descending into St. George’s Channel with a splash of reds and golds. A pair of green herons lazily glided across the sky, heading for their inland roost after a day of fishing. Even after they’d gone by, she could still feel them. They didn’t so much impinge on her thoughts as they flew through her awareness if she focused on them. Rather, they were soft, no more significant than the sunlight.