At the Merest Glance

by M. L. Buchman

  Like the gawking tourists they were, the others were pointing out interesting sights outside the car. At the moment they were focused on what Jesse’s map declared were the Deux Mamelles—the two breasts—as the twin hills of Dakar were called. They weren’t much, maybe a hundred meters each, but since the rest of the peninsula was under twenty meters, they stood out prominently. One was topped by a great white lighthouse and the other by a monstrous bronze sculpture that rose fifteen stories of a family questing for the horizon.

  Glancing over for Katie’s reaction, he’d seen her withdrawal.

  He took her hand.

  “Hey you.” Real powerful opening line. He had to work on that. “What are you thinking?”

  “Um, fairly vile thoughts actually.” She didn’t make it a joke with an easy smile.

  “Not about me, I’m hoping.”

  “No. About my family.”

  “Huh,” that had always been a hard one for him to answer. Sure, a lot of families sucked, he’d heard about more than his fair share in the service. But his didn’t, so it was hard to really relate. “That bad?”

  When she just nodded, he was even more at sea. For lack of anything better to do, he began toying with her fingers. Her whole hand barely covered his meat-hook palms, but they weren’t delicate. Katie used her hands. They were good and strong.

  “Want to tell me about them?”

  “I’d rather never think about them again.”

  “Okay,” he pulled her fingers apart enough to run a finger along the smooth webbing while he looked for a subject change. “You’ll like my folks. They’re just regular farmer types.”

  Again one of those strangely assessing looks.

  Oh, dumb. So he turned it into a joke. “Look, if I’m going to put a ring on your finger, you’re going to have to meet my folks. Just the way it works.”

  That earned him a pained smile. “If you’re lucky, you’ll never, ever meet mine.”

  “Did they do shit to you?”

  “Ow, hey,” she shook her hand, which he didn’t realize he’d clamped down on.

  He eased off.

  “No. They weren’t abusive. They…ignored me. I suppose they felt they needed an heir, reproduced, and then decided they couldn’t be bothered with the child.”

  “What kind of a parent does shit like that to a kid?”

  Katie studied his eyes for a long moment. Then, as if finding a surprise answer to his question, she spoke up.

  “Chas.”

  “Chas? That Chas Thorstad guy? What kind of a shit father would he be?”

  “No, I mean—” Katie jerked her hand out of his like he was a branding iron or something. “Still there.”

  She looked around desperately and Anton tried to see what had spooked her.

  “Chas,” she said again.

  He finally got it. She’d just felt him.

  Even while she was telling Hannah to turn around, which looked to be completely impossible here, Anton dumped his vision out of the car and began running it back the way they’d come.

  “Talk to me, Katie.”

  “But I don’t feel anything until we turn around again.”

  He probed around, reaching for her arm without bringing his vision back into the car until he found something soft.

  “Hey!” By the angle that her hand took his, he suddenly realized what he’d taken a hold of.

  “Oh God. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—” He hadn’t just grabbed a woman’s breast, had he?

  “Warned you my big-little-semi-brother was too nice,” Michelle chimed in happily.

  Apparently he had.

  Katie pushed his hand down against her thigh and then laid both of her hands over his to pin it there.

  “I’m—”

  “Shush,” Katie whispered. “I’m concentrating.”

  He was trying not to concentrate on the feel of her athlete’s thigh, or where his thumb overlapped her shorts and rubbed against the soft heat of her bare skin.

  “Keep moving.”

  He found his focus again, mostly, and continued back the way they’d come as Hannah did whatever her driving tricks were. Without his vision to help him anticipate, it made him a little bit seasick as she slalomed the car back and forth, then carved a long turn around what he guessed to be a tight traffic circle. Or an illegal U-turn.

  He swallowed hard and continued back up the road.

  The highway here was two-lanes each way with a wide, knee-high concrete median; the same to either side. No traffic lights, no marked crossings. Pedestrians perched like sandpipers along the Carolina beach, dancing back and forth along the high-tide line—before spotting a brief break in the traffic. Then young and old alike jumped down to the roadway and raced to the median. Once clear of the first two lanes, they perched once more at the median, awaiting the tide of traffic racing from the other direction.

  No one stopped.

  “There! There!” Katie squeezed his hand urgently, drawing most of his attention back to her smooth thigh. He was getting seriously desperate to get his hands on this woman.

  “Which way.”

  “How should I know?”

  Duh! Her feeling didn’t have direction without motion.

  He walked his vision around a broad circle passing through a lane of traffic, two courtyards, and a stall selling potted plants. As he crossed a narrow dirt lane to the side, Katie called out, “Warmer!”

  He hurried along the lane leading down between white- and yellow-painted courtyard walls. They’d been smoothed over with a slurry so that the concrete blocks didn’t show, but as the whole city seemed to be made of the stuff, he assumed these were as well. It made all of the houses very angular. A curved wall was hard work with rectangular concrete blocks.

  “Where are you?” Hannah asked in the car.

  “I’m walking down a narrow dirt lane immediately after a plant-seller’s stall.”

  “Shit!” Again he felt the car swerve. “I just passed that. A little warning next time, Anton.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Katie didn’t call out “cooler,” so he kept heading down the road toward the beach, not that there were any other options.

  When Hannah had finally found their way through the traffic again to where Anton was waiting, Katie couldn’t help being charmed.

  Hannah had said that greater Dakar had doubled in size in just twenty-five years and now was over a quarter of the country’s population. It was easy to believe.

  Yet here, just down from the towering white lighthouse, was a tiny enclave. A parking area big enough for only five or ten cars. A beautiful house on the left, a small restaurant with a wide, thatched porch perched on the cliff edge to the right. Between them lay a sweeping view of the sea a dozen meters below.

  As none of the others had skills that would let them track Chas, they headed to the restaurant to order a late breakfast and wait. For the first time, perhaps the very first time, she and Anton were alone together.

  Suddenly her worries about overlapping family histories, and her strange new role in the team, didn’t seem so important. Now it was just the two of them on a lovely beach.

  Unlike Cornwall, Dakar’s waters were a dark blue that made the ocean’s deep feel far more close and real. The rocky cliff and narrow strand of sand and boulder could have easily been Cornish, but the small sandy terraces covered by individual thatched roofs with no walls placed her firmly in the tropics for the first time in her life.

  For just a moment, she let herself focus solely on walking along the sandy strand, holding Anton’s hand.

  At this hour, there were only a few people on the beach and none under the thatched huts. To the south the beach opened up into a wider area and was dotted with umbrellas and a few lounges.

  “You a one-piece gal or bikini type?” Anton rubbed his thumb over hers.

  “One piece.”

  “Too bad. Bet you’d look amazing in a bikini.”

  “You’d rather I was
naked.”

  “Damn straight.”

  Katie looked up at him in surprise. She’d been teasing, but he shrugged easily that it was truth.

  Getting naked with Anton?

  That image actually worked surprisingly well inside her head. Not that she was ready to tell him that.

  A man as dark and tall as Anton, though much more slender, was playing with his dog in the low surf.

  Except the big German shepherd wasn’t playing, she was cowering. And the man had a heavy rope leash wound tightly in his fist.

  “You don’t think he’s drowning that dog, do you?”

  In answer to her question, Anton raised his hand in greeting.

  The man waved back. He had a bright smile that made him look like he couldn’t possibly be a foul dog-abuser. Over the years, she’d found more than one pet that she’d returned to a shelter rather than the owner—along with a vet’s report of the abuse the animal had suffered.

  “Na nga def,” he called out what sounded like a greeting.

  “Hey there,” Anton offered back.

  The man tipped his head uncertainly.

  “Bonjour,” Katie tried French.

  He lit up at that. When she asked if everything was okay, he’d responded with a whole tale of how Clovis was the only dog in the whole neighborhood who was afraid of the water. The seawater, which he was actively scrubbing into Clovis’ coat as she cowered and the waves sprayed them both, was needed to kill fleas.

  When he was done, he unclipped the leash, shooed the dog, and called out At-cha. “Get out of here.” Clovis scrabbled for footing as another dog-high wave battered at them, then she scrambled for shore struggling over the wave-washed cobblestones toward the sand.

  Katie waved and they continued down the beach searching for signs of Chas, when she heard the man call out loudly behind her—

  “Attaque!”

  Attack?

  Katie spun to face the dog.

  The speed of her motion must have triggered Anton.

  However mild-mannered he might normally appear, he’d spun fast and low, gathering up a fist-sized rock even as he shoved her behind him. He was suddenly six-five of highly trained soldier on full alert.

  The dog stood on the dry sand with her legs braced well apart.

  Then she shook hard, creating a wide spray that caught the sunlight to make a brief rainbow. Katie managed to dodge aside, but Anton caught the brunt of the “attack.”

  “Désolé,” the man apologized, but he was laughing, even slapping his thigh at the glorious joke.

  The dog shook itself again, though the “attack” of seawater spray was far less on her second effort. Then the dog lay down on the sand to wait.

  Anton was slow to rise to his feet. “I hope a goddamn wave flattens his ass.”

  “He said he was sorry.” She waved and he waved back.

  “Sorry my ass,” Anton grumbled as he wiped the dog-water from his face. It took her some effort to control her own laughter as they headed once more along the beach.

  They’d strolled another hundred meters or so when Katie had an idea.

  “Hey, if he was local, do you think he knows where the cables come up?”

  Anton just pointed.

  A large sign was perched atop the low cliff another twenty meters ahead. The red lettering would have been weather-faded into unreadability if it hadn’t been written so large. Though the pictogram of an anchor with a slash through it was something of a giveaway.

  “What’s it say?”

  Katie had to squint to make out the faded French. “Cable Crossing. No anchoring.”

  “I think the cables come up right about…” he made a show of scanning up and down the beach, before pointing at the sign’s base, “there.”

  “Jerk,” but she squeezed his hand harder.

  Then she felt him and shuddered for a moment.

  “Chas was definitely here.”

  Chapter 16

  They tracked back and forth across the beach.

  “No. Just right here. Directly over the cables.”

  Anton watched her walk a quick circle around the narrow beach.

  “One piece of it leads toward the parking lot. But in the other direction…” Katie stood at the edge of the water looking out to sea. “No, that’s crazy.”

  “Try me,” Anton edged up close behind her.

  “There must be something wrong with my radar. Psychometric skills. Whatever you want to call them.”

  Anton indulged himself and wrapped his hands across her belly and pulled her back against his chest. She tucked as neatly under his chin as if she’d been designed to fit. “There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with you.”

  “You’re biased.”

  “Even if I wasn’t—though gotta admit I seriously am—there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Except I’m this weirdo freak with a psychic power.”

  “No!” His response was automatic. Instinctual. It hadn’t required any thought.

  Yet he’d said words like those a thousand times to himself. It hadn’t bothered him; it had just been his sucky reality.

  “No,” he didn’t care what he’d said in the past. “It makes you wonderful in more ways than you already are.”

  “Biased,” but her voice was softer as she slipped her hands over the backs of his arms and leaned against him.

  He could stand here like this all day, didn’t care if the sun cooked him to a happy crisp. But he knew the others were waiting for them at the restaurant.

  “What are you feeling?”

  “Like if I don’t get you into a bed in very short order, I’m going to melt with frustration.”

  “Okay, I can definitely work with that image. God damn, woman, can I ever. Except you said you felt something wrong.”

  “Boy scout.”

  “Eagle scout. Order of the Arrow.”

  “I should have known.” He felt her sigh through his palms on her belly. “Chas—”

  “Mood killer,” he teased her.

  “—went that way.” And she pointed out to sea.

  “Huh.”

  “Told you there was something broken with me. Bloody hell. Three days ago I didn’t even know I had this power and now I’m convinced that I can tell the direction of flow. His trail gets…older…back toward the cliff. That direction is fresher sign.”

  He scanned the horizon. “No boats except some fisherman out past that point to the southeast.”

  “No, Anton. Look where I’m pointing.”

  He looked down at her arm, which pointed downward into the waves. “Really?”

  Her shrug sketched twin lines of heat on his chest. Quite why that gave him an idea to do with anything other than getting this woman into a bed, he didn’t know, but it did. Swimming?

  “Want to try something weird?”

  “Weirder than psycho-vision-localization of bad guys on different continents?”

  “Yep.” He figured this rated that—if it worked.

  “I’ll bet it doesn’t involve that bedroom.”

  “Not yet. How about this instead?”

  He stepped his vision out of his body and headed straight into the waves. The waves closed over him, but he could still see underwater.

  “Are you okay?” Katie twisted enough in his arms to bang her head against his chin and click his teeth together.

  He realized that he was gasping for breath, even though his body was still on dry land. It was a struggle to disconnect from what he was seeing and assure his body that it was fine, but he managed.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just never tried walking underwater before.”

  “You think that Chas can walk underwater?”

  “No. I’m thinking that he probably swam out from the shore, or was picked up by a boat. Maybe you can feel where he went from above or below. We’ll have to test that someday.”

  Despite growing up within a few miles off the North Carolina beach, Anton had never dived, not even snorkeled. He
knew how to swim and had survived egress training in the Army’s dunk tank in case of a helicopter crash. Now he was following a sand slope downward.

  Sun ripples painted the sand before him in sparkling light. An occasional fish swam by, one right through where his left arm would be if it wasn’t wrapped around Katie’s waist.

  “Fish can’t see me.” He jumped when a rock he’d been circling around abruptly burst to life, leaving behind a cloud of black ink.

  “What happened?”

  “A little octopus and I just scared the ink out of each other. Guess they can see me.”

  “He’s fading,” Katie reported.

  Anton zig-zagged until he picked up the right direction once more.

  He hadn’t really been counting steps, but he figured that he was roughly a kilometer offshore when he found the terminus of Chas’ signal. No matter how he circled, Katie couldn’t feel a thing except maybe a fading hint out to sea.

  Then, in the dim light filtering down through a hundred meters of ocean, right at the center of Chas’ disappearance, he found something grim that was all too easy to explain.

  Katie poked at her Sicilian Citrus Scallops. She’d come all the way to Africa and chance had led them to an Italian restaurant. The chef, sick of the pressures of owning a restaurant in Rome, had come to Dakar. He’d built a restaurant with twelve tables that could seat barely forty people, and set about serving up southern Mediterranean cuisine.

  The food was excellent. Her appetite wasn’t.

  In fact the only one who appeared to have a hearty appetite was Anton, presently devouring a deep bowl of fresh-made pasta with meatballs and red sauce. Maybe nothing bothered him. The other three military people were eating, if not as eagerly. Or maybe they’d seen so many worse things that this was mild.

  She, Michelle, and Isobel hadn’t really touched their food.

  For her? Each time she thought she was surfacing and finding some new mental framework to handle what was happening to her, it collapsed. She couldn’t actually accept any of it, but she’d been managing it.

  Until Anton had walked beneath the ocean and found something.

  “Are you sure about this?” Ricardo was looking unnerved. What did it take to unnerve a Delta Force operator? He’d shifted closer to Michelle when Anton had relayed the news. Protecting his wife was what had unnerved him. How must that feel to a warrior so used to operating on his own?