by Unknown
Wyatt pondered the pouch sitting on the coffee table. A pouch he hadn’t seen before, and he could tell that there was something bulky inside. He hadn’t asked his dad about it yet, but it was now that time. Something told him that he needed to ask him in private, though.
Wyatt stood and called out to all of the officers. “Please clear the room for a few minutes. I need to ask my dad some things in private. Go help the others with the neighbor interviews.”
They all nodded and obeyed. They knew that when Wyatt asked something of them, he had good reasons for doing so.
Once they’d left, he sat down on the couch beside Willy and put his arm around his shoulders. He leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“I love you, Dad. But, it’s time for you to tell me what you were doing. You’ve been saying things for the last two hours about how you’re to blame for all this. So, tell me about that.”
Silence.
Wyatt picked the pouch up off the table, snapped open the clasp, and pulled out the contents.
He whistled.
“Dad! There has to be a few thousand dollars here. What’s this all about?”
Willy took his hands away from his face and looked into his son’s eyes.
Then, he sighed and spoke slowly in a monotone. “It was those punks, Wyatt. They were blackmailing me. Said they were going to tell their story about what a freak I am to the media. And, they said they’d planted some hard drugs in my studio. I was paying them off and they were supposed to tell me where the drugs were stashed. I know now that was just a ruse to get me out of the house. They wanted Helen. They wanted much more than just that pile of money.”
Wyatt rubbed his shoulders. “That means they’re going to call with some demands, Dad. Calm down. They turned down all this money for a bigger score. They’re not going to hurt Mom.”
Willy shook his head. “They’re crazy, Wyatt. Druggies—not thinking with a full deck.”
“They want money, Dad. Lots of it. We have two choices—when they call, we can either pay them or try to trap them. My suggestion is that we arrange for a drop-off. We won’t take any chances with Mom’s life. I promise you that.”
Willy nodded and licked his dry lips. Then, he said, almost in a whisper, “Spoken like a good son. But, what would you be suggesting to me if she was somebody else’s mom and wife?”
Wyatt stared back, speechless. His dad had just asked one of the toughest questions any police officer could ever be asked. He opened his mouth to answer, thought he knew exactly what he was going to say, but then just slowly closed his mouth again without uttering one word.
Willy grimaced. “I thought so. You need to assign someone else to make this decision, Wyatt. You can’t be objective, for the very same reason why doctors go to see other doctors when they get sick. They can’t safely diagnose themselves. We need to do the right things to get Helen back, and if that means paying money, fine. If that means planning a trap instead, fine. But…we have to get her back alive.”
Wyatt’s wise father had once again taught him a life lesson.
Wyatt wrung his hands together. “Okay, Dad. You’re right, as you usually are. Once they contact us and we have all the facts we need, I’ll hand this off to one of the detectives to make the safest recommendation.”
“I have lots of money, Wyatt. You know that. If money will get her back alive, we’ll pay. But, if there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll just kill her even if we pay, then we have to go for their throats. And, she may already be…”
Wyatt grabbed onto both of his hands and squeezed hard. “No, don’t even think that! They want money, Dad. Remember that. Their best chance of getting money is to show us ‘proof of life.’”
Willy nodded. “Yes, I know you’re right.” Then, he lowered his head, hands covering his eyes. Wyatt could tell he was sobbing again. “Christ Almighty. My weird condition has brought this down on my wife. I feel like I just want to die, Wyatt.”
Wyatt was experiencing a different feeling entirely than what his dad was feeling right now. He tried hard not to let his imagination run wild—tried not to picture her in any kind of position of restraint. Tried not to envision the twisted criminals who had stolen her freedom. Didn’t want to think about what they might be doing to her. Refused to let the image of her face—tear-stained, fretful—creep into his brain. Didn’t want to imagine her fears about whether she’d get out alive or not.
His mother, the caring and selfless person that she was, was probably worrying more about how her son and husband were coping with this.
But, Wyatt couldn’t help it—all those thoughts crept into his head anyway, and he started feeling a strange tingling in his hands and feet.
He wanted to kill someone; whoever had done harm to his mother deserved to die a horrible death. And, he wanted to be the one to carry it out.
The tingling in his hands was getting worse. His feet had actually gone numb now, but his hands seemed to be on fire. It was strange—he’d never had these sensations before. Must be the stress, and the fact that he was so close to this horror story.
Wyatt got up and went into the kitchen. He turned the tap on and let the cold water rush over his hands. It seemed to help, but as soon as he took his hands out from under the tap, the fiery tingling came back. He put them back under again.
Suddenly, he heard his name being called.
He ran back into the living room. One of his officers, Clark Wilson, was standing there with a young couple beside him.
“Chief, I think you know these folks, Sharon and Bob Hunter from the house behind the alleyway?”
“Yes, yes, we’ve met before at one of my parents’ parties.” Wyatt noticed, out of the corner of his eye, his dad getting up from the couch and walking over.
“Well, they saw them take your mom.”
Wyatt let out a deep breath, and rubbed his hands together. They were tingling even worse now. “Why did you wait, folks?”
Willy jumped in. “What did you see?”
Sharon spoke first. “I’m sorry, we were scared that they were going to come back for us. We locked all the doors, set the alarm, and went down into the basement. We only came out when we saw the police at our front door.”
Wyatt shook his head. “Okay, doesn’t matter. I understand. Just tell us what you know, quickly.”
Clark jumped in. “Sharon gave us a description of the vehicle, Chief. A black Jeep Cherokee, late model. And a plate number.”
“Fantastic! Who owns it?”
Clark shook his head. “Didn’t check out. The plate was for a 2006 Chevy Malibu, stolen off a car in Vancouver a couple of months ago. Car registered to a Stuart Barkley. We’ve already talked to him in Vancouver. He’s solid.”
Wyatt’s heart sunk, but he quickly bounced back. “Okay, we can probably assume the Jeep is a stolen vehicle, too. Check on reports for stolen vehicles of that type over the last six months.”
“Already in the process, Chief.”
“Good. Okay, Sharon, Bob, what did you see?”
Sharon swallowed hard. “I was coming out the back gate with Rusty—our dog—and I saw them throwing who I thought was Helen into the back of the Jeep. She had something over her head, so I couldn’t see her face. But, I recognized her outfit—pink slacks, red blouse—she wears that outfit a lot in the summer. Anyway, Bob was right behind me and heard me yell out. We started walking towards them, but one of them shouted and the other two jumped into the car. Then they took off fast.”
Willy took a step towards Sharon. “The other two? So, there were three of them?”
Sharon stammered, ‘Y…Yes, Willy. Two…younger guys, guess around twenty? Skinny, greasy, jean jackets, one had a green toque. And…the d…driver…we didn’t see him. But, he sounded…older.”
Willy glanced over at Wyatt with a question in his eyes.
Wyatt just nodded. No one else in the room knew about what the two of them knew. They didn’t know that Willy had already encountered the two
young guys a couple of times, and that on this very day he’d planned to meet them in an extortion pay-off. For now, Wyatt intended to keep that knowledge between the two of them.
“Okay, Sharon and Bob—you did good.”
Bob hadn’t said a word yet, and Wyatt suspected his male pride was suffering a bit. Their decision to hide in fear in the basement and not even phone the police after the kidnapping, was probably something he was regretting right now.
It was a stupid thing for them to do—time was so precious in kidnappings and it could make a difference between life and death. But…unfortunately, Wyatt was seeing more and more of this lately, especially with the younger generation. More concern for ‘self’ than anything else.
He addressed them again. “You’re free to go. And, you don’t have to be afraid. These guys know you saw them, and they’re probably quite certain that you’ve talked to us by now. There would be no point in them coming back for you.”
Sharon shivered. Bob wrapped his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her tight.
They turned and began to leave by the back of the house. Wyatt called out to them. “Actually, show me where you were standing out in the alley when all this happened, and where the SUV was.”
As he and Willy followed them out to the back alleyway, Wyatt shoved his hands in his pockets. They felt like they were actually burning, but he knew they weren’t. There was no rash on his hands, no loss of movement—just a constant hot, tingly sensation he couldn’t understand. His feet were still completely numb, but, luckily, like his hands, they had suffered no loss of movement.
Sharon and Bob came to a stop in the middle of the laneway. “We were right here, and the SUV was there.” She pointed. “Right behind the back door to Willy’s studio.”
Wyatt scanned the gravel of the lane, looking for anything that the kidnappers might have dropped. Nothing.
There were no noticeable tire tracks. This lane was well-traveled, so it would be impossible to discern anything from an individual vehicle.
“I can’t believe they did this in broad daylight, Chief.”
Wyatt nodded. “I think they were pretty stupid, Sharon. And, because of you, we might have a chance of catching them. Thank you.”
He pulled his hands out of his pockets, reached out, and took hold of Sharon’s hand.
At that moment, a shock reverberated through his body. Like an electrical shock, a little stronger than the shock you would sometimes get by touching a door handle on a dry winter day.
Then, something else happened. It was as if he was standing in the alleyway when it happened, standing exactly in the spot where Sharon showed him she was standing.
He saw the two young guys throw his mother into the back of the Jeep. Winced as he saw her head bang on the roof as she went in. Saw the hatch door slam shut.
One of the thugs looked back, then whirled around and yelled out, “Aaron!”
Then, Wyatt heard Bob’s timid voice from behind. “Sharon! What’s wrong?”
The driver was shouting now. “Forget them! Let’s get out of here! Get in the car, both of you!”
One of the young guys now. “But…”
The driver again. “No buts! Get the fuck in the car!”
The Jeep sped off, kicking up gravel as it did. Wyatt raised his tingly hands up to shield his eyes from the stones that were flying back at him.
Then, he seemed to be in the air. Soaring above the vehicle as it made its way quickly out of Nelson.
Wyatt floated above it, watching it weave its way along several side roads until it finally reached Highway 3A, going southwest towards Castlegar. The wind was blowing through Wyatt’s hair as he soared along above the Jeep.
It was a calm feeling, almost peaceful. The sky was blue and the Sun was blazing, but he couldn’t feel any heat from its rays. The only heat he felt was in his hands and feet.
The Jeep turned off onto a secondary road. Wyatt saw a sign that said, ‘Shoreacres.’
He aimed his consciousness down, closer to the pavement and saw the sign, ‘Doukhobor Road.’ They went northwest about two miles, then turned off onto a dirt road.
Wyatt was there, right above them, right there when they turned off the dirt road onto the long driveway for an old farmhouse. Old, but in good shape. Quite a large house—wood frame exterior walls, stained dark brown. A roof constructed of pine shingles, marred in spots with growths of moss.
Wyatt hovered above the house and watched while they dragged his mother out of the back. She had a gunny sack over her head, and her hands were tied behind her back.
They shoved her roughly towards the front of the house. She stumbled and fell to her knees and the two young guys grabbed her under the arms, yanked her to her feet, and practically dragged her through the front door. The driver of the Jeep was the one who had the keys to the house.
Suddenly, Wyatt was back on the ground again, back in the alley behind his dad’s house.
He heard Sharon’s voice. “Chief, are you okay?”
He found his own voice. “Yes, I’m fine, Sharon.”
“It looked like you were off in a daydream for a few seconds there.”
A few seconds. That’s all it had taken.
The tingling and burning in his hands and feet had disappeared.
All that was left was Wyatt’s body trembling as if it were a cold winter day.
His brain moved into overdrive.
This entire weird experience reminded him of a seminar he’d attended about fifteen years ago. He and several other RCMP inspectors had flown to Quantico, Virginia. While Quantico was primarily a military installation, it also housed the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. The BAU. The subject matter of TV’s hit series, Criminal Minds.
The RCMP and the FBI did joint training quite often, and sometimes just shared special tools each of them had that could be called upon once in a while, to solve challenging crimes. The two institutions worked closely together and had a great relationship.
The seminar topic was something called ‘Remote Viewing,’ and the session was merely a sharing of top secret information about something spooky that the FBI, C.I.A., and Naval Intelligence had been experimenting with for decades.
Not always successful, but sometimes it had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. It had been used to track down missing persons, hideouts of some of America’s Most Wanted, and terrorist cells. In fact, it had been used to “see” certain events before they happened, allowing intelligence agencies to prevent them.
It was a team of people who possessed a special skill.
A skill that allowed them to transfer their consciousness to different times and different places. With the inherent talent that these people had, they only needed to focus their energies on a time and place. They were then able to see it just as if they were there.
They generally operated in dark rooms, totally alone with just their own thoughts. They’d be given a time, place, and sometimes an event to focus on.
Remote Viewing was an aspect of ESP that most people did not understand, nor even believe.
The FBI never explained how these people were chosen, or how they had even developed the skill. They only wanted the RCMP to know that the service was available to them if they ever needed it.
Wyatt remembered asking if they could meet some of their ‘Remote Viewers.’ The answer was an emphatic “No.” Their identities were protected. Someone else asked if these people were actual agents.
They answered that none of the ‘Remote Viewers’ were active agents. They were simply a team of…assets.
He remembered the FBI telling them that very few people in the world possessed this special ‘gift,’ and that, almost without exception, the gift was awakened inside of them by a traumatic event in their personal lives.
Something personally traumatic almost always triggered it the first time.
As Wyatt stood perplexed in the alleyway with Sharon and Bob looking at him with genuine concern, he remembered
one other thing.
About his dad telling him that his altered DNA from the horrific incident in Korea would have, without a doubt, been transferred down to Wyatt when he was conceived.
In one form or another.
In one manifestation or another.
Chapter 24
Allison’s stomach was doing flip-flops as her private jet circled for a landing over Burlington, Vermont.
She knew that it was going to happen soon. Very soon.
It had to be stopped. All of this had to stop.
Knowing now without a shadow of a doubt that her parents and husband had been killed on the orders of Chad Powers and Majestic 12, she felt empty inside.
For the last five years, she had reconciled their deaths in her mind as just being a tragic accident. One of those fluke things that happened once in a while—wrong place, wrong time. Wrong curve in the road along the Oregon coastal highway. A moment of inattention.
But, after reading the thoughts in Chad’s brain for just those few shocking seconds, she knew that he’d had the journalist her dad had been talking to, Darren Sheppard, shot in the head. Disguised as a suicide.
Then, when she’d asked him about her dad, the images of the car accident came through to her loud and clear. Her dad’s red Mercedes careening off the cliff while trying desperately to avoid a head-on collision with an assassin disguised as a Range Rover.
And, the deaths of Sheppard and Allison’s family had occurred on the exact same day. Chad Powers hadn’t taken any chances—didn’t want any time to pass between the killings. It would have been too obvious a warning if he’d waited. Someone could have been spooked.
Allison pictured in her mind the hands raised around the Majestic 12 boardroom table; that table made of solid granite symbolizing the cold and determined solidity of the group.
Hands raised, voting in favour of killing her father and the journalist.
Of course, it would have been a special meeting of the group, a meeting with only eleven members in attendance instead of twelve. Chad would have stated the murderous intention, and then asked for a show of hands.
