I stood back and looked at the bottom of the tank. There was a small bleeder valve but I’d need a wrench to get it open.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m attempting to drain off some diesel fuel from the boiler’s reservoir.”
“Do you think that’s the best use of our time? You know, under the circumstances?”
I was back at the workbench looking through the contents of the toolbox. I found a small crescent wrench and headed back to the boilers. I then turned back and grabbed the toolbox, too.
“If I told you what I was doing and why, you’d think I was insane.”
“Yeah, well, you really don’t want to know what I’m thinking about you as it is.”
“Probably not.”
I looked over at her. “You could help me, you know,” I said.
She stood in the middle of the basement, her arms crossed.
“Pfft, help you? Like that’s going to happen,” she replied angrily.
“On that workbench. See if there are some coffee filters to go with the coffee maker,” I said.
She stood immobile for several moments with an impassive expression. Then, as if coming to some kind of decision, walked over to the bench.
I adjusted the wrench to fit the bleeder nut and turned it counter-clockwise until fuel started to drip. I emptied out the top of the toolbox, wiped at the dust there with the palm of my hand, and placed it on the floor.
Pippa was crouched down rifling through items on the shelf beneath the bench. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me, scowled, and returned to what she was doing. A moment later she stood up, holding a faded box of Mr. Coffee filters.
“Perfect. I’ll need the brew basket from the coffee maker as well.”
She hesitated, then turned to fiddle with the coffee maker. Facing me again, she held up the small brew basket. “This thing?”
“Yep.”
She tossed the items over to my feet. “There you go, your coffee filters and that other thing.”
There were about ten filters in the box. The first seven were unusable. The bottom three were in better shape. I used my foot to position the toolbox beneath the bleeder valve. Holding the filter basket with one of the filters in place, I opened the bleeder valve the rest of the way. A stream of thick, gummy, black fuel poured into the filter. Eventually, a stream of less congealed fuel was dripping into the toolbox. It took fifteen minutes and all three of the filters to fill the toolbox.
I walked to Pippa’s left, giving her a wide berth in case she took another swing at me. Dropping the diesel fuel would be tantamount to game over. She followed me over to the generator. I gestured with my chin, “Can you open that cap?”
She opened it and placed the cap on the floor. Slowly, I poured the diesel fuel into the generator’s gas tank.
“You might want to get some of that in the tank instead of all over the floor,” she observed.
“I see you still have your sense of humor.”
She didn’t reply.
I set the now-empty toolbox down on the floor and replaced the cap on the tank.
“The sweating … jittery movements … coloring not good—you’re going through withdrawal,” Pippa said—a statement, not a question.
“Yeah, I am. But I’m working on that.”
“By fucking with this old machine?” she asked.
I pointed to the light bulb hanging eight feet over her head. “I need that extension cord.”
She looked up at the light and then around the cellar. “It’s too high up. No way to reach it.”
“There’s a way. If you’ll let me.”
“Let you what?” she asked.
“Let me hold you up by your legs,” I said.
She walked around, looking up at the light. “I don’t understand.”
“There may be some play in the cord. If you pull on it, we may be able to bring it down here, over to the generator.”
“I guess we can try. You’ll get blood on yourself,” she said, pointing to the dark, rust-looking stains on her pants.
“Not yours?”
She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate. She positioned herself so she was directly beneath the light bulb. As I moved closer, almost touching her, her eyes stayed on mine. I lowered myself to her knees, grabbed hold of her legs and slowly stood, bringing her up higher into the air. I felt one of her hands on my shoulder. With the other she reached up. Her fingers were an inch away from the light.
“It’s too high.”
I brought her back down. “Let’s try it again. This time I’ll grab you lower on your legs.”
“You’re not looking so good. Sure?”
“I’m fine.”
She nodded and we repeated the same steps. Now, several inches higher in the air, she was able to reach past the light bulb and wrap her fingers around the cord.
“I’ve got it. Bring me down,” she said.
Slowly, I brought her legs back down while keeping my eyes on the cord above. It was pulling free. I saw where the light bulb cord was knotted and plugged into an orange extension cord. It was coming free from a hole in the ceiling. Once Pippa was standing on the floor she continued to pull on the cable until she handed it over to me.
She took a step backward and crossed her arms again. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing.”
I headed back to the workbench and found needle-nose pliers and a role of sticky electrical tape. I put them in my pocket. I unplugged the battery charger and carried it back to the generator. “I’m trying to get this generator working.”
“Yeah, I figured that part out. Why?”
“I’ll have to show you. I already told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
She rolled her eyes.
I needed more wire to splice things together. My hands were shaking almost uncontrollably now. Walking was becoming difficult. At the electrical panels on the wall were several conduits. I used the pliers to pull one of them away from the wall. I yanked it free from the panel and then tore it away from a junction box that was six feet away. I sat down on the floor and spent the next few minutes pulling each of the wires free from the conduit.
Pippa watched and shook her head. “Why don’t you let me do that? You’re barely able to hold on to the pliers, let alone strip those wires.”
“Okay,” I said. “Strip an inch from both ends of each wire.”
She sat down next to me and took over from where I left off. She pursed her lips and glanced in my direction. “Are we going to talk? Are you going to tell me why you turned—went rogue?”
“I never turned. Never went rogue—”
The anger was back in Pippa’s face. “How can you even say that?”
I held up a hand. “I promise, I’ll explain everything. First, the generator. Then I can tell you and show you what you need to know.”
Pippa let out a long breath and continued to strip an inch of insulating coating from the wires. When she was done, she handed the bundle of wires over to me. The next step was going to be the trickiest. Especially with my hands not working well.
“Just tell me what you want to do. I’ll do it for you,” she said.
“We need to strip back the insulation from the two wires connected to the light bulb, and do so without cutting all the way through them.”
“Seriously? It’s plugged in. Won’t I get shocked?”
“Not if you do them one at a time. But if you cut the wire we’ll be in the dark. We won’t be able to get the generator running.”
“I’ll do the best I can. It’s not like I’m an electrician or anything.”
We moved closer to the generator and Pippa brought the light bulb cord onto her lap. She separated the wires of the cord away from each other and slowly started to strip back the plastic insulation. Her long fingers moved with a dexterity that surprised me. Once she had an inch of copper wire exposed I told her to cut the plug off the battery charger cord, splice in one wire, and wrap
it secure with electrical tape. We did the same thing on the other side of the cable. Within minutes we had the battery charger up and running, as well as keeping the light bulb lit.
Next, we needed to repair the wire bundle on the generator itself. With little direction, Pippa used the spliced wires she’d previously cut and stripped and, one by one, connected them as I instructed.
I made a few more connections on my own, including the attachment to the twelve-volt cables, now taking the place of the old battery cables. I stood up uneasily and walked around the generator. Had I forgotten something?
Pippa’s eyes were on me. When I looked at her, she raised her eyebrows. “Well? What now?”
The truth was, I had little faith that this would work. A hundred things could go wrong. A fuse could blow … the engine’s starter motor, or alternator, or any combination of things, could be defective.
I checked the battery charger and saw that it was constantly putting out twelve volts. I flipped the generator’s power on/off switch to the ON position. The engine immediately cranked and sputtered, then died.
Pippa looked up from the generator. “That sounded promising, didn’t it?”
I nodded. I flipped the power switch again and this time the engine roared to life. The noise was loud and the generator shook like it wanted to fly into the air, but it was running.
Pippa was smiling and looked triumphant. Within seconds, I felt the effects of the power coming off the generator. Earlier, I had attached a bundle of insulated high-voltage wires to the 220-volt output of the generator. I sat down on the floor and pulled them close to me—cradled my head right onto them.
I tapped in. The familiar song was there, waiting for me—welcoming me. It filled my consciousness as blue light surrounded me, bathed me in its nurturing grace. I felt the familiarity of the presence there. It was alive and once again I was becoming one with it. As the moments passed, my strength returned. My mind became clear and I was able to reach out beyond myself—I found Pippa. In a flash I was in her mind—experiencing the depth of her own inner-beingness. I sat up and looked into her eyes.
How about I start from the beginning?
Chapter 23
Pippa was up on her feet, looking infuriated. “What the hell was that!?”
I had only been in her mind for a few seconds. I communicated directly with her via my mind to hers. In those few moments I understood her, felt her anger toward me. I grasped how her life had been turned upside down and why she had decided to follow through with her orders to apprehend me and escort me back to Washington.
I jumped to my feet and let her come toward me, her face full of fury. She spoke quietly now: “I asked you a question. Answer me.”
I reached over and turned off the generator. “I can read minds. I can influence thoughts.”
I watched her. She stared back.
“Several days ago I was in a car wreck,” I told her. “I’d careened into a telephone pole. Sustained head trauma and what’s called retrograde amnesia. That’s another story … Anyway, a high-power line was severed and for several hours dangled inches above my head. Something happened in that time period, something physiological, to my body, to my mind. Sitting trapped in what was left of my car, I started to hear the thoughts of animals, the EMT workers around me, everyone. At first, I chalked it up to having a serious concussion; maybe I was having delusions. Later, at the hospital, I found a way to what I call tap in to high-voltage sources and the ability returned. Again, I was able to communicate directly into minds, if I desired to. Later, I discovered I could influence people’s actions as well. I’ve also discovered a limitation to this new sixth sense. I need to tap into a power source within twenty-four hours or I go into withdrawal. You’ve seen those symptoms first hand. And you’ve felt my consciousness intrude in your mind.”
She was shaking her head. “You know how utterly ridiculous this sounds, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. If I hadn’t experienced it myself, I’d say I was definitely delusional—that I was seriously over the edge … crazy. So test me. Prove me wrong.”
She smirked—more shaking of her head. She shrugged. “Fine, what number am—”
I cut her off: “Sixty-two.”
Her expression changed; now serious, she no longer shook her head. “Lucky guess. Very lucky. I’m thinking of a place—”
“The top of the Washington Monument, where we kissed,” I said.
The beginnings of a smile pulled at the corners of her lips. “Whoa! How did you do that? Okay, one more. Talk to me without talking. Like directly—”
Again, I cut her off, not by talking, but with my thoughts speaking directly into her mind. Pippa, I am so sorry … so very sorry. I was trapped in Russia for months. Please forgive me.
Her eyes never left my lips, as if she was trying to uncover some kind of trickery, some magic trick. “This is real. Oh my God, you really can do this. This is so freaky.” Her expression changed again. “I don’t want you in my mind, Rob. Promise me you won’t do that again—promise me right now.”
“I promise. Your thoughts are safe. Although I already saw your memory of us kissing in the Washington Monument.”
“Well, don’t read too much into that. You still have a lot to answer for. There’s not a U.S. Intelligence agency not looking for you, not to mention most international ones.”
“Listen. Veronica was a double agent. Pippa, I’d discovered she was working for the SVR; her cover was blown. She pulled her weapon, was going to shoot both Harland and myself. I shot her first.”
“That’s not how Harland reported events went down when he got back. As far as he was concerned, you shot his wife in cold blood, then went to ground. He was so devastated he eventually had to leave the agency.”
“The only reason I went to ground was because Veronica had the SVR already coming for us. How Harland got out still has me baffled.”
“So where did you go?”
“Remember Ladislav Skykora, the Slovakian national? You met him in Moscow several years back. Anyway, he was a friend and I knew he was no ally of the Russians. He agreed to keep me hidden, but he extracted a price from me for doing so that I still need to pay. Over that next year I couldn’t leave his flat. He was being watched … his phones were tapped; twenty-four hour surveillance on his flat. Several times, I had to hide in a crawlspace between the walls. I owe him my life.”
“Why didn’t you come in once you got back to the U.S.?” she asked.
“I was planning to. But I needed to keep my promise to Skykora first. It was only going to take me a day, two at most. That’s why I’m here in Kingman. I had to keep my promise.”
I watched Pippa’s face. She still looked skeptical.
“What was it you had to do for Skykora—what was your promise?”
“I had to kill a man. Another Slovakian national. I’ve actually already met him, but at the time, with my amnesia, I had no idea who he was.”
“Who is he?” she asked.
“A man named Drako. Drako Cervenka.”
Chapter 24
“You just can’t kill a man in cold blood. It’s not like an agency sanction, it would be murder,” Pippa said incredulously.
“Drako’s a pretty bad dude. I’m not going to lose sleep over taking him out. I’ve taken out worse—so have you. He’s been getting rich off human trafficking, mostly Slovakian women and children, for years. A master strategist, he’s always one or two, or even three steps ahead of the authorities. My friend, Skykora, lost his sister and niece to Drako’s trafficking enterprises. They were abducted from their small eastern bloc village, smuggled into an oceanic shipping container with thirty or forty others. Skykora was able to alert the authorities, and the freighter was boarded and searched. Unfortunately, they’d gotten to the container too late. Everyone inside was dead. His sister, niece, everyone, had run out of water halfway across the Atlantic. Died of thirst.”
Pippa was quiet for a while. I wasn’t sure if
she had come to some kind of acceptance of my predicament. “If we get out of this, Rob, I need to bring you in. I believe what you’ve told me. And after what you’ve shown me, what you could show them—”
“No! No one can ever know about these abilities, Pippa. Can you imagine the potential for misuse? How I’d never have a life again?”
“You won’t last long on your own. There’s too many looking for you,” she said.
“I’ll think of something. But my days working for the government are over. If you think about it, you’d realize too what I’ve come to know. In a profession where everyone lies to everyone else, I’d quickly become a liability.”
She seemed to accept that. She continued to stare at me. The unspoken words were written in her expression. What about us? What about what we had?
Noises were coming from above. Harland was returning.
“Get directly under the perch—stay out of sight,” I said. I fetched up the same long piece of metal I’d used as a fulcrum and waited for Pippa to get across the room. I licked my fingers and unscrewed the light bulb until the basement went black. Carefully, I moved forward in the darkness to where I remembered Pippa was standing. I walked right into her. Her arms instinctively came up, her hands resting on my chest. We stayed like that as the noises from above got louder. I felt her breath on my neck, could smell her light perfume. Then we heard Harland’s footfalls right above us.
A beam of light shone as his flashlight moved in slow, wide arcs around the basement.
“What are you up to, Chandler? I know you’re down there.” The beam of his flashlight had settled on the light bulb and extra coils of extension cord lying on the floor, then on the generator and the spliced-in wires. “Someone’s been busy here. What are you two up to, Rob?”
I heard him rack the slide of his handgun to chamber a round. Not so easy with only one working hand.
Mad Powers (Tapped In) Page 11
