Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  T-Rex focused the miniature satellite dish to improve the reception over the car radio of the couple talking in the restaurant—Felicia Winthrope and Fred Fields; they made quite the pair. Ear buds would have been more discrete, but he wasn’t a big fan of them. The fact that it was nighttime did much to conceal the satellite dish; nothing to hide the sound of the crackling radio. From the parking lot, he had a pretty good line of sight to the dynamic duo seated against the restaurant window.

  “So what are you going to do?” Felicia said, empathetic, but not implying he should worry, or feel helpless, or hand over his power to her. And yet the desperation, the sense of urgency in her voice was undeniable.

  “Just a minor setback. There are a lot of people working on anti-gravity.”

  T-Rex adjusted the center ring on his binoculars, brought Fred Fields into sharper resolution.

  “Only, you know something they don’t.” She said it as if reading it in his eyes.

  “Yes. Something ridiculously simple. So simple no one would take it seriously. Pyramid power.”

  “I don’t understand,” Felicia said. The way she said it—she sounded smart, as if she could be made to understand, intrigued and at the edge of her seat. She didn’t have to restrain laughter, as T-Rex did, just listening to this silliness. How did this guy make it on to anyone’s watch list? They must be desperate in Washington to not leave anything to chance, however remote the threat.

  “You’re familiar with how they found herbs inside the great pyramids of Egypt, hundreds, thousands of years old, as fresh as the day they were picked?”

  “I always ascribed that to the dry air of the dessert. They preserve planes the same way. Half the World War II fleet is on mothballs in Arizona for just that reason.”

  “Yes, yes, but they shouldn’t be as vital, as charged with energy. Herbs lose their potency after a while, dry air or not.” Fred Fields absently rotated the salt shaker in his hand on the table, back and forth.

  “I recall the pyramid power fad,” she said. “Everyone was storing their vitamins under store-bought pyramids the size of a breadbox in the seventies. Magnet therapy followed. They put bottles of water in the fridge on top of magnets to get more negative ions into the water. I’m not saying there’s nothing to it. But…” She was making him work for this, showing herself to be a peer, someone he could bounce ideas off of to clarify his own thinking, ingratiating herself in his world, which honestly had room for no one. Most of these scientists worked alone for a reason. No one, not even their own peers, could follow them. By proving she could, he would take her everywhere with him. Smart, very smart.

  “Everything depends on perfect mathematical relationships, and more than that… The pyramids are situated on the planet’s ley lines for a reason. They’re telepads. Using pyramid power, you can blast off from those points to anywhere in the universe. Of course, you have to stick to the ley lines themselves that extend throughout the cosmos. The aliens left us the solution for how to join our world to the federation of planets as soon as we ourselves were ready to decode the message.”

  “Are you saying the pyramids themselves are spaceships?”

  “No, of course not,” Fields said, desperate not to be associated with “those people,” going by the tone of his voice. “They were built with the perfect mathematical proportions that could channel the field energies of the Ley lines. Of course, with erosion and time, the precise mathematics have to be inferred. The theft of the capstones and the skins on the pyramids, made of very different materials, was the biggest loss. Still, not so hard to reverse-engineer what I need.”

  “It all sounds a little too much like the claptrap coming from advocates of ancient aliens. Allegedly, they’re responsible for all mankind’s biggest breakthroughs, down to poached eggs. There are plenty of people eager to lap this stuff up. But so far, no one has been able to make much of the idea besides talk. Even the government people who are happy to clandestinely look into anything and everything, while denying any possibility that it’s more than mere drivel. The best minds in the world, Fields…”

  “…Don’t know what I know,” he said calmly, confidently, not the least rattled with her systematic exposure of one facet after another of his craziness. He stopped talking, reached into his pocket and pulled out what T-Rex had to look through his binoculars to identify: crystal pyramids. They floated above the palms of his hand, glowing.”

  “How…?” Felicia said.

  “The chi energy running through my own body is all that’s needed to levitate them. We’re all conductors, amplifiers in our own right, riddled with ley lines all our own. Of course, it takes training, esoteric training, to supercharge the energy body, get the gunk cleaned out, and get it to amplify the chi flowing through the planetary grid rather than dampen it down.”

  “You have more of these things?” she said.

  “Yes, of course. These are mere toys.”

  “You must take me to see.”

  “Later; we haven’t even had our dessert.”

  She smiled with anticipation and excitement, made sexual overtures with small gestures, like how she ran her hand around the rim of her glass, or left a lipstick impression on her cigarette when she set it back in the ashtray, or how she adjusted her voice subtly, to make it more breathy, all suggesting he’d scored big time. Meanwhile she avoided any sense of rush that could show her hand and reveal her alternative agenda.

  T-Rex had never seen a man in black who was actually a woman before. Felicia was not what he expected by any stretch of the imagination. If she were going to be a woman, she should be Jane of the jungle, fierce, athletic, dare he say, superhuman, or as close to that ideal as possible. She was nothing like that. She was full-bodied—that was the polite term for it, at least fifty pounds overweight, though she wore it well, so well it was hard to tell. Dressing the part to make her look every bit the goddess. And her plump face looked pretty, like it was meant to be rounded, and would look cruelly out of place with hollowed cheeks if she slimmed down. She wore an old-fashioned feminism with, if anything, a futuristic take on the matter, as if evolving an offshoot of feminism that didn’t surrender an ounce of softness for all the inner strength radiating from within her. And she was sharp as a tack. She was limited in that body, probably to poisons, and fast talking, the art of the short and long con, and to handing off stolen information to others who could better act on it or do the killing for her if smooth talking and poisons weren’t sufficient. Still, T-Rex imagined, she could be black widow deadly, substituting depth for breath. Now that he’d justified her place in the world, he relaxed some, the mystery of her depths no more fathomed than they were a second ago, but at least, she was now worth exploring. Save for one thing.

  She was the mark. He was supposed to kill her.

  T-Rex had no idea why he felt so conflicted about that now that he’d actually set eyes on her. It was time to initiate contact to see if he could afford to ignore these conflicting emotions.

  “Careful with this one,” he heard the voice in his head say. It rattled him because it wasn’t his voice. He knew what his inner voice sounded like, after so many years alone with himself, all the guises it could take, moreover. This was more of a foreign presence, just short of a possession. T-Rex relaxed as he felt a wave of warm loving energy flow through him. He was starting to feel sick at the outrush of toxins stored in his body, for holding on to so much evil, so much darkness, for so long, locked up in his joints and muscles, headed straight into his bloodstream. He shook and sweated profusely. Someone was turning the car into a sweat lodge. He raced the sixteen-ounce glass of ice water nestled in the cup holder to his mouth, downed it. The sweat beading on his body was literally black. He took the handkerchief in his rear pocket and wiped his forehead, down the back of his neck, and stared at the dark oily film in horror.

  “Who’s doing this to me?”

  “Relax,” the voice in his head said. “Love is easy to beam over a great distance. Hate, not s
o much. Unless the victim’s mind has been prepared to amplify the weak signal with auto-suggestion, as with voodoo.”

  T-Rex realized it was a woman’s voice doing the talking and, he had to admit, aside from her methods, she didn’t sound threatening. “What about the woman in the restaurant?” he asked, still preferring the security blanket of suspicion.

  “She’s filled with toxic ooze, like you. Only, she’s content to stay like that. You’ll want to save her, you’ll try to save her, but in the end you’ll have to eliminate her.”

  “That doesn’t sound very loving or enlightened.” He dialed up the volume on the radio in an effort to drown out the voice in his head that he really didn’t want to heed. He wasn’t fully conscious of any attraction between himself and the woman in black until now.

  The volume on the radio actually dropped, the volume of the voice in his head went up. “You can be so in love with life, you can let the viruses invading your body take over for fear of weeding them out. A good way to end up dead. The heart must inform the mind; it must not decide for it.”

  Whoever this chick was, he wasn’t about to win a philosophy debate with her. “Who are you?”

  “One of many. Or so it turns out. Who knew? I’m as surprised as you are to find others exist, at least in such numbers—pleasantly surprised.”

  T-Rex didn’t appreciate her evasiveness, but then, considering his occupation, he couldn’t exactly blame her. “I’m not sure you want plenty like me running around. Even a few may be too many.”

  “You’re early on in your recovery. As, I suppose, are we all. Stick to the path and neither of us will have to worry.”

  “I don’t know if I can do this. It’s as if she cast a spell over me,” he said, staring into the restaurant at Felicia Winthrop seated at a window booth. “I may have known her in another incarnation of herself. I’ve been around a long long while.”

  “Yes, I know. You’re wrong in this case. She has lured you in as she has lured all the others. She has a specific type who is drawn to her murky depths. You must break the hypnosis, or it is you she will end tonight.”

  Strange how everything the voice said in his head sounded so right. Maybe he was under her spell, and his mark was everything he wanted her to be. “It will do no good to lie to yourself,” the voice said, reading his mind. Damn, this woman was good. Unaugmented telepathy, this sharply focused, over such a distance, he wouldn’t have believed it until now. Of course, he specialized in people who built tech toys to turn men into supermen. It was just easier, he supposed, than trying to do it the hard way. He had heard stories about the rare individual, always in some far away land, some yogi on a mountain top, in another era… never up close and personal like this. Never anything more than myth. He didn’t find the thought particularly comforting. It was bad enough keeping a lid on the boys with the tech toys. People like this one would be even harder to track down.

  “I’m going in,” he said. Hoping for some encouragement. But the voice was gone, the psychic connection dead. She had to work on her timing, her exits even more than her entrances. Though, it wouldn’t hurt to dial back on the criticism and show gratitude, if he wanted to attract this kind of help again.

  Fred Fields and Felicia had just finished dessert, so they’d be getting up soon. If he was smart, he’d follow them to his lair, but that would also risk her killing him before he could come between them.

  He reached into his glove compartment, and ferreted out a couple of bottles, spritzed himself with cologne. Damn his lack of a sense of smell. Didn’t want his nerves giving him away. A good predator can smell fear.

  T-Rex sauntered into the restaurant, waited patiently to be seated. Then, as his host walked him by their table, he and Felicia locked eyes. He had caught her with her guard down. Vulnerable enough to realize something terrible was about to go down about which she could do little.

  He took his ice pick and drove it through a nostril straight into her brain. He then unscrewed the handle, stuffed her nose with a sliver of paper napkin, and leaned her against the window, as if she were trying to stop a nose bleed.

  Fred Fields had cooperated with the ruse so far because because there was no time to react. And now, shock had set in so Fred would be lucky to get his mouth to work if he so desired. “Follow me, I’m here to help you,” T-Rex said.

  “You’re one of the men in black?”

  “No, she was. I was one of them once. And now I’m the only thing keeping you alive from the next one they send after you.”

  Fields didn’t need any more coaching. He donned his hat, and slipped out from under the booth’s table. “You lead,” he said.

  T-Rex was happy to, not figuring this guy for a runner. He was pretty cool, all things considered.

  Once they were back in the car, T-Rex had to ask. “You made the necessary emotional adjustments pretty fast in there.”

  “I’ve been preparing for this moment all my life. My father was a man in black. He trained me on everything to look for, the signs.”

  “Doesn’t mention that in your file.”

  “That’s because according to his file, I don’t exist. They must have found me some other way.”

  “I guess that explains why you didn’t wet your pants in there.”

  “Oh, I wet my pants, all right. This ratty old car has endured worse insults.”

  T-Rex smiled. He was starting to like this guy. And he was gaining confidence in his new ally, the telepathic psychic who reached out to him from some far corner of the world. Without her cueing, he may have mistaken the look in the woman’s eyes for simple fear, mixed with shock and anger, and a host of negative emotions she had every right to have looking up to find a gun rudely pointed in her face. Instead he saw the professional that she was, in full control of all those emotions. He saw the blackness of her soul staring back at him, no transient phenomenon, no fleeting moment of rage and weakness of which we were all capable. Raw, unrepentant evil, given a silky smoothness only professional training could create. He knew the feeling well. It had been his baseline for most of his life. It took one to know one. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t be fooled, couldn’t second-guess himself that he was in fact projecting his own shit onto her. A second’s hesitation was all it would have taken to end his career. And, if she had done her research, his long long run. Even the Eternal could be brought down, with the right choice of weapons, if she were prepared for him. If she was as good at her game as he sensed, she would have been prepared.

  ***

  Piper poured terracotta red colored sand into its groove in a miniature mandala, the size of a card table. It was in fact seated on a card table. It was scaled down from the five-acre size it was meant to be. He even had a miniature rake with which to smooth things out. The salesman in the New Age shop swore up and down this exercise would clear his mind and snap him out of his depression, which was undeniably very deep for him to fall for this nonsense, hook, line, and Titanic-sized sinker. So far, despite the decidedly pleasant distraction from his depression, he couldn’t say that his dour mood had lifted any.

  “So, did you have your post-game debrief with Cliff, in the wake of your encounter with the Barroom Butcher?”

  “No,” he said. He sighed like a tempestuous child before he realized he was answering an alien voice in his head not his own. “Who the hell am I talking to?”

  “Focus, Piper.” She was referring to the conversation he and Cliff had on the plane while watching Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, what seemed like eons ago, and to the decision they’d made to discuss how each subsequent kill affected them. Mixed into that conversation were some other interesting ideas…

  “Because the theory was complete bullshit, that’s why.” He was referring to another part of their conversation on the plane. The idea of past lives bubbling up through this one… complete hokum, like the idea that building this mandala is going to do me a damn bit of good. He realized his pent up anger had been held in so long he didn’t mi
nd talking out loud to imaginary voices. Depression with psychotic features, they called this.

  “The mandala cleared your mind enough so I could establish a link to you.”

  Piper gulped, realized she was right. “Is that why we’re having this talk? Because I was actually on to something with that crazy past life theory?”

  “Yep.”

  He raked the terracotta gravel he’d just poured so it was better couched between the lines formed by the strips of wood. “So what, these other lifetimes we’re channeling, like a pair of séance mediums, are like shades of gray, variations on a theme? Only, we keep getting worse and worse from one lifetime to another?”

  “I don’t think you need me to answer that. You see your problem. That’s a lot of inertia pulling you down. The good news is: this is a rare lifetime in which you’ve given yourself a fighting chance. You’re willing to take a step back, look at what’s driving you. So you can do something about it.”

  “What if we can’t change who we are?”

  “Until you do, each lifetime will be one more chance. The longer it takes for you to get it right, the more attracted you are to getting it wrong. You get better or you get worse, you can even do both at the same time, you just can’t stand still. Not forever. I think maybe enough lifetimes have gone by now that that’s starting to get through to you. The truth is leaking across timelines, like the Godhead on too many blood thinners.”

  Piper laughed, the first time he’d done so in a long while. He wasn’t sure if it was on account of the voice in his head, or his mandala, which he had continued to work on the whole time they were talking. He needed the distraction from the nagging thought he was mad for talking out loud to himself. “Thanks. I feel a lot better.” When he didn’t get a response, he said, “You still there?” Silence. “Guess not.”

  “Who you talking to?” Cliff asked, entering the room, cleaning one of his guns. It was his favorite mind-clearing ritual.

  “Some psychic chick. She reached out to me out of nowhere. Shit, she knew me better than I know myself.”