by Greg Curtis
The instant she reached the garden it was as though a switch had finally been flicked on. As one they mobbed her, all wanting to be close, and Sherial welcomed them to her with a smile that outshone the sun. He gathered it wasn’t a completely unexpected event for her.
But at least while they were with her they’d stopped eating his gardens. His mind in chaos he fled the scene, needing to find some peace.
Entering the gym he discovered he was right about the birds. More right than he could have guessed. They’d left their calling cards over every single piece of equipment he owned, giving it an aroma far less pleasant than the sandalwood he normally favoured. But at least he found, after carefully checking the indoor pool, they’d made it no further. Swimming in bird droppings would have been simply too much.
He busied himself with a mop, thanking every god known to man for the fact that the floor and equipment was all easily cleaned, and in half an hour had the place looking like new. Nailing up a board over the broken window hopefully ensured it would stay that way if his guests remained. He could have left it till Tuesday when Mrs. Pool visited but thought it wouldn’t really have been fair. Besides what would he have done until then?
All the while as he worked, he kept an eye out for Sherial, determined to know and understand everything she did and was. Yet while it was relatively easy to see everything she did through the French doors, to see everything she was, it was close to impossible for him to accept it.
For the most part she sat on one of the small garden seats he’d laid several years ago, surrounded by her adoring audience, and accepted their love. And while that was all she did and he saw absolutely everything, it explained nothing about what was really happening. For animals don’t generally just start loving people, nor do they live in peace with one another. Yet these did, and he could even see it in their eyes. As perhaps had he looked in a mirror he would have seen in his own eyes. It was a depressing thought for a man of secrets and self-confessed paranoia like himself.
Stranger still, he could also watch her aura glowing around her, a visible corona of golden light that extended around her like firelight to encompass her entire audience. It had been with her ever since he had first seen her, but only now did it finally occur to him to wonder about it. People don’t usually bathe in golden light.
Then there were her wings, huge and glorious wonders which were far too big for her when she sat and trailed along the grass behind her. She extended them high above her head each time another adoring animal jumped to her lap for a blessing, an automatic reflex he guessed. She had easily a twenty foot span, and considering her light weight Mikel was almost willing to accept that they’d support her in flight, or at least gliding. But the previous evening he’d had a distinct recollection of seeing her hovering, with the wings only moving gently in the still night air, barely creating a breeze. That too was surely impossible according to all the laws of physics.
Of course, he finally had to admit, perhaps the laws of the world simply don’t apply to angels. He wondered what if any laws did.
Mikel followed his labours with a light workout which was all that his muscles could take after the previous day’s hammering. An hour at the weights, another in the dojo and a quick three miles in the pool. In the next few days if he was able to continue with his schedule, he’d return to full training, five or six hours a day of intensive, gruelling weights, aerobics and combat, coupled with swimming and meditation for breathing and focus. Then just before his next job he’d add in the gymnastics, rings, horse, parallel bars and sprints. A work out that almost no one else in the world could have done. On the other hand as no one else in the world did what he did, no one else needed his physical abilities.
It was odd. Everywhere he went people would look at him, assess his shape as somewhat over weight, his build as oversized, slow and clumsy, and then guess him to be an out of shape banker. Yet he ate less and worked harder than any ten of them put together, and just to cap it all, he’d gained his black belt in three different martial arts. If it ever came to fisticuffs, most would think him soft. None would expect him to fight like a kick boxer. Then again he was careful never to remove his shirt in public any more. One look at his ropey muscling might give him away.
Once it would have upset him as people’s opinions seemed important to him as a younger man. But no longer. Now, far from insulting he found people’s opinion of him an effective and useful tool and actually cultivated it, dressing to conceal his physique. More than one cop had ignored him completely in an investigation, because there was no way he could possibly be the cat burglar they sought. Cat burglars were small, wiry, athletic people. Similarly most people would have had an image of a master criminal as an athletic, good-looking, Adonis. A middle aged office worker simply didn’t cut the mustard.
Sherial came in as he was finishing off in the pool and once more caught him off guard and red-faced. He normally swam naked in his home, there was no one to see him after all, but now suddenly there was. He cursed himself for another oversight. No one else could have walked in through those automatically locked doors, and normally no one else would have been in the house anyway. But he should have known neither of those conditions applied here. The mistake worried him. He was making far too many mistakes lately. Mistakes got you killed in his line of work.
Sherial showed no sign of leaving however as he got out of the pool, and he determined to brazen it out. Anything to show he wasn’t a complete dolt. Or just to show he still had some self-control.
Mikel tried not to give away his embarrassment as he walked calmly towards the hanging towels, though he was certain she guessed anyway. But in turn Sherial said nothing, choosing instead to stare openly. It was odd. She was a beautiful and sensuous woman, or angel or whatever, and he would somehow have expected her to be checking him out as it were. Instead he felt it was more as though he was being scrutinized, studied as a scientist does bacteria under the microscope. It sent a chill through him that mere towels couldn’t ward off. But she said nothing and no more did he.
Instead of speaking with her, he decided he would be better off spending time in his workshops, and asked if he could see her for lunch in a couple of hours instead. A proposal which, much to his surprise she accepted without question. Maybe she wanted to spend more time with her adoring fans.
Whatever her reason it was a relief. For as well as wanting to get some practical business attended to; such as checking on the police’s progress investigating his latest crime, laying more false trails, and pawning the stones, he also needed the time to address his feelings for her and control them. And to do some basic investigation.
Every fibre of his being screamed at him that he had to learn everything he could about her. He had to retake control of himself. For too long he’d allowed himself to be a puppet in someone else’s show. It was time to take over the reigns again, to pull his own strings and maybe, just maybe to learn how to pull hers. Before she returned and every fibre of his being went gaga once again. It was a black thought.
The first of his day’s chores were easily done, after all he’d had plenty of practice over the previous years and decades. The police when they started checking the clues he’d left for them, had found themselves irresistibly drawn to the new Asian crime gangs appearing on the scene. Bogus licence plates, fake financial transfers and some strange tales spread on the street, all had done their work well. No doubt the triads would be picking up some more unwelcome publicity and, quite probably for the first time in their miserable existence, would actually be innocent of it. That might at least curb their evil for a while.
The stones he decided to pawn through his vast network of jewellers, stone by stone as he usually did. Breaking them up and setting them in stunning arrangements would as always be slow. But it would net the best possible price, the tracks would be that much harder to follow and there was no sign yet that anyone was on to the ring.
Mikel had a network of jewellers always willing to
deal with him, few of them even suspecting the gems were stolen. After all he was a registered dealer in precious stones. It was just that he sold far more than he bought. A little astute bookkeeping meant he showed only a relatively small profit each financial year. Enough to explain the nice though not particularly lavish home he lived in, and the frequent trips around the world. Not enough to mark him as anything more.
Likewise the gold would be traded at a huge profit through other stores, after carefully being re-smelted so it could pass as Swiss gold. Paper money was always a problem, although he doubted the serial numbers would have been recorded. But a hundred million in U.S. currency was simply too difficult to just bank. Over the coming weeks it would be banked in small deposits in a thousand accounts and under a thousand different names. Likewise, large wads of it would simply be mailed from a dummy mail box somewhere, to respective charities.
The electronic money on the other hand was a cinch to move. He simply passed it through a set of dummy bank accounts, and then deposited it directly in some of his favourite charities. It would take years and multiple court orders before anyone would be able to track it, and by then it would be far too late. The accounts would have been emptied and closed, new ones created and when they checked the owners would never have existed anyway.
Next he turned his attention to the crime scene. True to the old saying, this criminal always returned to the scene of the crime, but only ever as an electronic eavesdropper. If the authorities only knew he’d often joked, though only to himself, - they’d have had a fit.
Initial forensics reports from the New York Police Departments’ own computers hadn’t yet logged any blood he’d left behind in the hallway, which wasn’t really surprising. They were still trying to piece together what had happened in Mr. Smith’s apartment, which had apparently been vaporized in a mini explosion. Thus far they were working on the principle that the mobsters had used a rocket on it. Mikel tried not to laugh too loudly.
At much the same time the Fed’s had shown up, wanting to know all about organized crime and the evidence that had been found. Excellent! He couldn’t have planned it any better. By the time those two departments had finished snipping at each other there wouldn’t be any evidence left to worry about.
The CIA’s Cat Squad hadn’t even shown up yet officially, although there were several references to ‘agents of other agencies’ in the reports. Either they were slow for once, or else just being more discrete. In a way he felt privileged, having had an entire department of the CIA dedicated to catching just him. A tribute to his skill and success. But it was also a worry. Still, despite having an overview of his operations in dozens of different countries, having studied his methods extensively, and even knowing what he was doing with the moneys, they hadn’t come any closer to catching him in decades. Then again perhaps the current President had reined them in. Catching him would after all, be an unmitigated disaster for the so-called free world.
The routine business settled for the time, he decided to start doing a little investigating of his new house guest, desperate to understand what made her tick. More importantly, he had to find out what made her so damnably dangerous to him. It was bad enough that she knew about his criminal activities, worse that she could seemingly wander through his every defence. But that she kept him off balance, causing him to make mistake after mistake; that was simply unacceptable.
Being caught in the nude had been merely embarrassing, but staring at her for perhaps twenty minutes in the middle of a burglary – that was straight out suicide. Mikel had spent decades training himself - perfecting his operations and planning them to the tiniest detail - and yet in a single day, a single moment she had undermined everything. Mistakes could not be tolerated.
First, on a hunch, he began with the halo. He focused on her with one of the security cameras, almost surprised it was still working, and studied her.
At first he’d worried the halo would be entirely in his mind, but seeing it there in the camera reassured him it was actually there. He wasn’t completely mad. Until he tried to spectrally analyse it with the computer. Far from breaking it down into its different light components, the computer couldn’t even find it. That made his head pound furiously as he tried to understand how that could be. He saw her halo even through remote electronic imaging equipment, but the equipment itself couldn’t see it.
Logically he finally decided, it meant that the halo wasn’t actual light after all. If it was, the cameras would see it. Neither was it some form of psychic projection. Otherwise, how could he see it through a camera, when she couldn’t even know he was watching? Instead it had to be a product of the viewer’s mind, but one that related to the viewer’s perception of the woman as an angel, rather than the angels’ own being. The viewer saw it but the angel didn’t project it. As an explanation it made no sense at all. But then what else about her did?
Just to be absolutely certain of his sanity, Mikel had the computer scan a photographic image of her and then reduce it to a tracery, which thankfully it did. The outline sketch although not particularly flattering, showed a woman with wings. He let out a small sigh of relief. Computer cogito, ergo sum. The computer thought it could see her, therefore she existed. It was the best proof of her reality he was likely to get.
Next he decided to study her speech. Not that she could, or at least, did speak with him. But whenever she was around he’d listened to her making a fantastic variety of sounds. Her voice was incomparable to anything he’d ever heard. It stood somewhere between birdsong and whale song, but with a few splashes of other creatures thrown in, and a large dash of something else all together. It flowed from her sometimes in response to him, sometimes to the animals that worshipped her, and sometimes without any reason. Whatever it was, it was wondrous, surely the sound of the ancient sirens as they lured sailors to their watery graves. Of course they too were mythical creatures. Did that mean, he wondered, that they too might exist?
Microphones a thousand times more sensitive than mere human ears, recorded her every note for about five minutes, while the most advanced voice analysis software started breaking it down. But even as he was waiting for the final results, he knew it would be a lost cause. Looking at the early data, he could see clearly that she was cooing and whistling at ranges far beyond human ability to hear let alone utter. It slowly dawned on Mikel that she didn’t speak not simply because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t. Her vocal cords weren’t even close to human. Assuming she actually had vocal cords.
On a hunch he tried some of the experimental cetacean speech analysis software he’d been donated by one of his research institutes. He didn’t support a lot of environmental concerns; he simply didn’t have the resources, but he’d always had a soft spot for whales. So when a bright young marine biologist had spoken publicly about his belief in their intelligence, and his dream of communication, he’d found himself an anonymous backer and in turn Mikel had gained access to some of his research.
Thus far the programme hadn’t been very successful in communicating with the huge creatures, but it had managed to decode some basic emotions, and a few whale words. Things like ‘food’ and ‘liking’. Mikel had always suspected a lot of the problem was that whale song wasn’t a true symbolic language in the human sense, and hence wasn’t analysable in the same way as speech. But that didn’t stop him hoping. Nor had it stopped the scientists from trying.
The programme didn’t have a lot more joy in decoding the angel’s tongue, but at least it detected most of the syllables she used, even if it couldn’t describe them as anything other than a mathematical model or a series of wave patterns. Her speech he finally accepted, wasn’t simply out of the vocal range of humans, it had sounds in it which couldn’t have been made by any known throat.
Infra red analysis at least gave more useful data. Her body temperature read a completely normal 37 degrees Celsius. Or normal for humans that was. He had no idea what was normal for an angel. He could see her
wings there in the screen, the blood pulsing through their massive arteries in giant orange throbs, and returning as dark blue waves. While the size of the arteries involved was staggering, with some being even larger than a man’s aorta, he was still relieved to see them. Whatever else she was, she had a mammalian circulatory system at least. Therefore, whatever else she was, she was a living creature, a mammal.
And therefore perhaps, she was vulnerable.
A thought that had been dancing senselessly at the back of his mind finally hit him between the eyes. The previous day as he’d desperately made their escape, he’d assumed she was in danger from the bullets. Yet he knew no church doctrine would ever have accepted that, - she was an angel and was therefore above mere physical danger.
If he’d thought about it at the time he might have been tempted to leave her to fend for herself. It would have been the smart thing to do. But he’d never thought about it. He’d known absolutely then, that she too was in danger, that she’d placed her physical life in his hands, and he’d reacted accordingly. Now, looking at her blood pulsing smoothly he realized he’d been right, she was vulnerable to the same dangers as him.
It still didn’t explain why she hadn’t left when the shooting started, and returned later. Even without her angelic powers, the gift of flight should surely have put her safely beyond all reach in mere seconds. One question at a time he decided.
