“How can you do that?”
“He doesn’t know me, so I’ll follow him if he goes out, and I have a good camera and a telephoto lens. I have today, and probably tomorrow before these BII agents try to contact me. In case they arrive earlier than I expect, I intend to be out of contact with my phone turned off. I want you to pick Stacy up after classes, and visit your sister or your parents in E-Town, so you aren’t available for them to ask where I am. I don't want you to lie to them if they find you. It’s illegal to lie to the FBI, and I think this might be worse, so don't lie, just be hard to find all weekend.”
“OK. I’ll pack up some things for Stacy and me, gas the car and pick up some cash. You be careful.” She’d thought that would be a caution she wouldn’t need to utter again after he retired from the force.
Grayson gathered some things he’d need in a tote bag, kissed his wife, and left the house.
****
After cruising around the gated community, with its big houses on large well-manicured lots, visible through the two entrances and on the other side of an eight-foot brick wall, he used the maps on his phone to identify the street where Stiles house was. There were gently rolling hills where the residential streets wandered, and the house was on a cul de sac that ended at an outer wall. He could see the second story windows and identified which of the two gated entries to the neighborhood Stiles would most likely use, based on proximity.
He wouldn’t be able to see the yard for continuous observation, but he parked and used the sidewalk that passed on the other side of the wall by Stiles house. Using a selfie stick and setting his phone to record, he raised it high enough to see the house, the wide front drive, and a four-car garage. The Aston Martin wasn’t visible, but a black BMW X5 M SUV was in the arcing driveway, parked in front of the house. The plate showed it was one of the cars registered to Stiles.
Grayson drove to where he could park on the wide boulevard under the shade of some large old trees and could keep the main entrance in view. His old dark gray Camry was a trifle outclassed by most cars inside the gated neighborhood, but here on the street, it would not stand out from the other cars parked there. He had a newer red Dodge Charger that might be fast but was too flashy for this work. He waited, camera ready on the dashboard, and hours passed as he sipped drinks from a cooler, and munched sandwiches and snacks.
It was just after sunset when Stiles SUV passed through the decorative electric gates and pulled onto the boulevard, turning away from Grayson. There was no chance for a camera shot, which in the fading light and his darkly tinted windows was only a faint hope anyway. He started his engine, pulled into the light traffic, and followed.
The car he tailed led him to one of the larger malls in the area, where the BMW parked, and he watched a slender man get out and walk towards an entrance. From behind, the figure seemed a good match for the man he’d seen in traffic camera images. Grayson rushed to park and then ran to catch up with him before he entered a business and he lost track of him. He had to leave his camera and long lens behind. He didn’t want to attract attention, and he had his phone camera anyway, which he could use more discretely.
The man was browsing display windows, looking at men’s clothing. He was well but casually dressed, and Grayson could only see him from the back or side as he looked at clothing. He wanted to get ahead of him and let him approach, while he held his phone unobtrusively so that he could get a decent shot of his face.
Grayson walked on the opposite side of the wide corridor as he passed the man. Glancing his way one time, he felt a thrill when the side view of the man’s face matched the grainy expanded traffic camera images he’d seen. There was a small island in the center of the passageway with a bench; he walked faster to get there so he could be ready to zoom in the phone camera on the man’s face. That was when he experienced a strange sensation, emanating from behind and to his right, centered on where Stiles was strolling, looking in display windows.
He visualized an image of a handsome, well-muscled man, shopping for clothing, and who was seeking attractive women. It was vivid, directional, and outside of any sensation that he’d ever experienced.
He resisted looking over his shoulder, but became aware of how many women ahead of him, of all ages, had looked in the direction he sensed was the source of the mental image. He noticed that some men also glanced that way, but quickly looked away, then another glance and away again. He decided he’d not seem very far out of the ordinary to look for a moment. It was a startling revelation.
Chapter 4: Bureau of International Intelligence
Stiles felt exhilarated. His trip to Chicago had paid him handsomely and was easier to complete than many of his early small insurance swindles. Organized crime proved to be more corrupt than organized, but they had contacts and influence with well-placed politicians and big business.
He’d promised to get an incorruptible politician to sign off on a city contract with a company that the politician previously opposed because he said it was involved in criminal enterprises. Stiles manipulated his opinion, put words in his mouth when he spoke on-air in an interview, and then directly controlled him when he was speaking at a city council meeting, where he vouched for the corporation he’d previously criticized, praising them, and supporting their bid on the contract. It was a two hundred nine-million-dollar public works project. He used group control from the audience of the public meeting to generate a favorable majority vote by council members, with a prompt and public contract signing shortly after that.
Several corrupt union bosses had wanted the bid to win, their mob connections wanted it for them, various subcontractors that would pay continuing kickbacks wanted it, and the billionaire bidder wanted it enough to pay for a guarantee that he’d win the contract, despite not having submitted the lowest bid. He would only have to pay the mysterious and unknown “fixer” if his company won the contract. For Stiles, this was what he had called a demonstration, a loss leader bargain for his first mob-connected client, to prove what he could deliver.
Two million ninety thousand dollars, a low one percent payment to be paid in cash, was delivered to a talented accountant that Stiles employed, and suddenly he had new money to launder and prove that an investment of his had paid off again. He’d pay the taxes, some of them anyway, and divert any IRS audit to find if the offsetting claimed losses had truly occurred. He’d manipulated IRS audits many times, and had never even needed to kill anyone.
As he often felt after a profitable manipulation of Susceptibles, or after cleaning up messes personally, he was in the mood to shop for symbols of his success. Buying things like cars, or the type of clothes his mother had been unable to buy for him before he discovered his ability, and for attracting the sort of women he wanted to fawn over him, sleep with him, and whom he dumped after he used them.
He headed for one of his popular hunting grounds for young and attractive women, late teens if he found any in pairs or alone. They inhabited the malls by the scores, and he could shop for suits and leisure wear at the same time. He called it trolling because he’d project a group image of what he wanted others to perceive when they looked at him, with an aura of sexuality. He was fishing for girls or young women that were drawn to men as he made himself appear to them. He was an expert in judging which ones were the most easily influenced, and he liked the envy he stirred in the men that were within his range of control.
It was nearly automatic for him to project the image of the virile male, a composite of men in entertainment and sports that always had beautiful women around them. He knew he wasn’t bad looking, but he had remained slender as he grew to six feet two inches, making him appear thinner. He worked out and added lanky muscle to his frame, but his cursed metabolism refused to let him bulk up or fill out his unmanly chest. That was no problem for obtaining the women he liked; he could project any appearance he desired to people within his mental range.
Individually, he could reach most Susceptibles out to roughly one hund
red feet, and for group projections, it worked well up to about seventy or eighty feet, unless he applied full mental force, which was a strain to maintain control for very long.
He reached the mall and entered near a men’s store he liked, and window shopped until he noticed the number of attractive young women out on a dateless Friday evening. He didn’t always make a catch, and he sought those that were strongly compliant, eager for a brief liaison, and that appealed to his interest in debasing them in a sexual encounter, exploring if they liked being dominated and submissive. He could force any woman to submit to him, but experience had proven that this could lead to an unpleasant and inconvenient “clean up” after they were free of his control. That had happened to him in high school twice.
His skill at finding those that were predisposed to behave as he wanted had improved, and even if they changed their minds about him later, they didn’t make trouble because the experience was still of a type they craved.
He started broadcasting his favorite self-image, with the overtones of his wealth and male sexuality. It was producing the usual reactions that he liked, and he resumed window shopping, intending to walk most of the mall until he spotted the unmistakable serious attention of one or two young women. A catch might be alone or in a female buddy pair. A rare pair was two that were both hot, and equally attracted to his image, and after a few simple questions might prove compatible with his desires. If not, he made them forget him, and he returned to fishing. It led to complications if he manipulated them to separate so that he could take one of them to a motel. He rarely induced any woman outside of his rich contacts to sleep with him at his house. A cleanup due to complications if he did that became overly tedious.
Between shopping and occasionally scanning around for women that might be interested in his projection, he barely noticed a man in his mid-forties sitting on a bench, doing as so many people did, using their smartphones to text or browse.
He walked towards another men’s clothing store and enjoyed the admiring stares of the women he passed, and the self-conscious envious or even resentful glances from the men he passed.
He paused at a window display of a store closer to the food court, where there was more foot traffic, and young women. He intensified the image he projected, with sexual overtones added, and then turned around, smiling, observing the reactions of the most attractive women nearby, watching for those that met his eyes directly, displaying the return intensity he sought.
As usual, even the men looked at him for a moment, some with jealousy, some with resentment, and as always, one or two men out of a group of fifty or more looked at him with the lust he sought from women, but which he ignored from men. Except for one man, only thirty feet away, who was behind him before he pivoted in place, and he saw him turning away as he looked around to see the women snared in his sexual trawling net. He’d encountered homophobes before; he was mildly homophobic himself.
It was fun to screw with their minds, by forcing them to look at him, to see him as desirable and sexy. He did that now. Look at me; You know you want me. Wink at me.
When he forced a man to do that, he might send an obscene image of them doing something with another man, and watch the revulsion on their faces when their unwilling minds went in that direction. Some of them became nauseous. But not this time.
Instead of looking at him as ordered, the man started walking away.
Slightly annoyed, Stiles focused on him. Turn around and smile. You desire me more than any woman you’ve ever had.
He intended to humiliate the man, even if he was the only person that knew that he felt humiliated. It was just another power game for Stiles, to force someone to do what he wanted, particularly when they tried to resist him.
It had worked, he thought, when the man looked back with an expression of surprise. But then he looked away and increased his walking pace.
That left Stiles staring at his back. He vaguely remembered the man’s face as the person sitting on a bench near the other men’s store. He sent a series of control commands, each with increasing force when they didn’t produce results.
Quit walking…., Freeze…, You can’t move. With a sense of urgency, with maximum mental force added to his words, he shouted, “Stop breathing.”
The man broke into a run.
Stiles was stunned. He’d observed resistance when ordering someone to act in a manner they considered deeply immoral, or hazardous to their survival, but never for commands so harmless in their execution. It wasn’t conceivable that his orders to the man to stop moving, here inside a safe shopping mall, violated anyone’s moral imperatives. Stopping his breathing might fall into that category, but usually, only someone with asthma or emphysema would feel at immediate high risk and try to resist.
His sudden distraction had allowed his image projection to slip away, but his shouted words ensured the same eyes remained focused on him. When the expressions of admiration fell away at the revelation of his true unimposing appearance, it pissed him off. It was petty, but he now wanted the man dead.
Stiles used his broadcast control before the running man could exceed his most effective crowd control range. Stop that thief, was the first thought that came to his mind.
It wasn’t effective because he hadn’t mentally identified who the thief was, and few people will leap into action at such a call, although dozens of people were looking around for a suspect. One teenage boy moved in front of the only person he saw running, but the man pushed him aside.
Stiles needed professional help, armed help. He looked towards the food court for a police officer or mall security. He didn’t see any uniforms, so he revised his crowd control command. Active shooter, a man with a gun. And he sent an image of the man he saw running away.
That command resulted in screams and shouts, with people ducking behind kiosks and food court tables and chairs. Unfortunately, no officers or mall guards were close enough to receive his thoughts, and the man that refused to become a Tool would be out of direct control range in seconds. Stiles spotted a bearded man with a husky build just ahead of the fleeing man.
Using a strong directed control command, he sent, tackle the running man before he can reload. If he managed to get the man down, he’d force everyone that would respond to close in on him and kick, punch, and stomp him until they beat him to death.
Once again, the runner looked back. Not just in Stiles general direction, but directly at him. Then the runner looked at the man with a beard and turned aside to place a group of people between them. In seconds, he was more than a hundred feet away, and out of range of anyone Stiles might use as an impromptu Tool.
Feeling oddly shaken, Stiles analyzed what had happened. The man appeared to have reacted to his purely mental efforts to control him. When his general commands were sent to everyone in range, and then when he tried direct control of him he didn’t show signs of stopping. The last command was when he sent only to the bearded man, and the damned runner looked directly at Stiles as if he had shouted and was waving his arms. Then the man changed directions to avoid the bearded man who was preparing to take him down.
Tonight was the first and only time since he’d discovered his ability that anyone had ever completely resisted his control, and yet this man seemed to have been aware that Stiles was trying to control him. In the fourteen years since his ability awakened, he had never encountered anyone that seemed aware of his inserting his thoughts into their minds, or seemed to sense his exercising of control over their actions at the time. There were some that eventually pieced together that he had manipulated them somehow, but even they couldn’t resist him, and he could force them to tell him what they suspected, and then try to make them forget. It was an invariably fatal condition if they retained that knowledge.
He needed to find this man, and he would use as many Shields and Tools as it took to track him down. Ordinary Susceptibles, people without the appropriate skills, or who were not predisposed to act violently on his command, wouldn’t
meet his needs. He had made new contacts in organized crime, and not just those he’d met from Chicago, who had the skills and violent dispositions he wanted to use.
Ending his sex-related fishing trip, he returned to his car, prepared to organize a hunting trip, or perhaps a safari was a more appropriate term. He now had outside help he could use as his gun bearers.
****
Grayson had known from the instant he’d looked at Stiles in profile that it was the man from the traffic camera images. However, he was acutely aware of a sort of mental image in his mind that he was following a different man, despite what his eyes told him.
Somehow the mental impression told him the thin man he saw was more filled out and muscular, and even from the back, he was Hollywood handsome and exuded wealth. He didn’t understand how a view from the man’s rear conveyed that impression, which his eyes physically refuted.
He passed Stiles well to the left of the wide concourse when the man paused to look at a stylishly dressed male mannequin. He couldn’t see his face as the man turned towards the display, but he oddly had a definite sense of direction for the source of the overlaid alternate image in his mind, of a bigger more handsome man.
He noticed that many of the people he saw ahead of him were looking at something behind him after he passed Stiles, and they behaved like people that saw a celebrity out in public, and they were trying not to appear as if they were staring.
The direction of the image in his mind’s eye shifted as he walked towards a bench facing back the other way. The source was now behind him, so he did like he saw others doing, he glanced over his right shoulder. It was a shock.
Superimposed over the figure his eyes reported was the translucent figure his mind said was standing where Stiles was looking at the window display. He quickly looked away and had his phone out before he reached the bench.
Controller Page 10
