Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master

by Gregg Taylor

  They spoke not a word to one another, but in the near-complete darkness they saw enough of one another’s silhouettes to know each other’s thoughts completely.

  “Well?” the Red Panda said by turning his head, just slightly.

  “Well, what?” she replied by tucking in her chin, as if looking over the rims of a pair of glasses which she was not wearing.

  “Shall we?” he said with a tiny, involuntary movement of his left hand.

  “We shan’t,” she said with a waggle of her finger, and then pointed up, as if to the sky.

  He nodded his consent. The darkened doorway was too simple for a man like Joshua Cain. Especially since his household staff had not returned from their errand of the night before. Cain would have prepared for them somehow, and if he were foolish enough to think that a dearth of tall buildings for them to swing down from would cramp their style, so much the better.

  Noiselessly they moved along the edge of the building until they reached a corner that was shrouded in blackness by the high boughs of an old oak tree that towered above the gardens.

  As one, they made identical motions with their hands, curling in the fingers on each hand, one after the other, as if grasping an invisible object. Hidden controls within their gauntlets interpreted the gesture, and power coursed through the soles of their feet as the remarkable Static Shoes they each wore sprang to life.

  The Red Panda reached his right leg forward, until the bottom of his foot pressed against the stone wall. As it bound to the solid object with the power of a massive static electrical charge, he hoisted himself forward and walked up the side of the building as an ordinary man might walk down the street.

  It was more of a process, to be sure. The constant tiny motions of the hand-sensors required to grip and release the walls and push his feet forward upon the vertical path was like gently working a marionette, but the gestures required were miniscule and through long practice he barely thought of them as he climbed, his partner moving silently a few paces behind him, and just to his right.

  When they reached the top story of Cain’s home, they each settled into a crouch and scuttled across the open space of the wall until they reached a landing onto which they dropped with a sound that was barely a whisper upon the wind. The large French doors were locked, but the latch was a simple one and delayed the man in the mask no more than a dozen seconds. They passed into the darkness of the house beyond quickly and quietly, so that as little wind as possible might disturb the silent stillness beyond.

  The latch closed behind them with the smallest of clicks, but the masked heroes froze in their tracks just the same. For a full minute they stood stock-still and listened for any sign that their presence was known. Listened for any creak, any footfall that might betray an opposing force.

  Kit Baxter’s ears were naturally sharp, and her keen senses had been honed by adventure. She heard nothing but the even thump of her own heartbeat and the controlled breath of her partner. Another thirty seconds went by. He turned his head to face her. She shook her head. In the slight glimmer of moonlight that had survived the journey she could just see the outline of his grin.

  He touched the side of his mask with a red gauntleted hand and there was a momentary dull flash as his lenses sprang to life. He gazed about the small sitting-room in which they stood. It was comfortable enough, though it looked as if it had recently been disturbed. A drawer in a small end table was still half-open, and several papers poked through the opening, as if something else had been hurriedly sought and removed. He moved noiselessly around the space, his footfalls casting no more sound than those of a cat.

  The Red Panda ran his fingers along the edge of a bookshelf. Several large tomes had been disturbed and not replaced and now lay carelessly upon the ground. He reached behind the books that remained and felt an open space that would normally have been hidden. It was empty.

  He turned and saw the Flying Squirrel on point, close behind him, alert for any disturbance and finding none. He leaned in towards her, bringing his lips close to her right ear as she watched their backs.

  “Looks like Mister Cain made tracks,” he whispered, trying not to be distracted by the smell of her hair.

  Kit’s heart skipped at the feel of his breath, but she never lost her focus. She tilted her chin up slightly and twisted her head just a few degrees to the right to be heard.

  “Think he’s gone to ground?” she breathed.

  “Wouldn’t you?” came the reply.

  Before she had a chance to answer that, there was a sudden burst of loud static coming from one floor down, as if a phonograph arm had just been dropped upon a waiting record. An instant later the halls were filled with the recorded sound of an operatic tenor.

  “Interesting,” the Red Panda said quietly, breaking for the door.

  The Flying Squirrel gripped his arm. “If anyone had been putting that record on, I’d have heard them doing it,” she hissed.

  He smiled at her. “I said it was interesting, didn’t I?”

  Moments later, the door to Joshua Cain’s study opened silently. The room was in precisely the same state of disarray that it had been that afternoon when Ajay Shah had seen it last. The false front in the bookcase was still open revealing the wall safe, now nearly empty, but ajar. Papers were strewn about the floor with little regard to their importance, and the great mahogany desk bore several piles of documents, clearly assembled in haste. The black leather chair was turned away to face the wall, but from the doorway, the Red Panda could tell that it was occupied.

  “Joshua Cain,” he intoned gravely.

  There was no reply. The music played on, but not so loud that Cain could have helped but hear the masked man’s voice.

  “Don’t be coy, Cain,” the voice boomed again. “We are far beyond that.”

  Again, there was no reply.

  “I’ve had about enough of this,” the Flying Squirrel said. Before her partner could move she had flung a combat boomerang across the room, hitting the corner of the black leather chair with a loud thwack before returning to her hand. The chair began to spin in response to the force she had applied, revealing a well-dressed young man with an utterly vacant stare. He spun with the chair, making no effort to stop himself, and showed no reaction to the presence of the masked newcomers.

  “That’s not Cain,” she said as he spun.

  “It’s… it’s young Randall Allyn,” the Red Panda said gravely.

  “As in the Allyns with more money than God and only slightly less than you?”

  “The very ones,” he said, moving into the room quickly.

  “What’s he got to do with Cain?” she said, annoyed at a turn of events that made no sense.

  “Not a thing,” the Red Panda said seriously. “Randall is too vapid for much, and far too rich to be tempted by crime.”

  “He looks like he’s been drugged.”

  “He’s in a trance,” came the reply at once.

  “A tr– okay…,” she said with a shake of her head. “So how did he put that record on? Even if he could move, I’d have heard something.”

  “He didn’t put the record on,” the Red Panda said, his fists clenched instinctively. “Our mysterious friend did.”

  “He’s here?” she cried, producing a pair of throwing stars in each hand in a blur of speed. “Where?”

  “I expect he’s far from here. Using Randall’s enthralled mind as a conduit… a relay station, if you will, for his telekinesis.”

  “Telekin-how-much?” she said, scrunching up her nose in distaste. She liked a straight fight.

  “Exerting control over the physical world using pure mental power. That’s how he knew that we were in the house. He had a slave mind here, waiting for us.”

  “Swell. Why?” she said, quickly crouching to better see beneath the phonograph.

  “I don’t know,” the man in the mask grimaced. “Come on, we’ve got to get Allyn out of here. If I can get him into a neutral space I might be able to he
lp him.”

  “Boss?” she said. “I think we might have bigger problems. The phonograph is wired up to a nice big strongbox on the floor.”

  “What?”

  “And if that strongbox doesn’t have another one of those big stinkin’ bombs in it, I’ll eat my cowl. My guess is we’ve got ‘till the music stops.”

  “Let’s go,” he said quickly, reaching out for the catatonic young man seated in the chair. His hand suddenly froze as a hideous smile spread across young Randall Allyn’s face, seeming to transform it into one the Red Panda had seen before.

  “Boss!” the Squirrel called out in alarm. An instant later, the Red Panda realized that she was not responding to Allyn’s change. He turned to the doorway and saw a small collection of toughs standing shoulder-to-shoulder, three men deep in the doorway. They each wore the same glazed, blank expression as Randall Allyn and stood stock-still, like statues.

  “Well, come on!” she shouted at the assembled gorillas as she settled into a crouch, prepared to launch into the amalgam of martial arts she called Squirrel-Fu. “Let’s do this!”

  The men in the doorway made no movement, nor any sign of having heard her.

  “What kind of fight is this?” she snapped, annoyed.

  “They aren’t here to fight us,” he said with a glance back at the record, which was rapidly reaching its end. “They’re here to slow us down.”

  “He thinks I can’t get past six zombie mooks?” she snorted.

  “Carrying Allyn? Before the record ends?” the Red Panda cried, hoisting the slight form of the wealthy young man on his shoulders. He shuddered as he heard a voice pass through Allyn’s lips. A voice that was the pitch and timbre of the boy’s own, but carried the essence of a ghost from the past, a voice the Red Panda had never expected to hear again.

  “Choose,” the voice hissed.

  Moments later, as the final notes still echoed triumphantly throughout the halls of Joshua Cain’s comfortable home, a wall of fire rose from the study and tore the building apart as if it were made of matchsticks. The roar rose like thunder across the quiet neighborhood. The thick black smoke masked the comfortable smell of wood fires. The tranquil song of the cold wind in the branches was lost to a cacophony of sirens from all directions.

  And of the Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel there was not a single sign.

  Twenty-Nine

  The hour was well past three when the telephone rang. The bell jangled urgently and echoed through the front room of a modest house in the city’s downtown, not far from a certain boxing gym well known to many field agents of the Red Panda.

  After a time, the ringing stopped, leaving behind a silence that was almost as jarring as the plaintive cry it replaced. The peace was a fragile one, however, and a moment later it was shattered by the bell once again.

  At last, the plodding of heavy feet on the stairs could be heard, together with a steady stream of muttered curses, some in English, the most deeply offensive in Greek. Spiro Papas turned the corner, his eyes barely slits as he shuffled for the telephone. No sooner had his hand reached the receiver than the incessant ringing stopped once again, spurring a torrent of curses from the old man’s lips that would have made a sailor blush in any one of a half dozen languages.

  At last, his venom spent, Spiro stood and stared at the telephone a moment, still seething. He seemed to be waiting. Sure enough, less than a minute later the ringing began anew, and Papas snatched up the receiver and barked into it like an enraged guard dog.

  “What? What? What do you want?” he bellowed, leaving the late-night caller no opportunity to answer.

  There was a momentary silence, in which only the boxing trainer’s fierce breathing could be heard.

  “Mother Hen calling,” a quiet voice said at last.

  “What?” Spiro seemed genuinely perplexed for a moment.

  “Mother Hen calling,” the voice said again, without elaborating.

  There was a pause. Spiro’s eyes pinched shut with the effort as he forced his still-sleeping brain to interpret the message, without apparent success.

  “What?” he said again at last, though with less venom.

  “I need you to dig in, Spiro,” the woman’s voice said sternly.

  “Mother Hen?” Spiro said at last, with a glance back to the steps to make certain that the call had not woken his wife.

  “There he is. I was worried for a moment.”

  “You are not supposed to call here,” Papas said sternly, his sense returning.

  “I apologize for the hour–,” Mother Hen began.

  “To blazes with the hour!” Spiro sputtered. “Spiro cares not for the hour. But you are not supposed to call here. This telephone line–”

  “Leave scrambling the telephone signal to me, Mister Papas,” the voice said seriously. “This is what I do.”

  “Well, do it properly,” he muttered sorely. “The Chief, he sets up the whole network so conversations like this never happen. You have your contacts, I have mine.”

  “I run the eyes and ears, you run the hands,” she said. “I know the drill, Spiro. That is the way it was for a long time… but he’s expanding fast. Too fast for rules like that. There are at least a half dozen more contact networks now, to say nothing of an army of informants and casual spotters.”

  “All of which I am not supposed to know,” Papas said, feeling a creak in his neck. “And for reasons. Good reasons. The Chief, he knows they may try to get to him through the agents.”

  “And if it is impossible for anyone to take out his entire network at a stroke, it makes it less likely that anyone would try,” the voice snapped. “Don’t quote regulations to me, I wrote most of them.”

  “So maybe you also should read them, huh?” Spiro lectured. “They keep all of us safe–”

  “Spiro, I am not one of your raw recruits. And we have known one another long enough for you to know that. When you hear my voice in the middle of the night, you can assume that it is something important.”

  “Spiro does not report to you,” the old man bristled.

  “Spiro, calm down and listen to me for half a minute!”

  Papas paused and sat down on a stool by the telephone. His head seemed very heavy.

  “Well?” he said at last.

  “I had a call from Jack Peters–,” she began.

  “No names!” he barked.

  “Spiro!” she said in a tone that dwarfed his bluster. After a moment’s pause, she continued. “The operative was calling from a pay phone near the home of one Joshua Cain.”

  “Cain? The fixer Cain?” Spiro’s interest was overpowering his indignation.

  “The same. The morning edition of the Chronicle will have a feature article on the involvement of Cain’s household staff in a mysterious warehouse fire, which none of them survived. The story is an exclusive, but they will share their sidebar with every other paper in town.”

  “Sidebar?”

  “That Cain’s house was blown to smithereens sometime shortly after midnight.”

  “All of which means you call Spiro because…”

  “Because a certain pair of masked heroes were on their way to Cain’s house tonight.”

  “They told you this?”

  “They don’t tell me their plans, Spiro, any more than they tell you,” she said with a sigh. “Jack- the operative gathered as much. What he was keeping out of the story was that the warehouse fire was caused when our Chief was rescuing Agent Thirty-Three.”

  “Gregor Sampson?” Spiro said in surprise.

  There was a pause.

  “All right, Spiro is aware of the irony,” he said at last. “Shoot me.”

  “I might just do that one of these days,” Mother Hen said quietly. “The point is that I have had no contact since the incident. There is no response on any direct wire and no request for medical attention has been routed through me, or received directly by any of the support agents with the appropriate skills.”

  There was an
other pause. The old man sighed. “So the eyes and ears are deaf and dumb,” he said solemnly.

  “And I was wondering if you could lend me a hand. Yes,” she said.

  “Give Spiro the address. I will call in a team.”

  “Send someone who knows our newshound if you can, he should still be near the scene,” she urged.

  “At this hour, Spiro may not be able to pick and choose,” he said with a snort, “but if I can, I will. What exactly should I tell them that they are looking for?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary,” Mother Hen said, recovering her normal, crisp tone.

  “The whole thing sounds out of the ordinary to Spiro.”

  “Then it should be a thorough report,” she said archly.

  Spiro snorted again. “And who will get this report?”

  “Spiro,” Mother Hen said quietly, “they may be hurt. They may be captured. They may be dead.”

  There was another pause as he rubbed his eyes. “You remember what the first rule is?” he asked at last.

  “The oath?” she said.

  “No, not the oath. ‘Holding high the lamp of justice’ is very nice. But every agent is told one thing – field man, informant, spotter, runner… all of them. Whatever else they do, it is the first thing on the list and the last thing on the list. Do you remember what it is?”

  “Await instructions,” she said at last.

  “Await instructions,” he nodded. “I worry about them too. But tonight I worry about what happens when we forget to await.”

  “Grammatical nightmares notwithstanding,” she said.

  “What?” he said, his brow furrowed.

  “Never mind. Just send them in, Spiro. And tell them to be careful.”