The Good Thief

by Judith Leon

  Zuza shrugged. “I think not, but I don’t know.”

  Lindsey forced her attention to the mural. Half of it was covered in thick, white dust, making the figures appear ghostly, but the part that had been cleaned revealed bright colors.

  Jeremy’s voice at her side made her flinch. “You enjoy the painting?” he asked. “It was walled in for protection during World War II, so it must be valuable.”

  “Let’s get on with this,” Todor boomed from across the room.

  “Allow me to accompany you to your chair,” Jeremy said as he took Lindsey’s arm.

  She was pleased that she successfully suppressed her instinct to snatch her arm from his touch. He led her and Zuza to the acrylic cubicle, to a pair of Gothic chairs nearest the servant’s door.

  A TV had been rolled in beside the cubicle and pairs of chairs were arranged in front of it at discreet distances apart. Foo Hai hadn’t waited for his psychic Bing to catch up. He strode to the center chair and claimed it. Bing scurried up beside him. Todor looked as if he were about to order Foo Hai to yield the center seat, but Foo Hai, comfortably settled, ignored him. Todor instead dropped himself into the seat to Foo Hai’s right with the wraith Petia drifting over like the Grim Reaper to join him.

  Jeremy moved to center stage. “Genetics is the wave of the future, and the nation that controls human genetics controls the future. In a process that so far only works with the X chromosome, thereby excluding genetic modification of males, I have developed the first generation of superwomen.” He beamed and rocked on his heels, proud of his little opener, then he blabbered on a bit about Aldrich Peters’ original process of genetic modification of embryos. “Of course, Peters never perfected the process. His first efforts suffered unfortunate imbalances and other side effects. The addition of my techniques corrected the problems beautifully, as you are about to witness. With Peters dead, I am now the only one who knows this complicated process. Enjoy.” Jeremy started a DVD.

  Lindsey recognized the first girl to appear on the screen as Lena. She was hiding behind a wooden structure, peering around the corner across what appeared to be a courtyard. She took a quick look behind her, which made it very obvious that she was, indeed, hiding from someone, and that perhaps she didn’t know she was being taped. Across the courtyard, perhaps a hundred feet away, a wrought-iron gate stood partway open, except that it was blocked on Lena’s side by a small, two-door Opel. To get through the gate a person would have to climb over the car’s roof.

  A man appeared who was walking close to the wall carrying an Uzi. He passed the car and kept walking and Lindsey had the impression he was a guard on duty. Lena shook her shoulders and shook out her hands. For several moments she seemed to be waiting, and then she bolted from behind her hiding place and raced for the gate. It had to be as obvious to everyone else as it was to Lindsey that Lena was going to scramble across the roof of the car to freedom.

  When she reached the car she did not attempt to climb onto the roof. She grabbed the front bumper with both hands and shoved the Opel backward at least six feet.

  Lindsey gasped and she heard several others respond similarly. The boy psychic, Yegor, said something that sounded like “Oh bald it,” but which she took to be an expression like wow or cool. Lena Poole was only fifteen years old, slender, and probably not much more than five and a half feet tall, yet she had lifted and pushed the Opel with the strain Lindsey might have put into moving a card table.

  Lena dropped the car’s front end and raced through the gate only to stop suddenly, fall to the ground and convulse, obviously hit by a Taser before she could make good on her escape.

  An electrical pulse charged across Lindsey’s shoulders, a sympathetic physical response generated by her mind. She shivered, and felt her neck growing hot with rage. She pasted a smile on her face as the video continued.

  Jeremy spoke up. “I show this next video so you can see the wide range of special powers you could produce in these genetically enhanced women.”

  The setting this time was indoors. A girl sat in a chair looking quite comfortable, not at all alarmed. Lindsey struggled to recognize her. She knew the face…. Then it came to her. This was Dawn O’Shaughnessy, one of Rainy’s egg babies and one of a set of triplets. Dawn was at least twenty-four now. Lindsey knew little else about her. She must have been fourteen or fifteen when the video was made. She picked up a knife with a vicious, 7-inch, serrated blade—a KA-BAR—and slashed a deep cut on her forearm from the elbow to almost the wrist.

  Blood rushed onto Dawn’s skin and the table and Lindsey again heard gasps, a particularly loud one of dismay from Zuza. And then a total hush fell as before their eyes, the girl swiped a white towel across her arm to remove the blood and then watched the wound’s edges begin to seal together. Or grow back together. Or…Lindsey wasn’t sure exactly what she was seeing, only that the bleeding stopped almost immediately and the wound closed.

  “Is the time real?” asked the Asian psychic with the big black mole on his face.

  “I assure you all that what you are seeing is real and in real time.”

  Lindsey could imagine how all these villains must be salivating, their minds now creating useful possibilities that would earn them money and power.

  Suddenly they were back in the original courtyard, but this time the girl who was hiding, obviously thinking she might escape through that open gate, was Teal. When the guard passed by the car, Teal waited as Lena had done, and then she, too, dashed for what she thought might be freedom. But the speed at which she crossed the courtyard was so fast that Lindsey leaned forward as if to see closer. Teal easily leaped from the ground to the roof of the car and then to the ground on the other side.

  But she, too, did not make her escape and was brought down by a Taser.

  “That completes our demonstration,” Jeremy said. His slick-looking henchman turned off the TV monitor as Jeremy stepped in front of it. “Sixteen more such genetic marvels exist, all between the ages of five and seventeen. They could be your ‘broodmares,’ so to speak, for ever more fantastic combinations.”

  Sixteen! Lindsey’s heart stopped. There were sixteen girls? God in heaven. Would Jeremy kidnap and sell them all?

  “These disks contain all the information you need to claim these amazing girls and begin your own program of alteration,” Jeremy blathered on. Lindsey drew in a deep breath as she yanked her reeling thoughts sharply into focus.

  “Two disks offer five girls and the third disk offers six. Included in the purchase is the information needed to do the genetic procedures that will allow you to produce your own modified lines of superwomen using their already enhanced egg cells. Take that into consideration as you draw up your bids.”

  Sixteen girls. Samantha and Christine needed to know this immediately. This monster had apparently used the women in the fertility clinics, replaced their own ova with genetically modified eggs, and was now offering the girls for sale, some as young as five years old!

  “When you purchase,” Jeremy continued, “you may be assured that only you and I will possess this virtually priceless information, and I guarantee I will not sell it to others.”

  She didn’t believe that he wouldn’t try to sell again. She doubted that the others would believe him, either. They would, however, want to possess any information their competitors might acquire and be the first to have it. And she absolutely believed Jeremy possessed exactly what he was claiming. She knew all about Lab 33 and the extraordinary truth of the egg babies, but the others were demanding proof.

  “Videos can easily be faked,” Galina scoffed.

  “This better not be all you’ve got here,” Yun nearly shouted. He was skeptical but clearly excited at the prospect.

  “Of course not.” Jeremy’s tone was a purr. “I give you Teal.”

  The servant’s door opened. Slick Hair, holding her arm, escorted the seventeen-year-old into the room. Meekly, Teal stepped into the acrylic cell and sat in the chair as the entry port sl
id shut behind her.

  Chapter 25

  T eal looked angelic as she sat in the awful acrylic cubicle, head lowered a bit, eyes downcast so that her full black lashes fanned out prettily. Her lovely high cheek and brow bones caught the light, but her pallor enhanced the ethereal quality of her presence. Her long, blond-streaked chestnut hair was no longer pulled into the saucy ponytail she usually wore, but hung straight down behind her. She was dressed in the jeans and top she’d worn when she was captured, now dirty.

  The urge to reach out to Teal threatened to overpower Lindsey. Whatever it takes, sweetheart, we’ll get you out of here.

  Teal slowly looked up and surveyed the crowd, stopping momentarily to look at Lindsey and Zuza. Lindsey longed to smile and wave the Athena wave at her, but she steeled herself, keeping her face impassive.

  Jeremy harrumphed. “Not only does Teal possess astounding speed, she is able to sense, when close-up, aspects of mood, emotion, personality and life events of nearly all individuals. With the assistance of the psychically talented aides you have with you, we will now perform a demonstration. I will give you time to think of an image. Any image you wish. You will draw that image. On the same paper you will also write out a description of your image. I will show these to Teal. She will immediately transmit the image to your assistant.”

  Jeremy hadn’t mentioned Teal’s ability to transmit images and feelings at great distances. Maybe Jeremy didn’t know about that.

  As Jeremy watched, Slick Hair passed a pad and pencil to Galina, Yun, Todor, Foo and Lindsey.

  “Do I have to make it simple?” Todor asked.

  “I can’t draw,” Galina protested.

  Foo, Lindsey noted, remained silent and impassive. The longer she was in the room with him, the less she liked him and the more intimidating he seemed.

  Jeremy shook his head. “You may make it as complex as you wish, Mr. Todor. The girl can convey to any receptive mind the finest of image details along with feelings. Imagine the potential of another generation bred by enhancement of her eggs,” he continued. “Her daughters would be able to transmit in secret, undetected by any communications satellite, the most specific information you might wish to send or receive.” He turned and smiled kindly at Galina. “Your drawing need not be accurate or beautiful. Use stick figures if you wish. But I encourage you to include at least one very specific item.

  “Naturally, you must not reveal this image to your telepathic accomplices—which would defeat the purpose, of course. I ask that, for the time it takes you to compose your drawings, that they be excused from the room.” Again, the smug, self-pleased expression, as though he were as clever as a stand-up comic.

  This man was intensely irritating, but he was right in that Lindsey must choose her image with extreme care. Brows, who moved away from the corner where he had been standing with arms crossed, signaled, and all of the psychics followed him out of the room.

  Lindsey scoured her mind for the perfect image. “Can we include words?” she asked.

  “Only if they are part of an object. The girl cannot convey sentences, per se, only images she sees and feelings.”

  So. Not words. The perfect image popped into Lindsey’s mind’s eye, a way to let Teal know that Lindsey was here and on her side. Teal’s core group at the academy was named the Penthas, after the queen of the Amazon warriors at Troy, Pen-thesilea. The Penthas’ logo was a woman riding bareback on a horse and wearing a quiver of arrows, her arms spread outward. The pose had reminded Lindsey of the classic scene of the boy riding on the beach in the old movie, Black Stallion. Since Jeremy knew about the AthenaAcademy only too well, Lindsey sketched a damn good image but omitted the arrows. The written image message she handed him: A woman on horseback, arms stretched upward and outward.

  When all the sketches and written descriptions were complete, Jeremy collected them and, to Lindsey’s dismay, he put all of them into one copper bowl and mixed them together. It looked as though Jeremy would hand the slips to Teal at random. The girl would have no way of knowing who had sketched the Pentha logo. The psychics returned to the room and their seats.

  Jeremy drew one of the slips of paper and passed it to Pietro, who pressed buttons on the acrylic cage and handed the note to Teal. She read it and closed her eyes. Almost immediately, the five psychics in the room began writing. When they stopped, each was asked in turn to read what they’d “seen.”

  Yun read what his petite Korean psychic had written: “An ancient Western god, half man and half goat. Very clear image.”

  Galina, the Russian woman, read what the boy had written: “The Greek Pan, very recognizable. A symbol that the gods were experimenters. They combined unlike life forms.” Galina smiled, nodding enthusiastically.

  Jeremy gestured to Foo Hai, who clearly didn’t want to speak. Bing read his own words aloud. “The ancient fertility god of horn and cloven hoof and later prototype for the Western Satan, chosen, perhaps, as an image of new fertility in genetically altered beings. The clear image carries a sense of ideas, as well.”

  Whoa! Lindsey looked at Bing and back at Teal. This was astonishing. A sense of ideas embedded in the image? What would they make of her own image? Teal had sent so much more than just the simple image of Pan. The drawer’s own thought processes, clearly Galina’s, seemed to accompany the image. This was frightening. What if Teal inadvertently revealed Lindsey’s true persona?

  It was Petia’s turn. Todor read Petia’s written impression. “An image based on ancient superstitions. The goat man.”

  Zuza read hers last. “The god Pan. Fertility. Mixing life forms.”

  Lindsey felt relief that Zuza’s reading echoed the others’. She’d actually been a bit nervous ever since Zuza had suggested that Lindsey and Marko were lovers.

  Jeremy passed around the original image message Galina had written, simply saying, “The ancient Greek god of fertility, Pan, half goat, half man.” Then he said, “Teal apparently sent more than Galina’s words. Is the idea of weaving modern fertility and genetics into the ancient image an accurate reflection of your thoughts?” he asked Galina.

  “Quite,” she replied.

  Jeremy went on and on, but even without his used-car-salesman gushiness, the readings were genuine, and Teal had done her job beautifully. And she was holding up well. Clear-eyed and with erect posture, the girl was made of strong stuff.

  The next symbol was generated by Yun. All five psychics saw the red star in a circle and identified it as a flag. Bing and Zuza recognized it as North Korean and felt intense patriotism attached to it.

  Todor’s image was of an instrument of torture, the iron maiden, which Bing pointed out was actually a hoax in Nuremberg. But the psychics all saw the casketlike device, lined inside with spikes, the head of a woman carved at the top. If the psychics understood that the image was chosen because Todor relished the use of torture, they kept it to themselves. It didn’t require telepathy to know that that was true.

  Foo Hai’s image was of a dragon eating a spider. Yegor said, “The spider has long hairy legs that have hooks in the ends that dig into flesh.” The way the psychics described the spider, it took all of Lindsey’s self-control to keep from shuddering.

  She hadn’t imagined that the selection of an image would reveal so much about the person who chose it. Her simple horse and rider was last, and even as they listened, everyone would know the image was Lindsey’s because everyone else had admitted the authenticity of the previous images. Would the psychics expose her? The urge to fidget set her foot to trotting in place, but she stopped it before anyone noticed.

  Yun read Haneul’s response to Teal’s impressions of the horse and woman: “A woman is riding a black horse. Arms reaching outward. She is proud.”

  Lindsey hadn’t said anything about the horse being black, but, of course, that’s what she’d drawn.

  Galina read Yegor’s impressions. “I think a Native American woman is riding a horse. I see arrows rising from something strapped onto
the woman. She will not hesitate to use them if threatened. She may be reaching for her weapon.”

  Thank you, Yegor, thank you.

  Yegor jerked his head toward her, staring.

  Yikes! Was he reading her mind?

  Bing began reading what he’d written. “A woman of ancient times is riding on a horse. She believes in her cause, reaches across time, and inspires modern women. Her outward reach is symbolic of magnificence and power and the desire to change things or defend something. She may even be military.”

  This man was scary. He’d picked up not only Lindsey’s thinking, but perhaps Teal’s own emotional response to the image. Lindsey held herself rigid to keep from betraying her response to how dead-on this was.

  Petia scowled as Todor read her impressions in an impatient voice: “A woman on horseback who believes men will let her have power.”

  Zuza spoke up immediately with her response. “A woman rides a black horse. She is fierce. She will do anything to succeed.”

  Lindsey allowed herself to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was clear that to a certain extent, the psychics put their own emotional spin on impressions. Maybe this fact would hide her true motives.

  Todor spoke up. “How do we know the accuracy of these messages is because of this girl? Maybe it is more because of the gifted people we bring with us? This does not yet convince me.”

  “The psychics themselves have expressed the unusual clarity of the messages the girl sends,” Jeremy said. “But she can also ‘read’ people well.”

  “Show us,” Galina said.

  Jeremy agreed.

  “I don’t trust your cage,” Lindsey said. “Who knows what microphones and speakers the girl could be listening to in there? I know how supposed psychics perform. Take her out of the box!”

  She’d started a minor rebellion, with everyone sharing her demand, and again, Jeremy consented. He and Pietro brought Teal out. Pietro stood between her and the bidders, who were to approach one at a time.