The first hint of frying bacon whiffed its way into the room, casting Sigmund back in time again, back to his life after the Lebensborn.
He’d grown too old for the nursery, and because his perfection intimidated the average German couple, no suitable parents had been found to adopt him. One night, however, a visiting SS officer from Auschwitz caught Siggy spying on him during his tryst with one of the finer Aryan specimens, but rather than getting angry and dragging Siggy back to the nursery, the Lagerkommandant kept on fucking the wench—never once taking his eyes off Siggy. The next day it was decided: Sigmund would be fostered to the unmarried officer, and just like that, he had a father.
It was with a delicious mixture of pleasure and pain that Sigmund remembered Vater and his time at Auschwitz.
After tending to the crematoriums and burn pits at the camp during the day, Vater would come home and oversee Siggy’s studies. Sessions always began with a whipping, not as a punishment for any indiscretion but as a matter of course. The whippings accomplished three things, Vater explained: they helped Vater release the stress of the day, they taught Siggy his place in Vater’s house, and they instructed Siggy in the proper way of disciplining his own people when the time came. Sigmund had learned his lessons well. Astrid could attest to that. Vater would have been proud.
Rather than using the horsewhip he used on the Jews during the day, Vater would whip Siggy with his bare hand. This made Siggy feel special; he wasn’t like the rest of them.
With each sharp impact of Vater’s bare hand on Siggy’s bare behind, the nidor of charred human fat that was permanently seared into Vater’s uniforms would billow out. Any scent of cooking meat, whether steak, chicken, or Astrid’s frying bacon, elicited a Pavlovian response in Sigmund. The foul phantosmia still aroused him.
Sinking deeper into the empty tub, Sigmund allowed his mind to fully wander into the forbidden pleasures of those final memories, the heat of his passion undamped by the chill of the porcelain. As he reached the precipice of climax again, a loud percussion jolted him out of his reverie. He wanted to rage against Astrid, but it wasn’t her faltering in the kitchen this time. It was emanating from the sweaty mirror hanging above the bathroom sink. The air around him crackled with static, and Sigmund watched in amazement as the condensation on the mirror slowly frosted over into a thin film of ice.
What sort of phenomenon is this? He rose from the tub and moved closer to the mirror.
Peering into the rime, Sigmund saw a hazy fragment of his own reflection—only he barely recognized himself. The man in the mirror looked well beyond Sigmund’s 32 years. The man in the mirror had hair more white than blonde, wispy and receding. The clear, bright blue eyes that normally looked back at Sigmund were grey—frosted over like the mirror itself.
Sigmund reached up and tried to wipe the disturbing distortion away. As he cleared away the frost, a figure stood in the reflection behind him. Immobilized, he continued to stare in the mirror as an apparition materialized at his back, a young woman with long, chestnut hair, the shocking green of her eyes blazing at him.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, whipping away from the reflection to confront the woman face to face.
With a loud whoosh, all the air was sucked out of the room through the open window sash, and the window slammed shut, leaving Sigmund naked in the empty room.
PRELUDE TO A DRIVE
The Chauffeur ~ Duran Duran
Three
Raze took only rural routes back to the city, the lost highways that led from the sleepy wasteland of the Central Valley to the lusty metropolis of San Francisco. He couldn’t be too careful. Not only was the car he was driving hotter than hell, but there was also a woman bound and gagged in the passenger seat next to him. The last thing he needed was some CHiPie with a hero complex to come across them. He’d hate to have to kill someone over this clusterfuck.
But he would.
He had wasted precious time looking for the car. Raze wasn’t a fool. He knew better than to use his personal vehicle for this mission. The 8 most definitely kept track of Raze as best they could. It was a given that they had a tracking device on his Audi.
He had wandered the pier for over thirty minutes scanning for frequency emissions from cars with keyless ignitions that he could hotwire telekinetically. He rejected a dozen hybrids. There was no way he was going to kidnap someone in a Prius.
He finally happened upon this beauty. Only a chick would have left a Mercedes SLS AMG parked on a waterlogged dock, exposed to the salty air of the Bay. With his left hand, he scanned its electrical system and honed in on its security frequency. With his right, he projected the coded frequency back into the circuitry. The doors unlocked, and the engine started. Raze threw the owner’s chick-shit in a pile on the dock, hopped in and sped off.
It was a sweet ride. Such a shame he’d have to torch it later. The 8 had ways of knowing where you’d been.
In the beginning, they had tried to implant nanotrackers to monitor him, but the mechanical bugs interfered with his frequency control, which limited his abilities during assignments. When Infinium’s bioengineering subsidiary developed the first organic nanotracker, Raze was their first guinea pig. This time, however, the frequencies Raze channeled in and out of his body during his Travels cooked the bugs in his veins.
When The 8 finally allowed Raze to live off the corporation campus, they had Qi readers installed throughout his warehouse. The energy scanners were programmed to identify Raze’s base signature frequency. Any frequency that didn’t match his profile was identified as a “guest” and was tracked the whole time they were inside his house. This was a security measure to protect both Raze and his highly classified workspace, but Raze knew the Qis monitored his every move as well.
The Qis were going to be a problem. Especially since he was planning to stash his current “guest” there. He only had 50 more miles to figure out a way around them.
The only other tracking option at The 8’s disposal was having an operative assigned to him, a hound who could remotely View his activities and monitor his whereabouts. It was a huge waste of resources—Raze was a boring target in the physical world. He pretty much only drove from his warehouse in San Francisco to Infinium’s headquarters in Palo Alto and back. The rest of his “traveling” was 4D, and The 8 didn’t have a hound good enough to track him in The Stratum—yet.
Even though Raze hadn’t felt a hound around in months, he had still taken extra precautions for this mission. First, he made sure he was in constant motion. A hound couldn’t hone in on a fast-moving target. Except for the nine seconds it took him to snatch the girl in the parking lot and restrain her in the getaway car, Raze had not stopped moving.
He had also set his watch to remind him to alter his signature frequency every three minutes. The constant fluctuation of his signature would make it impossible for any Viewer to pinpoint him on the grid. This was a trick he’d learned just yesterday from a 12-year-old.
These measures were probably unnecessary. Raze had never given The 8 any reason to suspect him a traitor.
Until tonight.
Was that what he was now? he wondered. A traitor?
Raze immediately dismissed the thought. Absolutely not. He still had Infinium’s interests at the forefront of his priorities. Everything that he’d learned tonight had the potential to make The 8 very, very happy. Raze had done good work.
First, he’d had a personal encounter with a rogue operative that The 8 had been hunting for over 24 years: Preston Reed.
Reed had been a superstar at Infinium back in the day; the best of the best. Able to Travel to dimensions beyond the Fourth, Reed had brought back advanced information and technologies that had made the company billions. But when Infinium demanded that Reed venture into their Control and Elimination operations, he refused and vanished from the grid entirely. The 8 had been scouring the planet for him ever since.
Tonight, Preston Reed had contacted Raze—actually reached out to him! It
was crazy. Raze was the last person on Earth Reed should have trusted. And not only did he contact Raze—he’d asked him for help.
Raze should have refused him. His request had the potential to ruin everything Raze had created for himself. But on the other hand, it could benefit him immensely.
Raze glanced over at the woman in the passenger seat. Aislen Walker, the daughter no one knew Preston Reed had. Right here beside him was the genetic link to Infinium Incorporated’s most wanted operative. Oh, the things they could do with her!
This was going to be very good for the organization. Without a doubt. The 8 were going to be ecstatic with this little piece of asset he had acquired…when he got around to informing them.
It wasn’t that he didn’t plan on telling them.
He did.
Eventually.
He just needed a little time.
But before he briefed The 8 about Aislen—especially before he handed her over to them—he needed to figure out who he could trust, if anybody. Because over the past three days, Raze had discovered that nobody was really who or what they seemed.
Aislen Walker had been the first one to surprise him.
Raze looked at the woman again. Her head wobbled like a bobblehead as he sped through the winding hollows. Bound into the seat with some heavy-duty caution tape he’d found at the wharf, wearing an eye mask made from a black Wonderbra he found on the floorboard of the car, and some good, old duct tape plastered across her lips, she didn’t look all that pretty anymore. But he definitely remembered what she looked like underneath his MacGyvered bindings.
He shook the image out of his mind. That was a distraction that could get him killed. He returned his attention to the stuttering yellow lines that snaked before him on the black asphalt and thought back to the first time he saw her instead, when she was covered in soot and reeked of fear—a more manageable vision.
It was hard to believe that was only three days ago. He had been in Demesne that morning, wrapping up the Parrish Project. His 12-year-old Manchurian candidate, Blake Parrish, had just completed the first half of his programming, shooting his father, Scott Parrish, in the head, and was about to finish the second half—turning the gun on himself—when a shocked gasp from Aislen had altered the course of events.
And fucked up everything.
Demesne was a controlled, fourth-dimensional construct. Raze had created the realm himself within the larger 4D plane Infinium called The Stratum. In the rare cases where Infinium’s mind control and mass manipulation techniques failed, Demesne was the final frontier. Using the video gaming interface of Demesne, Raze lured his targets’ subconscious minds into the construct where he could work his particular brand of magic.
No one ever made it out alive.
Until Aislen Walker wandered in.
At first, Raze had thought she was just a harmless blip—an accidental astral tourist who’d taken a wrong turn in The Stratum. When Raze terminated her in Demesne with a 4D bullet into her 4D brain, he assumed he’d seen the last of her. But he was wrong, and she was far from harmless.
Aislen Walker may have looked meek, fragile and female, but underneath that skin of hers, she was a frequency powerhouse. Not only did her oscillations disrupt the energetic construct of Demesne, causing it to fall apart when she deresonated, but later that afternoon when she physically walked into the mental health hospital where Blake was being detained, her robust voltage had thrown Raze’s astral body out on his remote viewing ass.
No, Raze had been completely wrong about Aislen Walker. And he was not used to being wrong.
Unfortunately, that had just been the first in a series of epic fails.
A few hours later, he found out his little puppet Blake wasn’t really his puppet after all. And probably never had been.
It was Blake himself who broke that tidbit of news to Raze, explaining that a person going by the name of “Ichiban” was inside his brain, showing him the ropes when Raze wasn’t around and teaching him new tricks, like how to change signature frequencies to keep from being tracked.
At first, Raze suspected that Grant Parker had gotten hold of the boy. There was no love lost between him and his one-time mentor, not since the day Raze had surpassed every lame skill Parker possessed and become Infinium’s new hot-shot Control Operative. Earlier that day, Parker had the audacity to tell Raze to “watch his back,” that he had found a new talent who could finally beat Raze at his game. So, of course, Raze thought that Parker was Ichiban and Blake his new protégé.
Mistake number two.
Such a bone-headed mistake, too. Raze should have known better. If you looked up “pussy” in the dictionary, you’d find a photograph of pasty-faced Parker. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have the skill sets required to be a Level XV Operative; Parker didn’t have the balls. The dirty work of an operative, eliminating and disposing of targets, left a bad taste in his mouth. Parker had neither the ability nor the guts to do what this “Ichiban” had done. Ichiban had taken control of the mind of a 12-year-old kid and brutally murdered the kid’s father.
If Raze had thought about it for even a nanosecond, he would have eliminated Blake as any kind of protégé material. First of all, no prodigy would ever be so weak as to be possessed and controlled by another entity. But Blake had done just that. He had given up his whole being to this Ichiban.
No, Raze had jumped to conclusions. He had looked only in his immediate vicinity for threats and never considered that somebody from outside his sphere could be involved.
And mistake number three had slipped completely beneath his radar.
Troy Kellen.
Parker, desperate to stay relevant so The 8 wouldn’t “retire” him, had found a solution in Troy Kellen. And Raze had never looked twice at the mild-mannered therapist who worked with Aislen at the hospital, never suspected that he was actually Grant’s new protégé. He was too nice—too pretty.
Kellen had a way about him, especially with women. He was warm and friendly, a Prince Charming straight out of a silly, romantic comedy or Grey’s Anatomy. One look from him and the ladies would give him anything he wanted. But his demeanor was all a farce. Underneath that magnetic charm, Mr. T was a twisted and sadistic fuck—everything Parker needed in a right-hand man. Parker could play the whiny bitch while his boy-wonder played it rough. They made the perfect couple.
Aislen was completely fooled by Mr. T, as well. She was actually running for him in the parking lot as though he was the one who was going to help her. He was more likely to slit her throat than to help her. Kellen had figured out there was something different about Aislen. He knew who Ichiban was, and he knew that Ichiban was looking for her. He just didn’t know why. Thanks to Preston Reed, Raze knew, and if Kellen or Parker or The 8 found out the truth about her, she’d be a goner.
Kellen was a big problem, not only for Miss Walker but for Raze, as well. Kellen knew that Raze had contact with Aislen and was keeping that a secret from The 8. He had vowed that as soon as he figured out her secret for himself, he would be informing them about her personally. A death sentence for Raze.
Yep, Kellen was Raze’s biggest threat right now, and if he thought he could get away with it, Raze would have killed him already. No doubt. No hesitation.
But doing that would send up red flags with The 8. No, Raze had to remedy this situation, turn it to his advantage, before Kellen beat him to the punch.
Aislen moaned and mumbled something under her breath. Her head was slumped forward as far as the restraints would allow. Her fingers were twitching, and a tremor worked its way up her arm. She had fallen asleep. And she was dreaming.
Raze wished he were dreaming right now. The fact that Aislen Walker was in the passenger seat next to him was a nightmare. It violated his personal code of ethics—not giving a shit. This was by far his worst mistake, and if he wasn’t careful, it could end up being his last.
Raze had always prided himself on being in control. After years of being everyone’s b
itch, he had turned the tables and seized control of his own life. He’d popped smoke from the small Nebraska shithole he’d never called home and busted his ass to create a new reality for himself.
He’d cut himself off from the virus of humanity, eliminated every weak personality trait that diminished him, and conquered the disease of emotion that clouded the higher senses. With each demon he vanquished, the more clarity he got and the faster his skills grew. He Traveled lighter and faster. It became easier to penetrate his targets’ weaknesses and deconstruct their defenses. Controlling people became effortless. But controlling others was just the icing. Having control of himself and his own life was the cake itself.
But Raze was not in control of anything now, least of all himself. Every moment he had spent in Aislen Walker’s presence—from finding her in Demesne, to seeing her at the hospital, to capturing and channeling her frequency into his veins—had worked to rewire him. Every belief structure, all his operating codes, each of the reality constructs that kept the maggot life separate from his life, had started unraveling.
He was in Demesne when he realized the truth. He was not in control of anything really. He was not free. The truth was, in building Demesne Raze had built his own prison. He was the real puppet—nothing but a pawn under the thumb of Grant Parker and The 8.
Raze had come undone. The rage that he’d buried in the depths of himself was unleashed, and in a fit of fury, he began destroying the one thing that he still had some control over, Demesne.
And then Preston Reed showed up—walked right through the destruction, into the very center of Infinium’s territory, and confronted Raze. But rather than attack him, as Raze would have expected, Reed asked for help—begged Raze to help Aislen.
Time Walker: Episode 2 of The Walker Saga Page 2
