by Kay Hooper
A deadly cipher.
“Yeah, you and me both. Look, go ahead and take off, get some rest.”
They had been splitting the watcher duties.
Murphy said, “Okay, but I’m coming back to relieve you around four. You’ll need to rest yourself if you mean to approach her tomorrow.”
“No argument.” Brodie settled down where they had decided was the best position to watch Tasha Solomon’s condo during the night, the corner of a rooftop on a three-story building that housed on its ground floor her favorite coffee shop. From their position they could see both entrances to her building and had a good view of her corner apartment.
Both the blinds and the curtains were drawn.
“Think she’s in for the night?”
“Yeah, pretty sure. Honestly, I don’t think she’d risk going out at night right now. She’s even more jumpy than before. The only time today she seemed able to put any worries or uneasiness out of her mind was when she was working at the shelter.”
Brodie eyed Murphy. “You think or you know?”
“Think. Her walls are up and we haven’t tried getting through.”
“It might make my job easier if you do.”
“Or the opposite. An alien voice in her mind spooked her. Duran’s goons spooked her. If we push, she could get spooked enough to haul ass away from here. And I have a hunch she wouldn’t be easy to track. At least not for us. The last thing we need is her in the wind.”
“True enough. Get some rest, Murphy.”
“See you around four.” She lifted a hand in a brief salute, then left the roof and made her way down to the street. She was somewhat preoccupied, tired but not enough to stop her mind from considering various possibilities and probabilities, weighing her own options, still walking the fine line she had been walking for some time now.
They had so few answers. So damned many questions.
And too many psychics like Tasha Solomon in danger and yet also in a position to possibly give them more information, more answers.
What she knew.
And what Duran might reveal in trying to get to her.
Murphy had been involved in this secretive group they had never really named for several years now, and in her time the only certainty she felt able to count on was that there were two sides to this . . . conflict.
Not a war. Exactly.
Maybe a struggle. A struggle to find and protect psychics from some mysterious “other” that wanted them.
Reasons unknown.
They did know of a few of the . . . soldiers . . . on the other side, the way they knew Duran. Not where he was born, or when, or where he’d gone to school or, really, anything about his background. Duran headed up their field operations, most of them, they knew that, but who or what he reported to was a mystery.
Still, after years, a mystery.
So there was also a struggle to gather information.
A struggle to understand. To learn who was behind this and why. To have it make sense somehow. To be able to look back and reaffirm that those who had fallen, to the other side or because of them, had given their freedom or their lives in a good and just cause.
Melodramatic.
Yes. But also true.
There was just so damned much they didn’t know.
They hadn’t even found a single way to protect psychics; each one was a unique situation and called for unique measures to make them safe. Some were in hiding, not really living any kind of a normal life and yet the only sort in which they felt even marginally safe.
A few had taken the opposite tactic, going public in a major way, drawing media and other attention to themselves. Sarah Mackenzie came to Murphy’s mind, at least in part because Sarah’s was both the most recent and the most successful case she knew of.
With Tucker Mackenzie’s celebrity status as a very famous best-selling author, and the publication of his book about his wife’s rather astonishing abilities garnering them both a lot of media attention, it at least appeared that Duran had backed off. They couldn’t even find evidence that he had the couple under surveillance where they lived in Richmond.
But they weren’t sure, of course.
They were never sure.
And just when they thought they were sure of something, just when they thought there was a fact they could stand on, it was neatly pulled out from under them.
Usually by Duran.
Don’t think about Leigh. Don’t think about the others lost along the way. But good people, dammit. Good people.
Murphy slipped away from the downtown area where Tasha Solomon’s condo was situated, but she didn’t return to the small apartment several blocks away, rented for the duration.
Instead, after hesitating only briefly, she stood in the shadows of a darkened doorway on a quiet, peaceful street, and pulled one of the burner cell phones from her bag.
Dead. The next two were dead as well, their batteries drained even though they had not yet been turned on.
Murphy cursed under her breath, making a mental note to charge all of them later tonight.
The fifth one she tried still had some power. Maybe enough. She punched in a number. Always the same one. He never worried they could trace the call, even ping the cell he always used.
Because they had never been able to.
Dammit.
“Yes?”
Murphy recited the address of a bar a couple of blocks from her location. A dark place, open late. Quieter than most bars, its patrons mostly intent on drowning their sorrows and not interested in what was going on around them while they did so.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said.
“I can make it in ten,” he responded, calm as ever.
It was a little game they played. Murphy tried to gauge how close by he was at any given time, and he consistently surprised her.
“So you are in Charleston,” she said.
“Didn’t you expect me to be?”
Murphy didn’t want to talk about what she expected, not during a cell call. So all she said was, “See you there.”
She didn’t wait for a response, just ended the call, turned off the phone, and removed its battery. She then went on her way, tossing the phone and battery into different trash receptacles.
He’s here himself. Which means Tasha Solomon is more important than we knew. Maybe more powerful. More . . . useful somehow? Or . . . is it just one more game of his, to keep us guessing?
To keep me guessing?
Murphy headed toward the bar, wondering vaguely if the high wire she walked was actually visible beneath her.
And wondering how long she could continue to walk it before she lost her balance and fell.
Undoubtedly into a very unpleasant pit.
—
Jeffrey Bell hadn’t asked to become psychic. And since the car accident that had resulted in a head injury hadn’t been his fault, he felt a bitter sense of resentment toward the universe that he hadn’t just ended up with a totaled car, but pretty much a wrecked life as well.
“Please.” Her voice even over the phone was desperate. “You have to help me, Mr. Bell. You don’t know me, but—”
He didn’t want to listen to another of the stories that had begun to haunt every day of his life.
“Listen,” he said to her, keeping his voice even and calm even as he made a mental note to himself to change his home number yet again. And to fucking screen his calls with voice mail. “I can’t help you, lady. Really. I can’t just flip a switch and predict something for you or anyone else.”
“But I just need to know if he’ll come back!”
“And that’s something I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
“If we met in person—”
“Nothing would change.” Somewhat grudgingly, he added, “If I’m going to
see anything at all, your voice would have been enough of a trigger. At least that’s the way it’s been so far. Look, I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.”
“But—”
“Sorry,” he repeated, then hung up the phone. And immediately unplugged it.
So far nobody had gotten his cell number, but he figured it was only a matter of time. He could give up the landline. Change cell numbers. Move again as he had moved here to Atlanta only a month previously.
It wouldn’t help.
Sooner rather than later, they would begin to find him again. The desperate. The lost. The greedy. Needing something from him, urgent and pleading. Sometimes demanding.
As if he owed them.
In Jeffrey’s mind, he didn’t owe anybody a damned thing. Except maybe a kick in the balls to the universe, if he could have done that. Because his life had been fun before the accident. A job he found satisfying, an apartment perfect for his needs. Friends and family around.
Normal.
But nothing had been normal since the accident. Family and friends, if they believed him at all, were wary of him. Avoided him. Clearly uneasy about what he might tell them.
And it looked spooky, he’d been told, whenever a new face or voice or place triggered one of his visions. His girlfriend told him he went white, his eyes went dark, and his stillness, for minutes at a time, was truly creepy to see.
She told him that just before she dumped him.
As for his job, they hadn’t said he was being laid off because of what he was suddenly able to do. The economy, they said.
“I’m sorry, Jeff, but you know how it is.” His supervisor sounded calm in the way that someone very nervous forced himself to be calm. “But there’s always a demand for IT people, so I’m sure you won’t have trouble finding another job. You’ll have an excellent recommendation from us, I can assure you of that.”
“Except,” Jeffrey had responded evenly, “there’s this lousy economy. That might factor into my ability to get another job.”
“Yes. Well, maybe a different city . . .” He didn’t quite say the more distance Jeffrey put between them, the better.
Except that was what he was saying.
Jeffrey had risen to his feet and headed for the door, almost wishing he knew something he could have tossed over his shoulder, something seriously spooky. But he had discovered that his “abilities” were beyond his control, grabbing him unexpectedly in damned inconvenient moments, and virtually never something he could trigger at will.
So he cleaned out his cubicle, and he left.
He left, moving temporarily to New York, where he could feel anonymous, sending out résumés all over the country. And the job offer from a company in Atlanta had been reassuringly prompt.
A better job, actually. And he had tried to avoid betraying this “gift” he had been cursed with. Had tried to limit his contact with other people, avoiding crowds whenever possible, remaining detached from others emotionally. Doing his best to isolate himself.
And it worked. For about two pretty lonely weeks. And then somebody Googled him because he was so quiet and kept to himself, and the gossip started. The questions asked jokingly became patently uneasy. Somebody blogged about him, there was an anonymous tip or two to the newspapers—and word got out.
Word got out, and people began contacting him.
The desperate. The lost. The greedy. Believing he could help them find something, someone. Pick a winning lottery number. Believing he was the answer to all their problems. Believing he could make their lives better, or at least reassure them that their lives would have meaning.
And then there were the disbelievers, the ones who wanted to challenge him, test him, prove he was a fraud.
So here he was. Packing a bag to go stay in a hotel, because his address had been posted by some nitwit on Twitter and Facebook who had thoughtfully tagged a whole bunch of the Roswell, Area 51, ghost hunting, paranormal believers—and he knew all too well what that would mean.
People turning up at his door.
A lot of people.
Jeffrey was nearly packed when a vision slammed into him as they sometimes did, without warning.
Darkness. Then the overwhelming, unsettling sounds of whispering, as though from a thousand voices, ten thousand, all saying things he couldn’t quite hear. And the darkness lifted just enough for him to have a sense of vast space all around him, space filled with . . .
Shadows. Misshapen, sliding away when he tried to focus on them. Somehow alien, unknowable. Moving all around him, the faint rustling sounds they made closer than the whispers.
Unthreatening at first. He had the odd idea that they were talking among themselves, discussing . . . him.
Weighing him somehow.
Was he valuable enough?
Was he ready?
Whatever their conclusions, Jeffrey felt, sensed, them coming closer. Closer. Reaching out for him.
Almost touching him.
He had no idea what it meant, but an almost primal fear sliced through him suddenly, as sharp and cold as a knife, and he fought to escape the shadows, the vision.
Don’t let them touch you.
Don’t let them have you.
He fought as hard as he could, and . . .
He almost got away.
Almost.
He could feel it, like surfacing in a pool and sensing the warmth of sunlight on his face, beginning to open his eyes to brightness. But then, beneath the surface, something caught at him. Tugged. Dragged him back down into the dark water.
Nobody heard his scream.
Nobody that mattered.
Days later, when his concerned boss asked the building super to check on him, his apartment was deserted. His clothing and personal belongings gone, including the boxes he hadn’t even had time to unpack. The apartment keys left on the kitchen counter.
Nobody was really surprised that he had left. Nobody in Atlanta had known him very well, but the rumors had circulated, and it seemed reasonable to believe he had just moved again, to escape the people who had left desperate notes and pleas stuck to his door in a multicolored sea of Post-its.
To escape his creepy abilities, maybe.
In any case, Jeffrey Bell was gone.
And no one ever saw him again.
—
Tasha spent another mostly sleepless night after the incident with the mirror. She had wiped the words away with a towel, convincing herself that the men who had been there the previous night had somehow left the message for her, a message that would only appear later, when she showered and steamed up the room.
It didn’t help.
Who were they? Why were they after her?
Was it because she was psychic? And, if so, why?
That alien voice in her head had said “we” had more questions than answers about “them.”
But how could that be? Tasha had never believed in conspiracies, firmly of the opinion that it just wasn’t human nature to keep any secret for long. By her reckoning, only some military or intelligence agency secrets were kept quiet for years, decades.
Except . . . Now that she was thinking about it, she supposed she couldn’t say with certainty that no people, no organization, could keep a secret indefinitely.
No way to prove a negative.
So maybe there were secrets out there. Maybe there were a lot of them. But a secret organization kidnapping or killing psychics for no discernible reason?
And whose activities most of the people around them never even noticed?
That didn’t just seem unlikely; it seemed absurd. Today’s mainstream media was an around-the-clock business hungry for headlines on dozens if not hundreds of channels and newspapers and magazines. And when you added to that all the Internet and social media, the websites, the blogs, the tweets and Face
book pages, and the fact that virtually nothing could happen without someone capturing it on a video camera or cell camera and posting it on YouTube or Instagram . . .
Well, nothing could happen unseen in the United States, at least.
Still, she couldn’t help wondering if that was why, although she felt watched almost all the time now, she only really felt threatened once it got dark. Did “they” move at night, in the middle of the night, largely to avoid attention?
Made sense—if anything in all this made sense.
Though that didn’t, of course, explain how they were able to gain access to her building, her apartment, when it was so well guarded.
Not that Tasha had asked building security any questions or asked to see the security footage from that night. She hadn’t asked them, and didn’t know why she hadn’t asked them, except . . .
She really didn’t know who to trust.
So Tasha tossed and turned most of the night, napping more than sleeping, and felt both unrested and on edge when she pulled herself from bed around eight that Sunday morning.
On past lazy Sundays, she had often taken a book to the park, but she wasn’t sure if she could even concentrate long enough to sit down and read. She did, however, want her usual morning coffee, so as soon as she was up and dressed, she made her way out and through the typical Sunday traffic and foot traffic, which was a bit thin as usual this early but would pick up later in the day, after church.
She went to her usual place at the coffee shop and placed her usual order. The Sunday morning customers sitting outside were reading newspapers or talking on their cell phones, or texting, or whatever. Preoccupied with their own lives.
Normal.
Tasha wished that reassured her.
It didn’t.
Her order came. She sipped coffee, picked at a very large muffin, and wished she’d thought to get a newspaper or bring one of her books to at least pretend to read. She’d fit in better with the others.
A folded newspaper landed on the table near her elbow and a man sat down across from her.
Oddly enough, though he was big and dark and a total stranger, Tasha felt no threat from him.
