Chapter 18
Adam’s soft-spoken voice filled my ears and, to my surprise, tears filled my eyes. I pressed the buds closer into my ears, trying to tune out the background hiss and background chatter.
“The thing that sucks the most about what’s happened to me since the accident is that I feel like I’m failing people. I mean, I don’t exactly go out of my way to invite them into my bedroom by the dozens and it isn’t right that they try to make their problems mine. They’re not my problems. I just want my fuckin’ life back and be like everyone else.
“But I’m not like everyone else. I never was and never will be. I’m special to them and that’s why they come to me. I can’t help them all but it really depresses me that I can’t help these poor people. I mean, I’m not the only person who’s ever had a near death experience and their lives don’t turn into Ghost Busters movies. And the stories they tell me…”
“Like what stories, Adam?”
“I dunno, Oliver. My mind’s kinda gone blank all of a sudden. OK, there were these twin girls who were sittin’ on my bed just before my sister knocked on my door. They were like 16, 17. They were killed in some car wreck about a year ago. They were still worried their parents were gonna ground them even longer if they found out they snuck out.
“They were killed the same way I was almost killed along with my girlfriend; I snuck out of my house when I was grounded, too. But they didn’t even know they were fuckin’ dead, dude. They still thought the worst thing in the world was to be grounded by their parents.”
“Tell me about your girlfriend. What has she said to you?”
“If you’re looking for her to give you the four one one about what happened on Halloween night, dude, you’re shit out of luck. She wasn’t even there. She was with me in Braintree, remember?”
“Has she said anything about seeing her parents?”
“No, which I hafta admit is kinda strange. I mean, they all died suddenly. Isn’t that when ghosts haunt you, when they die with unfinished business or something?”
“That’s the theory, yes…”
The conversation kind of dragged on and nothing much of any substance was said at the café as Adam and Oliver were both taking the measure of the other. Still, I knew that a helluva lot more was being said than as if I had been there. And Adam wasn’t telling them anything that he hadn’t told me already in the two times he’d spoken to me.
Yet, it wasn’t what he said that made my eyes well up. It was how he’d said it. I could hear the bleakness and frustration breaking his voice, his frustration of not being able to help total strangers who looked to him for answers he couldn’t always give them, in asking him to solve mysteries that threatened to remain mysteries.
Kind of like in my line of work. The only difference is I have the same requests made of me by the living. And I know what it feels like to be on the other side of the desk, to ask a homicide detective to give me some answers before I go crazy and to be told, “We’re doing our best, sir, but…”
But what was said to Adam wasn’t nearly as important or as interesting as what was said behind his back while he was in the bathroom. The kid had the foresight to hide a digital recorder in his hooded sweatshirt that he’d hung right next to Oliver Blood. It was a ballsy move and there was nothing but a thin layer of fabric to hide the recording device from view.
The kid isolated the dialogue and emailed it to me in an mp3 file. He assumed that I had an mp3 player like everyone else in the digital world. The fact is I’d barely graduated from eight tracks and still hoped vinyl would make a comeback. It was true that I could’ve played the kid’s mp3 file on both my computers at work and home but I wanted something portable that I could take with me. So I went to an electronics store and looked at the bewildering array of mp3 players they had zip tied to a peg wall. Some of the fuckers were no bigger than Wheat Thins and I wondered how many of these things were lost every year and had to be replaced. Maybe that was the whole idea.
Some kid in a blue polo shirt who still looked young enough to enjoy the Power Rangers tried to talk me into getting something called an iPhone and things called apps. But all I wanted was the biggest, most outdated one they had, something that I couldn’t accidentally swallow or get caught in my eye.
After clicking my mouse and cursing at my home computer for about an hour and a half I finally discovered how to upload the damned file onto my new toy. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes, but still conspicuous enough so that I wouldn’t leave the house without it if I needed it with me. I hadn’t the heard the file, yet, and this was the first time I’d played it.
What I heard filled me with rage. Laura and her boss still weren’t speaking completely openly on account of the few other customers who were there and who’d subsequently arrived but they were speaking openly enough so that I knew where they were planning on taking this.
“OK, he’s gone. What do you think, sir?” Apparently, the “Fuck you” schtick really was a ruse.
“Well, he’s your brother. What do you think? Do you think he’s the One?” Pause. “The One what?” I wondered. Maybe Blood was thinking along the same lines as me.
“There’s a pretty high probability. I have to say in all seriousness, sir, I’ve never seen a level of contact as I do with my brother.”
“So do you think it would be a good idea to bring him in, to meet the Others?” Sigh from Laura.
“I think it may be a good idea, even if for no other reason than to let him know that he’s not the only one.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, Elle. Obviously, what’s happened to him since the accident is freaking him right the fuck out. Introducing him to the other adepts may be the best thing anyone can do for him.”
“Your best guess, sir: Do you think Dietrich will try to acquire him?”
“Affirmative,” Blood said immediately. “He’d be crazy to not try to make a play for him. If I was him, I would.”
“Sir, you’re not planning on using him as bait, are you?” I pressed the buds even deeper into my ears. “I mean, he’s just a kid, sir.”
“Elle, some of the adepts were even younger than him when they came in and they adjusted.”
“Not all of them, sir.”
“OK. Most of them, then.”
“I just don’t want you using him as bait. Let’s not forget, he’s my flesh and blood. I already lost a brother years ago. I have no intention of losing the only other one I have.”
“I understand that, Elle. Don’t worry. No one’s gonna tie him to a stake in Jurassic Park and wait for the raptors to get him. That’s not what we do. You know that.”
“If he does try to acquire him, what do you think Dietrich has planned for him?”
“Hell if I know, Elle. Only thing I do know is, whatever the fuck happened in Boston last month will be nothing compared to what he’s still got planned.”
“Sh. Here he comes…”
The rest of the tape was a copy of what Adam had sent me. With one exception. The digital recorder in Adam’s pullover was left on and it picked up something that, for some reason, wasn’t caught by the wire’s microphone. It was a fourth voice and at first I thought it was one of the other customers or employees in the background. I played it over and over but couldn’t make out any words. It was like a raspy whisper. It sounded as if whoever said it was standing right next to the coat rack and I know for a fact no one was because I could see it.
So later that day I took it to one of the sound engineers at the CSI lab and had him isolate and loop it, as he termed it. As already noted, it wasn’t picked up on the other audio file on my unit and the engineer confirmed it when we played them simultaneously.
Reducing the background hiss and all other ambient noise it became crystal clear what this disembodied voice was saying:
“Don’t trust him.” I wondered who was warning him and if Adam had seen who it was.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 17
Berlin, East Germany, October 1961
Eight year-old Hans Dietrich had constantly heard the phrase “Checkpoint Charlie” on East German radio and TV but seeing the soldiers, barbed wire and tanks of different armies facing each other was something else entirely. Across the No Man's Land, an American soldier smiled warmly at him from atop a halftrack and he squeezed his father’s hand a little more tightly.
“Go on, smile back at the nice man,” Fritz Dietrich told his son in English as he waved back. In response, little Hans twitched his lips in a simulacrum of a smile and the soldier gave him a playful two finger salute from behind the tank's turret.
Hans was too young to understand very much about geopolitical matters. But that obviously didn’t apply to Papa. He would tell Hans about the time the young American president recently spoke to the Soviet Premier and how Khrushchev had walked all over the vastly more inexperienced leader. The Communist propaganda mill in East Germany had played up that angle big but in this case, the propaganda happened to be true. Before Kennedy walked out of Vienna with Khrushchev’s footprints all over his back, the handsome young President could only impotently sputter in response to the impasse, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
Outwardly, Fritz Dietrich was a member in good standing of the Communist Party. He held the right views, publicly cheered the Soviets’ growing postwar encroachment over Europe and beyond and never missed a party meeting in his local chapter. In that respect, he was like tens of millions of middle-aged man in virtually every country: Just some poor slob trying to fit in, feed his family and not to stand out.
Unfortunately, his expertise and official standing as a scientist was a major hindrance to anonymity. As a civilian, he’d done research and development for the Nazis during the war, working on some of Hitler’s most secret projects. One of them was the Hell’s Gate project. Since virtually all research papers and test results were destroyed when the Soviets came rolling in, only a handful of people even knew of the existence of Hell’s Gate let alone the startling results. Over the last 16 years, Fritz Dietrich hoped and prayed that the Communists never knew about his collaboration with the old National Socialist Party. He was never a Nazi or a party member. He was just some poor bastard whose scientific research was being appropriated and perverted by another damned government.
Hans realized early on that his father wasn’t a Communist any more than he was a Nazi. Even while at home, he never spoke openly to his wife, son or daughter unless the radio or television was turned up loud and even when he did speak frankly he barely did so above a whisper. He would smile at them and talk about possible KGB bugs in the house and Hans would always imagine black beetles with red hammers and sickles on them. To further confound any Germans or Soviets who may be listening in, Papa would sometimes speak in English or even Esperanto, even though Hans never fully grasped the artificial language.
By this time, a formidable but still-porous wall had actually been built separating East from West Berlin. In advance of such a thing, people began fleeing East Germany and going to the West by the millions. Many of Dr. Dietrich’s colleagues and personal friends had already made the exodus and the Soviet leadership was getting more and more jittery about the “brain drain” that was already weakening the East German scientific establishment and its economy.
Little Hans couldn’t understand why the government would put up a wall and cutting a major city in two. After all, who were they trying to keep out? His father explained wryly, “Son, it’s not who they’re trying to keep out but who they’re trying to keep in.”
“Papa, why are we here? I don’t like it here. I want to go home,” he said in German.
“Look around you here, Hans,” he said by way of reply, sweeping his arm in the general direction of the barbed wire and tanks. “They call this ‘peacetime’ but this is the way Berlin looked when Hitler was in power, during the war. That Churchill fellow said that we live behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ and I cannot disagree with him.” He stopped and looked around, shaking his head then said sadly, “This is no place to raise children.”
Young as he was, Hans got the impression that his father wasn’t merely sightseeing but, rather, looking for something. He never did know if his father found it that day.
East Germany, 1967
By now, Hans was a strapping young man of 14 going on 15. Kennedy and Khrushchev were dead and out of power, respectively, but the country was even more divided when the Berlin Wall went up during the Kennedy years. As his mind grew and took in more of the world around him, Hans gradually came to understand the geopolitical conflict that bisected Germany. What he couldn’t understand was why his intellectual father chose to stay behind and to remain in a country where free thought was suppressed.
He dared asked his father that once while they were helping his mother tend the garden in their modest backyard. His father abruptly stood up and his mother and older sister shot him a look that immediately told him that he’d just stepped into No Man’s Land. His father quickly turned to him and said,
“It is a lot easier for single people and couples to sneak out than it is for entire families. It would have been dangerous to do so even before the wall went up. We will not speak of this again!”
Hans never forgot how much his face burned with chagrin. His father was generally a quiet, soft-spoken man, a true intellectual, and very few were the times he’d addressed anyone in the family so sharply. He thought it was a perfectly valid question. Why not leave? His father was plainly unhappy with his work and with what his half of his country had turned into. He knew the results of their research and tests were getting sent straight to Moscow where it could be perverted for military/intelligence applications. Hans wouldn’t know the exact nature of his father’s work until long after he suddenly died later that week.
Fritz Dietrich, as stated, never missed a local Communist party meeting. That’s not to say, however, that he stayed for the entire meetings. In fact, more often than not, he would slip out and go somewhere else after he’d documented his presence. The whole family knew what he was doing at these secret meetings if not precisely what was being discussed or where and they dreaded the nights when Communist party meetings were scheduled. There was never any guarantee that he’d walk through the door in relative high spirits carrying an apple strudel wrapped in brown butcher paper as always.
One Saturday night in 1967, Hans walked through the front door for the last time. The children no longer ran to the door as when they were younger even though they greatly looked forward to the delicious pastry that Papa would bring home for their dessert. Their mother Greta, however, always greeted him at the door and still took his hat and coat. They heard the key open the door and someone walk in. They heard their mother get up from her needlepoint to greet Papa.
Then they heard Mama scream like they’d never heard any human scream.
Hans and Kirsten looked at eachother and bolted to the foyer. They got there just a split second before their father fell on his face while their mother got down on her haunches and covered her ears as her screaming continued. Blood cascaded out of their father’s mouth and his eyes were completely red. The strudel, blood dripping on the butcher paper, fell to the ground a second before their father.
The doctor who performed the autopsy told the family that Dr. Dietrich’s aorta had suppurated or split. Occasionally that happens, he said, and that there’s nothing that can prevent it. There’d been no evidence of foul play. There were no contusions, cuts or punctures although the pathologist was surprised at the sharpness and cleanness of the split, almost, he said, “as if someone slit the artery with a scalpel.”
By 1976, Hans Dietrich began working for the Stasi and was at 23 one of the most dangerous men in East Germany. The rest of the world had moved on and grew comfortable with the idea of two Germanys, one free, the other Communist. It was a standard chestnut of the Communist propaganda mill that the Americans had failed to check Communist expansion in Germany, in Korea, in Vietnam and even in Cuba off its shores. All of Eastern Europe was Communist thanks to the ailing FDR at the Yalta conference.
As with all rookies, Dietrich started out as a glorified gopher by doing scut work for the senior officials above him. Soon thereafter, however, he began distinguishing himself with a mounting arrest rate and, even more impressively, a high conviction rate. It was astounding how many suspects that he’d brought in those first 12 months who wound up singing like canaries to him.
It seemingly never struck him that he’d become the very thing that his father had despised. And if it had, he knew what his real reasons were for joining the East German Secret Police. If he was going to solve his father’s suspicious death, he’d have to be on the inside. Then, eleven long frustrating years later, he’d gotten his big break.
A Czech intelligence asset of the American government had been picked up by the Stasi in 1987 and had the misfortune of winding up in the same interrogation room as Dietrich. His excellently-forged passport listed him as a West German national but it was obvious from the minute he opened his mouth that he wasn’t a true German. After some brutally earnest interrogation, Dietrich got it out of the Czech that he was, indeed, an asset of the American Central Intelligence Agency’s Psy Ops division.
Among other things, Dietrich discovered to his astonishment that he’d attended the same exact meeting as his father in 1967 on the night he died. He admitted that he wasn’t a regular member of the group yet had somehow successfully passed himself off back then as an authentic German who was just as committed to leaving East Germany as the other dissidents.
In subsequent interrogations it had come out that this guy, whose last name was actually Dubcek, was a highly-skilled courier who’d specialized in placing psychtronic hardware devices on unwitting victims. Dietrich thought the guy was off his rocker until he explained that both the Soviets and the Americans were working along parallel lines. The metal devices, which were often crude and resembled metal children’s toys more than weapons for psychic espionage, could channel and even amplify the powers of a remote psychic from even half a world away. They intended to go after another person posing as an East German dissident but who was in reality a Soviet spy. He just slipped the device into the wrong coat pocket: Hans’ father’s pocket. His father was murdered, said the Czech, by mistake.
Not surprisingly, the suspect soon thereafter died in Stasi custody. When his superiors asked if he’d revealed anything of interest, Dietrich shook his already platinum head and curtly said, “Nein.”
Such a device that no one in the family could recognize or identify was found in his father’s coat pocket the night he died of that esophageal hemorrhage twenty years earlier.
22 years later, Hans was holding it in his hands, furiously swallowing his tears.
Eight year-old Hans Dietrich had constantly heard the phrase “Checkpoint Charlie” on East German radio and TV but seeing the soldiers, barbed wire and tanks of different armies facing each other was something else entirely. Across the No Man's Land, an American soldier smiled warmly at him from atop a halftrack and he squeezed his father’s hand a little more tightly.
“Go on, smile back at the nice man,” Fritz Dietrich told his son in English as he waved back. In response, little Hans twitched his lips in a simulacrum of a smile and the soldier gave him a playful two finger salute from behind the tank's turret.
Hans was too young to understand very much about geopolitical matters. But that obviously didn’t apply to Papa. He would tell Hans about the time the young American president recently spoke to the Soviet Premier and how Khrushchev had walked all over the vastly more inexperienced leader. The Communist propaganda mill in East Germany had played up that angle big but in this case, the propaganda happened to be true. Before Kennedy walked out of Vienna with Khrushchev’s footprints all over his back, the handsome young President could only impotently sputter in response to the impasse, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
Outwardly, Fritz Dietrich was a member in good standing of the Communist Party. He held the right views, publicly cheered the Soviets’ growing postwar encroachment over Europe and beyond and never missed a party meeting in his local chapter. In that respect, he was like tens of millions of middle-aged man in virtually every country: Just some poor slob trying to fit in, feed his family and not to stand out.
Unfortunately, his expertise and official standing as a scientist was a major hindrance to anonymity. As a civilian, he’d done research and development for the Nazis during the war, working on some of Hitler’s most secret projects. One of them was the Hell’s Gate project. Since virtually all research papers and test results were destroyed when the Soviets came rolling in, only a handful of people even knew of the existence of Hell’s Gate let alone the startling results. Over the last 16 years, Fritz Dietrich hoped and prayed that the Communists never knew about his collaboration with the old National Socialist Party. He was never a Nazi or a party member. He was just some poor bastard whose scientific research was being appropriated and perverted by another damned government.
Hans realized early on that his father wasn’t a Communist any more than he was a Nazi. Even while at home, he never spoke openly to his wife, son or daughter unless the radio or television was turned up loud and even when he did speak frankly he barely did so above a whisper. He would smile at them and talk about possible KGB bugs in the house and Hans would always imagine black beetles with red hammers and sickles on them. To further confound any Germans or Soviets who may be listening in, Papa would sometimes speak in English or even Esperanto, even though Hans never fully grasped the artificial language.
By this time, a formidable but still-porous wall had actually been built separating East from West Berlin. In advance of such a thing, people began fleeing East Germany and going to the West by the millions. Many of Dr. Dietrich’s colleagues and personal friends had already made the exodus and the Soviet leadership was getting more and more jittery about the “brain drain” that was already weakening the East German scientific establishment and its economy.
Little Hans couldn’t understand why the government would put up a wall and cutting a major city in two. After all, who were they trying to keep out? His father explained wryly, “Son, it’s not who they’re trying to keep out but who they’re trying to keep in.”
“Papa, why are we here? I don’t like it here. I want to go home,” he said in German.
“Look around you here, Hans,” he said by way of reply, sweeping his arm in the general direction of the barbed wire and tanks. “They call this ‘peacetime’ but this is the way Berlin looked when Hitler was in power, during the war. That Churchill fellow said that we live behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ and I cannot disagree with him.” He stopped and looked around, shaking his head then said sadly, “This is no place to raise children.”
Young as he was, Hans got the impression that his father wasn’t merely sightseeing but, rather, looking for something. He never did know if his father found it that day.
East Germany, 1967
By now, Hans was a strapping young man of 14 going on 15. Kennedy and Khrushchev were dead and out of power, respectively, but the country was even more divided when the Berlin Wall went up during the Kennedy years. As his mind grew and took in more of the world around him, Hans gradually came to understand the geopolitical conflict that bisected Germany. What he couldn’t understand was why his intellectual father chose to stay behind and to remain in a country where free thought was suppressed.
He dared asked his father that once while they were helping his mother tend the garden in their modest backyard. His father abruptly stood up and his mother and older sister shot him a look that immediately told him that he’d just stepped into No Man’s Land. His father quickly turned to him and said,
“It is a lot easier for single people and couples to sneak out than it is for entire families. It would have been dangerous to do so even before the wall went up. We will not speak of this again!”
Hans never forgot how much his face burned with chagrin. His father was generally a quiet, soft-spoken man, a true intellectual, and very few were the times he’d addressed anyone in the family so sharply. He thought it was a perfectly valid question. Why not leave? His father was plainly unhappy with his work and with what his half of his country had turned into. He knew the results of their research and tests were getting sent straight to Moscow where it could be perverted for military/intelligence applications. Hans wouldn’t know the exact nature of his father’s work until long after he suddenly died later that week.
Fritz Dietrich, as stated, never missed a local Communist party meeting. That’s not to say, however, that he stayed for the entire meetings. In fact, more often than not, he would slip out and go somewhere else after he’d documented his presence. The whole family knew what he was doing at these secret meetings if not precisely what was being discussed or where and they dreaded the nights when Communist party meetings were scheduled. There was never any guarantee that he’d walk through the door in relative high spirits carrying an apple strudel wrapped in brown butcher paper as always.
One Saturday night in 1967, Hans walked through the front door for the last time. The children no longer ran to the door as when they were younger even though they greatly looked forward to the delicious pastry that Papa would bring home for their dessert. Their mother Greta, however, always greeted him at the door and still took his hat and coat. They heard the key open the door and someone walk in. They heard their mother get up from her needlepoint to greet Papa.
Then they heard Mama scream like they’d never heard any human scream.
Hans and Kirsten looked at eachother and bolted to the foyer. They got there just a split second before their father fell on his face while their mother got down on her haunches and covered her ears as her screaming continued. Blood cascaded out of their father’s mouth and his eyes were completely red. The strudel, blood dripping on the butcher paper, fell to the ground a second before their father.
The doctor who performed the autopsy told the family that Dr. Dietrich’s aorta had suppurated or split. Occasionally that happens, he said, and that there’s nothing that can prevent it. There’d been no evidence of foul play. There were no contusions, cuts or punctures although the pathologist was surprised at the sharpness and cleanness of the split, almost, he said, “as if someone slit the artery with a scalpel.”
By 1976, Hans Dietrich began working for the Stasi and was at 23 one of the most dangerous men in East Germany. The rest of the world had moved on and grew comfortable with the idea of two Germanys, one free, the other Communist. It was a standard chestnut of the Communist propaganda mill that the Americans had failed to check Communist expansion in Germany, in Korea, in Vietnam and even in Cuba off its shores. All of Eastern Europe was Communist thanks to the ailing FDR at the Yalta conference.
As with all rookies, Dietrich started out as a glorified gopher by doing scut work for the senior officials above him. Soon thereafter, however, he began distinguishing himself with a mounting arrest rate and, even more impressively, a high conviction rate. It was astounding how many suspects that he’d brought in those first 12 months who wound up singing like canaries to him.
It seemingly never struck him that he’d become the very thing that his father had despised. And if it had, he knew what his real reasons were for joining the East German Secret Police. If he was going to solve his father’s suspicious death, he’d have to be on the inside. Then, eleven long frustrating years later, he’d gotten his big break.
A Czech intelligence asset of the American government had been picked up by the Stasi in 1987 and had the misfortune of winding up in the same interrogation room as Dietrich. His excellently-forged passport listed him as a West German national but it was obvious from the minute he opened his mouth that he wasn’t a true German. After some brutally earnest interrogation, Dietrich got it out of the Czech that he was, indeed, an asset of the American Central Intelligence Agency’s Psy Ops division.
Among other things, Dietrich discovered to his astonishment that he’d attended the same exact meeting as his father in 1967 on the night he died. He admitted that he wasn’t a regular member of the group yet had somehow successfully passed himself off back then as an authentic German who was just as committed to leaving East Germany as the other dissidents.
In subsequent interrogations it had come out that this guy, whose last name was actually Dubcek, was a highly-skilled courier who’d specialized in placing psychtronic hardware devices on unwitting victims. Dietrich thought the guy was off his rocker until he explained that both the Soviets and the Americans were working along parallel lines. The metal devices, which were often crude and resembled metal children’s toys more than weapons for psychic espionage, could channel and even amplify the powers of a remote psychic from even half a world away. They intended to go after another person posing as an East German dissident but who was in reality a Soviet spy. He just slipped the device into the wrong coat pocket: Hans’ father’s pocket. His father was murdered, said the Czech, by mistake.
Not surprisingly, the suspect soon thereafter died in Stasi custody. When his superiors asked if he’d revealed anything of interest, Dietrich shook his already platinum head and curtly said, “Nein.”
Such a device that no one in the family could recognize or identify was found in his father’s coat pocket the night he died of that esophageal hemorrhage twenty years earlier.
22 years later, Hans was holding it in his hands, furiously swallowing his tears.
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 16
When Laura knocked on my door on Saturday morning, I almost wished it had been a ghost. I knew it was time and I wasn’t exactly creaming my denims to meet her boss. Plus, to make matters worse, that Coffey dude gave me a wire to wear, meaning that not only was I now doing undercover police work for free, I was also lyin’ to my own sister and risking pissing off her boss if he ever found the fucking wire.
It was a pain in the ass putting it on in the bathroom. I only have like three hairs on my chest so at least I didn’t have to worry about shaving before taping it on but it felt weird, like I had a cold insect clinging to me. Back at the skateboard park, Coffey had taken the wire out of his coat pocket and explained how to put it on. Then he asked me to call him when I was about to leave since it was just one of those one way things. I reminded him that I lost my cell phone in the accident and that using the house phone was too sketchy.
So I logged on to AOL Instant Messenger and IM’d him at the really imaginative handle of MisterCoffey. He pinged me to acknowledge that he got my message and I logged off.
I got up from the bed that I was sharing with two other ghosts, two girls about my age that were killed in a car accident about a year ago. They floated past me and through the door before I had the chance to open it and the first thing Laura said was, “Jesus, Adam, did you just feel that draft? I felt like it came right through the door!” I just shook my head and shouldered past her, eager to get this spy shit over with. “Why are you wearing a buttoned collar shirt all of a sudden?”
After I got the kid’s message on my computer at home, I made sure I got within range of the rendezvous point. Blood apparently wanted something public but not too public and they settled for a trendy coffee shop in Braintree that was long on comfort and short on customers. The idea, I guess, was to provide just enough exposure to put the kid at ease while ensuring as much as possible that their conversation wouldn’t be overheard by prying ears like mine. Without any specific reason and without knowing a blessed thing about this Blood guy, I was starting to despise him. Maybe it was because I feared that he’d try to exploit Adam. Some of it also had to do with my son Chaz. Adam looked nothing like Chaz yet there was an innocence and vulnerability about him that would’ve made me think Adam was his reincarnation if Chaz had died before Adam was born. In fact, if Chaz was still alive, he’d be just a year older than the Moss kid.
I shook the thought out of my head as I drove to the coffee shop and looked for a place where I could park without being made. Before that time, I began getting the transmission as I heard Adam’s voice and his sister over the hum of her Chevy Cobalt. The kid was getting too freaked out and I was afraid he was going to blow it.
“So, what does this dude want, Laura?”
“I… I don’t exactly know, Honey. All I know is if I was him, I’d want to get a sense of what level your powers are at right now, what you’re seeing and hearing.”
“I’m starting to get this uneasy feeling that you’re not looking for my help but that you’re trying to protect me from something. Something that you know about that you haven’t told me, yet.”
“Adam, listen, I’m your big sister. I’m your friggin’ flesh and blood, OK? You should know I’d never put you in harm’s way.” She sounded sincere and shit but I noticed that she never looked me in the eye.
“Yeah, well, not too many dudes have big sisters that work for super secret fuckin’ spy agencies, either, with bosses named Blood.”
Laura turned and gave me the stink eye like I just picked my nose and put the booger on her passenger window. Alright, maybe I shouldn’t hold the dude’s name against him. Still, just my luck the guy couldn’t have a friendlier sounding name like Flowers or Pinkerton or something like that.
“Look, it’s just an informal meet and greet. You could’ve dressed like you usually do.” She looked up and down at my chest. “I mean, I appreciate the thought and all but seeing you in a collared shirt just… doesn’t look right.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a little cold for a tee shirt. Besides you bought this for me last Christmas. Well, you mailed it to me. You never showed up.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Hun. Ah, here we are.”
Laura steered into a parking spot across the street from the coffee shop. I couldn’t tell whether or not her boss was already there and I looked for a black car with government plates and ninjas, guys wearing sunglasses and trench coats and snipers on the roof.
The problem with someone wearing a wire is that fabric rustles against the stalk mic. A wire’s no fucking good if someone can see it so it has to be covered up by a shirt. I’d recommended a buttoned shirt like the one he was wearing. I was well aware that I was using an untrained asset to monitor and record a conversation with some super spook that was the head of a secret intelligence outfit and that maybe he’d sweep the kid for any listening device. But I was counting on Blood giving Adam a free pass because 1) he was just a kid, not a pro and 2) he was Laura Moss’s brother and maybe Blood would count on her turning up anything beforehand.
I pressed the headphones closer to my ears and checked for the twelfth time if the digital recorder was on. Satisfied that it was, I concentrated on the feed and tried to tune out the rustling fabric and focus on the voices. I heard Laura announce their arrival and I realized I was just a couple of hundred yards away. It was a pretty nondescript café that was nestled between a pizza place and a Brazilian grocery store. Since I was coming from the other direction, I could park on the opposite side of the street as Laura. I found the perfect spot just a door away. I could get a decent visual if they sat at the right places while not giving them much chance of seeing me. Trouble is, since it wasn’t a two way setup and I had no way of communicating with Adam, I couldn’t give him any idea where I was parked unless he actively looked for me. And that could blow the whole thing.
I checked for a car with government plates unless Blood would be stupid enough to drive all the way out to Braintree in his own car. Then I recalled Laura telling me at the station that their agency’s HQ was in Washington so that meant he, too, would be driving a rented car. So I began looking for rental car plates in the small parking lot out back. There were none. What could be so interesting and important about this Moss kid that the top banana of an intelligence agency would hop on a jet for several hundred miles just to have coffee with him?
I assumed that Laura and Adam were early until I heard a deep voice say, “Adam? Hi, I’m Oliver. I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
“Uh, hello, sir,” I half said, half swallowed. The tall black dude showed me his impossibly white teeth and laughed.
“Call me Oliver, please. You don’t work for me.” Then he looked at my sister, “You still have to call me ‘sir’, though.”
“Fuck you, Oliver,” she said. My eyes must’ve gotten as big as donuts but Oliver just looked up into the fluorescent lights and laughed again. The first impression I got was that the two of them had a relationship that was a whole lot more informal than she led me to believe. And that helped put me at ease. Then again, maybe that was the intention. I never forgot what these two did for a living. Innocent people suddenly died in their line of work and all I knew was that I wanted no part of it. If Laura’s war story about that Russian chick getting croaked was supposed to put my mind at ease, then she bombed big time.
“OK, just for that, Moss, you’re payin’ for everyone else.”
Laura smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “OK, cheapskate. Any excuse to get a free coffee. This guy’s an incurable mooch. Watch out for him.” Oliver laughed for the third time in half a minute. Yeah, they were layin’ it on pretty thick and it was getting old PDQ.
She ordered a couple of lattes for herself and her boss and I settled for an ice coffee. “While we’re waiting for the coffee, let’s sit down, Adam.” He tried to steer me into a corner of the café, the part with the least people but I wanted to sit more in the middle so anyone parked right outside could see us. I looked for Coffey’s car out of the corner of my eye. He said he personally drove an old Ford Grand Victoria but I didn’t see it.
I sat on the right side of the black leather sofa and kept nervously looking out the window while pretending to look at my sister. I had no idea where this Coffey dude was. I didn’t just want him to listen in. I wanted him to be able to see me… just in case.
I didn’t know if it was serendipity or savvy on the kid’s part but he managed to position himself and Blood perfectly from where I was parked. Adam could be seen from my oblique angle while Blood’s back was turned to the front bay window. He wouldn’t be able to make me even if he saw me, anyway, but his big sister was another matter. She met me.
“So, how are you doing in school, Adam? Have you gone back, yet?”
“Yeah. I, uh, went back yesterday. My folks figured it would be better if I went back on the last day of the week just to, like, ease me back into the routine. I was gettin’ my homework sent to me.” He tossed his long bangs out of his eyes.
“Good, good,” Blood said. “Ah, here we are…”
I could see Laura cautiously walk into view holding a tray with three cups which she then placed on the table between Adam and Blood then she sat next to her brother on the couch. All I could see of her boss was the back of his head of white hair. Among the dark furnishings, he stood out like a dandelion.
“Thank you, Elle. Is your iced coffee okay, Adam?” The kid nodded his head up and down. He cradled the cup against him like it was a kitten and looked scared. I could hear the coffee and ice sloshing around and I wished he’d put it down.
“Hun, Oliver here just wants to talk to you about some of the things you’ve seen and, considering what we do for a living, I think it’s safe to say you’ll get a fairer hearing than you ever got from Dr. Sutter or Dr. Rubin.” Adam just mutely nodded again and I felt bad for him. Here I was suspicious of Blood and Elle exploiting this kid yet what the fuck was I doing? At least I could confirm that I had his best interests at heart but that was cold comfort considering how uncomfortable he looked.
“That’s right. Let me give you a basic overview of what our agency does. We’re not exactly what you call ghost hunters although we’re called upon to investigate the paranormal and to prevent certain private and government entities from perverting research into the paranormal. More often than not, we directly get leads or are tipped off by other intelligence agencies when there’s a strong probability of someone seeking to exploit that technology.”
“Yeah, I know. My sister told me a little about it.”
“OK, good. Now, considering our line of work, Elle here thought it would be prudent to tell me about your experience since your accident. She tells me you’re seeing more and more full body apparitions, that you can communicate with all of them?”
“Well, not all of them. Some of them can’t talk. But it’s obvious they’re coming out of the woodwork just to see me. I hate it. I just wish they’d go away and leave me the fuck alone.”
Blood nodded his platinum head. “Yeah, I can understand that. We’ve seen our fair share of manifestations. It takes a lot to get used to, that is, if anyone can get used to that sort of thing.”
“So, where do I come in, Mr. Blood?”
“Please, call me Oliver. Where you come in has yet to be largely determined. We know that you’ve been seeing ghosts left and right starting the moment you came out of your coma. We happen to be very interested in what happened on Halloween night in Boston, the… incident that claimed the lives of your girlfriend’s parents.” He leaned forward to take a sip of his latte and continued. “We’d like to know if the spirits of any of those victims have been talking to you and, if so, have they shed any light about what happened that night?”
Son of a bitch was thinking along the same exact lines as me. Yet something told me that this Blood character’s interest in Adam went far beyond him being a stenographer for the dead. I held my breath for a minute and hoped and prayed the kid wouldn’t let it slip that some fat Boston cop with bad taste in ties was asking the exact same questions of him. It suddenly occurred to me that I rushed out of the house without having a cup of coffee. I looked forlornly at the café next to me. How ironic is that?
“Well, uh, nothing that I can think of. Like I said, dude, they can’t all talk. And there’re so many that I kinda tend to tune ‘em out since they all drive me apeshit.” The kid took a long sip of his iced coffee then looked up and frowned. “Wait a minute. If your agency’s getting involved in this, you think what happened on Halloween night has something do with the paranormal?”
“Well, we’re not officially involved, yet, Adam. We were tipped off by the FBI. Don’t forget, there were senators and congressmen in that high rise so that automatically gets the federal government involved. You’d be surprised how many of our so-called leads turn into doggie doo doo. More often than not, it’s not remotely paranormal.”
Then he regaled Adam with a story about a woman who claimed to be haunted by ghosts only to find out her husband was manufacturing the hauntings by using hidden speakers and piano wires to make things move. Apparently the idea was to drive his wealthy wife insane and to the point of suicide so he could collect the inheritance. As an investigator myself, I know all too well that not all investigations bear fruit. I never told the Moss kid about the autopsy results and I specifically told Elle back at the station to pay her kid brother the same courtesy. He didn’t need to know about hearts being torn apart and people pierced with ghost swords. The poor kid was freaked out enough these days as it was. I was counting on Blood to be equally considerate.
“Still, why this? Where didja get the idea there could be something paranormal about this?”
“Well, at first glance, Adam, it looks like a mass suicide. But not a whole hell of a lot adds up. What would make all those people jump from a penthouse dozen of stories up? There wasn’t a fire, gas leak, shooting or any kind of terrorist attack that would account for that kind of sheer, blind panic. We’re just covering our bases.”
Through the glass I could make out just enough of the kid’s facial features to know he wasn’t buying it. In fact…
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
In fact, the kid whispered the word “bullshit” into the mic. Good boy. Teach them skepticism early, I say. Then Adam took off his hooded sweatshirt, hung it up on the coat rack and announced he was going to the bathroom.
He began muttering into the microphone as soon as he was out of their earshot.
“Dude, I don’t buy this shit for a minute. There’s, like, so much they’re not telling me.” I nodded and silently agreed with him. Now that he was no longer there, they were no doubt talking amongst themselves. I was looking right at them. Unfortunately, with Adam no longer there, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
As if reading my mind, the kid then said, “I figgered if I left them alone, they’d start talking. I know what you’re thinking, dude, but don’t worry. I got that covered.”
I frowned in puzzlement and wondered what he was talking about then I looked at the hooded sweatshirt still hanging on the coat rack. Elle and Blood continued talking and weren’t paying it any mind.
“Oh, this kid is good,” I chuckled out loud.
It was a pain in the ass putting it on in the bathroom. I only have like three hairs on my chest so at least I didn’t have to worry about shaving before taping it on but it felt weird, like I had a cold insect clinging to me. Back at the skateboard park, Coffey had taken the wire out of his coat pocket and explained how to put it on. Then he asked me to call him when I was about to leave since it was just one of those one way things. I reminded him that I lost my cell phone in the accident and that using the house phone was too sketchy.
So I logged on to AOL Instant Messenger and IM’d him at the really imaginative handle of MisterCoffey. He pinged me to acknowledge that he got my message and I logged off.
I got up from the bed that I was sharing with two other ghosts, two girls about my age that were killed in a car accident about a year ago. They floated past me and through the door before I had the chance to open it and the first thing Laura said was, “Jesus, Adam, did you just feel that draft? I felt like it came right through the door!” I just shook my head and shouldered past her, eager to get this spy shit over with. “Why are you wearing a buttoned collar shirt all of a sudden?”
After I got the kid’s message on my computer at home, I made sure I got within range of the rendezvous point. Blood apparently wanted something public but not too public and they settled for a trendy coffee shop in Braintree that was long on comfort and short on customers. The idea, I guess, was to provide just enough exposure to put the kid at ease while ensuring as much as possible that their conversation wouldn’t be overheard by prying ears like mine. Without any specific reason and without knowing a blessed thing about this Blood guy, I was starting to despise him. Maybe it was because I feared that he’d try to exploit Adam. Some of it also had to do with my son Chaz. Adam looked nothing like Chaz yet there was an innocence and vulnerability about him that would’ve made me think Adam was his reincarnation if Chaz had died before Adam was born. In fact, if Chaz was still alive, he’d be just a year older than the Moss kid.
I shook the thought out of my head as I drove to the coffee shop and looked for a place where I could park without being made. Before that time, I began getting the transmission as I heard Adam’s voice and his sister over the hum of her Chevy Cobalt. The kid was getting too freaked out and I was afraid he was going to blow it.
“So, what does this dude want, Laura?”
“I… I don’t exactly know, Honey. All I know is if I was him, I’d want to get a sense of what level your powers are at right now, what you’re seeing and hearing.”
“I’m starting to get this uneasy feeling that you’re not looking for my help but that you’re trying to protect me from something. Something that you know about that you haven’t told me, yet.”
“Adam, listen, I’m your big sister. I’m your friggin’ flesh and blood, OK? You should know I’d never put you in harm’s way.” She sounded sincere and shit but I noticed that she never looked me in the eye.
“Yeah, well, not too many dudes have big sisters that work for super secret fuckin’ spy agencies, either, with bosses named Blood.”
Laura turned and gave me the stink eye like I just picked my nose and put the booger on her passenger window. Alright, maybe I shouldn’t hold the dude’s name against him. Still, just my luck the guy couldn’t have a friendlier sounding name like Flowers or Pinkerton or something like that.
“Look, it’s just an informal meet and greet. You could’ve dressed like you usually do.” She looked up and down at my chest. “I mean, I appreciate the thought and all but seeing you in a collared shirt just… doesn’t look right.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a little cold for a tee shirt. Besides you bought this for me last Christmas. Well, you mailed it to me. You never showed up.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Hun. Ah, here we are.”
Laura steered into a parking spot across the street from the coffee shop. I couldn’t tell whether or not her boss was already there and I looked for a black car with government plates and ninjas, guys wearing sunglasses and trench coats and snipers on the roof.
The problem with someone wearing a wire is that fabric rustles against the stalk mic. A wire’s no fucking good if someone can see it so it has to be covered up by a shirt. I’d recommended a buttoned shirt like the one he was wearing. I was well aware that I was using an untrained asset to monitor and record a conversation with some super spook that was the head of a secret intelligence outfit and that maybe he’d sweep the kid for any listening device. But I was counting on Blood giving Adam a free pass because 1) he was just a kid, not a pro and 2) he was Laura Moss’s brother and maybe Blood would count on her turning up anything beforehand.
I pressed the headphones closer to my ears and checked for the twelfth time if the digital recorder was on. Satisfied that it was, I concentrated on the feed and tried to tune out the rustling fabric and focus on the voices. I heard Laura announce their arrival and I realized I was just a couple of hundred yards away. It was a pretty nondescript café that was nestled between a pizza place and a Brazilian grocery store. Since I was coming from the other direction, I could park on the opposite side of the street as Laura. I found the perfect spot just a door away. I could get a decent visual if they sat at the right places while not giving them much chance of seeing me. Trouble is, since it wasn’t a two way setup and I had no way of communicating with Adam, I couldn’t give him any idea where I was parked unless he actively looked for me. And that could blow the whole thing.
I checked for a car with government plates unless Blood would be stupid enough to drive all the way out to Braintree in his own car. Then I recalled Laura telling me at the station that their agency’s HQ was in Washington so that meant he, too, would be driving a rented car. So I began looking for rental car plates in the small parking lot out back. There were none. What could be so interesting and important about this Moss kid that the top banana of an intelligence agency would hop on a jet for several hundred miles just to have coffee with him?
I assumed that Laura and Adam were early until I heard a deep voice say, “Adam? Hi, I’m Oliver. I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
“Uh, hello, sir,” I half said, half swallowed. The tall black dude showed me his impossibly white teeth and laughed.
“Call me Oliver, please. You don’t work for me.” Then he looked at my sister, “You still have to call me ‘sir’, though.”
“Fuck you, Oliver,” she said. My eyes must’ve gotten as big as donuts but Oliver just looked up into the fluorescent lights and laughed again. The first impression I got was that the two of them had a relationship that was a whole lot more informal than she led me to believe. And that helped put me at ease. Then again, maybe that was the intention. I never forgot what these two did for a living. Innocent people suddenly died in their line of work and all I knew was that I wanted no part of it. If Laura’s war story about that Russian chick getting croaked was supposed to put my mind at ease, then she bombed big time.
“OK, just for that, Moss, you’re payin’ for everyone else.”
Laura smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “OK, cheapskate. Any excuse to get a free coffee. This guy’s an incurable mooch. Watch out for him.” Oliver laughed for the third time in half a minute. Yeah, they were layin’ it on pretty thick and it was getting old PDQ.
She ordered a couple of lattes for herself and her boss and I settled for an ice coffee. “While we’re waiting for the coffee, let’s sit down, Adam.” He tried to steer me into a corner of the café, the part with the least people but I wanted to sit more in the middle so anyone parked right outside could see us. I looked for Coffey’s car out of the corner of my eye. He said he personally drove an old Ford Grand Victoria but I didn’t see it.
I sat on the right side of the black leather sofa and kept nervously looking out the window while pretending to look at my sister. I had no idea where this Coffey dude was. I didn’t just want him to listen in. I wanted him to be able to see me… just in case.
I didn’t know if it was serendipity or savvy on the kid’s part but he managed to position himself and Blood perfectly from where I was parked. Adam could be seen from my oblique angle while Blood’s back was turned to the front bay window. He wouldn’t be able to make me even if he saw me, anyway, but his big sister was another matter. She met me.
“So, how are you doing in school, Adam? Have you gone back, yet?”
“Yeah. I, uh, went back yesterday. My folks figured it would be better if I went back on the last day of the week just to, like, ease me back into the routine. I was gettin’ my homework sent to me.” He tossed his long bangs out of his eyes.
“Good, good,” Blood said. “Ah, here we are…”
I could see Laura cautiously walk into view holding a tray with three cups which she then placed on the table between Adam and Blood then she sat next to her brother on the couch. All I could see of her boss was the back of his head of white hair. Among the dark furnishings, he stood out like a dandelion.
“Thank you, Elle. Is your iced coffee okay, Adam?” The kid nodded his head up and down. He cradled the cup against him like it was a kitten and looked scared. I could hear the coffee and ice sloshing around and I wished he’d put it down.
“Hun, Oliver here just wants to talk to you about some of the things you’ve seen and, considering what we do for a living, I think it’s safe to say you’ll get a fairer hearing than you ever got from Dr. Sutter or Dr. Rubin.” Adam just mutely nodded again and I felt bad for him. Here I was suspicious of Blood and Elle exploiting this kid yet what the fuck was I doing? At least I could confirm that I had his best interests at heart but that was cold comfort considering how uncomfortable he looked.
“That’s right. Let me give you a basic overview of what our agency does. We’re not exactly what you call ghost hunters although we’re called upon to investigate the paranormal and to prevent certain private and government entities from perverting research into the paranormal. More often than not, we directly get leads or are tipped off by other intelligence agencies when there’s a strong probability of someone seeking to exploit that technology.”
“Yeah, I know. My sister told me a little about it.”
“OK, good. Now, considering our line of work, Elle here thought it would be prudent to tell me about your experience since your accident. She tells me you’re seeing more and more full body apparitions, that you can communicate with all of them?”
“Well, not all of them. Some of them can’t talk. But it’s obvious they’re coming out of the woodwork just to see me. I hate it. I just wish they’d go away and leave me the fuck alone.”
Blood nodded his platinum head. “Yeah, I can understand that. We’ve seen our fair share of manifestations. It takes a lot to get used to, that is, if anyone can get used to that sort of thing.”
“So, where do I come in, Mr. Blood?”
“Please, call me Oliver. Where you come in has yet to be largely determined. We know that you’ve been seeing ghosts left and right starting the moment you came out of your coma. We happen to be very interested in what happened on Halloween night in Boston, the… incident that claimed the lives of your girlfriend’s parents.” He leaned forward to take a sip of his latte and continued. “We’d like to know if the spirits of any of those victims have been talking to you and, if so, have they shed any light about what happened that night?”
Son of a bitch was thinking along the same exact lines as me. Yet something told me that this Blood character’s interest in Adam went far beyond him being a stenographer for the dead. I held my breath for a minute and hoped and prayed the kid wouldn’t let it slip that some fat Boston cop with bad taste in ties was asking the exact same questions of him. It suddenly occurred to me that I rushed out of the house without having a cup of coffee. I looked forlornly at the café next to me. How ironic is that?
“Well, uh, nothing that I can think of. Like I said, dude, they can’t all talk. And there’re so many that I kinda tend to tune ‘em out since they all drive me apeshit.” The kid took a long sip of his iced coffee then looked up and frowned. “Wait a minute. If your agency’s getting involved in this, you think what happened on Halloween night has something do with the paranormal?”
“Well, we’re not officially involved, yet, Adam. We were tipped off by the FBI. Don’t forget, there were senators and congressmen in that high rise so that automatically gets the federal government involved. You’d be surprised how many of our so-called leads turn into doggie doo doo. More often than not, it’s not remotely paranormal.”
Then he regaled Adam with a story about a woman who claimed to be haunted by ghosts only to find out her husband was manufacturing the hauntings by using hidden speakers and piano wires to make things move. Apparently the idea was to drive his wealthy wife insane and to the point of suicide so he could collect the inheritance. As an investigator myself, I know all too well that not all investigations bear fruit. I never told the Moss kid about the autopsy results and I specifically told Elle back at the station to pay her kid brother the same courtesy. He didn’t need to know about hearts being torn apart and people pierced with ghost swords. The poor kid was freaked out enough these days as it was. I was counting on Blood to be equally considerate.
“Still, why this? Where didja get the idea there could be something paranormal about this?”
“Well, at first glance, Adam, it looks like a mass suicide. But not a whole hell of a lot adds up. What would make all those people jump from a penthouse dozen of stories up? There wasn’t a fire, gas leak, shooting or any kind of terrorist attack that would account for that kind of sheer, blind panic. We’re just covering our bases.”
Through the glass I could make out just enough of the kid’s facial features to know he wasn’t buying it. In fact…
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
In fact, the kid whispered the word “bullshit” into the mic. Good boy. Teach them skepticism early, I say. Then Adam took off his hooded sweatshirt, hung it up on the coat rack and announced he was going to the bathroom.
He began muttering into the microphone as soon as he was out of their earshot.
“Dude, I don’t buy this shit for a minute. There’s, like, so much they’re not telling me.” I nodded and silently agreed with him. Now that he was no longer there, they were no doubt talking amongst themselves. I was looking right at them. Unfortunately, with Adam no longer there, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
As if reading my mind, the kid then said, “I figgered if I left them alone, they’d start talking. I know what you’re thinking, dude, but don’t worry. I got that covered.”
I frowned in puzzlement and wondered what he was talking about then I looked at the hooded sweatshirt still hanging on the coat rack. Elle and Blood continued talking and weren’t paying it any mind.
“Oh, this kid is good,” I chuckled out loud.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Bone Bridge, Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
(November 2nd 2009, eight days ago)
“Define ‘exploded’”, I said to Dr. Albert Tomlinson, ME.
“Well, it’s kind of an unscientific term, Ed, but that’s basically what happened to these people. Their hearts just… exploded. Atria, arteries. In 14 cases, the various parts of the heart just suppurated.”
A cadaver still covered by a slightly blood-stained sheet lied between the portly medical examiner and me. It’s a cliché in the movies, I know, about the homicide detective visiting the coroner or ME during a murder investigation but the truth is we’re often called upon to do just this. It’s one thing to dispassionately read an autopsy report, look at toxicology results, free histamine levels and so forth and look at morgue photos but sometimes the only way to get a real sense of what actually happened, if not how, is to see the body itself no matter how gruesome it is. Thankfully, Tomlinson was enough of a professional to avoid the Hollywood ME stereotype by not resting a sandwich on the chest of the corpse. He was, however, relishing a 12” meatball sub on honey wheat that he got from the Subway shop down the street.
“14 out of the 23 who were still in the penthouse?”
“Uh, not exactly. And that’s the strangest thing, too.”
I hadn’t yet read the results of the one file that Tomlinson had just put in my hands. “What do you mean? It actually gets stranger?”
“Oh yeah. In two other cases with the body bombs…” I winced as he used that term. That’s what the NYFD called the poor bastards who jumped out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and I always hated that phrase. “In the cases of Senator Dumont and Congressman Feingold, there was the same cardiac suppuration that we’d seen with the penthouse victims.”
“Could traumatic deceleration account for that? They were a couple of dozen floors up.”
“Mmm,” Tomlinson hummed with a cynical wince, “it’s possible but not too likely. Even from that height, the internal organs are still pretty heavily shielded by the musculature, the rib cage and so forth. In the most extreme cases of traumatic deceleration, you’d see, at most, a tearing of connective tissue in some of the internal organs. But nothing to compare to this degree of suppuration. And even if a fall from that height could account for the suppuration, then how do we explain the penthouse victims? Let me show you something…” Then Tomlinson pulled off his blood-stained latex gloves and turned his back to me while he briefly washed and dried his hands. Walking to a corner of the lab, he picked up a plastic model of the human heart.
“Now, look at this training tool. You can just remove the various atria and arteries and so forth almost like a puzzle. That’s the closest I can come to describing what my assistants and I had discovered.” To prove his point, he removed a ventricle or something and put it back in its proper place. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ed, it’s cases like this that make me wonder if I should’ve become a vet or dentist instead. Medical forensics is a frighteningly exact science to a lot of criminals and laymen while there’s still a lot we don’t know about the human body.
“But for the life of me, Ed, I cannot give you one good scientific or even logical reason why or how this could happen to a human heart even considering the physically traumatic perimortem circumstances. It’s almost as if… I dunno, as if someone noninvasively reached into their chest cavities and took apart their cardiac tissue by intelligent design. The two that puzzle me are the senator and the congressman. They were in free fall. And don’t even get me started on those clean wounds on several of the bodies.”
Even keeping an open mind, I still had no clue as to how that could’ve happened. “Yeah, and their angle of descent proves that they didn’t just keel over and fall through the window. They actually jumped. They couldn’t have done that if they were already dead.”
“True. Unless they were thrown out.”
“Nah. We’ve reviewed the security tapes from the lobby. Nobody who wasn’t cleared got up to that penthouse. And I can’t believe that members of Congress and captains of industry would start throwing each other out of high-rise windows.”
“You’ve also never think until the night before last that any of them would willingly jump from those windows, leaving their spouses behind in some cases, and that their organs would come undone on the way down.”
Tomlinson had a point. Once again, I felt like the village idiot that had my hat snatched from my head and kept behind me by a jeering crowd of tormenters no matter how many times I whirled around.
OK, suppose we’re talking about an intelligent entity taking apart the senator’s and congressman’s cardiac tissue. Whatever… creature that could accomplish that would have to do so while the victims were in freefall and accelerating at the rate of 66 feet per second. What the fuck could do something like that? What could be that predatory and tenacious? I wasn’t exactly eager to find out.
(November 10th 2009)
By this time I and the growing task force was armed with the autopsy reports of all 53 victims. I say “armed” in a semi-facetious sense. Actually it was like being armed with handguns and rifles with no ammo or weapons from an alien technology. The facts led us nowhere that anyone was willing to go. The Ritz Carlton massacre was getting out of control in the press because neither the mayor’s office nor the Boston City PD could come up with any credible spin or story that would account for everything. Conspiracy theories were being floated on TV, radio, the print media and, Lord help us, blogs. Was it chemical or biological terrorism like nerve gas or anthrax, were they poisoned, was it some new, more virulent strain of Legionnaire’s Disease? Inquiring yet stubbornly uninformed minds wanted to know.
I think I can lay a pretty good claim to be the loneliest detective in America because I was reluctantly working my way down a road that was not only the one less traveled but one overgrown and blocked with foliage, mountains and healthy, human skepticism. Because if I was to come forward and let the other detectives on the task force know what my pet theory was, they’d either put me on the rubber gun squad or on a permanent vacation in a rubber room. I could just imagine it now.
Chief, we got him. Put an APB out on a ghost who has medical knowledge and can fly a couple of hundred miles an hour…
Yet as crazy as it sounded, it was still better than the idiotic theories being floated around the office by the other clowns. Roddy had the stupidest one of all: It was some new super virus that had been introduced into the ventilation duct work of the hotel, which would explain why the Boston Fire Department wouldn’t have found it since they were looking for carbon monoxide and other common contaminants. Yet that brilliant example of ratiocination didn’t explain why we were still alive with our internal organs intact after freely walking around the penthouse or why such a surgically-savvy virus never showed up in the blood work done by the coroner’s office.
Still, the easiest and most convenient explanation that could be floated was that this was an act of terrorism. Considering the social standing of the 50+ victims (almost all of whom were millionaires, including one billionaire), the likelihood of this being a random, tragic accident just didn’t fly, if you’ll pardon the phrase. After all, terrorists attacked our financial and military infrastructure on 9/11 and Flight 93’s crash in a barren field in Pennsylvania was only incidental. They could’ve been headed to the White House or elsewhere in Washington, DC.
But there was no telling how the public would react if the Boston City PD and the mayor’s office announced that terrorism accounted for all the deaths of 53 of our most high profile citizens. In this paranoid post-9/11 nation of ours, I’d heard stories of toddlers getting kicked off airplanes for waving bye bye to the planes still on the tarmac and Sikhs getting detained at the departure gates because the minimum wage-earning organ donors hired by Homeland Security thought they were Muslims.
Yeah, terrorism would go over real well. Yet, this was exactly what we were probably looking at. The only difference between me and the rest of the task force was that I was looking at a theory that was somewhat more unconventional than the chief of detectives would have liked. And after my conversation with the Moss kid’s older sister, I got the closest thing yet to confirmation that what happened at the Boston Ritz Carlton on Halloween night was definitely not explainable by conventional means.
So I wanted to be a fly on the wall when that kid got to meet his sister’s boss, this Oliver Blood character. I ran a BOP or a background check on this bozo and got nowhere. Nothing there, nothing on NCIC, not even shit on him on Google. In a way, this guy, too, was like a ghost. I was interested in knowing if this bird even existed. That’s why at the skateboard park in Braintree I gave the Moss kid a wire to wear with instructions on how to use it and expressly forbade him from telling his sister about it. When this Blood character had his little face-to-face with Adam, I absolutely wanted to be there. I trusted Elle and her mysterious boss about as far as I could throw Langley and hated getting in as deep with her and her agency than I already was. The very fact that I gave her as much confidential information as I did is in itself a testament as to how desperate I was for answers and insight.
(November 2nd 2009, eight days ago)
“Define ‘exploded’”, I said to Dr. Albert Tomlinson, ME.
“Well, it’s kind of an unscientific term, Ed, but that’s basically what happened to these people. Their hearts just… exploded. Atria, arteries. In 14 cases, the various parts of the heart just suppurated.”
A cadaver still covered by a slightly blood-stained sheet lied between the portly medical examiner and me. It’s a cliché in the movies, I know, about the homicide detective visiting the coroner or ME during a murder investigation but the truth is we’re often called upon to do just this. It’s one thing to dispassionately read an autopsy report, look at toxicology results, free histamine levels and so forth and look at morgue photos but sometimes the only way to get a real sense of what actually happened, if not how, is to see the body itself no matter how gruesome it is. Thankfully, Tomlinson was enough of a professional to avoid the Hollywood ME stereotype by not resting a sandwich on the chest of the corpse. He was, however, relishing a 12” meatball sub on honey wheat that he got from the Subway shop down the street.
“14 out of the 23 who were still in the penthouse?”
“Uh, not exactly. And that’s the strangest thing, too.”
I hadn’t yet read the results of the one file that Tomlinson had just put in my hands. “What do you mean? It actually gets stranger?”
“Oh yeah. In two other cases with the body bombs…” I winced as he used that term. That’s what the NYFD called the poor bastards who jumped out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and I always hated that phrase. “In the cases of Senator Dumont and Congressman Feingold, there was the same cardiac suppuration that we’d seen with the penthouse victims.”
“Could traumatic deceleration account for that? They were a couple of dozen floors up.”
“Mmm,” Tomlinson hummed with a cynical wince, “it’s possible but not too likely. Even from that height, the internal organs are still pretty heavily shielded by the musculature, the rib cage and so forth. In the most extreme cases of traumatic deceleration, you’d see, at most, a tearing of connective tissue in some of the internal organs. But nothing to compare to this degree of suppuration. And even if a fall from that height could account for the suppuration, then how do we explain the penthouse victims? Let me show you something…” Then Tomlinson pulled off his blood-stained latex gloves and turned his back to me while he briefly washed and dried his hands. Walking to a corner of the lab, he picked up a plastic model of the human heart.
“Now, look at this training tool. You can just remove the various atria and arteries and so forth almost like a puzzle. That’s the closest I can come to describing what my assistants and I had discovered.” To prove his point, he removed a ventricle or something and put it back in its proper place. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ed, it’s cases like this that make me wonder if I should’ve become a vet or dentist instead. Medical forensics is a frighteningly exact science to a lot of criminals and laymen while there’s still a lot we don’t know about the human body.
“But for the life of me, Ed, I cannot give you one good scientific or even logical reason why or how this could happen to a human heart even considering the physically traumatic perimortem circumstances. It’s almost as if… I dunno, as if someone noninvasively reached into their chest cavities and took apart their cardiac tissue by intelligent design. The two that puzzle me are the senator and the congressman. They were in free fall. And don’t even get me started on those clean wounds on several of the bodies.”
Even keeping an open mind, I still had no clue as to how that could’ve happened. “Yeah, and their angle of descent proves that they didn’t just keel over and fall through the window. They actually jumped. They couldn’t have done that if they were already dead.”
“True. Unless they were thrown out.”
“Nah. We’ve reviewed the security tapes from the lobby. Nobody who wasn’t cleared got up to that penthouse. And I can’t believe that members of Congress and captains of industry would start throwing each other out of high-rise windows.”
“You’ve also never think until the night before last that any of them would willingly jump from those windows, leaving their spouses behind in some cases, and that their organs would come undone on the way down.”
Tomlinson had a point. Once again, I felt like the village idiot that had my hat snatched from my head and kept behind me by a jeering crowd of tormenters no matter how many times I whirled around.
OK, suppose we’re talking about an intelligent entity taking apart the senator’s and congressman’s cardiac tissue. Whatever… creature that could accomplish that would have to do so while the victims were in freefall and accelerating at the rate of 66 feet per second. What the fuck could do something like that? What could be that predatory and tenacious? I wasn’t exactly eager to find out.
(November 10th 2009)
By this time I and the growing task force was armed with the autopsy reports of all 53 victims. I say “armed” in a semi-facetious sense. Actually it was like being armed with handguns and rifles with no ammo or weapons from an alien technology. The facts led us nowhere that anyone was willing to go. The Ritz Carlton massacre was getting out of control in the press because neither the mayor’s office nor the Boston City PD could come up with any credible spin or story that would account for everything. Conspiracy theories were being floated on TV, radio, the print media and, Lord help us, blogs. Was it chemical or biological terrorism like nerve gas or anthrax, were they poisoned, was it some new, more virulent strain of Legionnaire’s Disease? Inquiring yet stubbornly uninformed minds wanted to know.
I think I can lay a pretty good claim to be the loneliest detective in America because I was reluctantly working my way down a road that was not only the one less traveled but one overgrown and blocked with foliage, mountains and healthy, human skepticism. Because if I was to come forward and let the other detectives on the task force know what my pet theory was, they’d either put me on the rubber gun squad or on a permanent vacation in a rubber room. I could just imagine it now.
Chief, we got him. Put an APB out on a ghost who has medical knowledge and can fly a couple of hundred miles an hour…
Yet as crazy as it sounded, it was still better than the idiotic theories being floated around the office by the other clowns. Roddy had the stupidest one of all: It was some new super virus that had been introduced into the ventilation duct work of the hotel, which would explain why the Boston Fire Department wouldn’t have found it since they were looking for carbon monoxide and other common contaminants. Yet that brilliant example of ratiocination didn’t explain why we were still alive with our internal organs intact after freely walking around the penthouse or why such a surgically-savvy virus never showed up in the blood work done by the coroner’s office.
Still, the easiest and most convenient explanation that could be floated was that this was an act of terrorism. Considering the social standing of the 50+ victims (almost all of whom were millionaires, including one billionaire), the likelihood of this being a random, tragic accident just didn’t fly, if you’ll pardon the phrase. After all, terrorists attacked our financial and military infrastructure on 9/11 and Flight 93’s crash in a barren field in Pennsylvania was only incidental. They could’ve been headed to the White House or elsewhere in Washington, DC.
But there was no telling how the public would react if the Boston City PD and the mayor’s office announced that terrorism accounted for all the deaths of 53 of our most high profile citizens. In this paranoid post-9/11 nation of ours, I’d heard stories of toddlers getting kicked off airplanes for waving bye bye to the planes still on the tarmac and Sikhs getting detained at the departure gates because the minimum wage-earning organ donors hired by Homeland Security thought they were Muslims.
Yeah, terrorism would go over real well. Yet, this was exactly what we were probably looking at. The only difference between me and the rest of the task force was that I was looking at a theory that was somewhat more unconventional than the chief of detectives would have liked. And after my conversation with the Moss kid’s older sister, I got the closest thing yet to confirmation that what happened at the Boston Ritz Carlton on Halloween night was definitely not explainable by conventional means.
So I wanted to be a fly on the wall when that kid got to meet his sister’s boss, this Oliver Blood character. I ran a BOP or a background check on this bozo and got nowhere. Nothing there, nothing on NCIC, not even shit on him on Google. In a way, this guy, too, was like a ghost. I was interested in knowing if this bird even existed. That’s why at the skateboard park in Braintree I gave the Moss kid a wire to wear with instructions on how to use it and expressly forbade him from telling his sister about it. When this Blood character had his little face-to-face with Adam, I absolutely wanted to be there. I trusted Elle and her mysterious boss about as far as I could throw Langley and hated getting in as deep with her and her agency than I already was. The very fact that I gave her as much confidential information as I did is in itself a testament as to how desperate I was for answers and insight.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
“OK, Adam, same rules apply. This better not wind up on your Facebook page. No one would believe you, anyway.”
“Sis, gimme some credit, OK?”
“Anyway, I’m fresh out of training and I get assigned to just my second case. You ever hear about Soviet experiments in the paranormal?”
“Sure. I watched every documentary about the paranormal that I could find the first time I got out of the hospital.”
“OK. So my second assignment involves safeguarding this Russian who was seeking asylum. She was a very highly-prized asset of the Soviets and their psychotronics division…”
“What’s psychotronics?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Don’t interrupt.”
“OK, OK.”
“So she comes here ostensibly attached to a Russian delegation for a chess match taking place in New York City. But they’re not there for chess. Somehow, she slips her handlers and reaches the State Department requesting asylum. Pretty soon, Justice gets involved then, finally, the CIA.
“Now, the CIA’s position on paranormal research isn’t just an official one. They really underestimate the advances that were made by the Soviets in that field. So they handed it off to us. That’s what we do.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve only been working for the government for a few years. Didn’t the USSR, like, collapse about 20 years ago?”
“Yes but that doesn’t mean the Russians didn’t continue their research in these parascientific disciplines. It continued straight through during Gorbachev, then Yeltsin all the way down to Putin. And this woman was part of the proof why. They weren’t about to throw away all those results and discoveries when they could still be used to tip the balance of world power.
“So this woman, whose first name was Galina, approached us, asking for political asylum. She’s all freaked out about some project the Russians were working on, something having to do with remote assassinations.”
“Remote assassinations? You mean like snipers?”
“Well, no, not exactly. This woman, and our agency tested her, had the ability to affect organic matter from a great distance. All she needed was a picture and little else and by using remote viewing, she was able to home in on that person no matter where on the planet they were.
“Then she would go to work on them. We still don’t completely understand how she was able to do it or what she used to key on these people. Even she didn’t pretend to understand it. All she knew was that she could do it and how to do it. Back when she was a teenager, they placed a frog in front of her. It was tied down so it couldn’t move. They had an EKG hooked up to it so they could monitor its heartbeat. Without touching it, she concentrated on it and was able to actually slow down or speed up its heart rate. Eventually, she stopped the frog’s heart entirely. We actually saw the file footage after the Soviet Union fell and read copies of the notes that were taken.
“So she was trained to do this to people at greater and greater distances until finally they honed and somehow amplified her abilities to the point where she could actually kill someone from thousands of miles away. It required a hell of a lot of effort. It would take her hours just to track the person down. The further away they were, the more time and effort it took. Then, when she got a lock on them, she would have to rest for about half a day.”
“Suppose the person started moving again while she was resting?”
“Didn’t matter. She had a lock on them, just like a laser-guided missile locks on a moving target. She just developed some connection to them that only she could break. Anyway, she’d done a couple of remote assassinations for the Russians until she realized she couldn’t do it anymore. That was the reason they attached her to that Russian delegation. They wanted to get her in the head of the Russian dissident who was the reigning world chess champion. Remember Vasiliy Tochilkin, the Russian expatriot?”
“Uh, sounds familiar.”
“He was the guy they wanted to lose. If she killed him by bursting a blood vessel, so much the better. For political reasons, they didn’t want him beating the Russian champion. But she slipped away before the first match.”
“So we vetted her, tested her, took down all the information she knew about the Russians’ psychtronic research. She was the real deal, Adam. We brought in federal prisoners and had her tested on them and she could do to them everything she claimed she could.”
“You used human guinea pigs??”
“Adam, they were violent prisoners with no chance of rehabilitation. This was their one shot to do something positive for society.”
“Did she kill any of them?”
“No. That would’ve defeated the purpose of her defecting. But she fucked up their heart beats something fierce. Some of the inmates were complaining of PVCs or irregular heart rates months after the experiments.”
“So where do you come in?”
“My job… My job was to guard her physically, and to look for signs that someone else with her abilities couldn’t reach her psychically. As far as Galina and our agency knew, there was no one who came close to having her abilities. Still, we kept a close eye on her. Or we thought we did.”
“What happened?”
Elle sighed and looked down at her interlocked fingers.
“Someone did reach her. On my watch. Just because she was a prized asset in their psychic research and development program doesn’t mean she was privy to classified information involving other subjects any more than a lab rat knows what’s going on in the next cage. They had someone who was at least as deadly as she was.
“She…collapsed one day while we were testing her in what we thought was a safe lab. Galina was dead before she fell out of the chair. The autopsy revealed that her heart literally exploded or came undone. The ME said he’d never seen anything like it before. She died right in front of me, Adam.
“To Oliver’s credit, he didn’t blame me. He couldn’t. After all, I’m what the adepts at the agency call a gentile. How ironic is that?”
“A gentile?”
“That’s what they call those of us who don’t have paranormal abilities like telekinesis, psychic, or psychotronic powers.
“So, that was how my second assignment ended up. She’s still the only one I ever lost and while I don’t blame myself for Galina’s death, there’s still this… stubborn sense of responsibility that I can’t shake, as if I should’ve or could’ve done more.”
“Sis, you couldn’t do more.”
“I know that, Adam. But that woman died literally on my watch. It was all so… sudden.”
“So she was killed by another remote assassin?”
“Well, that’s what we thought at first. But then when we reviewed the security tape we realized that things weren’t adding up. First, when a subject is the victim of a remote assassination, there are warning signs. It doesn’t happen all at once. The subject will complain of headaches, being distracted, chest pains, whatever. With Galina, there was none of that. But she didn’t have a simple heart attack. Her heart literally exploded from inside. That just doesn’t happen in real life, Adam.”
“What did kill her?”
“We still don’t know. But she managed to get out one word: Jodl.”
“Yodel?”
“After some research, we realized that there was a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Jodl who did experiments in vivisectioning during WW II.”
“Wait a minute. Isn’t that like carving up people while they’re still alive?”
“Exactly. But Jodl committed suicide when the Russians liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.”
“Good.”
“Well, here’s the kicker. A guy we’ve been tracking for about two years now, some East German prick named Hans Dietrich, former secret policemen, went to Buchenwald a few years ago on a ghost safari, paid for by the unified German government. There’d been reports that Jodl was still haunting the place and actually hurting tourists. After Dietrich did his thing, there were no more Jodl sightings. That was the year before Galina defected.”
“So you think this Yodel guy did this to the Russian chick?”
“Can’t tell you. How can you prove something like that? But if that is the case, it’s pretty frightening on a couple of levels.”
“Yeah. It means you have an East German Commie who’s using ghosts to kill people for whatever Commies may be left in Russia.”
“Exactly. And that’s why we’re so interested in what happened at the Ritz Carlton in Boston on Halloween night. Several of the victims died the same way Galina did.”
“You mean…?”
“OK, Adam, same rules apply. This better not wind up on your Facebook page. No one would believe you, anyway.”
“Sis, gimme some credit, OK?”
“Anyway, I’m fresh out of training and I get assigned to just my second case. You ever hear about Soviet experiments in the paranormal?”
“Sure. I watched every documentary about the paranormal that I could find the first time I got out of the hospital.”
“OK. So my second assignment involves safeguarding this Russian who was seeking asylum. She was a very highly-prized asset of the Soviets and their psychotronics division…”
“What’s psychotronics?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Don’t interrupt.”
“OK, OK.”
“So she comes here ostensibly attached to a Russian delegation for a chess match taking place in New York City. But they’re not there for chess. Somehow, she slips her handlers and reaches the State Department requesting asylum. Pretty soon, Justice gets involved then, finally, the CIA.
“Now, the CIA’s position on paranormal research isn’t just an official one. They really underestimate the advances that were made by the Soviets in that field. So they handed it off to us. That’s what we do.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve only been working for the government for a few years. Didn’t the USSR, like, collapse about 20 years ago?”
“Yes but that doesn’t mean the Russians didn’t continue their research in these parascientific disciplines. It continued straight through during Gorbachev, then Yeltsin all the way down to Putin. And this woman was part of the proof why. They weren’t about to throw away all those results and discoveries when they could still be used to tip the balance of world power.
“So this woman, whose first name was Galina, approached us, asking for political asylum. She’s all freaked out about some project the Russians were working on, something having to do with remote assassinations.”
“Remote assassinations? You mean like snipers?”
“Well, no, not exactly. This woman, and our agency tested her, had the ability to affect organic matter from a great distance. All she needed was a picture and little else and by using remote viewing, she was able to home in on that person no matter where on the planet they were.
“Then she would go to work on them. We still don’t completely understand how she was able to do it or what she used to key on these people. Even she didn’t pretend to understand it. All she knew was that she could do it and how to do it. Back when she was a teenager, they placed a frog in front of her. It was tied down so it couldn’t move. They had an EKG hooked up to it so they could monitor its heartbeat. Without touching it, she concentrated on it and was able to actually slow down or speed up its heart rate. Eventually, she stopped the frog’s heart entirely. We actually saw the file footage after the Soviet Union fell and read copies of the notes that were taken.
“So she was trained to do this to people at greater and greater distances until finally they honed and somehow amplified her abilities to the point where she could actually kill someone from thousands of miles away. It required a hell of a lot of effort. It would take her hours just to track the person down. The further away they were, the more time and effort it took. Then, when she got a lock on them, she would have to rest for about half a day.”
“Suppose the person started moving again while she was resting?”
“Didn’t matter. She had a lock on them, just like a laser-guided missile locks on a moving target. She just developed some connection to them that only she could break. Anyway, she’d done a couple of remote assassinations for the Russians until she realized she couldn’t do it anymore. That was the reason they attached her to that Russian delegation. They wanted to get her in the head of the Russian dissident who was the reigning world chess champion. Remember Vasiliy Tochilkin, the Russian expatriot?”
“Uh, sounds familiar.”
“He was the guy they wanted to lose. If she killed him by bursting a blood vessel, so much the better. For political reasons, they didn’t want him beating the Russian champion. But she slipped away before the first match.”
“So we vetted her, tested her, took down all the information she knew about the Russians’ psychtronic research. She was the real deal, Adam. We brought in federal prisoners and had her tested on them and she could do to them everything she claimed she could.”
“You used human guinea pigs??”
“Adam, they were violent prisoners with no chance of rehabilitation. This was their one shot to do something positive for society.”
“Did she kill any of them?”
“No. That would’ve defeated the purpose of her defecting. But she fucked up their heart beats something fierce. Some of the inmates were complaining of PVCs or irregular heart rates months after the experiments.”
“So where do you come in?”
“My job… My job was to guard her physically, and to look for signs that someone else with her abilities couldn’t reach her psychically. As far as Galina and our agency knew, there was no one who came close to having her abilities. Still, we kept a close eye on her. Or we thought we did.”
“What happened?”
Elle sighed and looked down at her interlocked fingers.
“Someone did reach her. On my watch. Just because she was a prized asset in their psychic research and development program doesn’t mean she was privy to classified information involving other subjects any more than a lab rat knows what’s going on in the next cage. They had someone who was at least as deadly as she was.
“She…collapsed one day while we were testing her in what we thought was a safe lab. Galina was dead before she fell out of the chair. The autopsy revealed that her heart literally exploded or came undone. The ME said he’d never seen anything like it before. She died right in front of me, Adam.
“To Oliver’s credit, he didn’t blame me. He couldn’t. After all, I’m what the adepts at the agency call a gentile. How ironic is that?”
“A gentile?”
“That’s what they call those of us who don’t have paranormal abilities like telekinesis, psychic, or psychotronic powers.
“So, that was how my second assignment ended up. She’s still the only one I ever lost and while I don’t blame myself for Galina’s death, there’s still this… stubborn sense of responsibility that I can’t shake, as if I should’ve or could’ve done more.”
“Sis, you couldn’t do more.”
“I know that, Adam. But that woman died literally on my watch. It was all so… sudden.”
“So she was killed by another remote assassin?”
“Well, that’s what we thought at first. But then when we reviewed the security tape we realized that things weren’t adding up. First, when a subject is the victim of a remote assassination, there are warning signs. It doesn’t happen all at once. The subject will complain of headaches, being distracted, chest pains, whatever. With Galina, there was none of that. But she didn’t have a simple heart attack. Her heart literally exploded from inside. That just doesn’t happen in real life, Adam.”
“What did kill her?”
“We still don’t know. But she managed to get out one word: Jodl.”
“Yodel?”
“After some research, we realized that there was a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Jodl who did experiments in vivisectioning during WW II.”
“Wait a minute. Isn’t that like carving up people while they’re still alive?”
“Exactly. But Jodl committed suicide when the Russians liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.”
“Good.”
“Well, here’s the kicker. A guy we’ve been tracking for about two years now, some East German prick named Hans Dietrich, former secret policemen, went to Buchenwald a few years ago on a ghost safari, paid for by the unified German government. There’d been reports that Jodl was still haunting the place and actually hurting tourists. After Dietrich did his thing, there were no more Jodl sightings. That was the year before Galina defected.”
“So you think this Yodel guy did this to the Russian chick?”
“Can’t tell you. How can you prove something like that? But if that is the case, it’s pretty frightening on a couple of levels.”
“Yeah. It means you have an East German Commie who’s using ghosts to kill people for whatever Commies may be left in Russia.”
“Exactly. And that’s why we’re so interested in what happened at the Ritz Carlton in Boston on Halloween night. Several of the victims died the same way Galina did.”
“You mean…?”
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