Second Thoughts and Last Chances
By
Latikia
Edited by
The Old Fart
Copyright © 2007,
2008
Chapter 11
Morning arrived far too quickly, with the alarm clock screeching and my head seemingly stuffed with cotton.
Lilly rolled over and shut off the alarm while my sister scrambled out from under the covers and dashed into the bathroom. Lilly got up and followed her, leaving Peggy and I alone in bed. Peggy grumbled absently and tightened her arms around my chest.
I gave her a gentle hug in return, at which she hummed slightly, murmured and rubbed her body happily against mine. It was an exceedingly peculiar sensation; the feel of her skin pressing and dragging over my own…followed instantaneously by her sensing of my skin against hers…followed by an equally instantaneous recognition of my sensing her sensing my sensing, and then her sensing my sensing of her sensing of my sensing of her sensing…and on and on and on ad nauseam. All in all it was a most pleasantly distracting type of feedback-loop; but one I needed to figure some way of shutting down, and the sooner the better…if I had any hopes of getting my ass out of bed sometime before the end of the year.
Peggy started to giggle, softly at first, and before long her entire body was shaking with laughter.
“Do you always start the day doing emotional flip-flops and hand stands?” she asked laughing.
“Damn near.”
“It feels really weird…like big fat hairy worms doing the Hokey-Pokey in my stomach.”
“Just be glad I’m in a moderately good mood…if I were having one of my dialogs I doubt you’d find it nearly as amusing.”
“Do you do that a lot? I mean, I haven’t heard you talking in different voices for a long time. I thought maybe you’d stopped for good.”
I took a deep breath, which caused Peggy’s nipples to dig deeper into my chest and her pelvis to press more firmly against my lower stomach. Peggy groaned softly…the feedback was killing me. I kept looking for the suppression switch inside my mind but wasn’t having a hell of a lot of luck locating it.
“We came to an agreement of sorts; they keep our conversations strictly between the three of us and I don’t ignore what they’re telling me.”
“You were having one of those dialogs last night, after you left us and went downstairs, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, I was. How’d you know?”
“I had this dream…well, it seemed like a dream…that you were standing in front of a pair of full length mirrors, talking to the reflections. Both images looked like you, but they were different; one of them was like a living ice sculpture and the other was…dark. Like a hungry black hole, but instead of sucking light into it, it leaked fire. Both of them were speaking at the same time, and you’d listen for a little while and then start swearing and snarling at them. Isn’t that bizarre?”
I looked down the length of my body at the elfin face that peered back at me.
“Actually, that’s a pretty damn good description of what it’s like when it’s happening. I guess it’s pretty obvious where Tink gets her powers of perception from, and it sure as hell ain’t me.”
Peggy giggled at the compliment. “Are they the only two left?” she asked.
“The voices?” She bobbed her head, bouncing her chin off my breast bone. “Yeah…it’s been ages since I’ve heard from Granddad or my Mother. Carlie stopped talking after the girls were born. Yeah, it’s just the three of us now.”
“Was that how I was when you first met me?”
“Well, you did vocalize…kinda. But when your voices were talking the ones I heard all sounded like you. Your attitude, speech patterns and body language changed, but your voice didn’t change much at all. When I went inside, that’s where the real change was noticeable. With me it’s different, I think.”
“How?”
“The voices are different…the attitudes are definitely different…but that’s about it. Everything else is the same. They’re me, just as much as I’m them. If I were analyzing myself I’d say that the dark image is my super-ego, the icy one is my Id, which would make me the ego, I guess.”
“Wow…” she breathed softly, “you’re really fucked up, huh?”
I burst out laughing, wrapping my arms around Peggy so she wouldn’t get thrown off or crushed while I rolled around.
“Thanks so much for that ringing vote of confidence.” I wheezed.
“At least you don’t look like a raccoon anymore.”
“Yeah? Well that’s good. I’ve always said there’s nothing better for quick healing than spending the night under a pile of naked women.”
“How’s your nose feel?”
“Not great, but better.”
“Ike…?”
“What sweetie?”
“I’m sorry I slapped you last night.” she said contritely.
“I know. I’m sorry…really sorry…about pushing your buttons the way I did. Did you at least understand what I was trying to tell you?”
She laid her head down on my chest, ear over my heart. “I got the message. All the messages.” She was still and silent for nearly half a minute. “I can’t believe how jealous I got. If that woman had been here I really would have hurt her.”
“There are limits to the kind of damage you can do with lust, half-pint. If you’re looking for a weapon, in my opinion there’s nothing better than the female orgasm. But that’s mostly because I can amplify. You should probably concentrate on fear and pain.”
“I don’t know…”
“Peggy, I’m counting on you to protect the family when I’m not around. You can do it…put away whatever doubts you might have on that score. You can do it. If necessary I’ll piss you off and keep you pissed off until you can do it in your sleep.”
“Just keep reminding me about that Megan slut.” she said jokingly -- except I could tell she wasn’t joking at all.
“Peggy, Megan is a very nice woman; smart and extremely good at her job. She also happens to be very good looking and for whatever reason has a thing for me. I, on the other hand, do not have a thing for her.”
“Are you sure about that? Not even a little?” Peggy asked in a small voice.
“No more than you have for Johnny Depp.”
She chuckled and clung tighter to me.
“Is she really younger than we are?”
“Yup.” We lay quietly for a few seconds, and then I decided to rescue my little sweetie. “But the three of you look younger than she does.”
“Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“Peggy my little love, being as objective as I possibly can, which isn’t easy what with me being so biased and all, you don’t look a day over twenty five. None of you do.”
The flood of relief and gratitude that washed thru my little sweetie made me want to cry. Apparently she was a lot more insecure about her age than I’d ever imagined.
“You’re even more beautiful now than when I first met you.” I whispered softly, stroking her hair and caressing her back.
“I’m so sorry.” she cried into my chest.
“Let it go, Peggy. It’s over and done with and it’ll never happen again.”
“We hurt you so much…and you still love us!”
“Yeah. Imagine that. And me destined for inexorable mental illness and all.”
“What?”
“Nothing honey, nothing at all. Just thinking out loud.”
I continued to hold Peggy close and send her soothing feelings until she drifted back to sleep. When Lilly and my sister finally emerged from the bathroom, I rolled Peggy off me and slipped out of bed.
“What was all that about?” Lilly asked me, holding one hand over her belly. “I was getting the oddest feelings…almost like I was pregnant again.”
“I was just explaining to Peggy that she doesn’t look like a middle aged bag of bones.” I bent down and gave Lilly a brief kiss on the lips and a light squeeze of her left breast. I released her and turned to my sister. “None of you look any older than you did when we first started sleeping together.” I gave Isabeau a quick kiss and a firm slap on the butt then headed into the bathroom to take a shower.
Breakfast was a subdued event, compared to most mornings. The kids were chatty enough, mostly with one another, but their mothers were rather quiet as they bustled about the kitchen making coffee, pouring milk and buttering toast.
I sat at the head of the table sipping a mug of tea and watching everyone else from beneath lowered eyelids.
Lilly, Peggy and Isabeau were huddled together near the refrigerator in consultation. Tink and Rosie were starting at them then turned silently to look at each other; some sort of unspoken communication passing between them briefly and then they turned their heads and looked pointedly at me.
I smiled slowly over the top of my mug and wiggled my eyebrows.
Rosie giggled and Tink grinned. It suddenly registered in my brain that AJ and Belle were sitting with their chairs rather close together and that they’d come down holding hands exactly the way he and Tink had been the night before.
I set my mug down and got up. One by one I went around the table, giving a quick kiss and hug to each of my children; first AJ then Belle, Rosie and finally Tink.
“Did you and AJ have a fight?” I asked very quietly, my lips close to Tink’s ear.
She shook her head and gave me the kind of look I’d been used to getting from my girls early on in our relationship, usually after doing something stupidly male in nature.
“Today is Belle’s turn.” she informed me, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh…I see.” I said, shaking my head. I stood upright and waved goodbye to my offspring, who were busily ignoring me.
I walked over to the coffee klatch by the refrigerator and put one hand on my sister’s shoulder.
“Time to go.” I informed her.
“I’ll get my coat and purse.” she said, quickly kissing Lilly and Peggy then rushing out of the kitchen.
Peggy jumped up into my arms and gave me a hard hug and kiss. “Be careful, will you? You seem a little wound up.”
“I will.” I set Peggy down and she headed back to the table. Lilly moved in to my arms and held me close.
“Go easy on her Ike. She’s kind of brittle right now…it won’t take much to break her.”
“I don’t know how careful I can afford to be; now or when I take you with me. Both of you have to learn a hard truth and I only know one way to teach it.” I hugged her tight. “But I’ll do what I can.”
The first ten miles of our drive to
“Are you really planning to kill someone?” she asked, accusing more than inquiring.
“Excuse me?”
“Today, at work. Peggy told me what you said to her last night.”
“Ahhh-ha…” I looked into the side mirror and shifted lanes; getting out of the way of a semi who looked willing and eager to challenge the land speed record. “Yes, I’d say the odds are better than even money I’ll end up killing someone today.”
“Why?” Her voice was pleading with me; her emotions were choking her.
“Couple of reasons…the first, and as far as I’m concerned most important one, is that I want to show you exactly what kind of person I am. The person the rest of the world sees, day in and day out. The guy you said you missed. You think you know who and what I am. I’ve tried for years to tell you, but you, more than anyone else, refuse to understand. The second reason is because I’m fuckin’ pissed off at the men in charge of the organization I’ve busted my ass to protect for the past eight years.”
I’d been ignored, marginalized, disrespected, insulted, slighted, snubbed, and disregarded…and I was fed up; fed up with being lied to on a daily basis, fed up with being treated like an idiot, an outsider…an enemy.
“I have fewer than ten people in my department, Isabeau. Congress has been chipping away at our budget for years now. At the end of the month they’re going to cut it again…all in the name of reducing the national debt and balancing the budget. And to top it off the Director and his staff have been conspiring with Congress to cripple my capacity to do the job. They don’t want me to find and stop spies and moles.”
I took a deep breath and continued. “Do you have any idea how many spies I’ve caught since I started at the CIA?”
My sister was silent, staring at me from the passenger seat.
“Twenty five. Twenty of them were turned and are working as double agents for us now. The other five I killed…the governments they worked for didn’t trust them enough to justify letting them live. So I killed them. Me. Their blood is on my hands, because the responsibility was mine and the decision was mine to enforce. I don’t let other people do my dirty work.”
“You didn’t have to kill them.” Isabeau said faintly.
“No, I didn’t.” I agreed. “I suppose I could have let them go; let them collect their money and escape to some other country. But what about the damage they caused, the lives they destroyed or ruined? Every single one was, at the very least, indirectly responsible for the deaths of some of our people. Each and every one was a traitor.”
“I didn’t mean let them go. But you could have brought them to trial. Let the law decide what to do with them.”
“Do you have any idea how much money I’ve saved the taxpayers over the years by eliminating those pointless trials and the years of keeping those people in prison? Look, you and I have been down this road before. Do you really think any of them would have been convicted and sent to prison in the first place? Isabeau, the law is so convoluted and twisted that the concept of justice has become as much a fantasy as the idea of Utopia or Atlantis. It’s not about right and wrong anymore…it’s about definitions and degrees. No one is responsible, because everyone is a victim. Especially if they’ve got the money to hire a good lawyer, and every damn one of those spies I killed had money. Hell, money is why most of them turned traitor in the first place.” I shook my head, forcibly calmed myself, took a deep breath then let it out slowly.
“Do you know how may good men and women lost their lives helping me stop those twenty five traitors? Shit, one…my last personal assistant, Reggie Walters, remember Reggie?”
“I remember Reggie. He was a very nice man.”
“Yes he was. He had a wife and two little boys. Beautiful twin boys younger than AJ. Reggie took a bullet for me. The fucker we went after that day knew we were coming, and rather than give himself up he decided to shoot it out, like some dumbass gang-banger caught holding up a gas station. You know how he knew we were coming? One of the moronic members of the House sub-committee I have to report to decided it would be a wonderful idea to leak word of our operation to the press; he wanted to get his name in the paper because he was up for re-election that year. I found out later that he did it with the blessing of our current CIA Director. I lost a damn good man so some preening simpleton could get himself a fuckin’ photo-op! So today I’m going to use Alex Chorney as an excuse to exact a little revenge.”
“But you don’t have to kill anyone to do it! If you can make a spy work for you, you can do the same thing to the people at the CIA.” she insisted.
I smiled coldly. “Don’t think I haven’t considered doing just that.”
“You want to kill.” she said flatly.
“Yes. Today I want to kill. I want to hurt, damage, destroy, demolish…I want to vent. And I want you to be there when I do it.”
“But why?” she whined ever so slightly.
“‘You’ve changed little brother. You probably don’t even realize how much you’ve changed, but we’ve seen it. You’re not the same man we fell in love with…you changed around us. We could still see other people reacting to you in the same way, but when you were with us…you were different. Softer…somehow less than what you had been. The air of danger was gone. The polar bear had actually become a teddy bear. We missed that part of you…the dangerous, edgy, just barely in control part of you. You weren’t you anymore…’ ” I quoted for her in her own voice. From the corner of my eye I could see her sink lower in her seat, and turning her face to the window. Isabeau’s emotions were dull and leaden as she realized what I was telling her.
“…because of me.” she muttered to herself.
“Not completely…mostly, but not completely. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but you, my dear loving sister, you were the catalyst.”
I felt her stomach churning violently, the sour taste of bile rising slowly up her throat. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, ignoring the blasting horns of drivers who were less than pleased by my sudden dramatic lane change. I unbuckled quickly, got out and rushed around to open the passenger door. Isabeau scrambled out, knelt at the guard railing and puked out the contents of her stomach into the dirty snow on the other side.
I removed the handkerchief from my coat pocket, took a knee next to her and wiped the dangling threads of saliva and vomit from her lips and chin.
I linked and drained off the majority of her guilt, shame and horror. But not all. I put one arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
“You hurt me like no one else can…and you’ve done it over and over and over again. But you know what?”
My sister shook her head weakly, hiding her face in the folds of my overcoat.
“It doesn’t change the fact that I love you.”
And you’re a damn fool to keep doing it!
Yeah, so what else is
new?
“But why? If you’d hurt me like that, I don’t know if I’d still love you.”
I shook my head. “I tried to hate you Isabeau. I wanted to hate you.” I exhaled loudly. “I can’t do it. Anger was easy; despair, rage, fury, jealousy, resentment, bitterness…sadness. Miles and miles of sadness. All of that and more…but not hatred. I just can’t find it in me to hate you.”
I swallowed hard. “I think that if I was capable of hating you we’d all be in very big trouble.”
Isabeau pulled back to look up at me. “I don’t understand.” she admitted.
I looked down into her deep blue eyes. “Loving you kept me alive when I didn’t want to live. If I hated you…my love…gone…” I fumbled around in our mind for words to explain what we were feeling and thinking as our thoughts began to twist and tumble.
“…without love…no hope…darkness rants and raves…flame and fury… sizzling arctic death – burn the barren world!” we grated, forcing the sharp edged words out of our raw and aching wound of a throat, as the fire in our eyes licked the edges of lashes and brows.
In our mind’s eye we envisioned a broad, ravaged landscape alight with a red-orange glow, filled with hordes of screaming, fleeing, desperate individuals running mindlessly for a sanctuary that didn’t…that couldn’t…exist. Husbands, fathers, wives and mothers abandoned their families, their children, parents, friends, pets… Not one single person gave a nanosecond’s thought to saving, defending or helping anyone but themselves.
Not that it would have done any good if they’d tried.
Bodies lay scattered all around; some burnt, some frozen, some twisted and contorted like pretzels, some splayed out like boneless bags of jelly; all staring blindly out on a world gone mad as wave after wave, pulse after pounding pulse of inhumanly powerful negative emotions exploded from Armageddon’s epicenter.
Us.
Me.
We stood alone at the heart of the world, side by side by side; uncaring and indifferent to their agony and suffering. Their fear, terror, panic and mindless desperation fed our ferocity, replenished our rage, and fueled our fury. We pulled it all in and spat it back out in walls and waves of madness, death, devastation and destruction. A trinity of unsurpassed terror; the depthless darkness on my left radiating flaming hatred and fury, the icily brilliant ghost figure on my right lashing out with waves of dispassionately unforgiving arctic horror, and me in the middle…drawing in every available emotion and feeling from the people and creatures around us, analyzing and amplifying, filtering out the positive, leaving us with only the most awful, dreadful, appalling and unspeakable to channel out thru my paranormal avatars.
No love…unloved…unwanted, despised, loathed, reviled…no love!
No love in the world
for us? Then no world for you!
Men exploded into bloody fragments, women screamed and ripped the skin from their faces before freezing solid, falling to the pavement and bursting into shards like dropped ice cubes. Children cried and cowered, tried to run, begged for help, called for their mothers and then were boiled alive in the cauldron of our riotous rampage.
No love. No hope. No reason. No direction. No future…no point.
Kill it all…
We saw the momentary panic in her eyes expand and spread across her lovely exotic features, only to be replaced instantly by understanding and determination.
Isabeau lunged forward, flinging her arms around our neck and clamping her mouth over ours, while at the same time compassion, understanding and unconditional love came smashing down the link with the force of a swollen river breaking thru a picket fence. Her feelings were genuine and mostly soothing…but hidden within the torrent of positive emotion was a furtive dash of resentment that was just as real, and just as honest.
Her lips were chapped and her tongue tasted sour and vile, but the kiss worked. I put both arms around her kneeling body and crushed her against me, squeezing much tighter than I normally would.
As the anger and fury subsided, drowned beneath the deluge of feelings coming at me, I noticed that I was actually hurting her. But despite the bruising bear hug she continued kissing me, grinding her lips on mine, mashing them brutally against my teeth.
I eased my grip, relaxing my arms, but kept her body pulled close.
Then I shot a brief blast of love back down the link to her and held tight while her body shivered and shook. Tears poured from her eyes as she wailed into my mouth.
Her muscles went slack, dry lips slid down off my own, over my chin and came to rest at the hollow of my throat. I held my sister gently, my chin resting on the top of her head.
“Saved again.” I whispered.
“You need me.” she whispered with breathless amazement, her soft words nearly getting lost in the roar of traffic behind us.
“I’ve always needed you. You just never understood how much.”
You never understood either.
No…not till now.
I blinked my eyes hard to clear away the watery blur then helped my sister to her feet, put her back into the car, shut the door and walked slowly around to the driver’s side. Once I’d gotten behind the wheel and we’d pulled back out into traffic. Isabeau spent a few minutes cleaning her face and fixing her makeup before she spoke again.
“Ike…?” she began hesitantly.
“Yeah?”
“Why do you keep calling me Isabeau?”
“Because it’s your name?” I quipped with a crooked smile.
“You called me Izzy when you loved me.” she said sadly.
“No…I called you Izzy when I wasn’t mad at you. I’ve loved you all my life, but there’ve only been a few years when I wasn’t mad.”
“Oh.”
“Like I told the kids, I won’t be mad forever.”
Another few miles passed in silence, and then:
“You wouldn’t…I mean…you couldn’t really…could you?”
I don’t know…could
I? Could I really?
Yes. It would be easy…
But would I?
“I’m not the thirteen year old boy you saved from his own fears and I’m not the twenty two year old soldier who tried to save you and Peggy and Lilly from everything. I am who I am today. That’s the best answer I can give you right now.”
She nodded a silent understanding.
“But nothing’s changed, has it?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t say nothing. You understand a couple of things better than you did before…I hope. I’ve learned a couple of hard truths about myself that I wasn’t aware of when I got up this morning. But if you’re asking about the probability of my killing someone…then no, nothing’s changed.”
She shuddered, and kept her thoughts to herself. I steered the car, watched traffic and siphoned my sister’s emotions into the storage facility I laughingly called my soul, saving them for later.
I parked in my reserved spot and escorted Isabeau inside the main lobby to get her a temporary visitor’s pass.
The second I stepped thru the front doors damn near every eye turned to glare in my direction. The heat from those stares must have raised the building’s ambient temperature at least two degrees.
I noticed a couple of interesting things at that moment. First, my sister grabbed hold of my arm, but whether she was being defensive or trying to restrain me I wasn’t sure. Second, she got physically excited, almost as if we’d been engaged in foreplay for the better part of the morning. I could feel her heart rate increase; goosebumps spread like wildfire across her skin, her nipples sprang to attention and became rock hard. And the tingling heat that erupted between her thighs had me hard as a Doric column in seconds.
In stark contrast to the excitement and lust emanating from Isabeau was the malice and antipathy I felt directed at me from damn near every other person in the vicinity.
Has it always been
like this?
Not always. It’s been getting worse
since that day in ’95.
You’ve been keeping
this from me.
Yeah.
Why?
Use your fuckin’ head! Figure it out for yourself.
Fine, be that
way. What am I supposed to do about
this?
What do you want to do about it?
Get them to stop
damnit! It’s beginning to piss me off!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…heh-heh-heh!
What’s so funny?
You want them to stop?
Yes!
Tough!
What?!
They’re never gonna stop. Unless
of course you…
I’m not enslaving the
whole goddamn world!
Then it’ll stop the instant you die, and not one heartbeat before. So deal with it and stop bugging me!
Isabeau pulled roughly on my arm. I tore my eyes away from the mass of people before me to look down.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hissed.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Don’t lie to me Ike…I can feel something going on inside you, and it isn’t good!”
I smiled just a tiny bit. “I’m not lying to you. Nothing’s wrong with me, I don’t think. This is the way I am. You’ve just never been able to feel anything from me that I didn’t send you. Now you can. Isn’t it wonderful?” I said with a sarcastic flourish.
“Well, whatever it is, it sure isn’t making you happy.”
I looked around, still sensing the unabashed bitterness that filled the lobby.
“I don’t come here to be happy. I go home to be happy.” I replied curtly, rolling my eyes at the irony of my situatition.
Isabeau winced, but clung tightly to my arm.
“You can tell how they feel about you, can’t you.” she asked me.
I nodded. “Don’t even have to link to feel this.”
“Most people would love to have the whole world jealous of them.” she whispered up to me.
“Most people can’t imagine what it’s like to actually feel the world being jealous, among other things.”
“Is that what you’re sensing right now?”
“Yeah, but it’s just surface stuff. If I linked it’d be much worse. I’ve been growing more and more sensitive every year, but I was suppressing the feelings, so it wasn’t this bad.”
I aimed us towards the visitor’s desk. I picked up a pen and signed my name on the form, filled in all the pertinent data for Isabeau and had her sign as well then handed the paperwork over to the armed security guard behind the counter.
His eyes ran over the form, flicked over to my sister, back to the form, and then up to me. His fingers darted over the keyboard on the counter before him and his eyes kept darting from the monitor screen to me and back.
He was a young man, middle twenties, pale skin, brownish
hair, stocky build, about Isabeau’s height and somewhere around one hundred and
seventy pounds. The name tag on his
confederate gray uniform shirt proclaimed to the world that his name was Germain.
Germain coughed into his hand, clearing his throat. “Could I see your Identification sir.” he asked politely.
“Is there a problem Mr. Germain?” I asked, unclipping my ID badge from the lapel of my overcoat and handing it to him.
He ran my badge thru some kind of scanner next to his keyboard. It gave off a dissonant squawk. Germain stepped back and put his hand on the pistol butt at his belt.
“Sir, you are not authorized entry to this facility. Please step back from the counter and don’t make any sudden moves.”
I sighed, lowered my head and frowned.
“You’re new here, aren’t you Germain? This is probably your first day on the job, am I right?”
“Please step back sir.” he repeated, as the sound of running booted feet grew closer. He’d hit the silent alarm and reinforcements were on their way.
I raised my head, still frowning and scanned the area looking for a familiar face.
Bingo!
Leaning negligently against a wall not more than thirty feet away was a face I knew. I didn’t much like his face, but I knew it. Will Walker, who liked to fashion himself ‘Captain’ of Security.
The contents of his personnel file popped into my head; West Point grad who’d served with a mechanized infantry unit in Desert Storm, he’d been passed over for promotion to Major three consecutive times on the strength of a less than sterling Officer Evaluation Report, resigned before he could be RIF’d and applied to the CIA. He failed to make the grade as an Agent, but somehow managed to end up in charge of building security.
“Walker!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs. “Get your lazy ass over here now!”
The man pushed away from the wall and swaggered towards me as the few people clustered around the visitor’s desk backed as far away from Isabeau and I as they could. He was joined by four additional security guards, two on each side, marching in step as if on a military parade ground.
Walker and his flanking support troops came to a halt about ten feet away from where I stood.
“You’ve been screwing around with the internal database file again.” I said, glaring down at the nattily attired little martinet.
Walker’s smirk increased in magnitude. “Testing the reactions of my Security personnel is all part and parcel of the job, Blacktower.”
“Test them using your access codes, if you have to. I’ve asked you three times now to leave me out of your little games. I’m not asking again.”
He pulled himself up to his full five feet nine inches and snarled, “I’ll run my department as I see fit. And if the way I do it occasionally inconveniences you, well that’s just too damn bad!”
I turned to my sister. “See what kind of monkey-nut morons I have to put up with every day? Is it any wonder I want to butcher one or two?”
Returning my gaze to the diminutive dimwit in the rent-a-cop outfit I gave him a cold smile and without looking pointed one finger in the direction of the new guard behind the visitor’s desk.
“Restore the database now, or I’ll show you how I run my department.”
His eyes narrowed. “As of now, you don’t have a department.” he chortled. “As of now, you no longer have a place in the CIA. You’d better leave quietly, or we’ll be forced to arrest your albino ass.”
A cold shiver streaked thru my body, chilling my blood and bringing everything around me into sharp focus.
“Isabeau, get behind me and stay there.” I said softly. I lowered my arm and took a deep breath then allowed my smile to widen, exposing all my teeth.
“Then by all means, try and arrest me, shit for brains.” I suggested to the little man and his flunkies.
As one they reached for their holstered pistols while I linked with everyone I could see.
I dredged up Isabeau’s earlier nausea, amplified it about ten times and slammed it down the links into each and every person before me…with one exception.
Down that individual’s link I sent a cloudy collection of trepidation, hesitation, indecision and uncertainty.
Coordinated projectile vomiting commenced; people began spewing along tangential lines and in parabolic arcs. It was almost like watching the fountains in front of the Kennedy Center.
Walker simply stood where he was, his head on a swivel, watching everything that was going on around him but unable and unwilling to do a thing in response.
I took a careful step forward, not wanting to slip in the rising tide of intestinal juices that were rapidly covering the tiled floor. The little security boss’ head snapped forward and his watery brown eyes locked on me like a mouse who’s just been spotted away from his hole.
His four back-up men were on their knees valiantly trying to heave their alimentary tracts out onto the filthy floor. Walker whimpered helplessly when I clamped a hand on the area between his neck and collar bone and began guiding him thru the mess to the visitor’s desk. With a helping hand on his pistol belt I lifted the man up and sat him on the counter. I hopped up, swung both legs up and over, knocking Mr. Germain out of the way and landing softly on my feet. I hauled Walker across the counter top and set him down in front of the computer keyboard Germain had been using.
“Restore the database Walker. Now!” I hissed into his ear, easing back on the intensity of the emotional fog I’d forced on the man.
While he tapped away on the keyboard, I reached down and removed his pistol from its holster, tucking it away in my right coat pocket.
Walker stopped typing and slumped down over the keyboard.
“Are you done, Captain?” I growled.
He shuddered and nodded his head. I pressed my CIA access badge into his clammy hand.
“Show me. If the system rejects it I’m going to rip off your ears and make you eat them.”
The trembling little man dragged my badge thru the vomit spattered card scanner above the keyboard while I watched the monitor screen closely. The computer program gave off an electronic ping and a pop-up window appeared showing the same picture as the one on the badge along with my official PR bio data.
I snatched my badge from Walker’s fingers, clamped my free hand around the back of his neck and stood up.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
“IKE!” Isabeau’s terrified scream ripped thru my ears and I looked out from behind the visitor’s desk in time to see one of Walker’s four henchmen on his knees, pistol held in the approved official two handed range grip, the barrel pointed right at me.
I’d underestimated this one man’s tolerance for personal suffering and now I was in trouble.