David Policar 1991
It's hard to know where to start, really, but the clearest thing I remember is the crowd at the airport lounge. Thirty-six men, twenty-four women, and six children. That meant even odds of a rogue talent or two trying to bolt, and better than average chances of a Purifier cadre tracking them down. Given those odds, it's no surprise that the overriding tone of the lounge was fear... nobody quoted the numbers officially, but everyone had suspicions. Had they known what I knew, there would have been panic.
Unfortunately, while their fear was understandable, it also made my job more difficult. Scanning a crowd that size is unpleasant under the best of circumstances, but the pitch of anxiety in that lounge was actively painful -- imagine sixty people scratching their nails on a blackboard inside your head, and you might get some idea. And that was with my "eyes closed." When I opened them, it took all my control to keep from crying out, and I just hoped nobody saw me flinch.
Tasha's armor, outside the passenger compartment, was the first thing that caught my attention. I let it fade out of focus and let my awareness drift through the room. Time passed.
Plain blond woman, young. She is afraid, like the others, but it is a personal fear, tinged in sharp reds and yellows. She imagines a hand on her shoulder, a voice in her ear, a bullet in her spine. She is determined to flee; it is a blue shield between the fear and the core of herself. In the blue there is a man, in a large house where she had been a child. Her father. She sits alone, legs folded, hands in her lap, under a shawl. The hands are important to her -- they are the focus of her attention. She fears them, but they lend her strength. They smell of blood to her, they are sticky with death.
Talent? Maybe, maybe not. The Change had turned things upside-down for us Children, but there were still plenty of things for normals to run from, too. And contrary to popular belief, you can't tell a talent by the way they look... even I can't always do that. She wasn't an ordinary passenger, but she wasn't what I was looking for. I kept searching.
Man, middle-aged, alone, vacant. His mind is with a woman and a child, and with an older man, his father, he is going to visit.
Near him, an older man. Dead eyes, a hole in his skull. Dead spots in his body. Scars upon scars. Faint images... bright lights, gowns, knives. Some kind of surgery. Grey... grey hair, grey suit, grey aura. No light, no color, no fear, no love.
He holds the hand of a young girl. She is bright, healthy, alive, Streamers of pink and yellow flow from her, touch the grey man, the planes beyond the window, the bear in her hand. She loves them all. In the yellow she boards an airplane, she swims in the sea, she runs on the sand... the sea is warm and flat and bounded, no size, no smells, no salt, no waves; the sand is cool and smooth, no sun, no rocks. She sees me and smiles, pink and yellow streamers reach out to me...
I snapped my mind shut in an instant, looked away. Such a young girl, no more than seven, a Purifier? Crazy! I was being paranoid. She had noticed me watching her, and she was an outgoing child, ready to love whatever caught her attention... even strangers in airport lounges. She was too young to have built walls yet, that was all... most of what she knew about people -- like what she knew about the ocean -- she had learned from the safety of a television. That was all.
I tried not to think about what it meant, that the innocent attention of a young girl threatened me. What was I becoming? What was becoming of all of us? I wondered whether, if I could see myself, I would seem as grey as her companion... all life, all emotion worn away.
But again, that wasn't what I was there for, and I felt a twinge of embarassment knowing that Tasha would be privy to my maudlin wanderings. Stick to the job, Castell! Exactly. Sorry, Tasha.
(It is strange that, even after all this time, I still reply to her voices in my memory. David never did get used to it... of course, he was never too comfortable with telepaths of any stripe. I'll admit I was never comfortable with her abilities, but I've also never known anyone I trusted to control herself better. But I digress.)
Young couple, holding hands, her head on his shoulder. Their colors intermingle, pinks and yellows and reds and greens, flashing without pattern. They are absorbed in one another.
Boy, teenaged MIT sweatshirt, vacant. He is naked with a woman, older; they are in her bedroom, having sex. He remembers and anticipates this. His hands shift idly near his pockets, he considers masturbation.
Older couple, sitting across from one another. He dozes fitfully, she reads a thick, hardcover book. She is active with images of bodies, organs I do not recognize swimming in blood, her gloved hands slice through skin with practiced ease. Doctor, medical text. They are tightly bound together; solid, strong relationship. Married.
Broad-built man, overweight, skin, hair, and eyes the same rich dark brown. Anxious, fatigued, excited. Sparks fly, vortices form around him... too many drugs, too little sleep. His images are of images of images of images, blurred beyond recognition, a man remembering dreams that fade away as he inspects them.
Another potential talent, I thought to myself for Tasha's sake. (Yes, she'd lift the impressions directly, but I had more experience reading them than she did, and the signs were subtle. She couldn't do everything, though it sometimes seemed that way.)
Broad-chested man, close-cropped hair, stands near the gate. Alert, fully present. Scans the crowd, one by one. Red flashes... not fear, but anger, and black hatred. They are sparks, erupting on the surface; they ripple through him but are somehow alien. He does not notice. Nervous, anxious, waiting. He sees the plane land, and a man comes out; faceless, white suit, a giant man looming against the plane.
Contact! Those signs anyone could spot, but just to be sure I ran through them "out loud" -- behavioral conditioning, scanning the crowd, waiting for someone to land rather than waiting to board. In other words, Purifier. One down.
The rest of the cadre was easy to spot; they paid a lot of attention to one another. They were a triad: the man by the gate, a long-haired, baby-faced adolescent distracted by his concealed weapon and the girls passing by, and a gorgeous redhead in red-tinted sunglasses, pretending to read a newspaper while she scanned the crowd for suspicious types. She was one to watch -- no obvious tampering, no strong emotions, good actress, and she had already pegged me and the girl with the shawl as worth closer attention. No special talents I could see... just a well-trained eye. Sometimes that's enough.
Normally, that would have been the end of my sweep... three agents,one experienced and two as "cannon fodder," waiting to pick up a Church official travelling incognito. But our intelligence indicated this fellow was something special, and for the big guys the Church sends out the big guns. That meant a watchdog, and that was a different ballgame.
We didn't know much about watchdogs at the time, but we knew they had special training and were dangerous. The Church knew about telepaths, of course, so watchdogs were trained to keep their thoughts shielded and recognize the signs of mental tampering. The rumor was that they were also black belts, crack shots, tactical geniuses, basically James Bond working for the wrong side -- or the right side, depending on who you listened to. None of us had ever faced one and gotten free to report it, and more of us had vanished than I liked to think about since the watchdogs had gotten started. I wasn't looking forward to joining them, but I was the only Child we knew whose talents might spot a watchdog. Might.
Maybe I should explain. The way Doc explains it, I'm something special among the Children... not a telepath, not even a peripheral one like Tasha. I don't actually touch people's thoughts at all, or their memories, or their senses. I guess you could say I read their auras, the way folks used to claim to do before the Change... I sense the constructs they build outside themselves by daydreaming, studying, imagining. Doc says those constructs are real energy, even though nobody's ever learned to measure it. I don't know about that, but I do know I can pick up patterns from things and places almost as clear as from people, and I don't know any 'paths who can do that. Doc calls it psychometry.
Anyway, the point is I wasn't looking for the watchdog directly... I didn't know what to look for then. I was looking for something common to all three Purifiers. The idea was that the watchdog, whoever he or she was, would be paying lots of attention to the three of them, and that would leave traces. So I let the three Purifiers swim in my vision, compared their auras, weeding out differences, looking for shared patterns, looking for anything familiar.
I guess it worked... or maybe it was something else. Either way, after a while I took a closer look at grey-suit, and noticed a few things... for one, that the girl he was playing with wasn't related to him; for another, the surgery he was recovering from was something I had never seen before, some kind of brain surgery. His eyes were vacant, like a prosthetic limb, and there were weird gaps and sparks in his aura like he was on drugs, but different. And he didn't seem to be thinking about anything, or paying attention to anything specific, or feeling anything... in fact, he was so calm, cool, and collected he didn't seem human.
So I wasn't sure, but I was as sure as I was going to get, and we only had a few minutes left before our target arrived. In the meantime, I had already aroused red-head's suspicions, and I knew I'd be running a risk leaving the lounge so close to departure time. Not that I had any choice.
As I entered the men's room, I felt Tasha's tendril touch my mind. My part of the operationwas over, and Tasha was busy lifting memories from two of the Purifiers and planting edited versions in their place. She agreed with my estimate of the red-head -- whose name was Anelle -- and decided not to risk tampering with her, either. Most people don't really notice when their thoughts aren't their own, but there are exceptions, and she might well be one of them. On the other hand, Rich and Pete (the other two agents) certainly weren't... heck, their heads had been messed with enough already that even Doc wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
I came back to the lounge, and Anelle gave me a "we're watching you" kind of look. I guess she was hoping to spook me, and I don't mind saying it worked. But I didn't think she really knew anything, and Tasha always said the best defense is a good offense, so I sat across from her.
"Hi... um, is this seat taken?"
I'm not much of an actor, so I suppose I looked nervous, and I suppose I overdid the 'just passing by' thing. But according to Tasha's briefing, Anelle wasn't too comfortable with men, so I hoped she'd misinterpret both the nervousness and the forced casualness as typical man-on-the-prowl.
"Suit yourself," she snapped, and went back to her newspaper, her suspicion replaced by simple annoyance. After a couple of minutes I went back to my seat.
After that, it was a waiting game. The flight was delayed, of course... somehow there's always plenty of time when nothing actually goes wrong during an operation. Rich kept his eyes on the crowd, fantasizing about gunning down another mutant monster. Pete got restless, and passed the time fantisizing about gunning down Anelle (well, actually, it was weirder than that, but never mind). Anelle watched the girl with the shawl, about whom I could remember nothing new. I went over Tasha's briefing on the three Purifiers and their mission, which unfortunately didn't tell me much, and tried not to pay too much attention to them.
We knew the Church was bringing some kind of high official into Boston to oversee the Purification, and that he'd be travelling incognito. Rich and Pete didn't know much more than that, unfortunately... they were assigned to pick up a large man in a white suit and escort him to Trinity. Anelle knew more, but she didn't trust them with details. And nobody knew about the watchdog, though Rich suspected there must be one.
There was more, but Tasha's briefings fade over time, like dreams... I don't remember most of it now. And of course, by the time Tasha was through with them, they remembered all kinds of details about a mutant plot to snatch their visitor. Like I said, most people can't really tell whose thoughts are whose -- or in Tasha's case, whose memories. As far as those two were concerned, Anelle and her partner on the plane were mind-controlled and had to be stopped.
The plane finally arrived about twenty minutes later. The passengers started disembarking about ten minutes after that. The last two passengers were a big, barrel-chested man wearing sunlasses and a dark suit, chatting amiably with an even bigger, friendly-looking man in a white suit who was limping just behind him. Anelle went up to the man in white and introduced herself. That's when hell broke loose.
I guess Pete got too excited about his "secret assignment" to stop Anelle. He was supposed to wait 'till they were out of the airport, of course, but he didn't -- instead he tackled her there and then. Maybe he thought she was making her move early. Maybe he was just eager to tackle her, I don't know. Pete was a sick kid. Unswervingly loyal to the cause, certainly -- they all were -- but we'd given him an excuse to act out against his boss, and he took it.
Rich went after the bodyguard as planned, but he was slowed by the surprise change of plans, and the bodyguard wasn't. Rich went down. The watchdog moved like a blur, and Pete was dead before he hit the ground, and I missed the next few seconds trying to keep from throwing up. I wasn't supposed to be around for the fighting; I'm no good at it.
I snapped out of it when the guns went off. Anelle took a shot or two at the watchdog, he dodged and disarmed her, bodyguard pushed white-suit back into the plane, and our plan was shot to pieces. The only two folks who would "recognize" Tasha as their boss were down, and there was no way we could snatch our target in the middle of a crowded airport against armed resistance.