Amanda's Eyes (15 page)

The realist in me, the reporter with
a well-known disdain for the so-called paranormal, sneered.  But a deeper part
of me, the woman who believed in intuition and serendipity, couldn’t dismiss
his idea quite so easily.  I made a desperate bid for professional skepticism,
that thread of objectivity that’s the life’s blood of every good reporter.  Came
up twenty logical objections to his cockamamie theory.  But they all died
unspoken, as I was suddenly swamped by the disconcerting conviction that my
whole life boiled down to this one surreal moment, this choice between belief
and denial.  I could have sworn the entire cosmos was holding its breath, waiting
for me to decide.

I lifted my hands, palms up.  “Assuming
you’re right, what am I supposed to do with this … this ….”

“Gift?” he suggested, then smiled
reassuringly.  “Don’t worry, Amanda.  The Good Lord gave you this ability to
discern hearts for a reason.  You’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

I’ve run into truth crazier than
fiction more times than I can count.  Seen stuff you wouldn’t believe.  So my shock-and-awe
threshold is higher than most.  Not high enough for this magnitude of crazy,
though.  This crazy blew my threshold to Kingdom Come.  And kept on going.

Once the numbness wore off, both
mind and body started to buzz with a spidery current that made every nerve
ending twitch.  All of a sudden, I needed to
get
out of there
. 
Put some distance between me and … and what?  The calm certainty in Bonner’s
eyes?  My disturbing inability to blithely file his conclusion under “Crackpot Theories?” 
Can you distance yourself from your own uncertainties and fears?

Sadie’s was six miles away as the
crow flies, closer to ten by Shank’s mare, but what the hell.  Wearing through
shoe leather was getting to be a habit.  Sam didn’t press me when I passed on
his offer of a ride.  Smart man.  Smart enough to know I had to unravel this
twist of fate on my own.

It was almost one thirty when I left. 
The wind had picked up, and the sun was playing hide-and-seek behind scudding
tufts of steel-gray clouds as I trudged toward the heart of town, hands buried
in the pockets of my leather jacket.  Time to corral my chaotic thoughts and
herd them into some kind of order.  What, exactly, were we talking about here? 
Sudden-onset ESP?

Of course not.  Only a complete
numbskull would buy that.

So why, against all logic and
reason, was I already half-convinced?  Not in my head, but instinctively, down
deep in my gut.  A smart reporter learns to pay attention to hunches,
especially when they have a proven track record, which mine do.  Ignoring the
gut leads to all kinds of missed opportunities and trouble.  Case in point: 
The last time I didn’t listen to mine, Cuey and Michaels died, and I woke up
minus two eyes.

But this?  This was stretching gut
credibility to the breaking point.  I could only imagine the chatter if word of
my latest hunch got out.

Hey, you hear about A.J. Gregson?

Heard she lost her mind somewhere in
Pennsylvania.  Claimed she was abducted by aliens.

I would be working the tabloids
before I knew what hit me.  “Farmer’s Wife Has Bigfoot’s Love Child,” by Amanda
Gregson.

And Mom thought
crime
reporting was undignified.

Absently sidestepping a toddler
barreling down the sidewalk on a bright red trike, I made a last-ditch grab for
common sense.  Scolded, pleaded, and debated with myself for at least two miles.

Fact:  I had evidently had a couple,
for want of a better word, visions.  Both turned out to be uncannily accurate.

But what if?

What if the Sight—as I was already
starting to think of it, although I would have cut out my tongue before calling
it that out loud—was temporary?  A passing aberration?  What if it fizzled as
suddenly and mysteriously as it appeared?

The smart attitude would be,
Get
a second opinion
.

I thought about it, I really did. 
But I couldn’t shake the strong, gut-level hunch that Sam Bonner was on the
right track.  His theory about the
what, how,
and
why
of my
predicament seemed to fit.

The only piece that felt wobbly was
the God angle.

I mean, come on.  We’re talking
God
here.

Okay, push comes to shove, I’ll
admit I believe in Him.  More so than not, anyway.  Like most people I know, my
impression of the Deity tends to be off-hand and fairly abstract.  He’s out
there.  You know, around.  But He and I … well, we’re not what you would call
close.  Begging the question, why would He start bestowing gifts?

Assuming this
was
a gift.

Maybe it was a curse.

That slant rattled me for a few
blocks, but I calmed down when I eventually decided I was probably no better or
worse than the next person.  In other words, either way you looked at it, I
wasn’t a likely candidate for special divine attention, be it a pat on the back
or a rap on the knuckles.  No, there had to be another explanation.  Quantum physics,
maybe—a subatomic glitch involving photons and quarks and the uncertainty
principle.

In the end, I gave up trying to
figure how it had happened.  Some questions don’t have easy answers, and going
off on existential tangents is a great way to get lost.  Better to focus on
questions I at least had a shot at answering.

Like, did I actually believe I had experienced
some kind of weird second sight?

Partly.  I mean,
something
had happened to me.  Twice.  And since arguing myself out of Bonner’s
explanation and my corresponding hunch hadn’t worked, I had no choice but to hang
with my gut and see what shook loose.  Wait and see if it happened again.  Even
I did feel like Alice must have felt when she took a header down the rabbit hole
and found herself hobnobbing with playing cards and jabberwockies.

Moving right along to question two,
I wondered,
If it’s permanent, can I control it?

Yet to be determined, but based on
my experience so far, I had to say no.  Or at least, not yet.  If the Sight was
going to stick around, maybe I could
learn
to control it.  Certainly be
smart to try.  It was either learn to flip the off-switch or collect way too
much information about way too many folks, up to and including friends and
family.  There were some secrets, I decided with a pained grimace, I did
not
want to know.

I had been walking for three-quarters
of an hour by then, and having missed lunch, had worked up quite an appetite,
even for me.  So I stopped at a canopied lunch cart on the corner of King and
Chestnut for a couple foot-longs and a large side of fries.  Food for thought. 
I sat down on a bench, peeled the foil off one of the dogs, and took a healthy
bite, moaning out loud as the combined flavors of beef, sauerkraut, onions, and
relish exploded on my tongue.

Ambrosia, thy name is fully loaded frankfurter.

Maybe it was the grease and carbs …
or the exercise … or the fact that I had at least partially suspended my
disbelief … but I wasn’t nearly wired as I had been five miles ago.  Which isn’t
to say I didn’t still have plenty of issues with my new talent.  The big
picture, for example, continued to elude me.  I had no clue how these visions,
assuming I continued to have them, would fit into the grand scheme.  But I was going
to figure it out.

The chirp of an UpLink in the wee
small hours can jerk you out of Dreamland into anxiety in less time than it
takes you to open your eyes.  Probably an outgrowth of man’s instinctive
awareness that ringtones at three a.m. almost never mean you won the lottery.

When Jack’s telepresence
materialized at the foot of my bed, his expression was grim.  He skipped right
over the part about how sorry he was to wake me up and said, “There’s been
another hit.”

“Ferrymen?” I asked, pushing myself into
a sitting position.

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Late yesterday.”

I scooped a hand through my hair and
struggled to catch up.  “How come I didn’t see anything on the news?”

“We clamped a lid on it.  I had to
call in some markers and make a few threats, but the networks agreed to hold
off on the story for twenty-four hours.”

“Ohh-kay.”

I stretched the word into two wary
syllables, because I was finally awake enough to catch the drift.  Eagan wasn’t
calling at this ungodly hour to deliver a courtesy brief to his favorite reporter. 
There was more.  Then my brother Jim virtualized next to Eagan, and the most
likely definition of
more
cannonballed into me.

My lungs seized.  I grabbed the
fistful of gray jersey directly over my heart and hung on.  “Dad!  Oh, my God,
it was Dad, wasn’t it?”

“
No!
”  Jim signaled stop with
both hands.  “No.  Dad’s fine.  The family is fine.”  He dropped his hands and
paused, sorrow etching deep lines in his face.  “Stretch ….  It was Bugsy.”

“Bugsy?”  My emotions ping ponged
from panic to relief to stunned as I scrambled to shift gears.  “Why would
anybody take out a contract on Bugsy?”

“Your brother and I have been
comparing notes on that,” Jack said.  “The senator had some powerful enemies.”

“The kind who’ll do whatever it
takes to get what they want,” Jim added.  “You know how she was when she got
riled.”

“Uh-huh.”

In default mode eighty-year-old Agnes
“Bugsy” Oppenheimer was a pussycat—soft  voice, endearing smile, benevolent
eye-twinkle.  But try to play the bully or violate her solid sense of right and
wrong, and the tabby turned pit bull.  And as a long list of sadder but wiser
opponents been unlucky enough to learn, once the elfin senator from California sank
her teeth into you ….  Well, you might get loose, but you would lose a pound of
flesh doing it.

She was a born science teacher, not
a born politician, but she had promised her husband, Darrel, she would try for
his congressional seat in the event he couldn’t serve.  So when he suddenly dropped
dead of a heart attack at age seventy, Bugsy reluctantly came out of retirement
and hit the campaign trail.  Much to the pundits’ surprise—and maybe her own chagrin—she
was elected.  Politicians and media alike tried to cast her as a cuddly figurehead,
Senator Grandma, but Agnes Oppenheimer refused to be relegated.  Never one to
do a job halfway, she dove into government headfirst and became a force to be
reckoned with in no time at all.

“Bugsy was a thorn in the side of
the International Climatological Consortium for the past three years,” Jim said. 
“Scuttled their last geoengineering proposal almost singlehandedly.”

“Because tinkering with the earth’s
radiation balance could turn Central Africa into a dust bowl.”  I released the fabric
bunched in my hand, absently rubbing at the hollow ache in my heart as I added,
“The last time the weather weenies monkeyed with the environment, it took European
agriculture five years to recover.  Africa wouldn’t survive a disaster of that
magnitude.”  I glanced from one face to the other.  “You think the ICC had her eliminated?”

“We don’t know who held the contract,”
Jim said with a shake of his head.  “I was using the Consortium as a
for-instance.”

Emotion threatened to break through
the insulation of shock, but I shored up my inner walls by concentrating on the
facts.  “Where did it go down?”

“Kenya,” said Jack.

“
Kenya?
”

“The bug safari?” Jim reminded me.

“Oh, right.  With everything else that’s
happened, I forgot.”

Insect or arachnid, didn’t matter. 
If it had six or more legs, Bugsy was nuts about it, hence her nickname.  She had
been psyched about her Africa trip, the latest in a long line of expeditions to
exotic (read: 
wild and wooly
) entomological hotspots.  She had
described her plans in such minute detail, I could easily picture her wading
through a tangle of vines, canvass bush hat held atop her flyaway silver hair
by a chin strap, hazel eyes alight with the thrill of the hunt.  I almost
smiled at the image now.  Until I remembered she was gone.

“How did they pull it off?”  Eagan called
up a photo, and I squinted to bring it into focus.  “Looks like a squashed
mosquito.”

“Close.  It’s a mini-drone, 
Anopheles
class.  You can get them on the open market.”

“Sure.  A dime a dozen for anybody
with a license:   DOD, police, PIs, corporations worried about industrial
espionage.  Used for surveillance, right?”

“Usually, but this one was weaponized. 
Pretty sophisticated design, too.”  Jack flicked the photo, giving me another
angle.  There still wasn’t much to see.   “Obviously, what’s left is in bad
shape, but we salvaged enough to guess it was programmed to home in on the
senator’s scent fingerprint.  She must have felt the ‘bite’ on the back of her
neck, because she slapped it and mangled it, so instead of flying off into the
sunset, it slid under her collar and into her shirt.  Doubt we would have found
the murder weapon, otherwise.”

“What agent are we talking about?”

The image dissolved as Jack answered,
“A potent combination of neurotoxins.  ME says a two hundred-pound man would
have lasted four minutes, tops.  Given the senator’s age and the fact that she didn’t
weigh half that much, paralysis of the respiratory muscles would have been
almost instantaneous.  Loss of consciousness in under a minute, death in less
than two.”

“Probably never knew what hit her,”
my brother concluded.

Maybe not—God knows, I hoped not—but
I
had an uncomfortably rough idea what had hit her, because I had boned up
on neurotoxins not too long ago.  I’m far from an expert, but I understand enough
to know you’re talking about an ugly, painful death.  Quick, but without a
shred of dignity.  Your brain shuts down almost immediately.  You start to
convulse and foam at the mouth.  Your bowels and bladder let go ….

I slammed the door on the image
taking shape in my mind, because I didn’t want to see Bugsy that way, not even
in my imagination, not even for a minute.

“I’m sorry, A.J.,” Jack offered after
a short silence.  “Jim tells me she was a close friend of the family.”

I nodded.  “The Oppenheimers never
had kids of their own—not sure why.  Always figured it was none of my
business.  Anyway, they made up for it by more or less adopting my brothers and
me.  Bugsy was like an extra grandmother, spoiled us rotten.  You know, the
usual:  cookies, pony rides, totally off-the-wall science experiments.  Remember
the time she helped us build that ten-foot volcano?” I asked Jim.

We traded crooked smiles as the
memory dawned in his eyes.

“Working model.  Yeah.  I also remember
she forgot to warn Sheriff Perkins about the eruption.  He thought the county
was under terrorist attack when that baby went off.  Dad and Darrel spent a
good week working their connections to quiet the uproar.”

“Darrel being the senator’s
husband,” Jack guessed.

“Right.  He was the one who
convinced Dad to run for the Assembly.”

The inner walls were crumbling
despite my best efforts, shock giving way to a potent mix of grief and rage,
heavy on the rage.  Probably because mad is easier.  Mad doesn’t knock you down
like grief will, mad makes you feel strong.  But I didn’t let my budding fury
show, because both Eagan and Jim were already eyeing me like I was an abandoned
backpack with a timer attached.  One hint of blood about to boil, and they
would have Happy Li throw me in the local deep freeze until I cooled off.

Thank God they didn’t have my
recently acquired gift.

“When’s the funeral?” I asked.

“We’ll get them, A.J.,” Jack said.

“Glad to hear it, but that doesn’t
answer my question.”

Jim stuck out his jaw.  “Forget it,
Stretch.  You’re staying right where you are.”

“You think Hell’s Boatmen will take
a run at me at a state funeral?  Security will be so tight it squeaks.  I’ll be
in no more danger there than I am here in—”

Eagan threw up a hand to stop me.  “Your
brother doesn’t need to know where you are.”

“Since you conferenced him in, I
assumed you had told him.”

“He conferenced himself in.”

“I was notified as soon as CIIS
found the obit.”  Jim glanced at Iceman.  “That was fast work, by the way.”

“Only because we knew what to look
for.  The job had Ferrymen
written all over it.  I just wish we had
managed to pull the blurb before the news got out.”

“You did your best.”  Jim turned
back to me.  “You know how it is.  Any threat or crime against the Assembly when
it’s headquartered in the District, my office gets read in.  As soon as I found
out what happened, I buttonholed Agent Eagan and told him to muzzle the press
until we could break the news to you.”

“You mean until
you
broke the
news to her.”  Eagan shrugged.  “I understood once you explained the
relationship.”

“So, I guess I owe you,” I mused.  “Both
of you.”

The smile Jim gave me then should
have been wreathed in canary feathers.  “Yes, you do,” he said, “and I’m
calling in the I.O.U. right now.  Promise me you won’t show up at the funeral.”

“But—”

“No buts.  You won’t do Bugsy’s
memory any favors putting yourself and everyone else at unnecessary risk.”

The
everyone else
was what cut
me off at the pass.  He had known it would.

“I hate it when you do this.”

“Does that mean you’re going to
pout, but you’ll stay put?”

“Yes, I’ll stay put.” 
For now
,
I hedged silently, because a plan was beginning to take shape.

“And don’t do anything stupid.”

“Who, me?”  When he scowled, I held
up a hand.  “Okay, okay.  Nothing stupid, I swear.”

An easy promise to give him, because
I planned to stick with clever and cunning from here on out.  Although I doubt
my brother would have agreed, if he could have read my mind.

“We’ve got eyes on her,” Jack said. 
“We’ll make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”

Eyes on her.
  It was all I could do not to roll
mine.  Feds.  It’s like they can’t help themselves.

Not that this was a newsflash.  Only
a nitwit would believe Eagan had parked me with former spook Sadie Carter by
accident or handed me a government-issue UpLink out of the goodness of his
heart.

All the better to surveil you with,
my dear.

Even though I had guessed as much, I
mentally thanked him for the official heads-up.  It would remind me I needed to
step carefully, if I wanted to put one over on my keepers.  (And I most certainly
did.)  I wouldn’t be able to get away with squat as long as CIIS was in a
position to block my slightest move.

But with the right skills you can
get past any blocker, and as luck would have it, I grew up playing football
with three older brothers.

One end run, coming up.