Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master (14 page)

The hour was well past three when the telephone rang. The
bell jangled urgently and echoed through the front room of a modest house in
the city’s downtown, not far from a certain boxing gym well known to many field
agents of the Red Panda.

After a time, the ringing stopped, leaving behind a silence
that was almost as jarring as the plaintive cry it replaced. The peace was a
fragile one, however, and a moment later it was shattered by the bell once
again.

At last, the plodding of heavy feet on the stairs could be
heard, together with a steady stream of muttered curses, some in English, the
most deeply offensive in Greek. Spiro Papas turned the corner, his eyes barely
slits as he shuffled for the telephone. No sooner had his hand reached the
receiver than the incessant ringing stopped once again, spurring a torrent of
curses from the old man’s lips that would have made a sailor blush in any one
of a half dozen languages.

At last, his venom spent, Spiro stood and stared at the
telephone a moment, still seething. He seemed to be waiting. Sure enough, less
than a minute later the ringing began anew, and Papas snatched up the receiver
and barked into it like an enraged guard dog.

“What? What? What do you want?” he bellowed, leaving the
late-night caller no opportunity to answer.

There was a momentary silence, in which only the boxing
trainer’s fierce breathing could be heard.

“Mother Hen calling,” a quiet voice said at last.

“
What?
” Spiro
seemed genuinely perplexed for a moment.

“Mother Hen calling,” the voice said again, without
elaborating.

There was a pause. Spiro’s eyes pinched shut with the effort
as he forced his still-sleeping brain to interpret the message, without
apparent success.

“What?” he said again at last, though with less venom.

“I need you to dig in, Spiro,” the woman’s voice said
sternly.

“Mother Hen?” Spiro said at last, with a glance back to the
steps to make certain that the call had not woken his wife.

“There he is. I was worried for a moment.”

“You are not supposed to call here,” Papas said sternly, his
sense returning.

“I apologize for the hour–,” Mother Hen began.

“To blazes with the hour!” Spiro sputtered. “Spiro cares not
for the hour. But you are not supposed to call
here
. This telephone line–”

“Leave scrambling the telephone signal to me, Mister Papas,”
the voice said seriously. “This is what I do.”

“Well, do it properly,” he muttered sorely. “The Chief, he
sets up the whole network so conversations like this never happen. You have
your contacts, I have mine.”

“I run the eyes and ears, you run the hands,” she said. “I
know the drill, Spiro. That is the way it was for a long time… but he’s
expanding fast. Too fast for rules like that. There are at least a half dozen
more contact networks now, to say nothing of an army of informants and casual
spotters.”

“All of which I am not supposed to know,” Papas said,
feeling a creak in his neck. “And for reasons. Good reasons. The Chief, he
knows they may try to get to him through the agents.”

“And if it is impossible for anyone to take out his entire
network at a stroke, it makes it less likely that anyone would try,” the voice
snapped. “Don’t quote regulations to me, I wrote most of them.”

“So maybe you also should
read
them, huh?” Spiro lectured. “They keep all of us safe–”

“Spiro, I am not one of your raw recruits. And we have known
one another long enough for you to know that. When you hear my voice in the
middle of the night, you can assume that it is something important.”

“Spiro does not report to you,” the old man bristled.

“Spiro, calm down and listen to me for half a minute!”

Papas paused and sat down on a stool by the telephone. His
head seemed very heavy.

“Well?” he said at last.

“I had a call from Jack Peters–,” she began.

“No names!” he barked.

“Spiro!” she said in a tone that dwarfed his bluster. After
a moment’s pause, she continued. “The operative was calling from a pay phone
near the home of one Joshua Cain.”

“Cain? The fixer Cain?” Spiro’s interest was overpowering
his indignation.

“The same. The morning edition of the
Chronicle
will have a feature article on the involvement of Cain’s
household staff in a mysterious warehouse fire, which none of them survived.
The story is an exclusive, but they will share their sidebar with every other
paper in town.”

“Sidebar?”

“That Cain’s house was blown to smithereens sometime shortly
after midnight.”

“All of which means you call Spiro because…”

“Because a certain pair of masked heroes were on their way
to Cain’s house tonight.”

“They told you this?”

“They don’t tell me their plans, Spiro, any more than they
tell you,” she said with a sigh. “Jack- the operative gathered as much. What he
was keeping out of the story was that the warehouse fire was caused when our
Chief was rescuing Agent Thirty-Three.”

“Gregor Sampson?” Spiro said in surprise.

There was a pause.

“All right, Spiro is aware of the irony,” he said at last.
“Shoot me.”

“I might just do that one of these days,” Mother Hen said
quietly. “The point is that I have had no contact since the incident. There is
no response on any direct wire and no request for medical attention has been
routed through me, or received directly by any of the support agents with the
appropriate skills.”

There was another pause. The old man sighed. “So the eyes
and ears are deaf and dumb,” he said solemnly.

“And I was wondering if you could lend me a hand. Yes,” she
said.

“Give Spiro the address. I will call in a team.”

“Send someone who knows our newshound if you can, he should
still be near the scene,” she urged.

“At this hour, Spiro may not be able to pick and choose,” he
said with a snort, “but if I can, I will. What exactly should I tell them that
they are looking for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary,” Mother Hen said, recovering
her normal, crisp tone.

“The whole thing sounds out of the ordinary to Spiro.”

“Then it should be a thorough report,” she said archly.

Spiro snorted again. “And who will get this report?”

“Spiro,” Mother Hen said quietly, “they may be hurt. They
may be captured. They may be dead.”

There was another pause as he rubbed his eyes. “You remember
what the first rule is?” he asked at last.

“The oath?” she said.

“No, not the oath. ‘Holding high the lamp of justice’ is
very nice. But every agent is told one thing – field man, informant,
spotter, runner… all of them. Whatever else they do, it is the first thing on
the list and the last thing on the list. Do you remember what it is?”

“Await instructions,” she said at last.

“Await instructions,” he nodded. “I worry about them too.
But tonight I worry about what happens when we forget to await.”

“Grammatical nightmares notwithstanding,” she said.

“What?” he said, his brow furrowed.

“Never mind. Just send them in, Spiro. And tell them to be
careful.”

“If they needed to hear that from me,” Spiro said with a
grim smile, “they would have been dead a long time ago. Goodnight, Mother Hen.”

There was a click in his ear as she disconnected the line,
and then another series of clicks as the link to the normal telephone network
was reestablished. Spiro sighed and shook his head as he began to dial.

August Fenwick had
seen the soldiers raise their rifles. As he raced across the uneven ground to a
high ridge, he had expected to find the men who now faced him. He had seen
their approach through the mind of his master, Rashan, who now held the bulk of
the approaching force in a hypnotic thrall.

For all of Fenwick’s
speed, he had not reached the ridge in time to use his martial training to his
advantage. Dozens of unarmed combat styles were his to command, together with
strength, agility and a familiarity with the terrain. But as the soldiers
approached he knew that he was too late, that their guns gave them a striking
reach he could not match. As the length of red silk around his eyes pulled taut
behind him in the onrush of wind, time seemed to slow. Each moment seemed to be
a complete act, an hour, a day. He forced his body harder, faster, knowing it
would never be enough. He saw hands move to triggers and seemed to throw
himself towards his enemies in a last burst of energy, of desperation, never realizing
that he did not, at that moment, move at all.

The men were perhaps
fifteen yards away when he heard the guns begin to roar. For an instant, August
Fenwick felt himself suspended, as if in amber. Still himself, but not within
himself. He heard the rifle shots tearing at the air, and their roar seemed to
wake him suddenly, as if from a dream.

His first thought was
sheer amazement at the absence of pain. His eyes darted up to the men on the
ridge. Their rifles were aimed, not at Fenwick, but at an open, empty space
thirty feet to his left. They had paused in their attack, as if confused, until
a sudden cry came from one of their number. Fenwick looked up and saw the squat
man with the beard pointing at him in astonishment.

August Fenwick did not
pause to wonder at what had happened. For months he had trained the hidden
powers of the human brain. Learned the ancient sciences of the mind as few
living ever had. But it had been theory; this was no mere exercise. In that
moment of desperation his training had taken over, he had reached out into the
minds of these gunmen with his one desire: that they see him where he was not,
fire their bullets uselessly rather than destroy him. As the soldiers changed
their aim and targeted his true position, he had little time to improvise. It
had worked once…

He reached out into
the ether with his mind, and felt his consciousness flow into those of the men
who faced him across the rock face in the biting wind. He felt his mind in
their minds…

Abruptly, the men
changed their aim again. And then again. They fired wildly as they saw the
masked white man appear and disappear before their very eyes. August Fenwick
felt the fear growing in their hearts with every errant shot. He could taste
their adrenaline, feel their hearts racing, their knees quaking. He truly knew
the terror that the strange apparition he had become put into the very hearts
of the men that wished to destroy him, if only they could find him.

As Fenwick’s power
grew stronger, more confident, he could not help but laugh. His laughter was
mocking, full of mirth, almost joyful. It sang of the promise of justice to
come and echoed through the valley. It seemed to come from a dozen mouths, and
places unseen. The gunmen heard the laughter of the masked man and despaired.
Desperately clutching in white-knuckled hands the guns that had made them brave
only moments before, they fired, again and again, knowing in their hearts that
it was futile. Knowing that their misdeeds had awakened a force they could not
defeat. Fearing for everything they might have ever held dear.

The laughter of the
man in the mask was a roar in their ears now as the mists of the high mountains
seemed to swirl around them, making the fleeting glimpses of their tormentor
even more unpredictable. Two of the soldiers turned and broke into a run,
scrambling back down the rocky path as quickly as the terrain would allow. The
squat man with the beard shouted orders after them, hiding his own fear within
a stream of oaths and threats in a dialect unknown to Fenwick’s ear. Whatever
he said, it didn’t seem to have much effect, as the men never broke the stride
of their retreat. Another soldier moved to follow them. The bearded commander
leveled his weapon at the would-be deserter with a glare that left the sincerity
of his threat in no doubt.

Hidden in plain sight,
Fenwick could see the moment clearly. The blanket of mist was, like his own
phantom images, a hypnotic projection of his own mind. He saw the rifle pointed
at the soldier’s heart. The soldier that had been his enemy, now under threat
of his own commander. Fenwick moved swiftly to intervene.

The eyes of the
soldiers stared into empty space with horror and wonder as the masked man once
more reached out with his mind. To their clouded senses, the fog had rolled
upward, growing thick and dense around a single point in mid-air. That mass of
mist slowly resolved itself into the face of their masked tormentor, tremendous
in size, suspended in the thin and biting mountain air. They heard the laughter
once again, heard it at volumes that made their bones rattle and knees quake.
The uneven war was lost, the soldiers were, to a man, more frightened of this
horror than the squat, bearded man. They turned and ran in terror, the wind
howling with the cruel, mocking laughter of the spirit that protected this
valley.

One man remained. Only
the commander, his rifle clutched between hands white with terror. He stared at
the apparition with an expression calculated to suggest he was unmoved. His
face was grim, scarred with a hundred battles. He was not a man to be
frightened by ghosts. Once more, Fenwick reached out with his mind.

The vaporous
apparition swirled once more, consuming itself into a man-sized tornado, just
feet away from where the man with the rifle stood. An instant later the wind
stopped, and the image of the man in the mask stood before his foe. The squat
commander leveled his rifle and fired directly into his enemy’s heart. The form
of the masked man took it and smiled, moving forward slowly but inexorably.

From his vantage point
at the bottom of the ridge, Fenwick grimaced a little. This was going to be the
tricky part.

The man that remained
at the top of the ridge would not be fooled by a simple illusion. He needed
persuasion. The sort that only flesh and blood could give. But from the base of
the ridge, Fenwick was in no position to use his physical abilities, only the
power of the mind. The telekinesis his fellow student favored had never been
Fenwick’s study. He had experimented with creating raw force with his mental
energy, but Rashan’s teaching had taken him down a different path.

With every ounce of
his energy, August Fenwick reached out with his mind. As the phantom image he
had cast lashed out with its fist, Fenwick gave everything he could to the
illusion. If he could just make the bearded commander believe the spell
strongly enough to actually feel the blow…

An instant later, the
soldier lay on his back, stunned momentarily by the punch he had received. From
his vantage point, the masked man laughed a little, his mirth echoing through
the thin air, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. The laughter stopped
suddenly as Fenwick gaped in amazement. It was difficult to see for certain,
but he was almost sure that there was blood on the soldier’s face. Had Fenwick
exceeded his training and truly thrown a telekinetic blow? Or had the illusion
been so complete that the soldier’s mind not only felt the pain but actually
created the damage the blow would have done?

It was at least
somewhat academic at this point, as the bearded commander scrambled to his feet
and raced down the path after his men. They would hurry down the trail until
they fell under Master Rashan’s spell, like the squadron they had broken off
from. They would join the ranks of confused men, staring at a rock wall where a
path had once been. When they did, they would speak of an unearthly terror
waiting beyond. An elemental force which they had awakened, which could not be
hurt with bullets and had powers no army could match. They would leave quickly,
and in defeat. If only…

 
The man in the red mask was drawn back to
earth by the echo of gunfire behind him. Slow, methodical gunfire.

He turned in haste
back towards the kuti. From where he stood, he could clearly see his fellow
student, holding the ground he had been charged with protecting in his own way.

The ground along the
main path was strewn with a dozen corpses. The men that remained alive were
each frozen, quaking and in some kind of mental thrall. Fenwick stood stock
still in amazement for a moment. Some of the soldiers stood, many were on their
knees, and each seemed to be fighting a losing battle of their own. The man in
the mask watched from a hundred yards away. He could see one soldier, his arms
quaking, resisting some inexorable force, lift his rifle and rest the barrel in
his own mouth.

Fenwick’s cry of
protest was drowned out by the sharp retort of the gun. He raced over the rough
terrain, leaping from rock to rock like a monkey, watching soldier after
soldier lose their hidden battles and take their own lives. He was still twenty
yards away when the final man fell and crumpled, his life snapped short, his
blood painting the stones a bright, unnatural red.

The man August Fenwick
knew only as One turned to face him with a self-satisfied smile, like a cat
that had dined well.

“No mean feat, young
one,” he said condescendingly, “to force another man to suicide with the brute
force of one’s will.”

Fenwick stood
astonished, the lengths of the sash he wore over his face flapping behind him
in the biting wind. At last he sputtered his reply.

“I thought it was
impossible,” he said quietly.

One smiled even more
broadly. “I had heard that, too. That is why I could not resist the attempt. To
force a mind into an act so far from nature is truly the act of a master. Like
all things, it just required practice.”

Fenwick stared, open
mouthed, at the carnage before him. His fellow student had certainly seized the
opportunity to experiment. Near the top of the path, where it entered the
valley, he could see men who looked like they had been shot down hastily by
their own enthralled comrades. As the men had neared, One’s mastery had grown
more complete, and the abominations grew more hideous until they reached the
last man sprawled, almost headless, at the feet of this smiling young man.

“Study is a very fine
thing, rich man’s son,” he said, his gaze narrowing as they looked deep into
Fenwick’s astounded eyes. “But in the end, nothing teaches like practice. Whole
armies will fall at my feet. The riches you scorn will be mine a thousand
fold.”

Fenwick blinked in
greater amazement. “What are you saying?” he said.

One did not seem to
have heard, lost as he was in a rush of adrenaline and a haze of darkness that
seemed to flow from within him. “And on that day,” he almost sang, “you, too,
will call me the Master.”