Anything but Ordinary (5 page)

‘We have a number of elite teams in the field,’ The Director was saying, ‘we want you to lead our primary team.’

‘I already have a team,’ Tamar pointed out.

‘And we want them also,’ said The Director placatingly. ‘But first, we decided, we would have to persuade
you
to join us. We had hoped that if you came on board they would follow you.’

Tamar was unsure of this; all her instincts told her not to believe too much that this man told her. ‘You
had
hoped?’ she said demonstrating her unerring knack of pouncing on the one thing in a statement that you hoped she would not notice. 

However, The Director answered smoothly. ‘Your boyfriend’s attitude, so I am told, when approached was less than receptive. We have decided that he, at least, is independent of your influence, wouldn’t you agree?’

Tamar reluctantly had to admit that this was true. She nodded shortly.

‘A pity,’ The Director continued. ‘I had hoped he might also lead a team. He has qualities of his own; second only to your own.’

‘Sexiest man in the world,’ murmured Tamar.

‘I was not referring to his attractions,’ replied The Director, apparently hearing this. ‘Nor yours for that matter,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Ah, here we are.’

He showed her into a large room equipped like a cross between a laboratory and NASA mission control.  Tamar’s internal radar went on the alert at once. The room was dim, lighted only by banks of small computer monitors on benches, which blinked and hummed constantly,  from a very large LCD screen across the back wall, and from small lights fixed above the laboratory equipment, which was set up on a long bench running along the adjacent wall. To Tamar it was a weird, alien world. 

There were seven people in the room, four men and three women. Two of the men were working at computer consoles, as was one woman. Standard geeks, thought Tamar, who ought to have known better than to make snap judgements like that.  Another man, extremely good looking with white blond hair and an air of extreme arrogance, was leaning back casually with his feet on a desk, one hand running through his hair the other hand contained a phone, into which he was talking animatedly. He looked like a stockbroker, but Tamar’s sixth sense said “con man”. She disliked him immediately. Two others, one man and one woman appeared to be soldiers, standing to attention at the opposite door. The last woman was more interesting. She was unquestionably a witch, but not like any witch Tamar had met personally.  She was wearing a lab coat for one thing and wore her hair in a tight bun. Her face and hair looked faded like an old photograph from which the original colour had drained. She might have been a redhead once, and her eyes may have been blue, now the hair was sandy and the eyes grey.  To the untrained eye she looked a lot like a high school science teacher. She was using the lab equipment to mix a potion or something like it.  She looked up and smiled, the only one who did, Tamar smiled back, but she had reservations. These people did not look to her like a field unit. She wondered how any of them would handle an encounter with a werewolf, for example, or a vampire. She was willing to bet that not one of them had ever faced such an encounter. And there were worse things out there. She would rather have Denny at her back in that kind of a situation than any of these people. Especially that blond man, who looked as if he might crease up in a shower of rain; and all of them looked like they would faint at the sight of blood. Even Cindy would have been an improvement.

She gave no sign of what was going through her mind, however.

But The Director seemed to read her thoughts. ‘I can see you’re impressed,’ he said dryly. ‘But I wonder if you have considered that your own erstwhile little band of soldiers do not exactly look like a formidable front line in the fight against evil and yet … they have proved to be just that – with you to lead them.’

Tamar did not answer. ‘
Erstwhile?’
she thought.
‘He’s taking a lot for granted isn’t he?’

‘Perhaps I should introduce you,’ he added.

But Tamar had already moved away from him. She stood silently behind the blond man on the phone for a few minutes listening to his subtle blandishments to a girl named Tiffany before suddenly darting forward and cutting the connection.

‘Does anyone ever actually fall for that?’ she asked him.

He grinned up at her. ‘A surprising amount of people,’ he told her. ‘People are gullible, ’specially when you tell them what they want to hear. My name’s Tony Rackham, and you must be Tamar.’ he held out a hand.

‘Tony,’ acknowledged Tamar coldly ignoring the proffered hand. ‘If that’s your
real
name.’ And, just for a second, Tamar saw his poise slip and a worried look creep into his eyes. However, he masked it quickly with a glib compliment and Tamar allowed herself to smile.

‘Pretty slick aren’t you?’ she said.

The girl in the lab coat hurried forward and held out a hand. ‘Hi, I’m Melissa Cuthbert, my
real
name,’ she grinned nervously. ‘It’s a great pleasure to meet you.’

A people pleaser, thought Tamar, shaking hands absently.

‘I was just running some tests on …’ Melissa stopped and glanced at The Director uncertainly as he coughed abruptly. ‘Oh,’ she faltered. ‘But I thought …’

‘Miss Black has not yet agreed to join us,’ said The Director firmly. The girl’s face reddened and she blinked rapidly. ‘Oh, but you
will
, won’t you?’ she asked earnestly. Tamar gave her a noncommittal smile.

‘This is Ray Evans,’ Melissa said, showing Tamar a scruffy looking man in his thirties with long reddish hair and an emaciated appearance, as if he were a zoo exhibit. ‘He’s a genius with computers.’

Ray, Tamar noticed immediately blanked the screen on his computer as she approached.  He turned faded blue eyes on her for a split second and gave a disinterested shrug before turning away again. Tamar was fascinated by his skin, which looked parched and yellow, the colour of old newspaper. 

‘And this is David Collins,’ continued Melissa. ‘He’s computers too,’ she added but did not explain further.

Exhibit B was younger and tidier, thought Tamar, than Exhibit A.  And at least he smiled when he was introduced. But it was an empty smile, and there was no warmth in the dark brown, almost black eyes looking out warily from under a thick shock of dark brown hair that fell almost to his nose in an elaborately dishevelled style. 

Tamar disliked him immediately too. ‘I’m doing well,’ she thought ironically.

‘And this is Valerie Byrnehil,’ finished Melissa. Introducing a stark, severe looking woman, with smooth pale skin and light blonde hair, and who would have been quite pretty had her face had more life in it. She turned sea coloured eyes on Tamar and gazed serenely at her as if she wanted to penetrate her soul.  ‘Good luck with that,’ thought Tamar who was not at all sure that she even had one.

‘Valerie coordinates the team when we’re in the field,’ explained Melissa. 

‘Ah,’ thought Tamar. ‘The Boss. No wonder she doesn’t look happy to see
me
.’ 

At that moment, they were interrupted by a loud droning sound followed by a lot of cursing. Tamar turned to see what appeared to be a bumblebee the size of her fist making a noise like a road drill, followed by a man chasing it with a net. ‘Damn the bloody thing, how the hell they keep getting out I’ll never know,’ he said apologetically. 

‘They’re Fons,’ said Tamar. ‘You’ll never contain them,’

The man looked interested. ‘They’re what?’ he said.

‘Fons,’ said Tamar. ‘And it isn’t an insect whatever it may look like.’

‘We thought it was some sort of genetically engineered …’

‘No, no,’ Tamar laughed. ‘Fons are mystical creatures, perfectly harmless and not at all interesting. Sometimes the babies are mistaken for queen bees, but they don’t sting and aren’t at all interested in flowers.  I’d let them go if I were you. The rest of the tribe will be coming for them, and you don’t want that believe me.’

‘We believe we
have
the whole – er tribe, did you say?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Tamar. ‘How many have you got?’

‘About a hundred and fifty.’

‘You’re about a million short of a whole tribe then,’ Tamar told him. ‘When they turn up they’ll cause chaos.’

‘I thought you said they were harmless,’ said The Director.

‘Oh they are,’ said Tamar, ‘just not very bright. Can you imagine a million of these things buzzing around the place like so many giant bees? Chaos!’

The Director turned to the man with the net. ‘Let them go,’ he said decisively. ‘Now!’ Tamar nodded.

When the man had hurried off Tamar turned on The Director. ‘What else have you got caged up here?’ she asked severely.

‘Why don’t I show you?’ he said imperturbably. ‘Maybe you can help us with some more identification.’

‘So, what exactly is this place?’ asked Tamar as The Director led her along more corridors. ‘What’s it all about? Is it government?’

‘No.’ The Director was firm. ‘We work for no governments. They work for us. The Agency – we have no other name – is like a “Men in Black” organisation for the supernatural.  We assess threats and eliminate them. In absolute secrecy. No one knows we exist.’ He gave Tamar a sideways glance. ‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘despite considerable funding, top flight experts and state of the art equipment we do not possess the impressive track record of a small rag tag group of mavericks, who work apparently off the cuff, when it comes to saving the world from supernatural threats.’ He sighed. ‘We need your help. That’s the top and bottom of it.

‘Of course we had no more idea of your existence than you did of ours until recently. People who do what we do have to work in secret out of necessity, and you kept your secret effectively for some years until this recent Faerie debacle. Something slipped I should say.’ He looked sideways at Tamar who nodded.

‘Something,’ she said quietly.

‘Of course we were aware of something else working away there in the background. Threats we had anticipated suddenly and inexplicably vanishing. And when you were exposed, we knew we had found you. All we had to do was backtrack events, and we found out a lot more than we ever imagined. So many threats averted that we had known nothing about, things that had never happened because of your interference, things that
did
happen and then, mysteriously, did not.

‘But the most amazing thing was you,’ he added. ‘I still can’t get used to the idea that you are five thousand years old. It’s incredible. And I’ve seen a few things I can tell you.’

Tamar smiled. 

‘What it comes down to is this,’ he resumed.  ‘You are now compromised, reporters on the doorstep and so on. We can help. With us, your anonymity will be restored. You will effectively disappear. You can continue to do what you do best which is what we all want.’ he smiled. ‘We might have left you to it had you not been exposed, but under the circumstances …’ he shrugged.

‘If we hadn’t been exposed, you’d never have found out about us,’ Tamar pointed out. ‘It’s not a question of leaving us alone. You’d have had no choice.’

‘A good point,’ The Director agreed. ‘But we
did
find out, because you
were
exposed.
C’est la vie.’

‘We, on the other hand, have
not
been exposed. We are in a position to help each other now, do you see?’

Tamar did see. She hated all the publicity that had descended on her lately. The chance to retreat back into obscurity was extraordinarily tempting. 
And
to be able to continue to fight. It all seemed too good to be true. She remembered what Denny was wont to say about that. “If something seems too good to be true – remember the Djinn code. There’s always a catch.” No one knew better than Tamar, that this was true. 

‘Denny’ll never go for it.’ She voiced the thought without meaning to.

‘Perhaps he might be persuaded,’ said The Director, ‘when he considers the alternative. Spending the rest of his life in the spotlight – never getting anything useful done. However, you wanted to see our holding pens, here they are.’

The Agents had been waiting in their car when she had returned to the house. Tamar had been furious and had gone and released the dragon from the garage. To her immense satisfaction, it had landed heavily on the car. The Agents had seemed to panic, they scrambled out of the car, and Tamar had decided that they had learned their lesson. She called the dragon off and sent him to the back garden.  But Agent Dawber had been …? It was as if he hadn’t
known
.  Hadn’t known about her,
or
her powers. The look of shock on his face… But he had been in her house! He had
seen!  And
earlier that very day, he must have seen her teleport. Then Agent Rook had dragged him back to the car and taken off, but she could not remember what had happened next.

However, she now had a shrewd idea.

~ Chapter Four ~

I
n a horrible little motorway café, two strange people sat uncomfortably in the plastic moulded seats and looked at their plates with a mixture of intrigue and horror. This is perhaps not unnatural, and it certainly caused little comment from the other patrons, many of whom were engaged in the same activity.

‘What do you suppose it is Fulk?’ said his mistress poking her plate suspiciously.

‘Err, the menuu, saays it’s caalled aa fuull Englishh breakfaast,’ said Fulk.’

‘Yes, but what
is
it? What’s
this
?’ She pointed at the plate.

Fulk leaned forward. ‘Shoe leather?’ he suggested.

‘I’m not hungry,’ she said decisively pushing the plate away.

Fulk hesitated, and then reached forward and scraped the plate onto his own and devoured the lot in one mouthful.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she snapped. ‘It’s so uncouth. People will stare.’ She took a tentative sip of her coffee and a look an agonized indecision came over her face; aware that people
were
, in fact, staring. The eternal conundrum faced her – to spit or swallow?