Origins (Remote) (10 page)

The door on the right was exactly the same as all the other doors in the hallway. Anyone coming in would have to go to each door to read the small engraved nameplates screwed into the wood to tell the difference. But from this door was a black glow, an absence of light that nonetheless shone in an ebb and pulse. He forced himself closer. He could hear a voice inside, muffled by wood and concrete. He knew he had to get into the room. The black glow repulsed him, made him shiver even without a physical body. He pushed on through the black glow, felt his skin shiver. He thought it odd that physical sensation would follow him even in this state, knowing he had a lot to learn about himself and his ability. What was worse he could feel his stomach churning and as he entered the room even the light began to dim. The man behind the desk was on the telephone and Ronnie could see the blackness seeping out of him. It rolled down his shoulders and onto the floor, piling up around the desk before oozing out around the doorframe. He remembered what
Cassie had said. “He’s crazy.” And knew it to be even truer than she had let on.

“Thorne,” he thought to himself and didn’t know how he knew that name. The blackness coming off the man seemed to flow everywhere, even seeping into the telephone. It crept from his clothes. Ronnie had once seen dry ice evaporating and this blackness dissipated in the same way. He moved closer. Thorne paused his conversation on the phone, cocking his head as if listening for something, looked around the room before turning back to the phone.

“Sir. I can have them in custody in twenty-four hours if you just get me the authority. No, Sir, we haven’t found Cutter yet but I talked to Farrow and Ruff and they’re proceeding with the planned session. No, I don’t think they’ll be any trouble. If they are I’ll take care of them.”

Ronnie took a step closer, listening. The trouble didn’t just begin and end with Thorne, it reached even higher. He had to try and find out where Thorne was getting his orders but didn’t know how he was going to do that. Without thinking, he reached out and touched the telephone. Instantly a low blue flame-like glow ran up his arm. It was like touching a magnet with the end of a screwdriver, an invisible but tangible pull. His heart clamped with fear, Ronnie surrendered himself to the attraction.

For the first time in his life, Ronnie ran the wire. The original plan had been for him to follow Cassie’s excursion up with one of his own, keep tabs on the man with Farrow and Ruff. But somewhere behind this man was something bigger and Ronnie knew he had to take the chance. He ran the wire and he ran it in darkness broken by intermittent explosions of flashes of light. It was traveling of a sort he had never envisioned and yet if felt oddly familiar. No wayward travel over roads and bridges. No view of sky or land or water. He plunged along the line as if in a dream. It went on forever. He had no sense of time or distance, only a wave, a push, a rocketing sensation that iced his blood and damped his breathing, though he only sensed he was breathing somewhere else.

Ronnie fell out into light. He was in a small office. There was a desk with a picture on it, an older woman with two young men. More photographs and plaques lined the walls. On the desk was a phone with six buttons lined up in a row. Three were blinking, one glowed steadily. The receiver was in the hands of a stout older man dressed in a business suit.

“I want any information you can get sent to me directly. I want this kept under wraps. Proceed with the directions I’ve given you and do nothing else. And find Cutter. I want to know what happened to him. And Thorne? Under no circumstances are these children to be taken into custody. I want to make that clear. You do not have authorization. I’ll make that decision if and when the time comes.” He hung up. Like Thorne had done, he cocked his head and looked around the room, as if sensing another presence. Finally, he turned back to the phone and punched one of the blinking buttons.

Ronnie backed off, willing himself away, back to
Cassie and the small living room in New Orleans. He woke up, if that’s what it was he thought, in the living room of Julie Hoffman. There was no return trip back along the wire, no blackness, no pressure. He was just back. Cassie was there, looking at him wide eyed, a glass of water on the table in front of her. Julie was standing behind the sofa, her hands clenched into the fabric, tendons on the back of her hands stretched and tight.

“Hey,” he said.

“Ronnie, what happened?” Julie said. There was tension and relief in her voice at the same time. “I’ve never seen anything like that. We couldn’t get you to respond to anything. All we could do was wait it out.”

Ronnie had no time to answer questions about things he didn’t understand himself. “It’s worse than we thought. This guy, his name is Thorne, and he’s talking to somebody else, somebody that’s giving him orders.
Cassie’s right. They want us. They’re going to try to use us to get something, some kind of information, and if we can do it, that might make things worse.”

Thorne had Farrow and Ruff in his office to give them the final briefing. “It’s time to push this thing.” He was standing with the two researchers around a table laden with maps. “What you’re seeing here is an overlay of troop movements within both Egypt and Syria within the last two weeks.” He pointed to a map spread out on the table. “Now here,” he pointed to a similar map alongside, “we have a map from six months ago. If you’re not blind we can see there’s a general trend, a re-alignment of forces in closer proximity to the Suez Canal.”

Thorne pointed to another stack of papers on his desk. “Over here I’ve got intelligence reports, satellite photos, and information gathered from logistical sources. What we’re seeing is an accumulation of resources and supplies, an increased training schedule, and the movement of men and machines. But we still have to ask ourselves what it all means. Is this a flexing of muscle or is there real intent here?”

“The Syrians and Egyptians have made it clear that they want their land back. We’re talking this area here...” pointing again to the map, “...along the Golan Heights and here in the Sinai Pensinsula. So far we’ve been able to keep things at a stalemate but our friends in Israel are getting nervous.”

“We need to know their intentions so we can prepare ahead of time. If there’s a conflict the United States will line up behind Israel for the most part, with some limits. The Soviet Union will be squarely behind the Egyptians and Syrians. The danger is the major powers being drawn into direct conflict and from there an escalation of hostilities. So here’s what we’re going to do.”

“We’re going to make history gentleman and only a handful of people are going to know about it. You can be one of them. Up to this point our project has been confined to the here and now. In other words we haven’t stretched ourselves. But we’ve gotten concrete results from these two kids haven’t we? And if they can see things happening now, things that aren’t in front of them, taking it a step further means they might be able to see what’s going to happen. In other words, we’re going to have our young friends predict the future for us.”

“Wait, wait, just a minute, Mr. Thorne,” Farrow said, holding up a hand. “There’s some things we need to get out in the open before we even try this. First of all, everything we’ve done in the past has been stuff we can verify. In most cases we already knew the answers so it was just verifying what we knew to establish a baseline of reliability. You with me so far?” He got a nod from Thorne, a wave of the hand in a keep going gesture.

“Okay, but now we’re talking about predicting the future. Fine, we can let them try it and see what happens. We may get nothing. To them, it may be like looking at a blank sheet of paper. In other words, if the future isn’t there they can’t see it. But let’s assume that they can. One, there’s no real way for us to determine if they’re seeing five minutes from now or five years from now or fifty years from now. Sure, we can tell them to concentrate on such and such a date but who knows what, or more appropriately,
when
they might be seeing?”

Farrow ran his hands over his head. He was getting charged up, working things out in his head. His excitement over the possibilities was tempered by both his fear of the man in front of him and his natural inclination to proceed with caution. Thorne wanted to plunge into this thing without a map of any kind and that was alien to the nature of the project. It was against everything he’d been trained for. Thorne was plunging into some kind of unknown territory.

“Secondly,” he went on, “There’s the idea that by simply observing, we take the chance on changing things. Suppose Cassie and Ronnie both see a conflict, a major war that would occur in the region. If allowed to happen without our knowledge it may be that it could be contained, there’s no escalation, you see?”

“On the other hand if we act on their information, if we prepare to support Israel, we build up supplies, we concentrate forces and do everything possible to ensure the success of our allies, that’s a visible and detectable move of aggression to the Soviets. We could end up pushing this thing way past what it would be otherwise. We could change the natural course of events into something much worse.”

“What would you suggest?” Thorne asked.

Farrow sighed. “I can’t make any suggestions. Nobody has ever done this kind of thing before. I can only suggest strongly that if we do get anything, and that’s a big if, that it’s handled with the utmost care. Remember, any information we get is totally unproven. It would take years of study on this to create any kind of reliability factor, any way of acting on information with some kind of assurance that we’re not creating an unpredictable situation. What we’re doing in essence is creating a paradox. And there’s another thing.”

“What might that be Mr. Farrow?”

“We’re giving them too much information. We start laying out maps and asking direct questions and we put the whole project in danger. They get scared, they tell their parents, they tell their friends, whatever. Without their cooperation and the cooperation of their parents we’re done.”

Thorne nodded his head. “Points well taken Mr. Farrow. As for their cooperation, we’ll have that, I assure you. As for the rest, we’ll proceed as planned and I’ll forward your concerns along with the results. Is that satisfactory?”

Farrow and Ruff looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders. It was about all they could ask for.

“Well then we’re agreed. We give them a date three months from now and another six months from now. We’ll compare their answers and try to create a scenario from there. All information comes through me and I’ll forward it with all cautions in place. Anything else?”

They got on the bus at Elysian Field and Chef Menteur and headed home, leaving
Cassie’s Aunt Julie after an earnest promise to be careful and call when they arrived. Ronnie spent most of the ride lost in his own head, trying to think things through. He was shaken and scared but didn’t want to communicate that to Cassie, who was crying quietly beside him as the bus rocked and waved its way east. It was a matter of taking what they knew and making a plan he thought, but he couldn’t see a clear plan. Running was an option but to where? Faking their way through it was another option. Ronnie had the unshakeable feeling they’d been pulled into things too far already.

It wasn’t just Farrow and Ruff anymore. This thing had worked its way up the chain and there were people involved who wouldn’t stop. He could feel that. He’d caught the madness of Thorne out of the air. The older man he had gotten no feel for, but at least he didn’t give off danger as Thorne did. Thorne would use them. They meant nothing to him. They were simply tools and the man on the other end of the line didn’t know them at all. It would be easy for him to see them the same way as Thorne. He thought again of running. But that left their families, not to mention the fact that they had to eat and sleep someplace, and the idea of his mother and father not being there, left behind to agonize over him made him want to cry himself. He knew
Cassie was thinking the same things but couldn’t bring himself to voice those thoughts just yet. The safe thing, at least for now, was to somehow convince Farrow and Ruff that they couldn’t get anything from them anymore. It was the smallest of hopes, but it was still there. Keeping them at bay for the time being was the only out he could see in this whole mess.

Cassie
has stopped her crying by the time they crossed the Danziga Bridge. She was staring out of the bus window. Ronnie watched her out of the corner of his eye. As the shops and street signs and people passed he could see the change start to come over her. When they’d left her Aunt Julie’s, Cassie had been quiet but visibly upset. Now he could see her working things over in her own mind. He was afraid to ask her to voice her thoughts but he knew this girl was no pushover. She was working things out. He sat and waited, doing his own thinking. He knew they’d find something and when they did it would probably come more from Cassie than from him. He decided at that moment that whatever she came up with he would go along with it. What other choice did they have but to stick together?

They got off the bus and headed towards
Cassie’s. They had gone barely a block into the neighborhood, passing the library where they had spent their Saturday sitting underneath the shade of the tree. Just past the library building itself Cassie stopped and turned around to face the structure. “Do you know these woods, Ronnie?” she asked.

“What? Well, sure. I’ve spent plenty of time in them. Why?”