Chapter Thirty-Three

Iranian telepaths were the spearhead of a successful coup against the Mullahs, who had declared telepathy immoral and ordered that all telepaths be put to death by the religious police. The new regime promised to open its borders, develop democratic institutes and eventually a rule of law. Unconfirmed reports from Tehran claim that former regime loyalists, radical mullahs and corrupt government officials are being ruthlessly purged by the new regime. Thousands are attempting to flee to Iraq or Pakistan, fearing for their lives and – in some cases – their foreign bank accounts.

-AP News Report, 2015

“Mr. President, get down!”

The President had no time to react before he was tackled by one of the telepaths, who knocked him to the ground and lay on top of him. He’d gone through emergency drills before, where the Secret Service had tried to prepare him for the day an assassin got through the perimeter and tried to kill him, but it was still a terrible shock. He hit the ground hard enough to stun, yet part of his mind kept calm and active. It was pure self-preservation. Losing his grasp on what was going on might get him killed. It might even end his political career.

“Stay down,” his bodyguard whispered. “They’re closing in on us.”

***

“I can’t find them,” one of the operators said. Alice sensed the desperation in his voice and shared it. The President’s life and the future of the Telepath Corps – the future of America itself – was at stake, yet they couldn’t locate the threat. “They’re hiding themselves somehow...”

“Got them,” another operator said. “Three of the reporters are not the people they were claiming to be.”

Alice cursed. They’d taken every precaution, or so she’d thought, and the enemy had still managed to get into the perimeter. How the hell had they done it? She shook her head, putting the thought aside for the moment. They would solve that mystery once Leo and his gang were safely in custody, or dead.

“Art, it’s Alice,” she said. “I’m uploading the details to your terminal now. Go get them, tiger.”

“Understood,” the reply came. “We’re moving in now.”

***

Roger blinked in surprise as the President was knocked to the ground by a hulking bodyguard in an ill-fitting uniform. A moment later, the fake Marines – if they were real Marines he would have been astonished, as he was sure that no one who had ever been through Marine training would ever slouch while on duty – turned and lifted their weapons, pointing towards the reporters. Others came running from all over the place, carrying their own weapons, even though there was no apparent threat. Roger stared, unsure what was going on, or of what he should do. It almost seemed as though the journalists were about to be shot down on the spot.

“Hands in the air,” the leader bellowed. Roger, shocked beyond words, complied with the shouted command. The Marines looked nervous, with itchy trigger fingers. It dawned on him that he could get shot and he concentrated on looking as harmless as possible, even though he was terrified. He’d been at Harvard and the Washington riot, but this looked even more threatening. “Spread out and – no, don’t move!”

Three of the reporters were moving suddenly. Roger saw one of them and froze as a chill ran down his spine. He had thought that he had known the reporters, but he saw now that they hadn’t been who they claimed to be. They’d been telepaths posing as reporters, using a low-level mental field to convince the reporters to accept them naturally, without panicking or trying to sound the alarm. He sensed, somehow, a sudden wave of mental force directed at the Marines, which was effortlessly dispelled by a second wave of mental force. The Marines, he saw now, were telepaths themselves. The Telepath Corps had used Roger and his fellow reporters – and the President himself – as bait in a trap.

He tried to move, to lash out at the rogue telepaths, but he was unable to even twitch. The mental battle held him and the other reporters frozen; the rogue telepaths, he realised with an involuntary shudder, were using him as a human shield. They had to know that they couldn’t escape, but somehow they seemed unwilling to give up and just surrender. The mental pressure in Roger’s head grew stronger. How long would it be before he felt mental whispers reaching into his mind, turning him against the Telepath Corps and turning him into yet another mental slave?

“Give up,” one of the telepaths said. “You can’t escape.”

“You should be with us,” one of the rogues countered. He sounded as if it was a struggle to breathe, let alone to speak, but then there were only three rogues against nearly thirty telepaths from the Telepath Corps. “You could join us and...”

“No,” the telepath said. “You need to give up, now.”

***

Art held back from the mental gestalt, watching as the rogue telepaths were trapped in a web of mental force. He wondered if Leo – if it was Leo there – appreciated the irony. He and his fellow terrorists had pioneered the technique, which allowed a number of weaker telepaths to ally their mental powers and crush the opposition. Now, the Telepath Corps used it to hold the rogues in place. The rogues were tough – and confident in their own superiority, which made them tougher – but they couldn’t stand up forever.

He scowled. Intentionally or otherwise, the rogues had taken the reporters hostage. Art wasn’t immune to the common military belief that the only good reporter was a dead one, but dead reporters would make for bad press. The reporters had almost no mental defences at all, leaving them caught in the mental crossfire, which might lead to mental damage. The whole battle had to be ended soon.

“Snipers; take aim,” he ordered. It was an unnecessary order, yet it had to be spoken aloud, just to confirm that the snipers were in place. The USMC had placed forty snipers in Washington, waiting patiently for their chance to shoot a few terrorists. Art hadn’t been blind to the dangers of including snipers in the defence plans, but there had been no other choice. “Prepare to open fire.”

The rogues sensed the snipers taking aim and reacted, precisely as he had hoped. They pushed out a wave of mental force, hoping to overwhelm the gestalt by sheer power. It wasn’t enough; the gestalt pushed back with all the force of thirty telepaths working in concert. The rogues couldn’t pull their own gestalt back into place before it was too late and powerful mental commands froze them solid. The reporters collapsed as the mental crossfire came to an end, several leaking blood from their noses and ears. Art keyed his radio and issued a quick order. The reporters would need medical attention as soon as possible.

He ran over to the three telepaths, who had been quickly bound and secured by their captors, and pulled away the hats they’d worn to add to their disguise. They’d been lucky, he realised sourly, using their clothing to help make their disguise believable. The Secret Service would go ballistic when they realised what had happened. Everyone who came near the President was going to require a deep telepathic peek just to make sure that he wasn’t an assassin concealed under a mental shield.

“Leo isn’t among them, sir,” one of the other telepaths reported. Art scowled. A brief glance revealed no sign of Alvin Greenwood either. “The bastard is probably watching events from a distance.”

Art keyed his radio, nodding thoughtfully. The entire area was blanketed in sensors. It would be interesting to see who bolted, or if someone was somewhere they shouldn’t be. The telepaths shouldn’t be able to fool the machines, even if they could fog the minds behind the machines. The operators should be safe from mental interference, although Art warned himself to be careful. Leo had shown a remarkable talent for pushing his telepathy into the fields of the ‘impossible.’

He reached down for one of the captives and pulled him into a sitting position. “I don’t have time to bandy words with you,” he said, sharply. The rogue telepath looked stunned. Art suspected that he, like Elizabeth, might have been having doubts about the terrorist vocation, although it was clear that he had been a willing participant in an assassination plot. “You either tell us what we need to know, or we form a new gestalt and rip it out of your mind. If that happens, your mind will be destroyed and you’ll spend the rest of your life with the mental ability of a baby. It’s your choice.”

Art leaned closer. “You just tried to kill the President,” he said, seeing objections and protests forming on the rogue’s face. “No one is going to complain if we rough you up a little before sucking everything worthwhile out of your mind. You’re going to go into a secure facility and be used as a test subject for all kinds of dubious experiments, unless you tell us what we want to know.”

He watched the rogue struggling for words. Art felt little guilt, or shame; the rogue had decided to join a terrorist group and commit acts of terrorism. Whatever justification he thought he had was hardly important compared to the lives lost – or ruined – at Washington, let alone the economic damage the rogues had caused. And it helped that the rogue had gone to a very liberal college. He probably believed all kinds of lies about the military, including the ones about soldiers being willing to use torture at the drop of a hat and eating babies for breakfast. Art had seen too many self-assured young men come up against a hard dose of reality. He’d break.

“Leo was watching from our base,” the rogue finally stammered. His entire body was shaking; Art could pick up a constant refrain of don’t hurt me running through his mind as his mental shields began to collapse under sheer panic. “He said that he wanted to deploy the others to cause maximum havoc. He said...”

He broke off. “He knows,” he added. “My God, he knows...”

Art stumbled backwards as the rogue convulsed, his entire body twisting unnaturally and then falling to the ground, stunned. It didn’t take more than a tiny mental probe to realise that Leo, somehow, had reached into his former comrade’s mind and scrambled it. Art cursed under his breath and looked at the other two captives, who had also collapsed. They’d all been mentally disrupted and it would be hours before they recovered, if at all.

“Damn it,” he swore. “Where is the bastard?”

“You may be in luck,” Alice said, through his earpiece. “One of the UAVs is tracking two figures heading away from the White House, heading downtown.”

Art knew then, with a certainly that refused to brook any contradiction. “Keep tracking them,” he ordered. “I’m going after them.”

He sprinted down the streets, ignoring the policemen and Marines who had gathered at the edge of the inner perimeter. Art hadn’t managed to keep up with his daily run since he’d developed telepathy, but it was still a fair bet that he was quicker than Leo, if not Alvin Greenwood. The earpiece kept whispering in his ear, telling him that the two fugitives were attempting to avoid the ring of steel that made up the outer security zone, yet they couldn’t do that as long as they were being tracked. Two more telepaths popped up outside the zone, using their telepathy to spark off a riot, only to be shot down by weapons mounted on one of the UAVs. Their bodies would be picked up later for identification.

“They’re ahead of you,” Alice said. Art turned the corner and saw them. Leo looked desperate, thinner than he’d been the last time they’d met, but Greenwood looked...amused. A moment later, they formed a gestalt and lashed out at Art, slamming into his mental shields and sending him staggering backwards. “Art?”

Art nodded, congratulating himself on having the foresight to push the limits on practice duels after the encounter with the mind controller. Leo was powerful, all right; perhaps one of the most powerful telepaths in the country, but Art had drilled with telepaths who had originated in rival organisations. The Marine in him had refused to be beaten by a Ranger and vice versa and both of them had risked mental damage while fighting each other. Two untrained telepaths couldn’t overwhelm him, even if he couldn’t overwhelm them.

“Hold the drones back,” he ordered, steadying himself. The two rogues had slowed their assault, perhaps realising that it wasn’t going to succeed. Or, he warned himself, perhaps preparing for a more subtle assault. Art raised his voice, hoping to talk some sanity into their heads before it was too late. “You have to know that you’re not getting out of here.”

“And we won’t let you take us in,” Leo said. His voice sounded high-pitched, as if he was on the verge of panic. Art felt no sympathy. He’d looked into Leo’s background and while he might have felt some sympathy for the young Leo, he felt nothing for the man who had used mundane men and women as tools and victims. Terrorists ruined their own cause when they became terrorists. “You’re on the wrong side. How can you fight for a government that intends to exterminate us all?”

Art scowled at him. “There are remote drones orbiting high overhead, controlled from a remote bunker,” he said. “If the two of you manage to overwhelm me, they will drop bombs on your head. No telepath ever born has been able to survive a bullet though the head, young man, so tell me – what do you think a bomb will do to you?”

“You’re bluffing,” Leo said, desperately. “No one would allow you to drop missiles on Washington and...”

“Read my emotions,” Art said, dryly. There was nothing worse than a person who forgot what he was and besides, Art was making no attempt to conceal his inner feelings. “You can tell for yourself that I am not lying. Your mad crusade ends now. The only question is if you live long enough to stand trial, or...”

“And you will die as well,” Leo said, wildly. “You’ll die...”

“Occupational hazard,” Art snarled, feeling genuine anger for the first time. “I knew the day that I enlisted in the Corps that I might die in the service of my country. I knew that my ass would be put in danger, I knew that enemies out there might be trying to kill me, I knew that I had sworn to put my life between my country and war’s desolation...and silly fucks like you, back home in peace and prosperity, bitch and moan about what we have to do to preserve your peace and prosperity.”

He allowed some of the anger to leak into his voice. “Don’t you dare talk to me about death,” he snapped. He pulled memories out of his head and blasted them towards the two rogues. “I saw the bodies at Washington, the bodies you left in your wake. Now give up or die. I don’t have time any longer.”

Greenwood moved quickly, almost as quickly as Art himself. He’d been holding a pistol within his coat pocket, an old trick. Before Art could stop him, he turned and fired – at Leo. The rogue telepath leader looked surprised as the bullet blasted through his head, a second before Art drew his own pistol and put a round through Greenwood’s arm, sending his pistol clattering to the ground. Greenwood fell backwards, laughing. Art had no time for laughs.

“Why?” he demanded. A nasty thought crossed his mind, but he buried it. “Why did you...?”

Greenwood hit the ground with a gurgle. Art realised in horror that he’d cracked a dummy tooth, one that had released poison into his mouth. The rogue operative was dying right in front of him, taking his secrets to the grave.

“So you will never know,” Greenwood gurgled. He was starting to foam at the mouth. “You can take your fucking feelings and...”

Art ran forwards, forgetting his safety. He pressed his hands against the dying man’s temples and plunged into his mind. The poison was already sending Greenwood into an uneasy slumber from which he would never awaken, weakening his mental shields and leaving him defenceless. Even so, Art had the uneasy feeling that Greenwood’s mind was shattering around him and that he couldn’t stay long, or he would be dragged down into darkness with the former terrorist.

Memories flared up around him in a blinding jumble. Greenwood’s life was flashing in front of his eyes. The early days at school, the decision to join the army, Ranger School, his recruitment by the CIA, his activities in Iraq, a Kurdish girl who had won his heart, the bitterness of knowing that he’d been betrayed by his own country...and that the betrayal had claimed the life of his girl. And then...a name flashed across his mind. A name that Art recognised, someone very important and dangerous...

And then Greenwood’s mind shattered.

He came to several hours later, lying on a hospital bed. Alice was sitting beside him, looking down at him, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Art felt a sudden surge of love for her and reached for her hand, even though he felt too weak to do anything else.

“You idiot,” Alice said, after they’d kissed. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Art shrugged, although – if the truth were to be told – he’d never been so badly scared in his life. “We had to know what he knew before he died,” he said. “We had to know the truth.”

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his head spinning. “And I have to go,” he said, ignoring her objections. “I have to go see a man about a dog.”