Chapter Twenty

Last night’s broadcast of the Jenny Dean Show – the successor to Oprah Winfrey and other such programs – featured several couples who had been torn apart by telepathy. Two of them were couples where one partner had developed telepathy and discovered that the other was hiding a guilty secret; the third was a couple where both partners had developed telepathy and found themselves unable to tolerate the other’s company. The friends and neighbours of the third couple were surprised and unanimously agreed that they were a good and loving couple.

-AP News Report, 2015

Tiffany Fieldstone was happy and wanted everyone to know it. An hour ago, she’d closed a deal for her bank that would ensure that it made a vast profit at the end of the year, practically guaranteeing herself a bonus when the time came for bankers to be rewarded. If that wasn’t enough, her manager had hinted that a slot was opening up on the board and that she – Tiffany Fieldstone – might be considered as a possible candidate. At thirty-one years old, still young and attractive, she knew she could climb high. If the board voted against her, she knew that her record was good enough to allow her to walk into a job with any other bank on Wall Street.

She smiled at the reflection of herself in the restaurant window. She knew she looked hot, if only because of the way some of her partners in the latest banking venture had spent most of their time staring at her low-cut dress rather than the figures. Not that there was anything wrong with the figures, of course, at least not as far as Tiffany was concerned. Even if their venture went bust, the bank’s ass would be covered – and so would her own. She ran her hand through her blonde hair and winked at her reflection. The young interns in the offices below her might catch the eyes of her male counterparts, but how could they ever match her?

“Ah, welcome,” the manager said, as she stepped through the door. Sven claimed to have been descended from Italians who had escaped Mussolini seventy years ago, but Tiffany did not know or care if that was actually true. All that really mattered was that Sven’s Diner served up excellent Pizza – it would have gone bankrupt swiftly in New York if it had served substandard Pizza – and that it was well away from her workplace. And it didn’t hurt that Sven was a handsome man without any of the pretensions so common in the more upscale eateries. He didn’t spend his time staring at her chest. “Your normal table is ready for you, my dear.”

“Thank you,” Tiffany said, as she took off her fur coat and placed it on the coat hook. The burning fire in the grate seemed to welcome her as she sat down. Briefly, she caught a glimpse of a hooded man sitting at another table, but he wasn’t looking at her and so she ignored him. Besides, the menu was right in front of her. Tiffany could be decisive elsewhere, even to the point of being brusque and impolite, yet Sven kept her from making her mind up quickly. So many of his dishes were simply wonderful and she had over two hours to choose and eat. She skimmed down the menu and finally decided on a loaded pizza. It was a special day for her after all.

She placed her order, suddenly realising that the hooded man had turned and was looking at her, before glancing away for a second. Tiffany realised that he had been staring at her and smiled to herself. When he looked back at her, she treated him to a smile that would have melted the heart of the coldest man in the world, wondering if he would have the nerve to ask her out. The man smiled back, rather weakly, and Tiffany met his eyes. A moment later, a wave of dizziness swept through her...

“Hey, are you all right?” Tiffany looked up in surprise. Her food was in front of her and Sven was looking down at her, concerned. “You just...were staring into space for a few minutes.”

Tiffany rubbed her forehead, confused. She’d been on top of the world a moment ago and now her head felt as if someone had filled it with cotton wool. The man who had been staring at her was gone and, no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t come up with any impression of what he actually looked like. She smelt the pizza and smiled, pushing the question of the man and her dizzy spell out of her head. Somehow, she never thought of him again while she was eating.

Sven had excelled himself, as usual, and Tiffany enjoyed the meal as much as she had her commercial victory a few hours ago. Normally, she would have gone for a walk before returning to Wall Street, but this time she had the impulse to return to her office and congratulate herself in private. Her head kept spinning and it crossed her mind that she should visit the company nurse, before she decided that it was only a small headache. She’d had worse when she’d been cramming for her exams. Besides, the last thing she wanted to do was appear weak, not when there was a chance at joining the board.

Her office – instead of a cubicle – was a sign that she was a senior and respected employee of her company. A junior employee was easy to replace – thousands entered Wall Street every year – but someone like herself, with a record of making profitable deals and transactions, was irreplaceable. She mentally patted herself on the back as she sat down in her comfy chair and stared up at the ceiling, grinning to herself. No matter what she did, or how outrageously she performed, they wouldn’t dare fire her. She’d just go into another firm and make them vast amounts of money instead. The thought of money fired her mind and she placed an email to the financial department, ordering them to send her a hundred thousand dollars in used notes. The director argued and she cut him off. She was a senior banking employee – how dare he stand in her way? The money arrived barely twenty minutes afterwards...

It crossed her mind that she really should take the money out of the building. It wasn’t easy to pack it all in her briefcase, but somehow she managed it, even though she had to secure the case with an extra strap. Walking to a beat that only she could hear, she walked down the stairs swinging her hips and out towards the great glass doors that invited people into the building. A second later, the alarms went off and a security guard jumped up from behind a desk and ran towards her. The shock snapped Tiffany back to herself and she recoiled in horror, her brain unable to reconcile common sense with what she’d been doing, too late. The security guard knocked her to the floor – the briefcase burst open, showering money everywhere – and cuffed her hands behind her back. Tiffany, still in shock, offered no resistance.

Her last sight, before the darkness descended on her mind and she blacked out, was of a hooded man making his way away from the bank.

***

Art was feeling more than a little jet-lagged and would have done anything for a hotel bed – or even a barracks bunk – and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. He had tried to sleep on the plane, but that had proven difficult, not least because of the presence of Alice far too close to him. He couldn’t help feeling her thoughts and feelings in his mind and some of them, he knew, were too close to his own thoughts. He wanted to ask her out, yet...what kind of relationship could they have? The Telepath Corps had learned about quite a few married couples who had separated after one of the partners had become telepathic. The non-telepath might have trusted the telepath, yet there would always be a quiet nagging doubt.

“All right,” he said, once the local NYPD officer had introduced himself. The officer had been relieved to see them, much to Art’s surprise. The Telepath Corps had jurisdiction over all crimes involving telepaths, but local cops – or, worse, the FBI – often baulked at allowing any outsiders onto their patch. “What’s happened here?”

He peered through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room. A mature blonde woman was sitting on one of the chairs, her hands cuffed to make it impossible for her to leave the chair. Her face was streaked with tears and she looked to be in shock, although that might have been because of her sudden transition from successful businesswoman to common criminal. Art reached out for her mind and touched a rolling mass of fear and confusion.

“Her name is Tiffany Fieldstone,” Inspector Jordon said. “She is – was, I suspect – one of the stars at her Wall Street bank. She was attempting to take a hundred thousand dollars out of the bank, apparently unaware that the money was tagged by the accountants and would trigger alarms when she tried to walk out of the building. She was arrested by the local security guard and started ranting and raving about how someone had made her do it.”

Art frowned. “And do you believe her?”

“I don’t know,” Jordon admitted. “She’s smart; her manager says that he cannot believe that she would be so dumb as to take tagged money through an alarm. With a little care, she could probably have smuggled twice as much money out of the building without setting off any alarms at all, yet she does something stupid. On the other hand...can someone be made to do something like that?”

“It’s possible,” Art said. He didn’t want to talk about it. He’d developed the power after the Harvard Blast, but every time he used it he found himself sickened by the potential. If someone had developed it without Art’s sense of morals – he found himself thinking of Leo Davidson and shivered – the results would be unpleasant. “It requires a powerful telepath and a great deal of concentration.”

“Right,” Jordon said. For the first time, Art picked up the flicker of fear that was becoming depressingly common. Jordon seemed unsure of what to do. “Can you verify that?”

“I’d have to peek inside her head,” Art said. “If I confirm her story, we can take her for treatment and make sure that the mystery telepath didn’t leave any unpleasant surprises inside her mind. If not...well, you can arrest her for grand theft and throw the book at her.”

Jordon frowned. “Will she be held responsible for what she did if someone forced her to do it?”

“No,” Alice said, flatly. “Legally speaking, she would be in the clear.”

Art nodded. “Yep,” he agreed. He winked at Alice as Jordon headed over to the door to arrange for an interview. “We have a blackmailer near Washington and a mind controller here. Do you think that the two are connected?”

“Not unless the second is intended to confuse us,” Alice said, practically. “The blackmailer thought through his plan very well. He made sure that even if his target decided to try to catch him, it would be impossible for him to be identified. The mind controller, on the other hand, didn’t realise that no one, not even a senior banker, would be able to take so much money out of the building without being stopped. He’s powerful and dangerous, but he’s not very smart.”

Art would have pressed the issue a little further, but Jordon returned before he could say anything. “Miss Fieldstone has agreed to see you,” he said. “Unless you have any special requirements, I suggest that you use the current interview room.”

“It will suffice,” Art said. He nodded to Alice and allowed Jordon to lead him through a pair of sealed doors. The police station didn’t strike him as particularly secure, but then he doubted that New York’s gangs were going to lay siege to it, as had happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, a well-built police station was the difference between life and death. “Leave us alone, please.”

Tiffany lifted her eyes as Art entered the interrogation chamber. Art didn’t need to be a telepath to know that she was on the verge of collapse. He scowled as he took in the cuffs that held her to the chair. It was obvious that she posed no physical threat and the cops should have removed the cuffs, or at least loosened them. Her hands had to be going stiff by now. Of course, there were politics involved; he suspected that her former employers had been pressing for the police to come down as hard as possible.

“My name is Art,” he said. Tiffany merely nodded slowly, as if it hurt to even move. “I am a telepath with the Telepath Corps, licensed to perform telepathic peeks for legal purposes. I need your permission to probe your mind and find out what happened.”

He tried to push as much reassurance into his voice as he could. “We can find the person who did this to you,” he added, “but you have to help us. Please let me in.”

“My career is ruined,” Tiffany said. She had a whispery voice, the result – Art figured – of too much crying while she’d been in the cell. If she had been influenced, if she had been forced to act against her will, it might well have broken her. But then, she hadn’t been directly controlled; instructions had been implanted in her mind, leaving her helpless to resist or even to know what was going on. Her mind had been pulled into a pretzel. “I...”

“It’s going to be all right,” Art said. “Please will you allow me to peek into your head...?”

Tiffany nodded. Art reached forward gently and placed his hands on her forehead. Maybe it wasn't quite the original Vulcan Mind Meld, but physical contact allowed for a deeper peek. Tiffany’s mind was a churning vortex of confusion, with thoughts and memories spewed up for brief inspection and then falling away, leaving Art wondering if her experience had driven her insane. He braced himself – contact with a mad mind could drive him insane – and pushed forward. A moment later...

He saw it, clearly. Tiffany’s mind was no longer natural. Someone had reached into her mind and stamped around inside, wreaking havoc within her thoughts and twisting her mind to the point where she no longer knew right from wrong. Her mental curves had been flattened, as if the unknown telepath had forced them to remain within set limits, and a whole series of mental commands had been inserted into her head. She wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between then and a normal thought and – like a post-hypnotic suggestion – she would have found herself compelled to justify her actions to herself.

I believe you, he sent, hoping that she would hear his mental comment. Show me what happened...

Her memories crashed around him. Her unknown tormentor had been careful, careful enough to program her mind to refuse to remember him. Art had peeked into the minds of a handful of people with repressed memories, yet they hadn’t been able to hide anything from him so effectively. But then, they’d wanted to help him – and they had known that he might see the memory, but they wouldn’t. Tiffany, on the other hand, had been programmed to hide the memories. The only consolation was that the job wasn’t done very well.

Art was walking beside Tiffany – no, he was in Tiffany – as she crowed over her success. She walked into the eatery and he was there. Tiffany’s eyes just passed over him, as if she refused to recognise his very existence. Art realised that Tiffany had to have been targeted some weeks, perhaps even a month or two, ago. It was the only explanation for how her mind had been rewritten. The Tiffany he was following had slipped into a fugue state...and orders slid into her mind. Art watched helplessly as Tiffany’s mind was violated – raped – in front of him. He reminded himself that they were memories, that they couldn’t harm him, but it didn’t help. He felt a cold burning anger deep inside him. He wanted the bastard’s head on a platter and his balls in a vice.

He looked back, flicking through the memories until he came up with the best image of the man’s face. He wasn’t a handsome man, but if he was powerful enough to control people, he probably didn’t need to be handsome. He wore a hood at all times, yet Art could see greasy dark hair and an unpleasant, very pale face. Art memorised the face and scowled, promising the unknown telepath a reckoning. He would catch him and throw him in jail...

Tiffany’s mind jerked and Art fell out of her. “It’s all right,” he promised, as her eyes started to fill up with tears. Art raised his voice. “Someone go find the handcuff keys and free her.”

Jordon and Alice entered, followed by a pair of female police officers. “Take her for a shower and then prepare her for transport elsewhere,” Art ordered, briskly. He turned to look at Jordon. “She was telling the truth.”

“Right,” Jordon said, slowly. “How do you intend to catch him?”

Art smiled. “First, I’m going to get one of your officers to help me draw up a picture of what he looks like,” he said. He held up a hand before Alice, at least, could point out that such a powerful telepath could make sure that no one saw him properly. “And then we’re going to load that image into every camera in the city. He’s somewhere around and I intend to catch him.”