Touch No Evil Page 4
Of course, none of this means anything to her. She sighs, places her tablet back on the nightstand, fluffs her two pillows up against the headboard, and leans back against them. Why is her past shrouded in fog while her future sometimes appeared with crystal clarity—so much so that she often mistook it for the present? She has struggled with that sensation all of her life. Certain parts of her past just don’t align well with her memory, but her present—and future—reality tended to fill in the missing parts.
Weird, she knows. And no one seems to understand her when she tries to explain it, so she quit trying and keeps the weirdness to herself.
Maybe I’m an alien or something. Some hybrid creature no one understands.
The same memories of her childhood always come to mind whenever she tries to remember anything. Not that she had any bad or traumatic memories, but that also forms the root of her problem. No one normal grows up with such a storybook perfect life, not even the daughter of a powerful family. In fact, those people often have the most baggage behind the scenes. Yet, every time she tries to remember her past, she catches snips and bits of the little girl she used to be, living like a fairy-tale princess. No bad memories. No dead pets, no fights with the parents, no fights with friends… she can’t ever remember being devastated, heartbroken, or even furious.
Julia shakes her head. It’s just so weird and confusing. Did everyone go through this? Or did I get lucky and turn out to be the world’s only oddball freak?
What kind of person dreams of a little boy killing their father, and smiling about it. The kid didn’t even do anything but touch him. She nibbles on her lip, mulling it over. Perhaps her father will have a heart attack, and the boy simply thinks it amusing to watch a grown man—the president—collapse. He looks young, maybe five or six, too young to understand a heart attack.
Yes. That must be it. Her father must’ve suffered a heart attack at that exact moment. It’s not like the mere touch of a small boy’s hand could kill someone. But does that mean her dream is prophetic?
Ugh. Get a grip. I’m just worried.
She shakes her head and tries to relax, knowing today will be a big day. The best idea she can come up with at the moment entails sneaking in a few more minutes of sleep. So she closes her eyes and tries to focus on something that always brings her peace, a technique she’d been taught long ago, though she can’t remember who taught it to her or why.
Julia concentrates, imagining a field of infinite darkness containing a butterfly with rainbow wings fluttering along. It takes her only a moment before a darting swath of color interrupts the void. She reaches out with her mind toward the butterfly, knowing the peaceful movement of its colorful wings will soothe her troubled spirit, as it always does.
The instant her fingertips touch the gossamer wing, a feeling of peace spreads over her. Julia sometimes imagines herself as the butterfly, with soft but curiously powerful wings that let her turn full circles and glide in long fluttering arcs. The wings keep her aloft even in driving rain or strong winds. Curiously, a hummingbird zips up and hovers right in front of her face. Did she imagine this delightful little creature? Surely, it must be in her head. All of it, the butterfly, the gliding over the meadow, the vast nothingness she used to ground herself before that—all of it comes from her mind.
Imagination or not, Julia looks past the bird’s slender beak and notes the two tiny eyes glistening like drops of dew in the morning sun. The contrast with the emerald of the diminutive creature’s head and the sparkling ruby of its throat makes the eyes all the more alluring. The moment she really locks in with her gaze, the little bird zips away and hovers, then darts back to her. The bird repeats the maneuver, and after a few back and forths, Julia understands the bird wants her to follow it.
What’s happening?
As the butterfly, she flaps after the little bird while it dashes over the city of Rome. Julia flies as fast as she can, although she can’t keep up with the hummingbird, which frequently pauses to wait for her, hovering. Soon, she realizes the bird has led her to Vatican City; indeed, it swoops down toward it. Julia dives as well, although she doesn’t so much swoop as flutter like a scrap of paper catches in the wind. The feathered creature hovers over two men and a woman speaking to another man. The men are handsome; the woman is striking in an athletic way. Something familiar lurks in the woman’s eyes, and Julia finds herself staring into them with great intensity.
A scream erupts below.
The hummingbird darts off into a tunnel between buildings. Straining to keep up, Julia flaps her filament wings hard. Not far from the entrance to the underground passage, a man struggles to drag an elegantly dressed young woman into a side tunnel. The woman thrashes, kicking, screaming, and clawing. The hummingbird swoops closer, leading Julia deeper into the passageway. The desperate woman fights hard to resist her abductor, but can’t overpower him. In the midst of her panic, she seems to freeze in time and stare straight at the butterfly. Julia gasps when she locks eyes with the well-dressed woman―herself. The man with his arm around her throat puts a gun to her head.
The vision cuts off, hurling her back to the hotel room…
Julia snaps out of her daydream to the sound of her own voice screaming.
Chapter Seven
Gary, aka Geryon, isn’t happy.
Being outsmarted by Hope, a little girl, doesn’t help his attitude. His student has obviously learned some things about time travel that he hasn’t been able to figure out. Transferring, as he calls it, was easier as a kid, but as he got older, he had less control over the process. He should have known better than to attempt going after her. He may as well try to chase a child through a play area at one of those pizza places with all the games and crap. Children can scurry like little rats through all of those tunnels and slides with ease. An adult simply can’t match their pace.
He and Echidna pursued her when she fled from the cave. Echidna grabbed her leg an instant before the two of them disappeared. He tried to follow the path of energy the kid left across time, but the traces had been too minuscule. He lost it and wound up having to return to the present, hoping he’d nab the brat when she returned, but he popped back in right in the middle of a major firefight, and almost wound up dead. That he didn’t take a bullet amounted to pure luck, and one extremely startled man who’d been only a few feet away from him when he appeared out of thin air.
Eventually, Geryon realized Hope more than likely slipped through several points in time-space in an attempt to shake him, but if Echidna gets hold of her, then maybe she will be able to make Hope bring the two of them and the scrolls back to the present. The woman has a way of forcing people to do things she wants. That, of course, makes him second-guess his feelings for her. As she had with Noah, as Jacqueline, she could’ve rather easily made him fall in love with her, too. Nah. His feelings are real.
But are hers?
Of course, the entire area disintegrated into a warzone, one too dangerous for him or anyone else to hang around. It will be just as dangerous for Hope and Echidna, though he can’t say it would have bothered him if the little brat got winged by a bullet. Bad enough she’s grown better than him at time travel, but she also played him like a violin. However, there was a safe moment before the gunfire started. He has to get back to that moment and catch Hope before she goes back in time to get the scrolls.
Pinpointing that exact instant in time down to the minute hasn’t proven easy, especially for an adult since children are much better at it. In fact, it requires several attempts before he realizes his accuracy leaves something to be desired. He finally decides to aim for approximately a half hour before Hope arrives at Qumran 4. Once there, he finds some solid cover, and waits until she arrives. Snatching her away from the three PSI agents protecting her will not be easy, though. He’ll have to create an enormous advantage for himself—but a brilliant idea strikes him.
He can return well before Hope arrives, study each agent as they approach, memorize where they
position themselves and what they do, then slip back to the original time. If he repeats the process until he knows exactly how things will play out, he will be able to find that one moment of weakness where he can slip in and nab Hope before anyone realizes what happened.
The first agent who arrives at Qumran 4 is the man upon whom Echidna has worked her special talent of deception: Noah. Having been in love with her from the first moment he met her, Geryon loathed Echidna’s assignment to seduce and marry Noah. She played the part of Jacqueline well, the perfect, dutiful wife. Poor Noah. Yes, it will be a delight to take the man out.
Geryon watches Noah’s every move, slips back in time, then watches everything play out again, making certain to memorize every place and every action. He can keep going back over and over it again as many times as necessary until he feels confident that nothing will surprise him.
When the other two PSI agents arrive, he eagerly studies them as well, getting a handle on exactly where Hope might be, and when and where it will be best to grab her—but he notices a problem: Hope isn’t with them… at all.
“But that’s impossible,” he whispers. “She has to be with them.”
He waits in the shadows, watching, but in all of those surveillances, Hope never appears. Once again, he transfers back in time to before Noah arrives. Again, he watches Noah, this time even more closely, and realizes Noah hasn’t come alone. The way he moves suggests he is obviously with someone, but Geryon can’t find any trace of another person. They’ve somehow become… invisible? That unseen person must be Hope.
Invisible?
He jumps back twenty or so minutes and waits again, hiding behind the statue closest to where Hope will stand. He’s observed this scene so many times, it feels like a favorite movie he’s watched every day since college. Eventually, Noah walks a little past Geryon’s hiding place, leaving the invisible child only two feet away from him. No one else has a view of him, so he takes advantage of the perfect moment and lunges out to grab the kid.
His arms swipe through empty air.
Stunned, Geryon almost doesn’t remember to jump back into cover before Noah turns toward him. He makes it out of sight at the last possible second but stays in this timeline.
“Did you see something move?” asks Noah.
Silence.
“Huh, odd. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Maybe I am nervous.” Noah chuckles and pats empty air about where a kid’s head would be.
Geryon’s brain turns into a metaphorical block of concrete. How in the hell? The child has been here, in this time, of that he is certain. But, somehow, she doesn’t exist in the time travel past. Something shields or cloaks her in this timeline.
But what? And how?
Furious, Geryon punches the statue, breaking a finger and gashing open three knuckles. He bites back the cry of pain, and scowls at the blood dripping from his broken hand.
That, too, is Hope’s fault.
***
Echidna hates sand.
She hates it even more since it has found its way into every conceivable crevice and crease of her body. Her once-comfortable dress has become a toga made out of sandpaper. With every step she takes, it rakes at her flesh, even the tender parts.
In her desperate dive to latch onto Hope, she’d even gotten sand in her mouth. No matter how many times she works up a mouthful of saliva and swishes it around, she continues to find granules of sand in her teeth. Near the point of screaming in frustration, she does her best to clean grit out of her eyes, ears, and nose. The rest of the sand in her garments will have to wait until she has more time to attend to it.
Then again, time might be all I have.
The realization dawns on her that she is not only stuck in the middle of nowhere, but the chances of Geryon finding the exact time in which Hope has left her amounts to impossible.
“Curse the luck,” she growls. If he had only done what she’d told him to do… if he had forced the girl to give them the scrolls instead of being stupid enough to let her trick him…
As soon as she gets back to the twenty-first century, if that ever happens, Echidna will make sure that little brat has a permanent piece of duct tape over her mouth. She’d only take it off to let her eat, and even that would be an intermittent kindness at best. Hope has a job to do, a purpose, and like a million-dollar missile, the brat will only live long enough to fulfill her purpose.
Nothing infuriates her in that moment more than how that child has proved immune to her mental influence. That isn’t how things work. People do what Echidna wants. No one defies her—especially not a whiny little girl.
Echidna snarls. Indeed, it is Geryon’s fault that she’s stuck in the middle of a sand dune at an unknown point in time. How far back has Hope taken her? Spitting out yet more sand, she pushes herself to her feet and scans the area. Her heart sinks. In all directions, as far as she can see, only endless, rolling dunes continue to the horizon. Nothing is visible but desert for hundreds of miles. The city of Jerusalem was here for many millennia. How can there now be… nothing? No life. And no water, either.
Going back in time is one thing. Going to another place is another. Hope doesn’t possess that skill. No one does. No, this is the spot where Jerusalem should be. It must be. But it’s not!
How far back has that little wench taken me?
Something gnaws at her, and not the fear that threatens to overwhelm her. She steadies herself as a hot wind rocks her unsteady perch atop the sand dune where she has climbed so she can see farther. Sand dunes. Yes, sand dunes! At no point in recorded history has this part of Israel been covered in sand dunes and no city. As far as she knows, psychics who can jump across time always remain in the same geographic location—only the clock changes. Yet, her present surroundings defy that notion.
Impossible.
Where are the Judean Mountains?
The realization comes over her that she is lost. Utterly lost. Not just in time, but in place.
Hope has somehow not only gone back in time, but traveled to a different geographical location. Or, maybe she went incredibly forward in time, perhaps after some global catastrophe reshaped the landscape of Israel into an open desert.
“What the hell has she done?”
After a while of staring in frustrated confusion, she focuses on a higher dune in the near distance and makes her way toward it for no other reason than it offers a better vantage point. Sand shifts under her feet, sending her tumbling down the slope. She doesn’t want another mouthful, so she holds back the urge to curse as she rolls over and over before finally crashing flat in a wadi between dunes.
A stream of obscenities trails out of her mouth as she pulls herself upright. With the cover of dunes on both sides, she strips long enough to shake sand out of her shirt, pants and flats. Here, in the low part between dunes, the sand is cool, but elsewhere, the desert scorches her feet. Cursing under her breath, she wipes a hand at herself in a feeble effort to reduce the amount of sand clinging to her skin. After dressing again, she waves her arms like a drunken ostrich to steady herself on the way up the next dune.
Echidna treks onward, glancing back over her shoulder occasionally to use her footprints—and fall marks—as a guide to keep going in a straight line. The sun bears down on her: hot, piercing, relentless.
Hours later, she crests the steep dune and collapses. She needs water, and badly. Shielding her eyes, she gazes out into the distance as a hot wind slaps her shirt at her body and whips her hair about her. A sight clearly too good to be true awaits her: a patch of greenery surrounding a small lake, walled by palm trees.
“Mirage or oasis?” she asks the wind. She can’t tell which, due to heat blur, but there’s only one way to find out if it’s real.
Summoning the last of her strength, she removes her shirt and ties it around her head, then works her way down the other side of the dune toward the shimmering green in the far distance.
Chapter Eight
I can “go within” anywhere, oft
en at a moment’s notice.
Earlier, we learned from Logan that he found something else in the scrolls. The prophesied Ultimate Evil—like the Ultimate Good—will be marked by a symbol as well. An anarchy sign, the A within a circle.
The team decides it’s time to call upon our gifts, each of us utilizing the skills we’d been born with and trained to use. Mine, of course, is long-distance eavesdropping.
I have my teachers to thank for this. No matter Simms’ current inclinations and motives, he and his team have known exactly how to bring out the best in me. Most important, they explained my gifts and how I could do things normal people can’t. With their guidance, I experience few surprises—and a whole lot of wonderment.
They started working with me when I was an adolescent, shortly after my father’s death. Sadly, my mother has not been capable of caring for me after losing my father. Or so I’ve been told. Her slow decline into insanity, which I believe started when I was quite young, began with a gradual erosion of her mental faculties—and ended with a break from reality. Later, I was brought to visit her a few times, but she never acknowledged or spoke to me. I can still picture her in a hospital bed, staring off into space, oblivious. I spent many years wishing only to hear her voice again, but she never speaks. At least, not to me.
In light of recent events, I wonder if Simms had something to do with throwing my mother into her mental hell.
I believe my dad had many psychic gifts that he kept from me. Those gifts caused him to design the GEPSI program in the beginning. I can’t help but question if he ever imagined that Simms, or any future successor, could pervert his work into a weapon to use against the world.
A million questions bounce around my head about my father. I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answers. In fact, the more I think things through, the more I question the circumstances around my mother, too. She’s been mute for over a decade. Could she be hiding things, or is she a victim of something darker?