I sat there a moment. Kiza Kazadi knew how powerful he was, but I didn’t think that Jack Boynton did. He could effectively take control over someone’s else’s reality, with the only stipulation being that he ultimately had to return them to the present time and place that he took them from.
I thought of all the things I could do with Jack’s powers. Give some repugnant politician a ten year jail term in the blink of an eye. Make an assailant lose track of where I was by layering a minute or two of fake reality on top of the real. Expose someone to their heart’s desire – or their worst nightmare.
Maybe it was for the best Jack was only using it to help people go on holiday.
Still, I couldn’t help but question his wisdom on coming out to the world, especially after my confrontation with the Miami mob boss Frank Halloran and the chilling words he had uttered, threatening my family. Sure, that threat was ended, but did any of us truly think there wouldn’t be more where that came from?
Which reminded me of H’s assertion that I was being watched. I had allowed myself to think that after my confrontation with the assassins, and especially after wiping out the Halloran crime family, that no one in their right mind would be tempting fate by crossing me, but I figured I may as well make sure.
So I geared up – just in case – and took to my astral form. Invisible, I flew up above the apartment building to scan the area.
If someone was watching me, then likely they were doing it 24/7, and it would have to be somewhere they had a clear line of sight on my front door. Obviously they would be doing so covertly, so maybe from a van or other parked vehicle, or from a building interior or rooftop – or from bushes and scrub.
I scanned around. Walpole along Route 12 was not overly crowded; there were only so many places that could hide spooks. I started with parked vehicles, even a mobile lunch meat vendor, flying through them to check occupancy, but no watchers.
I started combing through the stores and commercial buildings nearby: the garage, the creamery, the farm store, nada – no surveillance. I was starting to relax. After all, who would be stupid enough to spy on the Arbiter of Life and Death?
On a hunch I checked all the other apartments in my building, but no spooks there either. That left only a small handful of residential houses to the northeast.
I found them at 554 Main Street, camped out with a roomful of electronic surveillance equipment, in front of a window pointed right at my apartment building, only 500 feet away from my front door.
I recoiled back into my body, a deep chill going through me. Of course they couldn’t hurt me – but they could hurt – or threaten to hurt – my family. My father had long since passed away, but my mother and all but one of my siblings lived close by, in Cheshire county.
And this wasn’t some short-sighted mob guy, this was likely some smart, compartmentalized covert group, maybe government ops, or maybe completely independent – either way, it didn’t look like these guys were fooling around. These were the kind of people whose contingency plans had contingency plans. And if they were surveilling me, knowing who I was and what I could potentially do, they were probably prepared for me as well.
This was getting all too serious. For the first time in what felt like a long time, I felt fear.
I made a quick decision, went astral again, and went back to the spooks, to turn the tables and spy on them, to see what I could glean. It was still vanishingly unlikely that they or anyone else could detect me in astral form.
There were two young but hardened and professional men at their posts, one using various equipment to surveil, and the other doing some kind of paperwork, logging observations possibly. In my head I called them the watcher and the scribe.
The watcher said, “Wait a moment, his body’s going cold again, looks like he popped back out of it. But he’s wearing the full get up including his facemask.” I could see the watcher consulting various screens, one seemed to show heatmaps of my apartment right through the walls, the other showed ghostly outlines of the contents of my flat, including my own body – again, right through the walls.
“These Quantums give me the heebie-jeebies” remarked the scribe.
“That’s why we’re here.” replied the watcher. “Should we call it in?”
The scribe shook his head, “You know the protocol. We only call it in if he takes his body to him, or if he’s gone longer than ten minutes.”
A silence descended, which the watcher eventually broke, “Did you hear what Kazadi is doing in the Congo? Our cousins in the CIA are not happy about it. He’s deposed their puppet and destroyed the criminal underworld that they spent years setting up, all in a few hours.”
“If only we had found and killed him before he learned what he can do.” lamented the scribe.
“Him and especially our Mr. Grey.” agreed the watcher. The scribe nodded. A new silence descended.
“I wonder where he is – Grey, I mean. He usually grabs his body after he gets where he is going, I don’t like to think of him being undetectable. He could be right here and we wouldn’t even know it.” said the watcher.
“I think we would know it.” said the scribe, as an uneasy vibe passed between them. I held back from fulfilling their worst fears, although I sorely wanted to.
A minute or so later, the watcher said, “Ten minutes, better call it in.”
The scribe picked up a bulky and rugged cell phone kind of device, unlike anything you could buy commercially, and dialed way too many numbers. “This is Messenger-6,” he said into the phone, “I’m reporting that our bird flew the coop ten minutes ago, but has left his egg behind. Yes. Of course. <pause> We’ll be ready. As you say.” He hung up. “Operations says we’ll be going to phase three in 24 hours, and possibly ramping up to phase four shortly after that, so we should be prepared to take advantage of the next time Grey takes his body along or leaves his apartment normally to bug his place.”
The watcher whistled, apparently impressed. “I didn’t think we’d actually see phase three, so much manpower – are we getting reassigned to Grey’s family, or do we sit tight?” The scribe responded, “We stay on Grey, the new teams will begin to keep tabs on his family.”
My astral form didn’t prevent me from feeling even more chilled. This was getting out of hand.
The watcher broke into my looping anxiety with another comment, “You know, if we go to bug his house, he could easily return while we are there.”
The scribe countered, “If he does, we’ll be dressed like electricians and we’ll just tell him the super let us in.”
“Fifty-fifty he ends us anyways.” The watcher shook his head unhappily.
“Yeah, well, I’ll take those odds – what, you thought you were going to live forever? This isn’t about us, this is about serving and protecting the greatest country on the planet, and if we die in that service, it’s a privilege.”
The watcher looked at the scribe, and smiled. “Yes it is. Who is going to protect Americans and even the planet from these freaks if we don’t?”
“Amen, brother.” said the scribe.
I couldn’t listen to any more – nor could I go somewhere else and take my body, unless I wanted to let them bug my place. So I went back to my apartment and retook physical form, knowing they were watching me.
I felt trapped. There was only one answer that would keep my family safe. Maxwell Grey would have to disappear completely. And fast.
I had less than 24 hours. And the next time I left my apartment would probably have to be the last.
I would have to tell my family goodbye.