Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Would they know that yet?” I asked. “I don’t know and really don’t care. This isn’t a matter of wanting to do anything. It’s all about being pushed and forced into things. I don’t like it, regardless of who is doing the pushing.”
“Neither do I,” Kieran said gruffly, casting a look back at me. “There are too many hands in this, and while life is not exactly precious on this world, we began on a moral high ground. I agree with you, Seth. We only have one option.”
“Let’s get this started, then, before I start pounding on them,” Ethan muttered, the muscles in his arms tensing in rhythm to his squeezing fists.
The clearing was getting dark now, faces shadowed in deeper streaks of black. We’d need more light soon. I did know how to glow so that would be helpful. Unlike the first time at Fuller’s mansion, I didn’t need the full effect of a daybreak and settled for a pale glow that lit the immediate area only, diffusing the light through my aura. The energy level I was playing at here was below even background noise for Gilán.
“Major, you have fifteen minutes,” I said pulling the Stone’s baffles away. Immediately the noises from outside of the circle intruded, reminding everyone that we were surrounded. Pulsing a short, circular wave of continuity of mind and body around me broke through the Tower of Babel spell and returned everyone’s ability to comprehend fairly instantly. I paused anyway, stalling, pacing in front of Echols and Calhoun.
Byrnes leaned back and said a few words to the men behind him. Two turned and walked casually and unhurriedly back to their men. There was a short hint of a scurry around the men as they issued quiet orders.
“Everybody back, now?” I asked loudly, idly kicking at the debris on the ground. “Don’t really care, actually. Agent Messner, I just want to thank you for thus far acting honestly with us. I do hope that continues, but considering the circumstances, I really don’t see your idealism surviving the next twenty or thirty minutes.”
“I… don’t understand, Mr. McClure. What do you mean?” Messner asked, cocking his head to one side.
“I didn’t understand either, initially,” I answered, glancing over my shoulder at Echols. “Dad? Would you and Peter go get Richard, please? I don’t like him being alone out there.” Dad nodded curtly then slipped away from our circle with Peter, disappearing into the dusk.
Pacing a little further up, I turned sharply on Calhoun. Pushing on his defenses harder this time, I asked, “Why is Harris hiding, Marshal?”
Calhoun stiffened at the sudden onslaught. His voice caught briefly as he answered, “I… told you I don’t know, Seth.”
Shaking my head slowly, I murmured, “No, Calhoun, you’ve lost that right. That’s reserved for family, for friends. You’ve shown yourself to be neither.”
“Seth, please—” he started.
“Don’t call me that!” I shouted, my anger getting the better of me. I ripped through his internal shields like tissue, bearing into his mind like a freight train on a toy truck. He screamed. Screamed and fell to his knees, grabbing at his head at the pain. I was out of his head before his knees hit the dirt, before the scream left his lungs. I whirled around and stormed away from him, continuing my angry pacing. The inner circle increased in size as people back away from us, afraid of me now except for my brothers and Jimmy. I got two minutes of stalling as everyone stared at Calhoun and tried not to get caught staring at me.
“You’ve lied to me, Marshal,” I said loudly, finally, once his whimpering had died down. “Not once, but twice now, and that has placed my family and me in an untenable situation.”
“I… was doing… my job,” he croaked, the pain gone but the memory of it still alive, especially in the muscles so recently jerked and wracked with shock.
“Yeah, you were,” I said calmly, nodding. “You do know, however, that excuse was pretty much thrown out wa-aa-aay back at Nuremberg, right? Over seventy years ago? ‘I was following orders’ isn’t an excuse anymore, for anything.” I looked over at Echols. “Remember that, Colonel, for when I come to you. It’s a lame excuse.”
Stalking back to Calhoun and squatting down in front of him, I said, “But let’s get back to today. When I asked you why Harris was hiding, you said you didn’t know why. But you do know why, don’t you, Calhoun. You’ve talked to him since he came back from his day off, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted, weakly.
“Ah, a small truth, finally!” I cried in mock triumph, glaring at him. “I’ll save you the trouble of having to admit anything else. I just don’t care anymore. Stand up.”
I resumed pacing, staying quiet while he struggled to stand. No one offered to help, not even Messner. There was a conflicting set of emotions in the FBI agent, a sort of sorrow at losing an ally mixed with a satisfaction in knowing his first assessment was correct. Peter came back with Dad and Richard then, moving slowly through the crowd of soldiers and causing a mild stir to mask the shifting of men.
Once Calhoun was on his feet, I stopped pacing and faced him. “Out of respect for our past working relationship, Marshal, I won’t reduce you to a drooling, gibbering idiot incapable of cleaning his own ass, but I’m sure you understand I can.” He clenched his eyes shut tightly, nodding once but not daring to speak. “I cannot trust the Marshals again. Tell your boss. Now, go. And if I see you again, it will be the last time you
can
be seen.”
I turned my back to him then, a classic stance and horribly melodramatic. I heard him shuffle off a moment later. If he attempted to argue, neither Kieran nor Ethan allowed it. Once he was out of earshot, I turned on Echols with roughly eight minutes to kill.
“And you, let’s go ahead and get the ‘I was doing my job’ out of the way,” I snapped. “You’ve lied a number of times, but you have the advantage over Calhoun in that you have no trust to break.” I snorted out a laugh. “Let me rephrase that, because you’ve broken so many that I need to qualify which one I’m talking about. There is no trust between you and us to break. You have, however, broken the trust from which you officiate over your prisoners and the trust you hold from your military rank. Does the military still require an Oath of Office? That pesky little Officer Appointment Acceptance? Doesn’t it speak to upholding the Constitution, bearing true faith, and all that?”
“It does, yes,” Echols said, stiffly and stoically.
“And you feel that you have lived up to your oaths?” I asked caustically.
“Yes, I do,” he answered, straightening and swelling proudly, his aura showing a different story.
“Major Byrnes, would you say that you have lived up to your oaths?” I turned to him and asked.
“No, sir, I have not,” he said, almost casually, having had some time to come to terms with this admission. That and the compulsion weighed heavily on him.
“With what you know of this situation and granting the speculative nature, would you say that Colonel Echols has lived up to his oaths?” I asked.
“No, sir, I would not.”
I turned slowly back to Echols. “Thank you, Major Byrnes, you and your men may be excused, but stand ready. I’ll be calling you again shortly.” He needed a few minutes, too, I expect. Five minutes more was all I needed. “Your original task here today, Colonel. What was it?”
“Confine and contain the detainees until transportation could be arranged,” Echols said, hedging his bets as widely as possible having seen Calhoun.
“Stop lying, Colonel,” I said. “Either you tell or I will, and if I do it, I’m liable to let a whole lot more slip out than you want.”
“What do you want me to say?” Echols pleaded, trying to make it appear that he was being coerced, forced to say the ‘right’ things. “Yes, I came here under orders to get these men back into active service. It was the simplest, most efficient way to handle this situation at the time. No, it isn’t the proper course of action, but even this way is going to cause enough irreparable harm as it is. Your way will cripple us as a force in the world forever.”
“My way?” I repeated archly. “Hmph.”
“And no one gets off Scot-free, McClure,” he added. “Their military careers are over. They’ll all be watched for subversive behavior for the rest of their lives. And those at the top will be detained, probably imprisoned and possibly executed.
“It would have been a more suitable situation than this,” he snarled.
“How were you planning to explain this to me when I returned?” I asked. “Or did you people bother to worry about that? Just destroy the evidence and be done with it. Worry about any lawsuits later.”
“We worried,” he said carefully, but he was lying. “But the Pentagon felt that the embarrassment of losing a general followed by four hundred cases of treason would be a greater loss than simply appeasing one man.”
“I see,” I said, acidly. “But when you got here and dove into the situation, you found I had thrown you a few curve balls, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The compulsion meant that you couldn’t just make them disappear anymore, right, Colonel?” I asked.
“No, we couldn’t,” he said, getting angry now, or rather, trying to appear that way. It was a mask.
“So what was their next option?”
“Try to get you to remove the compulsion,” he said, showing some anger now. “But you wouldn’t talk.”
“Close, Colonel. You mean I wouldn’t be bullied. You didn’t try talking.”
“You still could, you know. Remove the compulsion.”
“Yeah, I could, but what would that achieve at this point besides make life easier for you?” I asked what I felt was a perfectly legitimate question. “More people out there to shoot at me? At my family? They were out to kill me, damn it! Doesn’t the injustice of that bother you in the least?”
“Yes, Seth, it does. I understand your outrage, I do, but this is a situation with extenuating circumstances that go well beyond
you
.”
“Finally, we are in agreement. This does go beyond me. This extends into the war that is being waged on all magic users in this world. Why the council of this country is turning a blind eye to it confuses me but I don’t have the time to delve into it right now, but I suspect that they simply didn’t know the whole situation and your bosses used that to their benefit.
“It’s also why I can’t just let this go,” I said imperiously. “Other lives are equally endangered, probably more so since some aren’t as able to defend themselves as we are. But what is your job now? What are you to do now that I have refused your terrible attempt of negotiation?”
“They are… acceptable losses,” he said quietly. He didn’t learn from the first time.
“Acceptable losses?” I asked loudly. “What does that mean, precisely?”
“What were you going to do, shoot them?” Messner asked, gawking at Echols, mortified at what he was hearing. He had stayed quiet longer than I expected. “What about me? Just another loose end? Four FBI agents and two Marshals? More acceptable loss? Do you know how many people know where we are?”
“Do you realize how few actually do?” Echols asked, as cold as ice.
“Oh, relax, Colonel, you’re still not quite in as much control as you think you are,” I said, letting a little of the Georgia lilt slide into my voice again. He cut his eyes over at me but was slow to turn, suspicious of both the change of timber and my pronouncement of his position. “See, the Colonel has forgotten more than a few things or maybe hasn’t gotten around to thinking about them in the first place. For instance, there’s the little matter of that row of computers sitting in that tent over there. Do you happen to know exactly what was on those before I spiked them, Colonel? We do. Sent a few copies flying around the world. It took quite a bit of time.”
“What did you take?” he whispered.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said coyly, committing to a grin that Lewis’ Chesire cat would be jealous of. “At the very least, it contains incontrovertible proof of this debacle. At the time, it seemed like extra work for nothing to me, but now… I apologize, Peter, you were correct and I’m glad you pushed for it.”
“Not at all, Seth, it just seemed a wise precaution,” Peter said and quite courteously, too, even though I hadn’t objected and he hadn’t pushed.
“The last twenty minutes has proven something, Colonel,” I stopped in front of him again, slightly increasing my luminosity, making him blink repeatedly. “There is absolutely no chance of us trusting you.
“Major Byrnes,” I called out loudly, startling the Colonel slightly. “Your fifteen minutes are up. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Mr. McClure,” Byrnes called from much closer than either Echols or I expected. Not that it mattered how close he was. Pushing my senses out, I started tagging every man I could find that already wore the scar of my magic of the compulsion. It was the easiest component to see in the deepening dusk. I went a little further and tagged the four FBI agents, too.
“What? Ready for what?” Echols asked quickly and almost panicked.
“Then bug out, Major!” I yelled, then shifted everyone over to the Throne Room on Gilán, leaving only Messner and me standing in front of Echols. His men began yelling for him immediately. “Agent Messner and his men will be available to you through their Atlanta office tomorrow morning, Colonel, but I won’t be leaving them in your care tonight. Good luck explaining this one to your superior officers.”