Chapter 13: Beginning High School

A few days after their capture of Leger, Wilson heard from Evan Masters at the State Department. Masters wanted to relay the FBI’s thanks to the Alexandres for their part in solving a number of open cases and that the FBI as well as the State Department were also highly pleased with the information Wilson had gotten in Leger’s confession.

Masters said, “I’m able to pass along this confidential information to you because you were personally involved and under the protection of the U.S. government.”

“If that’s the case, how did someone come so close as to be able to attack my wife?”

“We’re still looking into what happened there, but apparently it was because of the two U.S. passports Leger had. We were watching for the one that Arthur Benson, their mole, had issued, but Leger used a different one, that one had been stolen from a tourist and had never been properly canceled. We’ve been fixing problems like that during the past week.”

“Okay. Are we still in danger from Vanessa?”

“Right now, that’s still hard to say. Here’s what happened as a result of your capture of Leger and the other things that happened when Vanessa’s other people arrived here. First, the other person she set to Miami, Vincent Sanon, we had his passport flagged but he was incredibly quick when they tried to detain him. Somehow he had gotten a knife and disabled a Border Patrol agent and a TSA guard. When a Miami cop confronted him and he tried to throw the knife, though, he was shot dead.

“There were two of them who arrived on separate flights in New Orleans. Border Patrol got one at passport control and he’s locked up. The other one got through by a slick dodge. They must have heard that we caught the first. We found out the next day that a Haitian consular official bribed an airport worker to watch for the guy at the gate and slip him a Haitian diplomatic passport. The Customs agent was suspicious by the passport and the appearance of the guy, though, and had a TSA agent follow him to the car rental desk and watch while the Haitian embassy in D.C. was contacted. They said that the passport he presented was bogus, so they had a parish sheriff arrest the guy as soon as he drove out of the airport to avoid the possibility of a hostage situation if the guy was armed.

“The last passport was used in New York at JFK. But from the info you got from Leger, we found that guy’s real name and the Haitian government helped us learn his banking info and we got his account frozen, so he has no funds other than what he’s carrying. Oh yes, the Haitian government has frozen Vanessa’s bank accounts and turned off their cell phone and land line accounts. They still have the burner phones though, they’re common in Haiti, and that can’t be helped. The rogue ministers and assistants that Leger fingered were arrested and the FBI arrested a bunch of diplomatic employees of the embassy and consular offices in Miami and New Orleans; Haiti has waived their diplomatic immunity because several of them were accomplices or were otherwise involved in several assassinations.

“The guy in New York no longer has a support network; the consular office there is all loyal to the current government. The chance of his getting money is small because his Haitian sources have been cut off. The FBI knows his last whereabouts from his last attempt to use an ATM card, in Flatbush in Brooklyn, so there’s a manhunt underway there now.

“So for your safety, I’d advise still keeping your head down. Leger’s visit was a one-off, a lucky guess, since Nadine’s was only the third place he visited. Looks like his approach was to be random. Find one, then the next.

“Oh, and about Leger. I don’t know what the hell Nadine did; whatever she told Wilbur Zane from the CIA; she’s still fucking scary. Leger is a whacko now, completely out of his mind. Being chased by demons and complaining of scorpions stinging him. He’s being kept sedated now and I have no idea what they’re gonna do with him. Maybe send him back to Haiti for them to punish. He’s been implicated in some murders there. He sure can’t hurt anyone now.

“Lastly, Vanessa’s still around and probably remains a threat. A lot of her power base here was taken out and most of her Haitian resources are tied up, but she still has supporters. We think that many of those in government have been flushed out, but there could always be sleeper moles. So remain cautious, my friend, and thanks for your excellent, but unexpected, service to your fellow citizens, both U.S. and Haitian. You do more honor to your military awards than the U.S. can acknowledge.”

It took more than a week for the fallout of Leger’s unwanted visit to end. The FBI was visiting the Alexandres almost daily—Wilson at his shop and Nadine at home, because she didn’t want the repeated interruptions to affect her job with the patients. Most were elderly veterans and she came to really care for them; in some ways they reminded her of Wilson because many were true warriors at heart, were strongly opinionated, but had romantic souls.

They learned that Vanessa’s missing thug, the one who had gone to ground in New York City, had been arrested when he tried to hold up a convenience store using a knife as a weapon. The clerk had a pistol and used it, hitting the man in the shoulder when he tried to leap over the counter. Many of Wilson’s or Nadine’s sessions with the FBI were to see if either had seen any of the identified suspects while the couple was living in Haiti. Wilson thought he recalled several from service work he had done for some of the wealthier Carrefour residents.

But most of those next two weeks were spent with Tamara, whose experience had both terrified and exhausted her. She was having nightmares almost every night and during the day, she was jumpy and irritable. Wilson realized that he recognized the symptoms.

“That’s classic PTSD,” he remarked to Nadine after five days of observing Tamara.

Nadine had heard of it but was unsure of exactly what it was.

“It stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the military in the mid-twentieth century, its name then was ‘shell-shock’ or ‘combat fatigue.’ You don’t have to be in combat to get it, though. Sexual abuse or assault, living through a disaster or accident—those all can result in PTSD. It’s caused by being exposed to repeated bad experiences or to a single major shock, like any experience that threatens your life or someone else’s—and that’s exactly what happened here.”

“She acted so mature and collected, though,” Nadine objected.

“That sometimes is part of it. When I was in rehab for my leg, there were lots of soldiers and Marines with severe PTSD. During the event that might have been the precipitating one for them, they told me that when everything seemed to get out of control; they’d get angry at feeling vulnerable, so they acted to try to restore some control. Lots of times that results in incredible heroism but it can come at a terrible psychological price. The body remembers the feelings of fear you had, and given a trigger—sometimes no apparent trigger at all—the body reacts with feelings of panic or severe anxiety. PTSD. Tamara acted collected and mature because that’s her nature—to stay in control, but her body was screaming ‘fear,’ ‘danger,’ while she was trying force her control over the situation. That’s heroism in my book.”

“How can we help her, then?”

“The biggie is just getting her to talk about it. Reliving her memories about how she was feeling and what she was thinking about while she was dealing with the situation here would help her process that the bad stuff is behind her. Talking helps her mind show her body that she’s in no danger now, because it’s the response of the body to a perhaps random thought that can cause the panic response. We’ll talk to her, or you should. You’re more sensitive and have counseling experience. Just get her to tell you what happened from her point of view and ask if that part is still scary or bothersome and explore with her why she feels that way. She might have a lot of ‘what ifs’ or ‘I should haves’ and working through those ideas is a huge part of the healing.”

“Wilson, are you hiding something from me? Are you actually a psychologist in disguise?”

He snorted. “Nah, just a badass Marine who got wounded and washed out of his dream career. I’ve been down the PTSD route. Got it real bad after my last mission and then I learned I was done in the Corps. And had an amazing doc who worked with me to slay the demons that were killing me inside. I know all—well, maybe not all—of the horrors that the mind can create when it starts to tell you about all the mistakes you made. I learned that those were not mistakes, they were the best possible decisions at the time. Learning that saved my sanity.”

It took several weeks of gentle but painful discussions with Tamara about her recollections of that morning, but soon Tamara was almost back to her normal, cheerful self. It was good timing because the graduation assembly was at the end of the week and the summer vacation would begin the next day.

Tamara had already decided that she wanted to study introductory French and Spanish at the local community college that summer, and she had an offer from Dr Beauford to work at the medical school on the MRIs in the imaging unit. She had a project of her own design, building tunable sub-coils to be installed in the machine’s external coils to enhance the scanning resolution in small areas of the body part being imaged. Because of her age and the possibility of any radiation exposure involved, she wouldn’t be allowed to work on the CT or PET scanners, and she couldn’t be paid, but the university gave her independent research credits in electrical engineering and physics. She’d have to write two papers and take two exams to complete the courses.

There was another topic that her parents wanted to discuss with Tamara but put it off because of the stress of the incident with Leger. They wanted to know about her mental and emotional state of mind regarding her “pushing” ability. They were also concerned that she might use her abilities in ways that society would disapprove. And how strong was she now—how close did she need to be to affect another person?

Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: six weeks later

One evening in mid-summer, Tamara was excitedly describing how one of her mini-coil installations had improved the imaging resolution in tests that day.

“I had used the Larmor equation—which gives the frequency at which the hydrogen nucleus will absorb energy—to do the calcs for my mini-coil orientation. The equation shows that the frequency of precession of the nuclear magnetic moment is directly proportional to the product of the B0 field—the magnetic field strength—and the gyromagnetic ratio, and the design result, when we tested it, matched the theory! Dr Beauford was so happy. He wants me to write it up—he gave me the format to use—because it can be patented and I’d be the sole inventor!”

Wilson was trying to slow her down. “Um, sweetie, you realize that neither Mom nor I have any inkling about what any of that means? Except that you can get a patent, I suppose. That fact we can celebrate with you. So I assume your work is going well?”

“It’s great. And I’m enjoying working on the other electronics too. Tomorrow Tim’s gonna show me an EEG that’s being surplused. He said several channels are getting funky and it’s five years old and they don’t want to fix it anymore. He said I could quote, ‘work my magic on it.’ That’ll give me the chance to learn about the tiny electrical signals the brain produces. Oh, and I’m still messing around with that cell phone jammer that I ‘liberated.’”

“You’re not going to use it to jam phones, right?” Nadine asked.

“‘Course not. That’s illegal—not that I haven’t ... anyway. I’m dissecting the circuit design. Getting ideas about radio wave transmission, is all. It sends an RF signal, like a lot of the things I’m working on, and I like to see how devices that do that work. I set up a little Faraday cage to block its emissions when I test it.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other and shrugged.

“Sweetie, to change the topic, how have you been feeling during the last week?” Nadine asked. “No more nightmares, right?”

“No, Manman, and I’m much better since we talked and you helped me work through the bad thoughts I was having.”

“What about your ... special abilities? You aren’t getting tempted to ‘push’ people to get them to do what you want, are you?” Nadine pressed.

“Oh, no. Um, I can’t just do that whenever I want, you know. To do that, I need help from ... um ... this is difficult. I’m not sure how it works. If I have an urgent need, like when those people at the school were questioning me that time, or what happened with that monster, somehow I can get the ability to ‘push.’ That’s only when stuff like that happens, when I need it. I guess ... I’m sure Emily helps me. Yeah, she must ‘cause I can’t do the big stuff all by myself. I get the help I need then.”

Nadine looked at her. “Emily? Your doll sits on your pillow all the time now. How...?”

Nadine stopped when Tamara pulled the amulet on its chain out from under her top.

“She’s with me always, Manman. I’m sure this pendant links me to Granmanman’s spirit, but I felt that calling this pendant ‘Tamara’ too would be confusing.”

“So you can touch the spirit world through that. Amazing,” Nadine whispered.

“Not like that, Manman. It’s different; I can’t go to the spirits. Through this ... it’s a gateway? Portal? ... the lwa seem to come into my mind. Like you told me back when I was ... eight? Yeah. That the lwa give us praise, scolding, and guidance. That’s what I feel; help comes when I need it. I know that Papa Legba is the Speaker of the lwa, but Ayizan, my protector, is his wife, and a Speaker too. She speaks to me. And when I need help, Ayizan brings the lwa who can best help me.”

“Tamara, in my studies, I have heard of only one such person with your abilities. When I was little, maybe older ... your age possibly, Manman told me of a legend of our people, Manman’s very-greats-manman ancestor, who communed with all of the lwa. You may well have her spirit in your soul,” Nadine said.

“What about your ‘making myself little’ ability?” Wilson asked.

“Now that I’m older—bigger—that’s not as easy ... I’m sure I can’t actually be invisible. That’s probably impossible,” Tamara answered. “I rarely do that anymore, too. When I did it last time, it was when Mr Evil was sneaking up to the house. I was ‘pushing’ an ... aura ... yeah. It was, ‘you don’t notice me; I belong here’; kinda like that. This is sooo hard to explain,” she sighed.

“How close do you have to be to ‘push’ to someone?” Nadine asked.

“That depends. To do uh ... compulsion? No, that’s too strong. I can’t force anyone. I do something like a suggestion backed by an emotion. So if they don’t want to have the emotion, like fear, the suggestion keeps the fear away. And people make their own fears—my ‘pushing’ lets them connect the fear to the suggestion. How close? To do that, I really need to look in a person’s eyes, so that’s pretty close. To project auras like confusion, I can be a little farther away but the farther away I am, the more taxing it is.”

Nadine gave her the ‘serious mother’ look. “Your abilities are unique and remarkable, but scary too. I don’t have to tell you that if someone learns about what you can do; your life, ours too, could be in danger. So please, darling, make sure you never take advantage of someone using them. And if you do need to use your abilities, please be discreet.”

Tamara nodded and hugged her mother, then her father.

August

The summer passed quickly. Tamara completed her French and Spanish classes at the community college and continued with the medical school’s study and her electronics work on the MRI and the other side projects she had begun. And just for her entertainment, she kept her “camera” zapper close by in her backpack, using it randomly on shop sensors and all of the school buildings in her area, getting close enough to the schools’ doors to use it on the RFID scanners there. She also used it near the few naked kids she encountered. She felt that if a kid really wanted to be naked, then the state had no business “branding” them like cattle, by injecting them with an electronic tag, just to allow them to “express their body freedom.”