Chapter 53: Recalled to Service

Back to the Present: late May

Now it was late May; university classes were over, and the Alexandres were moving into a house that they had purchased. It was midway between their jobs, his in Laurel and hers in Westphalia. Their new home was in a semi-rural area about a mile from Peter’s parents’ home. It was a 2400 square-foot ranch house on three acres of fenced property with a detached garage and a pole barn that had been used by the prior owner, a collectibles dealer, to store his merchandise. That was where Nadine planned to put the contents of her ounfò; she intended to eventually set up a small ounfò after she made contact with the area’s Haitian expat residents. Tamara and Peter were going to help them unpack the items which had been in storage.

Tamara and Peter showed up early at the Alexandres’ new home just as the moving van pulled up with their stored household goods.

“Oh, Dad,” Tamara said when she greeted him when they arrived as he was carrying a carton from his truck to the house, “yesterday the Brits published the birthday honors lists in their official government journal—it’s called The London Gazette. Did you find out if you guys can come to the ceremony? It’s about three weeks from now.”

“Yes I did, sweetie. That’s right around the time I need to go to those economic talks. And I spoke to Evan Masters at the State Department. All the details that I discussed with Gerston have been finalized and he told me that my appointment as a global good-will envoy—a g-dash-d ambassador, of all things—to Europe is all set. Incidently, so is your mom’s appointment, as the special envoy to Haiti. Your mom’s appointment is tied to her position at the Columbia Institute of Economics. She can tell you more about it. But mine? Gerston told me that I have an unusual ability to see through bullshit and go right to the core of a problem. Your mom told me that Gerston’s right; that’s the piece of Ogorin in me. The lwa of both the warrior and the diplomat.”

“What’s your job then?” Tamara asked. “You were unclear after that awards ceremony.”

“Ha. What happened there just blew my mind—never expected anything like that. The job? Like a mediator. My going’s been cleared with the APL too; they don’t mind if I’m away from the lab at times. I think that, with all of their federal defense work, someone up very high in the Defense Department must have ‘suggested’ that they let me take the envoy job. Somehow the president thinks I should have that ambassadorial status and got the Senate to confirm me. This particular problem—I’m scheduled to get into it right after your ceremony—has to do with the talks the U.S. is involved in with reps from the Brits, the European Union, and some Common Market economic nerds. I’m supposed to listen to where they are now—it’s some kind of stalemate—and figure out how to get the stalemate fixed. And you know? Somehow I don’t mind doing it; I like challenges. So we’ll see.”

“That’s so cool, my dad’s a diplomat,” Tamara grinned. “Hey, use your diplomat passports.”

“Sure. You can do that too, Masters said you could. It’s an honor for the U.S. as well as for you, being on the queen’s honors list.”

Tamara nodded. “So since you’ll be able to go to the ceremony too, Emma said that you can stay with us at her place in London if you want, even stay longer for your meetings. Her flat’s got four bedrooms and a live-in housekeeper, she told me.”

“Emma has a London apartment?” Wilson asked.

“Yep. It’s where she lived till she came to the U.S. Her family owned it and the building it’s in, and her estate trustees didn’t want to sell it, she told me. One of her London companies is in real estate and the building is in a good location. They rent her apartment out for housing official visitors to their other companies, so they pay for its upkeep and for the staff that run it. And the bedrooms are actually all self-contained suites.

“So here’s what I wanted to show you. I copied the section of the honors list from The Gazette’s web site. Here,” Tamara said, handing him a sheet.

“What’s this?” Nadine asked as she walked past them and stopped.

“The Brits’ honors list,” Wilson told her.

Nadine looked at it and they read it together.

Order of the British Empire

To be Ordinary Dames Grand Cross of the Civil Division of the said Most Excellent Order:

...

Dr Emma Elizabeth CLARKE FRS. Professor of Physics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA and Research Professor of Physics, Cambridge University, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia.

For services to Entrepreneurship, Commerce, and Science.

(Cambridge, Cambridgeshire)

Nadine looked up at Tamara and asked, “This is like a knighthood, right? I see there’s a heading ‘Knights Grand Cross’ with other names just above this section. What’s ‘FRS’?”

“Yep. She’s a female knight,” Tamara said and chuckled. “Also, last year she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society, that’s the FRS. It’s an honor that’s awarded only to eminent scientists.”

“What’re those towns in parentheses? I thought you said that Emma had a London home,” Wilson wondered.

“Emma told me that she owns a home in Cambridge near her company. It’s her U.K. legal address, so I guess they use that in the honors list. See, the others have towns shown like that.”

“So her official address is in Cambridge,” Nadine remarked.

“Yep, she told me that’s an estate that her grandpa owned,” Tamara said. “While she was growing up, her trustees leased it out, but she took it over to live in when she went to Cambridge on her sabbatical. Okay, I’m further down the list, in the honorary section, ‘cause I’m not a citizen.”

They looked at that part.

Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Honorary DBE

Tamara Nadine ALEXANDRE, Scientist and Engineer, Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Maryland, USA.

For services to Commerce and Engineering.

“And look,” Tamara pointed to a name. “I see that President Gerston is getting an honorary knighthood too. I wonder if he’ll be able to come to the ceremony.”

Wilson pointed to the “Dame” title above her name and asked, laughing, “So we need to call you ‘Dame’ now?”

Tamara chuckled, shaking her head. “Emma told me that only citizens of countries that recognize the queen as their monarch can use that title. She’s a Brit so she can, but not me. I can use the ‘DBE’ after my name, though.”

“And you said you’re going to Cambridge after the ceremony,” Wilson commented.

“Right. There are engineering and physics meetings during the week before the roll-out and her company, EEC Energy Solutions, is having me do some presentations too. Emma built that company from scratch, you know, and it’s become one of the largest of its type in the U.K. Emma’s actually extremely wealthy. She owns a controlling interest in the industrial empire her grandfather built, but she lets its boards and her CEOs run the operations. This company is her baby and she keeps close track of it. She’s its board chair and chief scientist.”

They had actually been working while carrying on that conversation, and soon the back of Wilson’s truck was unloaded. Nadine got called away by the movers to answer a question about where some items were to go. Soon the movers were finished and the four of them began to unpack the boxes. A knocking at the door announced the arrival of Peter’s parents, Barbara and Terence, and the Winsbergs senior.

“Hey, Alexandres, we’re here to help,” Greta called.

Nadine quickly got them all organized into teams to unpack each room—three teams, with Wilson, Nadine, and Tamara leading one each. Each knew where and how things were to be stored, based on their Miami home, so the unpacking went quickly. In the late afternoon, Mason and Angela Richardson arrived with plenty of pizza and beverages to feed everyone. One of the items of furniture that Nadine and Wilson didn’t have yet was a large table for the dining room, but Peter told Wilson not to worry; he’d fix that. He grabbed Terence and they ran to the pole barn. Peter had seen the movers bringing several large folding tables and lots of folding chairs to that building. They brought two of the tables and a bunch of chairs back to the house. Then they all sat down to eat.

Werner looked around the room. “I got to see this place after my staff found it,” he said. “It looks really good now; the work crew that the realtor got did a great redecorating job, didn’t they?”

Nadine smiled at him. “You just want a pat on the back, you big teddy-bear, right? Actually they did do some great work, and so fast too, so thanks for all you did.”

“My grapevine tells me that you’ve been appointed as the U.S. special envoy to Haiti,” Mason said to her. “And Wilson was appointed as an ambassador with no portfolio—that’s govspeak for troubleshooter—a good-will envoy to Europe. I know all about troubleshooters, but what exactly is your role, Nadine?”

“One of the missions of the Columbia Institute is to find ways to improve economic conditions in third-world countries. My research specialty was in social anthropology and was based on family dynamics and structure from the female point of view. My thesis was that the transmission of cultural values in non-industrial societies is based on the mothers teaching their daughters. Women traditionally have been pushed aside in economic development in third-world countries, actually in many other societies too, but in the late 1970s, the idea arose to form organizations to provide microfinancing—that’s making very small loans to people in impoverished communities—to provide capital to support local entrepreneurism. Soon after that, women began receiving micro-loans and many used those funds in entrepreneurial ways to become self-supporting. Microfinance is completely different from charity; it’s actually a very useful tool for socio-economic development, and many millions of women world-wide have benefitted from those programs.

“As you know, Haiti’s economy is simply terrible and my Institute project is to develop ways to try to improve the economic conditions there from the bottom up. I know the country intimately and how the culture works. Many people there knew me and my mother, or know about us. The envoy role gives me official standing, but it will be humanitarian in nature, not political. There’s discussion now at the Institute to apply for some backing for this work from the U.N. and the Organization of American States. So that’s what my envoy role is about.”

Eventually everyone left and Tamara and Peter remained to talk to her parents.

“I never got to completely explain what happened with that Lt Jennings,” Tamara told them.

“You said that his mind was turned inward,” Nadine remarked. “Like you did to Leger.”

“After thinking about it, it was more like what happened to Peter in high school. Like Peter’s dissociation. Jennings had fallen into a kind of dissociation, caused by his own self-incrimination about how he reacted in battle. A lot like you told me happened to you, Dad.”

Wilson grinned, “So my genius daughter is now a psychologist?”

“Um, no, but Barbara gave me her senior thesis to look over and it was on dissociation. It was really good and I learned a lot. But I could see how Jennings looked and could ‘taste’ his emotions. They were buried so deeply that he had almost no personality overlay.”

“Yeah, that’s what I saw when I passed him in the hall,” Wilson told her. “He looked vacant. I tried to give him a little boost and apparently it did something because Gerston noticed it and remarked to me about it.”

“Yeah—but did you see what happened when the presentation was over? He deflated like a balloon.”

“From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see him too well.” Wilson said.

Peter broke in. “I did notice that, actually, and Barbara told me afterwards that his eyes looked like mine when I was a zombie back in high school. Like I was, he was probably detached from his surroundings. Then Tamara went to talk to him and soon it looked like he was normal—well, not quite; but then his wife would whisper something to him and he was back again. What happened there, honey? What did you do?”

“I did to his wife Shelley what I showed you, sweetie. Then she could use what I showed her to help him. Mom, I need to show you how my ‘pushing’ works; I figured out a little bit about how the mind works when it does that. It’s a latent ability in people and the brain has structures that are dormant unless they are turned on somehow. With empaths, some parts of those structures are active and with charismatic people, other parts seem to be active, but they’re all part of the same neural network and they’re activated by the limbic system.

“Let me show you what I learned, but I found out that we need Dad’s help too. It’s something that appears to have a direct sex component to make it work or maybe it’s an emotional link. I’ll need to check out both possibilities. Anyway, take Dad’s hand and pay attention to your thoughts, okay? You’ll get some strange random ones.”

Peter laughed. “For sure. If it’s like what happened to me, it felt like I was immersed in this strange green light everywhere but it was gone in an instant. And then I started feeling like I had grown a new body part ‘cause I started to feel more aware of things around me. That was crazy.”

Tamara placed her hand on her parents’ joined hands and Tamara “pushed” the “not-color” taste to her mother, who gasped and looked at her daughter. Wilson had also received the “transmission” which had been amplified by their physical contact and he stood there blinking.

“Spirits! It’s like I grew another whole sense!” Nadine exclaimed. “Now I’m suddenly aware of everyone’s emotions—is this what you see all the time, Tamara?”

Tamara was delighted and hugged her mom.

“If you mean sensing people in several different ways, then yes, Manman. You’ll need to practice using it now; Peter has it too now and he’s still learning how his sense works. I think it’s a little different from person to person. Dad, did you feel anything? I couldn’t tell with Jennings ‘cause his emotions were still turned inward.”

Wilson was trying to clear his thoughts. “Something happened but I’m not sure.” He looked at Tamara. “Oh, jeez, Tamara. You’re kind of glowing ... Nadine too ... and Peter. What...?”

Nadine looked at him. “Darling, maybe the sense she gave you works so that you can see people’s auras...”

“Nope, not ‘gave,’ Manman; I simply unlocked it,” Tamara corrected her. “Dad, that’s wonderful—hey, maybe you’ll be a human lie detector now, I’ll bet. I can do that too but in my case, I sense it as tastes. You must see aura colors like Granmanman.”

“You know, I’m seeing aura colors too,” Nadine said. “But they’re muted and faint and I sense emotions along with them.”

“Wow, three of us have had our abilities unlocked and we all sense them differently,” Peter mused. “We’ve got a lot to learn about how this stuff works.”

Two days later, Wilson got a message at work from the Marine Corps commandant’s office asking him to report to the commandant as soon as possible and to contact the office to tell them when he could arrive. He responded that he could be there at 8 a.m. the following day if that was acceptable. It was.

Wilson entered the commandant’s office suite in the Pentagon and was directed to an office, where he was met by a female Marine master gunnery sergeant.

“Wilson Alexandre reporting as ordered, Master Gunnery Sergeant,” he intoned, being sure to use her full rank. He knew that calling her just “sergeant” would be insulting. If you did such a thing in the Corps, you’d get your butt chewed out so badly, even a firehose wouldn’t be able to douse the flames.

She smiled at him. “Thank you for your service and thank you for your courtesy too,” she said. “General Connelley is ready to see you, sir.”

Wilson was still getting used to his new sensing ability, and even though he was aware of how it worked when he met people, it was still disorienting. He could somehow sense their emotional frame of mind, but it was up to him to interpret what those emotions meant. The MGySgt’s current emotions implied respect and admiration.

She led him to an office door, knocked, and opened the door.

The general rose from his chair and saluted Wilson, then came over to him after Wilson returned the salute. They shook hands.

“Pleasure meeting you, and allow me to express my thanks for the honor your bravery brought to the Corps and yourself. President Gerston gave me a few orders concerning your status and he said you agreed to the appointment that he proposed,” the general said. “We’re to recall you from your medical retirement and place you in the Corps reserve, put you on detached duty, and assign you to the commandant’s office—my office. Tell me—do you think that you still could pass the fitness test?”