Interlude

T’s life had changed in a number of ways since leaving Afghanistan.

He’d had no need for his PK Talent. On a few occasions, he’d simply tossed a pebble using his PK, just to prove to himself that he still could. He and Shezzie had rolled down a few hills while inside the bubble, but he really didn’t need the practice and was soon bored by the pointless exercise.

The paranoia he’d felt in Afghanistan decreased as he got further from the Rockpile and into a population he could blend into.

He and Shezzie kept moving and attracted no attention. It helped that officialdom had no idea they’d left on their own, so there was no search and no expectation they would appear in Europe. The two had simply disappeared, and apparently no one realized that the disappearance of an anonymous CW3 named Tagliaferro and the simultaneous disappearance of LTC Schmidt were not only related, but that the two were now traveling together.

After a few days, the hunt in Afghanistan died down and soon other needs diverted official attention. There was still a war on, people were being killed and wounded. Helicopters crashed, IED’s blew up.

The disappearance of Tagliaferro and Schmidt became old news. Since there was no evidence they’d been captured, they were just two people who’d gone missing in a combat zone. Not every corpse is reclaimed. Sometimes there’s nothing that can be recovered.

News sources paid no attention to their absence, other than to list the names among the missing. The terrorists had not claimed credit for a kidnapping or released their names as hostages, so the press never picked up on the story.

Without intending to do so, they’d become a couple in all respects.

The two had established a relationship based on friendship in the beginning, then seamlessly drifted into physical intimacy. Perhaps it was inevitable after the melding their minds had undergone. Physical intimacy is as close as most people ever get, but for two with strong psi ability intimacy has a meaning that those who lack Talent can never know.

That first melding of her mind with his had produced changes that made them very nearly two parts of one individual, a kind of left side and right side. There were differences still, but not significant ones and the process of change had given each of them more than either had possessed before. The sexual relationship only emphasized their unique relationship.

T found his Talent for communicating much stronger and the PreCog became more reliable as well. Practice, he thought at first, but he soon realized that his PK Talent had also grown and he’d not practiced that ability much at all. It was simply there, ready; the level of concentration he’d always needed before was no longer required. Moving an object was no more complicated than grasping something with his hands. At the same time, the headaches that were the price he’d paid for using his Talents had become infrequent and much less severe. They soon vanished entirely.

But even with their new close relationship, when he asked about the name he knew her by, Shezzie, she’d blushed. “I had a hobby. Somehow Surfer picked it up from one of those first contacts. I think I was on my way to practice, and I was thinking about what I was going to do, and ... well, anyway, he caught some of my thought. A few of us had developed an interest in belly dancing; it’s exercise, it beats calisthenics, and anyway it was my only real social outlet.

We had hired a local woman to come in once a week and give us a class. She led the dancing more than taught, but she’d also stop the dance and show us a move or help us get in time with the music. She didn’t speak English and we knew just enough of her language to allow us to learn, but it was fun. It took us away from hospitals and trauma and people who come in from the field with arms or legs blown off. Anyway, Surfer thought that a proper nom-de-Talent for a belly-dancer was ‘Scheherazade’. I was not having any of that, even if only two people knew it, so he shortened it to Shezzie,” she paused for a moment, thinking, “and I just drifted into accepting it. It’s a silly name, but he thought it was important not to use my real name and after he told me about the things in the back of your neck a little paranoia seemed justified.”

The two had found it relatively easy to blend into the English-speaking population around the US air base in Germany, where they’d left the plane after escaping from Afghanistan, but they soon moved on. A train took them to France, thence to England, and every move took them slightly farther from what they’d left behind.

They lived in a modest section of London, at first in a private apartment where the lessor augmented his income by renting them a bedroom for a week, then into a tiny apartment of their own. They were quiet, even reclusive and worst of all not-English, so they were not a good fit within their small slice of London society.

They found more acceptance among recent immigrants and the invisible underclass that swirls around and through native-born society without ever quite becoming a part of it, but the non-English society was also never theirs. Culture and language aside, the main difference was that they had no plans to remain in Britain as the others intended.

Still, in the seams between the two, they found safety and anonymity while they worked out a way to get home to America.

They acquired fake documents in England, papers that allowed them to board an airliner for the US. It took just over a month to accomplish that. Good documents, the kind that could withstand scrutiny in an age when hijacking of airliners was common, were not easily acquired, nor were they cheap. Most find the process difficult, forging a new identity and gaining documentation, but the process is much easier when you can sense emotions, even thoughts. You also realize very quickly whether the seller is a police informer on the side. But when you know, with no doubt at all that the person selling the documents is confident of their quality and not simply running a scam, you can proceed without worry.

The paperwork they acquired first would stand up to casual scrutiny, but not an in-depth examination. Yet it was a beginning, and CWO Tagliaferro and LTC Schmidt vanished. Two US Army ID cards became small pieces, chopped up and dropped one at a time into rubbish bins. Their temporary identities would serve while they looked for a source of better documents. That too wasn’t unheard of; in fact, many undocumented visitors followed much the same path.

As a couple, they appeared quite ordinary despite the age difference. Both had let their hair grow by this time, making it easier to blend in, and T had also grown a scruffy beard. It didn’t make him look particularly handsome, but he was only one of many young men with such. The beard didn’t draw a second glance, and neither did he.

They soon found means of acquiring money. It’s not difficult when you can sense thoughts, and Shezzie had become much more adept at TP than T was. If their attempts sometimes fell outside the law, T found no difficulty in accepting that. After a year in combat, seeing people killed and killing men himself, he was willing to ignore some standards of behavior. His peculiar ethic excluded violence, but he had no need for it; short-term jobs in the underground economy worked just as well. If taxes weren’t paid and licensing was ignored, such things rarely crossed his mind.

Better documents were acquired, including American passports, and they reserved them for the attempt to leave Britain. So it was that they departed from Heathrow three months later without incident and landed at New York’s JFK airport. Once again, their documents attracted no attention. The two took a cab into the city and found temporary lodgings.

They acquired other documents in New York, documents that would stand up to anything short of an in-person physical examination. The documents included birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers; the former owners wouldn’t need them. Short of contacting relatives of the man and woman the documents described and doing a DNA comparison, there would be no questions asked. Fingerprints would not match, but neither expected their fingerprints to be taken. Should this happen, there were ways of hampering a search; papers can vanish, electronic scanners stop working. Talent can be turned in a number of strange directions.

Not even bodies remained now of the persons who’d owned the identities the two had bought. Two fringe members of a crime organization had been found wanting, and when one of the organization’s associates owns a crematorium making a body vanish is simple. Two such bodies had done so, piecemeal, the parts being slipped in with legitimate cremations.

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Berry took the Amtrak Crescent from New York to New Orleans, and attracted no attention from anyone. They tarried there for a month, long enough to establish an on-line banking account using the funds they’d acquired in London, and few days later their new credit cards arrived.

They also bought a used car from a private citizen; he was truly sorry to see it go, but he really did need the money. A pre-purchase inspection from a garage confirmed that the car would likely give good service; there were no major problems the seller hadn’t known about. The cash purchase meant there would be no dealership records available should their latest identities ever be questioned. The vehicle was duly registered to Samuel Berry of New York, who presented a driver’s license from that state when he paid the tax and transfer fee.