Chapter 31

(Four)

I watched the fight with interest. The bodyguard the girl had was increasingly a problem. She needed to be dealt with. I watched our target go deeper into the school and prepared to leave, taking a moment to observe the gang of boys picking themselves up. I swung the parabolic mic in their direction just out of curiosity.

"Damn that D!" shouted one boy.

"She's too strong Flint maybe we should just forget that Amanda chick. Plus you know Winston has a thing for her too," another smaller boy said.

"Shut it you chicken! Not after what that bitch did to Stacy! We just need to take her unaware, take out D first, then we can take our time teaching that damned lizard a lesson," Flint replied. He was obviously in charge and had a serious axe to grind.

"Yeah OK ... well we better head up it's nearly registration time," the other boy said nervously.

"Sod that," spat Flint, "Let's bunk off down at the shops, I'm sick of school already."

The gang moved off out the gate with Flint at its head. The more nervous boy looked torn for a bit then ran after them. This group could prove to be useful, blunt instruments but perhaps suited to our task. Maybe they could take out that bodyguard, they looked fervent enough as well as stupid enough to manipulate. I'm not sure that having them do it would do our cause much good locally, but the general media backlash the target had engineered meant it couldn't do much more harm. In fact it might be beneficial just have the locals write this place off as a bad school.

"Do we have any scrubbed and tagged HEFW7's?" I called to Five.

"Couple," she said eyeing me suspiciously.

"Could you collar a clean one and gift wrap it for me," I said.

She nodded and went to work while I dialed for authorisation, something like this could backfire so I wanted to be sure I wouldn't be blamed if it did. Standard arse covering techniques but much needed as in this case I wouldn't be fired I'd be found swinging from a lamppost with bits of my anatomy cut out, probably by the hand of the lovely Five.

"Barry this is Dave," I said into the phone, neither were real names just convenient nondescript names close to our code numbers. Traffic using code numbers would have raised some eyebrows and using encryption made it look like you had something to hide. Much simpler to hide in plain sight it was a lot harder to detect, "I've been thinking about giving the boys I told you about a set of flowers to give to Dorothy for her birthday since I won't be able to make the party. Would you ask Alfred if that's alright?"

"Just a second Dave I'll ask him," the line went quiet.

"Alfred thinks she'll really enjoy that, you have his blessing," Two replied.

I exchanged farewells and rang off putting the used phone in for recycling.

I was just preparing to move off to follow the boys when a car pulled up in front of the school. A young woman and a man got out. The woman was a very attractive brunette, but it was her more nondescript companion that caught my eye. His subtle grey uniform and the odd case he carried made me realise immediately what he was.

I calmly began performing mental exercises we had been taught to mask our thoughts, and leaned back and said, "Spectre," to Five.

She went pale and nodded. As calmly as possible I drove off after the boys. We were probably far enough away that they couldn't detect us. Plus the van had been modified with materials that supposedly dampened any telepathic activity. I wasn't sure if that was true or not it might have just been something to stop people panicking.

Spectres were something of a mystery, seemingly government but not from any agency we could identify. Possibly black bag or maybe a more private group like us or something else. Their methods rarely fitted any obvious pattern suggesting something more than simple government or security service agents. They were almost always highly trained and terrifyingly powerful telepaths. They could look at a person and rip their darkest secrets out of their mind without effort seemingly with no issue, even when you were shielded by other telepaths. They adopted a somewhat mythical nature like fictional men in black or something similar, partly as a ruse to make people doubt they existed and partly as an intimidation tactic. They would often turn up under the guise of some other agency with a bona fide agent or member of that group, do whatever it was they did and then they and often the subject they were investigating would vanish usually so thoroughly that it would be like they had never existed.