Chapter 1 #4
“I know you’ve got this problem with governments in general because of your own government,” Jonas pointed out, “and trust me that I wouldn’t have brought you in on this, except that obviously something’s happened.
” He shook his head. “Typical that you would turn it around and make it sound like it was me.” And, with that, he stormed off, leaving the two men standing here, staring at each other.
“I don’t think Amy’s disappearance has anything to do with Jonas,” Wallace noted.
“No, unfortunately I don’t either.” Riff turned to Wallace. “Didn’t you say you had some directional kinds of abilities?”
“Yeah, I do—to a certain extent—but nothing like we need here.”
“What do you mean, nothing like this? She’s missing. So can’t you just pinpoint where she is?”
“Of course not,” Wallace replied, as he groaned. “She’s been gone too long for us to track her by the energy left at the hotel. It’s dissipated already. Short of your hacking into MI6’s surveillance tapes, we’re still waiting for the CCTV cameras. I don’t understand what’s taking so long.”
Just then Riff’s phone rang. He looked down at the screen and answered it. “Terk, what’s up?” he asked. “Did you guys get anywhere on the cameras?”
“No, of course not.”
Riff listened in a little bit longer and nodded.
“I just braced Jonas about it, and, as far as I’m concerned, he could easily be involved in this.
… Yeah, I know. I know that you don’t seem to think so.
That doesn’t mean I’ll believe you just because you say so.
” He groaned and listened to Terk for a moment.
“I know. I know. Fine.” When he ended the call, he turned and glared at Wallace.
“What would you do for MI6 if you came on board here?”
“They were looking at me running the team,” he shared, with a shrug.
Riff stared at him. “Does that mean you have skills equal to what Terk has?”
“Nope, sure don’t,” he admitted. “I don’t think we even know what Terk has for skills, much less MI6, which is one of their main problems. They’re fishing for anything they can get their hands on, but I don’t know what they’re really looking for.”
Riff snorted. “ That I can believe. I can’t figure out why they didn’t go to the source in the first place. No offense.”
“I think Terk probably turned him down, not trusting governments in general anymore.”
At that, Riff nodded. “That would make total sense, but it still doesn’t make any sense to bring in somebody green.”
“I didn’t say I was green,” Wallace corrected in exasperation. “I just don’t have the same level of skill that Terk does.”
“So, what do you do?” Riff asked.
“I’m a precog and can see… some things in the dark. Unfortunately I can’t control it.”
“Of course not. That’s the problem with precogs. Don’t mind me, but I think they’re fairly useless.” Riff turned and headed out of the MI6 building.
Following quickly behind, Wallace asked, “Where are you going?” And then quickly changed his question to, “Where are we going?”
Riff glanced at him and shrugged. “Unless you’re a precog who can come up with any answers as to where Amy is, I suggest we do it the old-fashioned way.”
Wallace followed him back to the rig. “Why is it I feel as if you’re not telling me something?”
Riff shrugged. “I do well at finding things,” he muttered, “gathering intel. So I’ll need my laptop, which is in the rig.
I’ll access some MI6 secret files myself.
It would have been much more fun to use Jonas’s own equipment to infiltrate their system, but I figure I’ve pricked his ego enough today.
Also, lately I’ve been a little off my game in some ways.
It’s a personal problem,” he muttered. “Unfortunately we are creatures of moods and emotions, and, when things went wrong,… well, it set back a lot of my world.”
“That’s all very cryptic.”
They got into the loaner MI6 rig and both reached for their laptops.
As Wallace opened his up, he checked for any messages, but there was none.
“If MI6 isn’t playing some game themselves,…
then somebody else is likely playing it for them.
” He wondered about the options. “Or it could be that somebody was serious about wanting to utilize Amy’s skills, in which case they won’t know if she has any, not unless she puts them to good use.
And they will likely have to force her to show them. ”
“Which makes sense,” Riff agreed, turning to look at him sideways. “But you know that it won’t be good for her.”
“No, it won’t,” Wallace admitted grimly. “The only way they’ll force her to do something is if they put extreme pressure on her.”
“And presumably she has a pretty high tolerance to resist their attempts.”
“I don’t know about that, especially since she’s been very sick recently,” Wallace shared. “As in very sick. She wouldn’t give me the details, but she was obviously still under the weather slightly when she arrived here.”
“That’s not good,” Riff said, “particularly if it’s affected her abilities.”
“It definitely has. Terk mentioned that too this morning. Amy’s not even really sure what she can do.”
“Which is even worse because she’ll make good testing material.”
“Or she’ll make great testing material since she’ll be exploring what she can do herself.”
“Right, but that’s not something any of us want her to go through with these unknown third parties involved,” Riff muttered. “Assholes like this really won’t care how things work. They’ll just want to confirm that they get the results they want when they want it.”
“Regardless of what it does to her, I presume.”
Riff nodded. Still sitting in their parked vehicle, but, with his laptop open, Riff pointed at Wallace’s laptop.
“While I peek into MI6’s dark corners, why don’t you check the street cams again, this time for service vehicles around the hotel at 11:15 p.m. last night, or Ubers, or the like?
” Wallace nodded, as Riff began his online search.
Riff hacked into MI6’s protected files, some employment related, some ops related, some about this new psychic team.
Then he jumped on the dark web, searching for Psychics Wanted ads and such.
He even telepathically asked Terk if he had heard rumblings of anybody wanting psychics really badly.
Even that ended in a dead end for the moment.
An hour later Riff sat back in frustration and exclaimed, “How is that possible?”
Wallace groaned. “You had no luck either? I didn’t see any service trucks until early this morning, like a bread delivery or whatnot. Either nothing suspicious went by the cams or the kidnappers rigged the cameras.”
“Or,” Riff suggested, frowning at Wallace, “the kidnappers already have a team with people who can do this energy shit. Maybe some energy worker did something to the cameras or knows how to set up a camouflage.”
“Oh no. That would be our worst nightmare, so I’m not going there.”
Riff glared at him. “We have occasionally come across people with these kinds of abilities who operate outside of the law.… It’s never a good deal for anybody. And it doesn’t give us much to go on, if that’s what’s happened here.”
Wallace frowned. “What if she’s still in the hotel?”
Riff stared at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“What if she didn’t leave—because we didn’t see a vehicle—and what if she’s still there somewhere?
An awful lot of rooms are in hotels, and some are in places most people don’t even know about, like down in the basement or in the laundry area.
Somewhere secluded, and who knows? Maybe it’s connected to those underground tunnels that Levi and his team already alerted me to,” he added.
“They are sending me a tunnel map soon.”
At that, Riff started to nod very slowly. “You could be right. A lot of service tunnels are under most of London,” he muttered. “Hell, there’s a whole city down there.”
Wallace nodded. “Exactly. What if somebody figured it would be a whole lot easier just to keep Amy down there?”
Riff suggested, “If they didn’t need to move her, that would be perfect. What we need then is to see where she could have gotten to, where the hotel elevator goes. Does it drop into the tunnels?”
“Hang on a minute. I got a new email.” Wallace checked and found one from Levi’s team, attaching subterranean blueprints, plus the blueprints for the hotel building itself.
A moment later he opened them and smiled.
He pointed to one of them. “This hotel was built on top of an old building foundation, with tunnels running right below it all.”
“Yeah, they always do that here,” Riff noted.
“As long as it’s structurally sound, they just bring down the old building and put the new building on top of the existing foundation.
It’s too much work to dig it up, especially if they should be unlucky enough to hit an old burial site or something.
That puts a halt to construction for a long time.
So they often just go down as far as they need to and build back up again. ”
Wallace looked over the blueprints and nodded slowly. “Plus, they avoid damaging the tunnels not too far below all that. I see sewer connections nearby Amy’s hotel too.”
Riff smiled. “So, it looks as if we’re going sewer hunting.” He looked over at him. “We’ll need some gear.”
Wallace looked up a store nearby that would give them headlamps, flashlights, and better footwear. By the time they were decked out and heading underground toward the location they had chosen, Wallace noted that four hours had gone by. “That took way too long,” he fretted.
“But we’re now geared up and on our way,” Riff stated.
Wallace muttered, “Ask Terk to send out a telepathic message to Amy, if he can. Or you do it. I can’t seem to reach her.
Tell Amy that we’re on the way, and we’ll get there as soon as we can.
” With that, Wallace still sent off his own message mentally, still hoping that maybe the energy field, that sense of communication coming, would open up her senses and would give her some reassurance that help was on the way.
Accessing the sewer system where they wouldn’t be noticed, Wallace and Riff navigated their way toward their target location and soon came up into some of the big service tunnels underneath the hotel.
With their flashlights and headlamps on, Wallace realized that this underground ecosystem was not only big enough to house a massive hotel itself but, at this moment, it seemed big enough to house half the city.
He stared at Riff. “It’s bigger than I imagined down here. How will we ever find her?”
Riff grinned. “Hopefully down here I’ll do more of my specialty. Follow me.”
And Riff led the way deeper into the tunnels.