Chapter 6
W allace winced. Amy might have made a gaffe herself, but what he had just mentioned appeared to put everybody in an uncomfortable position. Amy squeezed his fingers and gave him a bolstering smile. He shrugged. “Obviously this time I said something completely wrong.”
Terk chuckled. “We can’t really be worried about who’ll say things around here, especially when it’s the truth,” he shared.
“That is something we’re all working our way into, finding a methodology that works here with all of us,” he said, with a smile.
“But I think we should turn our attention to what your plan is at this point.”
“I don’t have a plan,” Amy stated boldly.
“I was hoping somebody here would have an idea of how to get these guys off my back, or get this whole concept of a team off my back. Not to mention that another man was already tortured by mistake in Wallace’s name,” she told everyone.
“So, it’s not just me who’s in danger. It’s also Wallace. ”
“I heard about the other Wallace. He couldn’t give you any other information?” Terk asked.
“He’s in the hospital,” Riff offered, “and was headed for surgery last night. I will get back in and talk to him today, but I’m not sure I’ll be allowed in, at least not until he’s a little bit better recovered.”
“MI6 will be allowed in, so, if that’s the case, you should be allowed in,” Terk declared, his tone hard, turning to face Wallace. “That poor man went through hell. For whatever reason they thought he was you.”
“I was trying to figure that out because I don’t know quite how it worked either. Jonas and I went to the hotel, dropping Amy off, which is why we didn’t suspect Jonas, because he was with me.”
“Nobody would suspect that,” one of the men joked.
That brought a certain amount of laughter, but it was also a valid question in the sense that nobody quite understood how this other Wallace had been picked up.
“We dropped off Amy, and then Jonas and I went to a pub and had a beer,” Wallace shared.
“It’s possible that the other Wallace guy was there too.
He did mention he’d been at a pub and had shared something about being in town for a job interview, then confirmed his name was Wallace. It’s his last name though.”
“It’s quite possible he was there,” Terk agreed, studying Wallace. “You’ll need to track that down so you understand how this worked. Specifically how are they finding their victims?”
Wallace snorted. “Jonas was supposed to be looking into a mole or a leak in his department.… I don’t know how much effort will go into that.”
Surprisingly Riff piped up. “I think he will be doing all he can. He was pretty upset that not only was Amy put through her ordeal but because this other completely innocent man suffered so badly as well. Jonas is angry about the whole thing. The mole might have a partner working in that hotel as well. So there is that possibility too.” Riff looked over at Terk.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you don’t get a call from Jonas. ”
Terk nodded, staring at his phone. “Yeah, he’ll call in a few minutes.” He sighed. “Not sure we have a whole lot to tell him though.”
“I don’t think we have anything to tell him, but that won’t stop him from calling and asking you to get more.”
Amy’s gaze went from one to the other. “Do you always work with MI6?”
“MI6, MI5, CIA, FBI, and other government agencies from all around the world,” Terk stated. “We work with them all. Sometimes the work is easier than others.” Terk sighed. “It all depends on the governments involved.”
She couldn’t imagine. “I had enough trouble, even coming to this interview,” she murmured.
“Yet you came, so do you want to explain that?” Riff asked.
“Because I don’t understand. For somebody who was a child psychic but lost her abilities at puberty, then you suddenly show up for this job interview?
How did Jonas find out about you, and why would you have considered going for the interview, even getting back into this work? ”
She winced. “All very valid questions,” she murmured, then groaned. “The first thing you must understand is that my abilities didn’t really completely stop at puberty. It was my way of getting out of the circus that my family put me into.”
At that, one of the women clapped. “Bravo, that was brilliant,” she declared, “because everybody knows that at puberty everything is completely chaotic, so absolutely no guarantee of anything at that point in time. That was a perfect time to call it, and kudos to you for being so astute at that age.”
Amy shrugged. “That’s what I thought, so I didn’t let anybody know that I still had the abilities, mostly out of guilt.”
“Guilt?” asked the same woman. She then smiled and added, “I’m Celia, by the way. Terk is my husband.”
Amy smiled at her. “Yeah, guilt ,” she confirmed, as she shrugged and shook her head.
“While I was doing the work I was doing, at least I was helping all those people,” she shared, “but it was costing me so much that I had to get out. I had to stop. I had to find a way to not be so completely wrecked by it all. Yet, once I was out of it, all I could think about was that I should be helping, that I could be doing more, so guilt and all set in. I just didn’t know how to help them and to protect myself. ”
Celia smiled. “Conscience and heart,” she noted, “a true sign of good people.”
“Good people don’t necessarily have good lives,” Amy pointed out, “and that’s part of the problem.
I was desperate to have a life, and I still am.
I’d been on that show-pony track for a long time, and I needed off.
Plus, I did have an illness not all that long ago, and the consequences of that were even more shocking.
I was contemplating doing something again with my abilities, wondering if it was all part and parcel of the same thing.
Then I got quite ill, and my abilities became…
different . But they were there.” She grimaced.
“It seemed serendipitous at the time that I heard about this job and was contacted.”
Terk asked. “Did you fill out an application?”
She nodded. “I did.”
“What did you put down for job experience?” Celia asked, with a note of laughter. “I can just imagine what Jonas was thinking.”
“For a start, these were invitation only,” Amy explained. “So that was a bit awkward. Obviously, once they realized who I was, they were interested in hearing if I had anything to say. Jonas did bring up the fact that I had supposedly lost all my abilities as a teenager.”
“What did you tell him?” Terk asked.
“I told him the recent illness brought them back somewhat,” she shared, with a shrug. “I wasn’t sure what to say at that point and wasn’t even sure I wanted him to pass on the news at all. I wasn’t sure about any of it, honestly.”
“Of course not.”
“I was hoping to see Wallace,” she admitted, looking over at him.
“We had been friends before, and, as you can tell, we still are good friends—even though we hadn’t been in contact for many a year.
That’s not a part of this at all, but it’s frustrating to realize that somebody found out about me.
It feels as if I’m very much back in that same show-pony thing again, only worse.
I wouldn’t be doing the bidding of people who might consider my welfare.
Instead it would be people concerned only with their bottom line.
Yet I’m driven to find a way to help people again.
” She shrugged. “I guess I’m looking for balance. ”
“You definitely felt that the kidnappers’ plan was to force you to use your skills, right?” Terk asked.
She nodded. “They were talking about it—the one guy, whatever his name was.” She frowned as she tried to remember that joker. “I can’t even remember his name at the moment,” she murmured.
“Dominic?” Wallace suggested.
“Ah.” She nodded. “That’s right. He was trying to test me in some way and was arrogant about his particular gifts.
I didn’t really understand what his game was, only that there was a game and that, as far as he was concerned, he was clearly the gamemaster.
The four others around him felt as if nobody else knew anything about energy worker skills but Dom, and they were definitely wary of him.
It’s always disconcerting when you have the wrong kind of people in the energy cycle.
” She looked over at Terk. “I’m sure you’ve seen it before. ”
He nodded. “I have, and usually they’re the people you don’t want to have around. Not to mention that too much ego just doesn’t allow us to utilize their energy when we need to.”
“How would you utilize Dom’s energy?” she asked curiously.
“Sometimes, when we’re on big jobs, we need to tap into other people’s energy because we’re flagging,” Terk explained. “If you aren’t okay with that, then you can’t be part of a team.”
“That’s what a team would imply though,” Amy noted.
“That, as a team, when you’re flailing, somebody else is there to step in, right?
I could have used somebody on my team a long time ago,” she murmured.
“But what I had were nonbelievers and,… well, people who just didn’t care.
It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about the victims or whoever I was trying to help at the time.
It was only about them,” she muttered, with a headshake.
“I ended up with a really negative view of the world afterward.”
“I can understand that.”
“It took a while for them to realize and to accept that puberty had killed my abilities,” she shared, with a twinkle in her gaze. “Maybe it wasn’t fair to the rest of the world,” she conceded, hating herself for being happy about it. “As you can tell, I’m still very conflicted about it.”
“If you needed a break, you needed a break,” Celia declared. “Whoever wasn’t looking after you while you were doing all that work for everybody else was just a complete asshole.”