And the World Changes - A M Kirk (books to read fiction txt) 📗

cars move with urgent speed. Logan gets up and moves closer to the window. The villa is equipped with guns. Should he prepare now?
The curtain sways gently in the breeze from outside. The hairs on Logan’s neck prickle and suddenly he feels a cramping feeling in his stomach. A few weeks ago he would have called this an adrenalin rush; now it registers as fear. His head is pounding.
There is someone behind him. He is sure of it. Someone extremely dangerous. He cannot turn. His head is thumping, his knees weak and he knows, just knows someone is behind him, but he cannot, not for worlds, turn around.
The approaching cars have turned into the driveway leading to the villa. The order has been given for them to turn on their blue flashing lights. Logan knows he must get guns and defend himself – he must go out fighting.
But he is too afraid to move away from the window.
“Logan.” The voice behind him is calm, quiet. It is a young voice.
Logan’s legs sag and he leans against the dresser but still cannot face the owner of the voice.
“It is time.” The hand settles on his shoulder and Logan flinches away. The grip tightens and it is absolutely inescapable. Window, flashing lights, dresser, villa, and dark Italian evening fade into blackness. Logan is terrified. He does not know what the hell is happening. There is a rushing sensation.
Then light appears again – a cheap dim forty-watt bulb, unshaded, seen through bars, steel bars, and the smell of damp and piss and rotten garlic and stale tobacco. Bars – Logan knows he is in a prison.
The hand leaves his shoulder and Logan now finds the strength to turn round.
“You!”
The Daniels boy stands facing him, his gaze level and completely unafraid. Power crackles all around him like faint blue lightning. Not at all like the last time they saw each other. Logan’s terror intensfies.
“How? What have you done? How have you done this? What are you?”
Mark smiles, almost sadly, almost pityingly. “Goodbye.” And he vanishes, into the air. One second Logan sees him standing plainly in front of his face, not two metres away, and the next second there is no Daniels boy there at all. No bangs, no flashes, no weird sounds, just silence and absence.
Logan grabs the bars of his prison cell and begins to scream. An Italian policeman comes running to see who can be making such a noise.


37


It was a cold Saturday afternoon in late October, when Carrie visited the Soros ship. The sky above Central Scotland that day was a brilliant blue as a high pressure system settled itself over northern Britain. Hoar frost sparkled on wide fields and a light dusting of thin snow whitened the higher mountain tops visible from Touch.
Mark called on Carrie. Gin showed him into the lobby. Carrie’s parents stepped warily around the young man’s celebrity. Their initial dislike had now evolved into a more amenable toleration. Gin even smiled weakly at Mark and had almost started a conversation before Carrie called from the upstairs landing that Mark was to come up to her room. Mark shuffled awkwardly past and his distrustful gaze.
“Hey,” Carrie said as Mark joined on the landing. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she ushered him into her bedroom. “What do you bet one of them comes upstairs in a minute singing a Rolling Stones song to advertise their presence and to stop us from doing anything we’re not supposed to. Or they’ll come armed with tea and biscuits…”
“I don’t know what you’ve got in mind. I don’t know what I’m not supposed to be doing.”
“Oh yeah, Daniels? I’m going to pinch your ears – “
“Does starting to save the world count as something we’re not supposed to be doing?”
The door was now closed and they could kiss, so they did.
“Okay,” said Carrie, stopping for breath. “How does saving the world actually start? Do I need to pack warm clothing?”
Mark laughed. “No, nothing like that. Okay, stand close beside me. Yes, holding hands is good. Now, I just imagine a kind of protective envelope or skin surrounding us both – “
To Carrie’s eyes the room seemed to shimmer slightly around her.
“ – and then, hey presto!”
Carrie had the merest sensation of falling and then: “OH MY GOD!”
She blinked and found herself on the deck of the Soros ship. The transfer took less time than it took to take a breath. In the huge viewscreen space stretched out before her. The ship was turning gradually and Earth drifted into the field of vision.
“Hey – look, there’s Scotland! It’s still a nice day there, not a cloud in the sky. This is better than Google Earth! Can it zoom in?”
“It can zoom in, zoom through and out the other side. Look, here’s your house.” Instantly the screen seemed to flash towards Earth and narrowed down to the little town of Touch, then a red slate roof, then some kind of x-ray imaging facet kicked in, the roof became transparent and Carrie’s bedroom was clearly visible, just as they had left it moments before.
“Look at this.” Mark put slight pressure on the hand control in front of him and dark marks appeared on Carrie’s bedroom carpet. “I’ve enhanced the carpet indentations where we walked in your room. Those darker ones are our footprints you’re seeing. The ones that are less dark are your ones from earlier.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“And you can check on what your parents are doing.” The focus shifted to the right and downwards and Gin came into view. He was at the foot of the stairs, looking up, clearly dying to know what Carrie and Mark were up to in her room – a concerned protective parent.
Sound kicked in.
He was humming “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.
“How can it get sound? We must be a million miles away from Gin!”
“I don’t know how exactly the ship does most of the things it can do. Maybe it can interpret vibrations in the air – I just don’t know.”
Carrie reached out and touched the console with her fingers. “I can almost feel the power of this thing. It’s… vast!”
Mark nodded. “It certainly is. Look at this – “
Instantly the screen showed a bird’s eye view of an office building that, it became obvious, was the Headquarters of the CIS. The focus became Roberts’ office… his desk… his computer. His computer files came up on the screen.
“But – he’s not even there.”
“No, he’s at home right now with his family.”
“But – his machine’s not even switched on!”
“I know,” Mark replied. “It’s magic! There is very little the systems on this ship can’t let us access. So I know what the surveillance teams are up to… everything!”
“So how can we use this like I said?”
“Well, I was thinking about that. If we screen all the communications in, say Scotland, and listen for particular phrases – “
“Say… ‘drugs’,” suggested Carrie.
“My thought exactly. And then we just…”
It became clear after a few minutes of mobile phone intercepts that a shipment of drugs was being ferried across the North Sea at that moment in an old fishing boat. The captain had just called his contacts ashore to confirm drop-off point. The Soros ship had pinpointed the precise location of the fishing boat.
“What shall we do about that?” asked Carrie. “Notify the police? Tell Roberts?”
“Well, if we do that, they’ll start asking us all sorts of questions and that could get awkward.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“But if you’ll excuse me for a moment…”
Mark vanished.
“Hey! Get back here, Daniels!” Carrie thumped the console. The screen suddenly showed a zooming in image of the fishing boat. As the boat loomed larger on the screen a dark figure appeared at its stern, out of sight of the two-man crew in the small cabin. Carrie could feel the rise and fall of the boat on the swelling waves. Mark appeared to sink into the wooden deck. He was in the hold. He found the cargo – a big one, a fortune in heroin. He reached out with his right hand and touched the cases that held the drug. Energy flowed from his fingers and at the molecular level began to work a different kind of magic.
Seconds later he reappeared at Carrie’s side.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
“I turned it into sugar.”
“Sugar?”
“Yeah – there are going to be some pretty upset people later on today. Shall we push this a bit further?”
“Okay, but take me with you this time. Don’t go flying off all by yourself.”
“There’s a container ship, a big one, heading for Hull. One of the containers has another shipment – cocaine this time. Shall we…?”
“Let’s do it.”
They transferred aboard the ship, holding hands. Carrie could feel the vibration of the vessel’s engines under her feet, and smell the salt in the air mixed with a rusty metallic oiliness. Large cargo containers painted in various colours loomed above and ahead of her. “Do you know which container it is?”
“Of course I do.”
“Of course you do. Shouldn’t we take cover… hide?”
“No need. The infra-red scan is showing that there’s no one around.” Mark led the way down a narrow passageway between piled high containers, each ten by five metres and three metres high. “It’s this one.” He touched it and its rusting doors parted. Inside Carrie could clearly see pack after pack of white powder.
“If you change it into flour,” she mused, “they might still make some bread out of it.”
“Ta-dah! My side-kick, folks, the Joker!”
Carrie nipped Mark’s arm. He touched the container side and the energy flowed from his hand again, entering into the molecular structures of the drug, shifting electrons, changing essences.
“It’s done,” he said. “As simple as that. Let’s go.”
They entered a leafy suburban street, but the air was filled the nasty smell of a house-fire. People were shouting and screaming. The lights of several fire engines and ambulances flashed.
“What the hell is this?” asked Carrie.
“We’re in Manchester. I picked up a message from one of the fireman’s radios. He’s inside that burning building. It’s a care home for the elderly. Someone is trapped in that room – “ He pointed to a third floor window – “and he can’t get through. You should wait here for this one.”
“I’ll wait here. Be careful!”
She watched as Mark walked quickly into the gathering crowd then faded from view. The home was a large one, converted from an old red-brick Victorian mansion. Unsightly fire-escape stairwells marred the outside of the building. Firemen were moving on these, escorting people slowly and carefully down to waiting paramedics before going back up. The fire seemed to be most intense towards the rear of the building.