Book 17

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***WARNING!  Rough Draft Here! ***

     Christopher watched two men in black suits, sunshades, and ear communicators pass him, hauling a cuffed and rebelling woman through a gate of a canvas-wrapped chainlink fence a few feet away from where he stood, and out of sight of the crowd leaping and shouting as though they’d just been given news that a savior had appeared in the sky. The roasting Florida heat didn’t slow the crowd’s zeal.

     Something told Christopher not to look away.

     Beyond the mobile wall was a tour bus parked close, and he could see from the bottom of the fence where the banner-and-canvas concealment ended a foot shy of the ground that the men and their captive halted just inside the gate. A giant advertisement that announced "Freedom Under Guard" prevented witness. Christopher’s flesh tingled, probably the sizzle of the sun too harsh in this land, worse than even Sydney today.

     Or was he sensing impending disaster?

     The assembly applauded at the introduction of a speaker, and a band struck up to serenade his rise to the microphone. Signs waved, endorsing various names for some election. Christopher didn’t give a tinker’s damn for politics, was only in the park to swim the river, but the shouts of the crowd had drawn him, then the smell of food, greasy fair food, the staff of life. Then he’d caught sight of his own name on some of the banners and posters as he’d entered the park.

     Cassadine. Not a terribly common name.

     Every single eye was pinned on the orator and, even though Christopher possessed extraordinary hearing and should have heard the conversation on the other side of the wall, the applause prevented him from picking up the specific nature of the captured woman’s protests. No one but Christopher saw her detainment.

     Completely uninterested in some political bloviation he’d met up with on the way to Weeki, Christopher watched their feet, the two men and their woman-captive who’d stilled behind the barrier. He couldn’t see what they did behind the fence meant to contain the mob and create some backstage privacy. He only saw their shuffling feet under the fence. What they did he couldn’t see, but he saw the woman hit the ground.

     Darting to the gate of the fence, Christopher passed through the chain-link to see one of the men yanking her to her feet, locking his hands around her arms, leaving her prime for further assault. Her cheek was red.

     "This is your second chance to tell us who you are," suggested the other determined man standing before her, leaning over her to haunt her. It seemed pretty clear the men were event security.

     But the woman hardly looked like trouble, 5 feet-something, garbed in a sun dress and sandals, didn’t even carry a purse. Christopher saw nothing suspicious about her, and she certainly wasn’t clothed for terrorism. Maybe these guys just liked to slap defenseless women around, Christopher speculated to himself.

     The woman gave her menace no answer, so the man wound back to slap her again.

     "Hey," Christopher called out, halting the man’s slap, and Christopher approached the three of them, scanning the area for others. There were a couple of limousines, and a couple of tour buses, people milling about beyond the buses a hundred yards away where the backstage participants clamored by, but there really wasn’t anyone to spot the too-formally attired men roughing the woman up.

     Both the men and their pretty victim turned to Christopher’s voice. On sight of him, Mr. Slappy pulled a gun, so Christopher froze, and slowly put his hands in the air.

     "Don’t move a muscle. Wanna tell me why you’ve just walked into a restricted area?" the gunman demanded, prepared to shoot him.

     "I’d love to tell you. You’re slapping my wife around."

     The gunman regarded the woman, who stared at Christopher as though he’d conjured fireworks in the daytime, then he squinted to his buddy. Christopher sent them both a threat with his eyes though they were the ones with the guns.

     The snarl of his lip revealing his displeasure at finding a surprise player, Slappy snapped the gun sideways, directing Christopher over to the bus that hid the scene from witness. The man who held the woman put her against the bus, and drew his weapon on them both, as Slappy shoved the Keeper against the cruiser for a thorough frisk.

     Deciding he was unarmed, the man spun Christopher around and slammed him against the bus again, facing him this time, then he turned to the woman and gave her a harder and fresher frisk than Christopher thought very decent. The agent paid extra attention to guaranteeing that she hid no weapon in her bosom. She looked as though she would cry.

     Done with his search, Slappy returned the ugly side of his gun to his target, understanding he would need more to intimidate Christopher than just attitude. Christopher had at least a half foot’s height on both the agents.

     Without an inch of his barrel dropping, the man raised his wrist, and talked into his sleeve. "She has a partner. No, they’re unarmed, and we have them both in custody, outside the bus." His hand returned to the sure aim of his semi-automatic pistol and said nothing more.

     "Can’t a guy send his wife to buy lunch at noon?" Christopher spouted, but neither of the men said a word nor dropped their hard stare or barrels.

     "So, do you guys get paid to slap women around? Is that some kind of career path these days?"

     Not a word.

     Christopher turned to the woman to see her gaping at him, wide-eyed with disbelief. "I wanted a sandwich, Sandy. You said you were going for sandwiches. Did you ask for side orders of harassment and injury, or was it complimentary?"

     She only gawked at him, holding her peace.

     No one said a word nor did they appreciate Christopher’s sardonic sense of humor, their loss. Christopher listened to the rally speaker expound on one meaningless idea after another, bringing the crowd to ovation time and time again. The hypnotic chant of their party slogan sounded like a fascist pep rally. The rise of applause reminded Christopher of the rain pouring down on the metal roof of his family ranch’s tool shed in Australia.

     From around the front of the bus turned an entourage of suits flanking a very tall, dark-haired man who spotted them and made a beeline to their way. They looked like a swarm of business men headed for a three-martini lunch until one saw the hard examinations of their eyes. Half of them spoke into communicators, some of the men fanned out surrounding the area, some backed up the dark man who seemed to be the center of the storm.

     The odd tingle in Chris’s skin became more profound.

     Appearing intensely-mooded, the dark-haired leader with powerful green eyes so like Christopher’s own father’s magical sight, stepped right up to the woman a foot from her face, and he hissed at her, "I know you."

     "We’ve never met," the woman replied, her fear not well hidden, her eyes too wide to look unalarmed.

     He shook his head slowly as though he knew better. "I’ve seen you in the Libertine Headquarters."

     "I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for another." Her eyes went to Christopher beside her, and she stuttered, "I-I was just attending the rally, and I went to buy lunch for my husband and me."

     "We found her behind the restricted zone," Slappy reported.

    "I was looking for the restroom when your friends here wrestled me to the ground," she tried.

     Slappy reached into his pocket and passed the dark-haired man a camera. "She was taking pictures of license plates."

     The boss looked down at the camera, then back to her. "License plates ..."

     "I like license plates," she deadpanned, and if she’d said it to get a dirty look from he-who-leads-an-entourage, it worked.

     Christopher watched the boss review the pictures on the camera the woman had taken. Then he began to push buttons deleting her pictures.

     "All gone," he said, dropped the camera to the asphalt, shattering it into fragments of glass and plastic. What remained he crushed with his shoe, even ground the remains into the parking lot to flex his power over her. He took hold of her jaw and examined her harshly. Christopher could see a tear rise from the woman’s eye.

     Then, releasing her, the dark-haired man turned his strange green eyes, unusually effulgent, onto Christopher. And he stared at the Keeper as though he expected to recognize him but oddly didn’t. "Who are you?"

     "A hungry man waiting for his sandwich."

     More than merely displeased, the dark-haired man scowled, and would have countered Christopher’s smart mouth with a wicked word when the crowd began to chant, "Freedom under guard! Freedom under guard!"

     "They call for you, sir," a man wearing the same black suit, sunglasses, and ear communicator as the other men pointed out. The mortuary suits must have been the uniform of the day.

    The boss didn’t move, only glared at Christopher dangerously, as if staring at him would yield some answer. The crowd was now stomping on the footboards of the bleachers, raising a ruckus.

     "Sir ..."

     Everyone heard the loud speaker announce, "Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Florida, I present to you the serving director of the Freedom Party, Stephen Cassadine!"

     Christopher chilled at the name of an uncle he’d never known, on a side of the family of which he’d met few members. The band struck up the National Anthem.

     The introduction did not cause the man to move his focus from Christopher. He squinted at the Keeper as though he could not figure him out, and he revealed, "I’ve never felt a presence quite like yours."

     "I can say the same for you, my lord," Christopher replied slyly, and the man calling himself Stephen Cassadine stepped backward, clearly surprised to be addressed so.

     "Sir, the crowd awaits you," a man muttered around his shoulder.

     His expression hard and fixed on the Keeper, Stephen Cassadine instructed Slappy, "Process the girl. Take the man into a seedy part of town and kill him."

    "Yes, Director," the aide replied, and the director turned toward the stage so slowly that it was clear he wasn’t happy to be leaving the situation, plainly wished to stay to harass them.

     But the crowd called, their feet pounding the portable bleachers, applause and shouts filling the air. They chanted, "Cassadine, Cassadine!"

     Reluctant, Stephen Cassadine turned on a heel, and Christopher watched the man and his shadow-guards march away. The Keeper got a worse-than-ominous feeling about the man. Why was another Keeper on Terra? Christopher knew no Keeper should be here. The Keepers were banned from Terra. His own father was forbidden to see him.

     Slappy and his friend opened the bus door, took fistfuls of the woman’s dress and Chris’s shirt, and launched them into the conveyance. Inside, Slappy drove the woman down into a seat, eliciting a squeal.

     "You don’t have to be so rough with her," Christopher slurred. He didn’t like guys who manhandled women.

     Officer Slappy turned to him with a grimace. "She’s a traitor to her country and a nonperson."

     "How do you trade in your country taking pictures of cars?"

     They felt no need to answer.

     Slappy’s partner sat down at a cubbyhole table, uncuffed the woman, and she rubbed the cuff prints from her wrists as he drew out a box from a drawer, and flipped the top open to reveal a fingerprinting kit. Christopher knew they were likely less than hours away from identifying her, whoever she was.

    Then Slappy’s partner reached into the drawer again, and withdrew an air-hypo. Without a word of warning, he pressed it to her arm and engaged the hypo, giving her another yelp, and the Keeper knew what he’d just done.

     Christopher had to get them out of there.

     Under Slappy’s watchful eye, his partner taped a band-aid to the injection shot turning a bit bleedy. Then he took hold of the woman’s left hand, chose her thumb, and rolled the digit over a biometric reader that probably sent the print to a database in Quantico for microscopic comparison.

     It was time for action.

     Christopher reached out and issued a hard punch to Slappy’s jaw, catching him by surprise. A sharp elbow to his face sent him to the floor unconscious and bleeding into the driver’s cab of the bus.

     The other officer rose, drawing his weapon, but Christopher spun and opened his hand, and directed his telekinetic energy to slam the man into a corner of a cabinet, causing him to drop his gun, and the Keeper hoped it happened too fast for the woman to have seen he hadn’t touched the man. Blood gushed from the back of agent’s head, and he hit the deck, lights out. The woman gasped at the surprise violence.

     Christopher quickly moved to the door of the bus, and looked through the window to spot a guard posted at the door, unaware of the blitz attack within the bus. The roar of the crowd must have covered the vibrations of the brief rustle inside the bus. No exit this way, he thought.

     Christopher turned toward the woman in shock, snatched up her hand, and swiftly moved to the back of the bus and checked the windows, finding few people around. Parked next to the bus was another bus, and Christopher knew it would serve as a great cover for a back-door escape.

     Finding the bus windows not only locked but sealed shut, Christopher took a nearby towel, wrapped it around his hand, and punched the glass, shattering it. Ripping away the shards of the glass, Christopher tugged the stunned woman forward.

     "Let’s go, Troublemaker."

    Before she had a moment to protest, Christopher hauled her up by her waist and poked her legs out of the window, lowering her to the ground. He felt her shaking, but she wisely didn’t waste time on a protest.

     A moment later, his feet hit the ground, and finding her pressed against the other bus and scanning their perimeter as though she expected a lion attack, and he snatched up her wrist, and they ran.

***