Greenly sat in the back row of the conference room at DSSA headquarters as Julie turned out the lights and powered up the projector. A picture of young twin girls with black hair and light brown eyes appeared on the screen. They were wearing matching Wonder Woman t-shirts and making faces at each other.
Julie addressed the assembled agents in the room. “One of these girls is Teri Darby. We aren’t sure which. The other was her twin sister Tabitha. They’re five in this photo. Teri seems like a normal kid here, but I promise you she’s not.”
An agent raised her hand, and Julie nodded to her. “That had to be long before the Event, though,” the agent said. “There were no talents then.”
Greenly smiled. The question was such a perfect lead in that Julie had probably planted it in the woman’s mind. He always enjoyed watching his partner work.
“Not all talents are like ours,” Julie said. “There have been talented people throughout history: Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Da Vinci. They didn’t have powers that defied the laws of physics, but they were most assuredly talented. Teri might have been the next person on this list if things had gone differently.”
She flipped to the next slide. An IQ bell curve appeared. “I want to make sure you understand what we’re dealing with. The average intelligence of a human being is around 100.”
She clicked her remote, and the center area representing IQs from 70-130 lit up. “This is 95 percent of people. Useful mentalists tend toward the higher end. All of you are above 120. It isn’t that stupid people can’t be mentalists, but it takes a certain amount of intellect to utilize our gifts. On the other hand, no one in this room has an IQ above 145, which is just below genius level.”
Julie brought a photo of a young Asian man onto the screen.
“This is Kim Ung-Yong. His IQ is around 210. He could speak four languages and solve differential equations by the time he was four years old. He started working for NASA at age eight.”
She clicked, and two screens of test results appeared. “Teri was tested when she was in grade school. If these results are to be believed, Teri Darby is even smarter than Kim Ung-Yong.” She paused. “And she’s the strongest mentalist DSSA has ever encountered.”
“Shit,” someone said.
“Exactly,” Julie said. “We have no idea what she can do.” She looked around the room. “I’m sure you all agree we can’t let her run around on her own?”
There was a murmur. Julie waited for it to die down.
“So, let’s get to know our subject, shall we?”
A photograph of Teri in a school uniform appeared. Her smile looked forced.
“This is the last photo we have of Teri. It’s from the fifth grade. Her twin sister, Tabitha, died a couple of years before this photo was taken. She fell down the stairs in their home. We’re not clear on the details but the police ruled it an accident.”
Another slide appeared, this one with a page full of math formulas.
“In the fifth grade, Teri solved in its entirety a math proof that had been unsolved since the 1600s. Her math teacher sent the proof off anonymously, and it was such a big deal that the media picked up the story. Everyone wanted to know who in this small town proved the Fermat-Catalan conjecture.”
The next photo was an older one, of a handsome man wearing a cowboy hat and a football jersey, holding an identical twin girl in each arm. He was posing in front of a Ford dealership.
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“This is Thomas ‘Tip’ Darby, Teri’s father,” Julie said. “Former high school football star and used car dealer. When Tip found out that her teacher had sent in the proof without his permission, he was furious. He made a lot of noise with the principal and the school board. Tip was locally well-connected, and the teacher got fired. He pulled Teri out of school soon after that.”
The next slide pictured a raven-haired young woman in a midnight-blue prom dress. She stood in front of a painted backdrop of marble columns. The girl’s face was flawless and had a hint of Asian heritage. She belonged on a magazine cover.
“This is Eva MacKenzie, Teri’s mother. She was a cheerleader and valedictorian—the whole package. She got scholarship offers from several good colleges, but she got knocked up by the quarterback—Tip Darby—and never went to college. She died during the Event, leaving Tip and Teri alone.”
“We don’t know much else about the family. Tip’s car dealership went out of business a few years before the Event—and after that the only place anyone saw him was the local bar. Two agents visited his trailer yesterday. It’s abandoned.”
An X-ray of a torso with multiple healed fractures appeared on the screen. “This is a recent X-ray of Teri. Our experts tell us that these injuries stemmed from early childhood. It’s almost certainly abuse, and it puts her sister’s accident in an interesting light.”
She leaned forward. “This is the only break we’ve caught. If Teri was abused, she probably has major issues. We can use that to our advantage.”
Another slide came up. It was a sixteen-year-old Teri, unconscious in a hospital bed with IVs in both arms and oxygen tubes near her nose.
“This is how we first found Teri just a few weeks ago. She was involved in a random shooting, and took two bullets intended for someone else. She incapacitated half a city block when she went down. We thought we’d captured her while she was unconscious, but, as the report you’ve all read details, she escaped as soon as she woke up.”
Director Whitchurch spoke up from the back of the room. “Agent Hawkins, you recently advanced a theory that Teri Darby is more than she seems, and that she let herself be caught.”
“It’s possible, Director,” Julie said. “Anything is possible with a mentalist of this caliber. But our team decided to proceed as if she is what she appears to be—an untrained girl with incredible potential. The alternative is to assume that we know nothing … to assume that everything we are seeing and hearing at any given moment is an illusion. I would respectfully submit that any investigation under those parameters wouldn’t matter anyway because we are all in the Matrix—so to speak.”
Greenly smiled. Julie waited a moment, then clicked to the next slide—a grainy picture of a group of people inside a church.
“This was taken off a security camera at Bethel Church earlier this week. The girl is Teri Darby. The man on the left you all know well. Ezekiel Daniels.”
The room erupted in chatter. “Obviously, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. I don’t need to tell anyone how dangerous he is. The man holding Teri is Reginald Unglesby IV, but he goes by Ruddy.”
A slide appeared depicting a hulking, ugly man with lumpy features and bright red hair.
“Unglesby is a bit of a problem. His father is Seb Unglesby. He runs one of the biggest oil companies left in Texas, and he’s got ties to politicians there and here in D.C. He’s on a first-name basis with President Hargrove. So, we’d rather not kill his son.”
“In addition, Ruddy Unglesby is an extremely powerful changeling,” Julie said. She smiled at Greenly. “And we all know how useful they are.”
Greenly nodded to her.
“Capturing him instead of killing him would give us leverage with his father, and making him a part of our team would continue that leverage indefinitely,” Julie said. “The problem, of course, is that as long as he’s with Teri Darby, we can’t even find him. We suspect she aided Unglesby in escaping our men at the bus terminal, but once again we have no direct evidence. Nor do we know how or why they are connected with Daniels.”
She turned off the projector. “You all have the report on what happened outside the Bethel compound. Read it. Our team agrees that none of this can be a coincidence. Someone is either guiding or controlling these events. It may be Teri Darby, or it may be someone else. We believe foreign talents are involved. The Eagle himself is closely monitoring this investigation. I don’t need to tell you that we need one hundred percent from everyone.”
She shook her head and looked at Greenly. “Horace, do you have anything to add?”
He stood and looked around at the audience. With his heightened changeling hearing, he could pick out the breathing of every person in the room and the elevated heartbeats of those near him—but no one said a word.
“Now you know what we’re up against,” he said. “It’s not pretty, and it’s not going to be easy. But you’re the best DSSA has. That’s why you’re here. Teri’s smart and she’s strong, but she’s also an untrained teenager with serious emotional issues. That’s what we have to exploit.”
“Let me be clear. She would make a valuable agent, but that’s not on the table anymore. Capture is no longer an option."
“Teri Darby has to die.”
