Don't Kill The Messenger (19 page)

Now it’s my turn to be confused. “I thought that was the whole idea of this trip. I take you home, you go back to school. Did I miss the part where that changed?”

“I thought you would at least try to talk me out of leaving.”

“Rebecca, I …”

“Sure, the night we met, I said I wanted you to drive me there, but now … Everything we’ve been through— We’ve made love.”

“I know. I was there.”

“Was it just a one-night stand? Just some conquest?”

“No, of course not. Rebecca, it was … it was beautiful, and it brought us closer in a way that nothing else could have. Right now, I’m a victim of geography. Unless you know a scenic route to your father’s house through Alabama, we’re going to be there in less than two hours. And I don’t think your idea of romance involves a quickie in a rest area. For someone who has the ability to read my thoughts, you’re certainly missing the biggest one—the one where I’d do just about anything to keep you from leaving this car and walking out of my life forever.”

And there it is, out in the open. I guess I am a bit surprised seconds later when she quietly says, “I
did
know. I just needed to hear you say it.”

I laugh a little to myself and shake my head. “You’re impossible. You do know this, right?”

“So what are we going to do?” she asks.

“I don’t know. As long as these assignments continue, I have to keep moving.”

“Would you come see me in between?”

“I’d really like that. Because you mean a whole lot more to me than a one-night stand. I really think I—”

My thoughts are interrupted as I glance down the road ahead. On the side of the highway, a car is parked with its hazard lights flashing. I see a male figure standing in our lane, waving his arms for us to stop.

“Is that a cop?” Rebecca asks me.

At first I’m willing to believe it, but as we draw closer, I recognize the figure and know that this is no member of law enforcement. Rebecca recognizes him as well.

“That’s impossible,” I say aloud.

“What would he be doing here?” she asks.

I slow the car to a stop, and the figure approaches. With no pause for greetings or formalities, he gets right to the point. “My friends, you have to come with me,” he says through his thick accent.

“Stelios, what are you doing here?” I ask him. “How did you find us?”

“There’s no time. Follow me to the next town. There is a little café where we can have some privacy. I’ll explain everything there. Hurry. It’s not safe if we’re seen talking here.”

Chapter 12
 

Without another word of explanation, Stelios hurries back to his car, gets in, and pulls into the lane ahead of us. Rebecca and I exchange a perplexed glance, simultaneously wondering if we should actually follow him, and then decide to do so. He drives fast, and I pace him, not wanting to lose him. As promised, he gets off at the next exit and we follow, down the off-ramp, around a corner, through several intersections to a tiny café in a quiet portion of a small town whose name I didn’t even catch. I park and put the top back up, then we follow him into the building.

Stelios catches a waiter’s eye, and the young man waves us back to a little meeting room with three tables in it in the back of the café. We all sit down together. “Are you hungry?” Stelios asks us. “Can I get you anything?”

Rebecca shakes her head. “No,” I tell him.

He turns to the waiter. “Bring us a pitcher of water and three glasses.”

The server exits, leaving us alone. “How did—”

Stelios holds up one hand, motioning for me to stop. The waiter enters the room and pours three glasses of water.

“We are not to be disturbed,” Stelios tells him, handing him twenty dollars.

The waiter takes the money. “Yes, sir.”

“By
anyone.
”

“Yes, sir.” He exits swiftly and once again we have privacy.

“You must have many questions,” Stelios says.

“That’s putting it mildly,” I reply. “For starters, how did you find us? Have you been following us?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. Your thought patterns are very distinctive, Tristan. Yours as well, Persephone. After we met, I was able to track you. I could tell where you were and where you were going. Just as I know where it is you’re going now. That’s why I had to talk to you before you get there. So I caught a flight last night and rented a car. And here we all are, together again,” he says pleasantly.

“Why us?” Rebecca asks. “Why is this happening?”

He looks squarely at her and the pleasantness leaves his voice. “How well do you know your father?” She looks away from him, forgetting how deep inside of her Stelios can see. “You’ve been to Wyandotte. You learned the truth about that place. About what he did there. But do you know about Consolidated Offshore?”

The name doesn’t sound familiar to me, and Rebecca shows no recognition either. “No,” she says. “What is it?”

“Consolidated Offshore is a group of oil speculators from all over the country. Men who have some money to invest, in the hopes of making much more. So they work with oil companies and geologists to search the coastal areas for the best places to drill. A few months ago, a small group of these investors was having no luck finding viable sites where they could drill. One of them had a side interest that he shared with the others—psychic ability. Do you know what dowsing is?”

I answer, “It’s the ability to find water underground with the use of divining rods.”

“Not just water, Tristan. Gems, minerals, anything hidden within the earth. Scientists try to say that dowsing is a fraud, that it doesn’t work. That’s because in order to make it work, the dowsers need to have some psychic ability, and this flies in the face of science. This group turned to dowsers to try to find the oil, and in the past month, they believe they’ve found a significant source of it.”

“But that’s good news … isn’t it?” Rebecca asks.

“Good news for them, certainly. If they strike oil there, it will be a windfall. But every discovery comes at a price. The area where they are planning to drill is in the Gulf of Mexico, just ten miles—”

“Off the coast of Tarpon Springs,” Rebecca says, finishing his sentence.

“Very good, Persephone.”

She gets a far-off look. “Twenty-eight degrees, ten minutes, sixteen seconds north; eighty-three degrees, five minutes, eleven seconds west.”

“Thank you for those coordinates,” he says, quickly writing them down. “I didn’t have an exact location until now. Do you know what is at twenty-eight degrees, ten minutes, sixteen seconds north; eighty-three degrees, five minutes, eleven seconds west?”

“No.”

“My fishing grounds, dear Persephone. Mine and my friends’. Hundreds of fishermen, looking for fish, shellfish, sponges—all creatures that will be wiped out if Consolidated Offshore begins drilling operations there as planned.”

“What does this have to do with my father?”

“Calvin Traeger is one of the investors using dowsers to find sites. He’s one of the backers for the Tarpon Springs drill site.”

She rests her head in her hands in disbelief.

Stelios continues, “He must have had one of his people send you those coordinates to keep them safe, in case something happened to him.”

“It makes sense now,” I tell him. “You knew we were going to see him, and you want us to ask him not to drill there, because of your fishing grounds.”

“I wish it were that simple, Tristan. This has gone far beyond polite conversation and personal appeals. There is a war going on, and the two of you are caught in the middle of it. I came here today to stop you from going there at all. You’ll be safest if you’re nowhere near Calvin Traeger or anything he touches.”

“No …” Rebecca says. I reach out a hand to calm her.

“Stelios, you don’t understand,” I say. “I was sent to get her, to take her home, because she was in danger if she stayed in Florida.”

“And where did you get that message?” he asks calmly.

“The same place I’ve been getting them for the past two years.”

“And where is that? From heaven? From God? Would you know a true message from a false one, Tristan?”

“A false one? I don’t understand.”

“You are a messenger. You and a handful of others like you go about helping others, just as you did with me. And for this, I thank you. But this gift of yours … it marks you. There are others out there who know you have this ability, and they can manipulate you, make you do their will by making you believe that the assignment comes from above. This is why you were sent to get Persephone. Her father needs her home again. So he instructed one of his team members to reach out and project an assignment to a vulnerable messenger. And you received that message, thinking it was real.”

“Are you saying I was used?”

“Yes, you were. Persephone here is very valuable to her father’s work. You’re discovering that Tristan isn’t the only one with gifts, aren’t you, my lovely little friend?”

“Yes,” she answers quietly.

“These gifts of yours will help your father. He doesn’t have them himself, but the same associate who saw Tristan’s abilities must have been able to see yours as well. And now he wants you to help him find the oil. This is why you were summoned home. You weren’t in danger before, but if you join with him, you will be. There are those who will go to great lengths to protect their livelihood.”

“Stop it,” I say sternly. “You’re scaring her.”

“She needs to be scared. I can’t guarantee the safety of her father or anyone in his investment group. If you doubt me, ask Jeffrey Casner.”

The name sends a shiver up my spine. “Casner … He was one of them?”

Stelios nods. “A major investor in the group, with ties to organized crime.”

“But I don’t understand. I was sent to warn him about the car bomb.”

He sighs deeply. “I owe you an apology, my friend. The one who sent you to Atlanta to talk to Casner was me.”

“You? But …”

“I sent you there because I needed someone to take the blame. When I met you and Persephone, I was able to see who she was. I saw the connection to Calvin Traeger, and I couldn’t take a chance. I sent you there in enough time to talk to Casner, but I knew you wouldn’t convince him.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because I called him ahead of time and bullied him. Told him he was a coward and he would back down from any threats. I also kept him from completing his vacation plans that day.”

At last I reach my breaking point. I spring from my seat and grab Stelios by the lapels—the second time, I realize, I have done this to someone in the past three days, and probably the second time in my life. “You son of a bitch! They arrested me for murder! They thought I killed Casner.”

“I know,” he says calmly, and once again I am dismayed at how calm people are when I grab them by the lapels. I really need to work on my fierceness. “They thought exactly what I wanted them to think. I am sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Oh, well, that makes it all better then, doesn’t it?”

“You can hit me if it will make you feel better,” he says, still calm. “But please try to see it from my point of view. You arrive on my boat with my enemy’s daughter, and I can sense that she is a psychic. You tell me that my boat is going to sink. How could I see you as anything other than a threat?”

“We came to warn you,” I remind him. “We came to save you from having that very thing happen to you, and this is how you repaid us?”

“After Atlanta, I realized that I had misjudged you. Believe me, I was quite relieved to see that you had been released from custody. Tristan, I really regret putting you in that situation. That is why I came here now, to warn you not to finish your journey.”

I release him and pace around the table a bit. “So you killed Casner?” I ask.

“No. The people who did that are far away from here, and they mean you no harm. Casner’s death was a warning to other members of the cartel.”

“Like my father?” Rebecca chimes in, quite agitated.

“Yes.”

“So they’re going to kill him next?” she asks.

“I honestly don’t know. I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you this is a war. There are those on both sides who will do whatever it takes to prevail.”

“Now that I know this, what’s to stop me from going to the Atlanta Police and telling them about your part in Casner’s murder?” I ask.

“Because I think you will look deep inside yourself and realize that I truly am on your side in all of this. And … although I would hate to do so, I have gathered pieces of evidence which, if given to the police, would very convincingly implicate young Persephone here in the murder. You have an alibi; she does not.”

Rebecca and I share a glance that says we both believe he means it.

“As I said, I don’t want to do that. All you have to do is go your way and let me go mine. The world will not miss Jeffrey Casner …”

“No, but I suspect his wife will,” I interrupt.

“Less than you might think,” he says. “He has inflicted hurt upon her, both physical and emotional. There are some men in the world for whom no one will grieve.”

At last, after all the questions I’ve had these past four days, the answer is standing before me, telling me everything I need to know, and I am completely unprepared to accept what he is saying. It’s too much; it’s just too much to take. The knowledge that other people can send me on their own little assignments sickens me; how many times have I fallen for it, thinking that I was serving a higher authority? All along, I’ve been feeling enormously guilty, believing I’d dragged Rebecca into this whole thing. Now I realize that, in fact, she dragged
me
into this whole thing, however unwittingly, and I don’t know how to feel about that. I can’t blame her and I can’t abandon her now, so close to the end. But Stelios keeps using the word
war,
and it feels ominously like a major battleground awaits us on Calvin Traeger’s doorstep.

“I’m not your enemy,” Rebecca tells Stelios, in response to his earlier threat.

“I know that now. You didn’t choose your family; and you were wise to get as far away from them as possible. The best thing you can do now is to do just that. Go back to Key West if you’d like. Or California, or Europe. But don’t tell them where you are going or why. You can bet that if I know of your gifts, others know of them too—others who would consider you their enemy. Or at least a weapon against their enemy.”