All that was left to do now was to make a call.
***
“Hello, my lovely!” Frost answered her on the first ring, anticipation in his voice.
“It’s all set,” Stella told him, her voice still dull and lifeless. She turned her PDC around to allow Frost to view the comatose Jocko. “I’m ready to begin transmitting whenever you want.”
“What a fine job, my dear!” Frost smiled warmly, while out of her view, he was snapping his fingers for Cee Tee to begin. “We’re linking up now. Be just a sec!”
Behind him, Cherry Denton watched intently, flanked by Sherman and Grant. This whole process had fascinated her. Her husband had no interest in it. He cared nothing for how things like this got done. He only cared about the results. Details weren’t necessary. He wasn’t a ‘hands-on’ kind of guy. He had no desire to build something from the ground up and take pride in the accomplishment of it, not when he could simply pay someone to do it for him. There were also details in an operation like this that he didn’t need to know about so he could maintain plausible deniability.
His wife, on the other hand, loved to watch as things came together. Perhaps it was due to their different upbringings. Her father had made his meager living fixing things … those times when he could stay sober long enough. As a little girl, she had always been fascinated with the way he could take something apart, tractor implements or a pump motor. She loved to watch him patiently space the parts out on his workbench as he rebuilt or replaced the defective or worn-out pieces. She was fascinated by the way he cleaned, lubed, calibrated and adjusted everything. Then, he would put it all back together, like the 3-d puzzles she worked. He remembered exactly where every little part went and was able to place it back just so, even in the most difficult and tiniest of spaces … when his hands weren’t shaking, of course. When he was finished, all those parts came together magically to work as one.
She had loved watching him work his magic. As a little girl, she would sit for hours enthralled with watching him work. But gradually, it got to the point his hands never stopped trembling, and he couldn’t reassemble the intricate little parts. He just couldn’t stay off the juice long enough. Maybe that was the reason she grew to hate him the most. It wasn’t that he was the Goose Spit town drunk, and an embarrassment to her, or that he died all alone on a Sunday morning, asphyxiated on his vomit, having chosen cheap gin over family one last time.
No, that wasn’t it. It’d started long before that. It’d started when the magic had left his fingers. Her love for him began slipping away when she realized he couldn’t take things apart and put them back together for her anymore.
Now, she was watching another journeyman at work. Frost was a man willing to do whatever it took to make sure his mission was a success, steal, kidnap, kill, even mind control. It was that kind of ruthless determination and drive that made the impossible possible. There were few like him left in this world.
“OK!” Cee Tee was shouting excitedly. “I’ve got incoming data! Downloading now!”
“Pull it up where I can see it,” Frost commanded. Cee Tee reached up and tapped a hologram key, and 3-D memories from the brain of Reginald “Jocko” Dewitt began flooding the room.
Back at the hospital, Jocko twitched and convulsed in the vat, his brain waves now being hijacked.
“C’mon, let’s get to what’s important!” Frost snapped, as images of Jock’s childhood began to appear as holograms, a procession of images conjured from his memory. Some of them, the older ones from early childhood and the more mundane, were faded, like a well-worn pair of denim jeans. Sometimes, they were barely discernible, like old black and white photographs out of focus. Some were very vivid, the colors too bright for real life. Some were probably exaggerated, embellished by time and fondness. Others, bad ones, came up slow, like corpses exhumed from a graveyard. But eventually, they all came … which was never pleasant.
“Ewww!” Cherry’s face twisted up in disgust, as a rather vivid memory from Jocko’s adolescent years wafted across the room. “Who’s he fantasizing about? She’s gotta be sixty!”
“I think it’s his eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Cummins,” Cee Tee informed her, as he read the data.
“Teenage boys are so nasty!” She wanted to close her eyes and not look, but it was like a mag-lev train wreck. She just couldn’t turn away.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Frost growled. “I ain’t got time for pubescent daydreaming!
“It takes time, boss,” Cee Tee shot back irritably. “I gotta sort through forty years of memories here!”
Cherry noticed Sherman was simply standing there, watching impassively, totally detached from everything that was going on. He was indeed a monster, a big, hulking beast that dwarfed her. He terrified her, more so by the fact that he said nothing. She always gauged people on their mannerisms, what they said, how they said it, their body language. This ‘thing’ said nothing. It simply radiated menace, not a hateful, vengeful menace. It was more a cold, emotionless, ‘when-I-kill-you-it’s-nothing-personal-it’s just-business’ menace.
She turned to Grant, still eyeing the giant monstrosity. “Is he always like that?”
“Like what, madam?”
“Silent. Can he even talk?”
“He possesses basic language skills, yes ma’am,” Grant smiled. “But, I doubt he’d win any oratorial awards.”
“Wow!” She cocked her head, acting impressed. “Look at you with the big words. Your mistress invested a lot in your education.”
“Actually, it was programmed into me at the lab.” There was a flash across his eyes. Had he taken offense
