With These Eyes (15 page)

As Isabelle was making her way into town in
Fuji's off-road SUV, Tasha and her Troopers were setting another
trap for her. A front-end loading garbage truck was busily going
through the motions of picking up trash containers. Unseen by the
casual observer, the truck didn't actually empty the trash out of
the large dumpsters before returning them to the ground. There was
an easy explanation. Equipped with three axles and snow chains on
each of its ten tires, the all-wheel drive vehicle transported yet
another one of Tasha's command posts. The truck had come from the
Apophis Arctic research facility. It was in regular use to observe
employees whose lifestyles matched the patterns of
persons of
interest to management
. Inside, a three-dimensional map of the
island dominated the big screen. A series of sensors built into the
Apophis-network of automated bank tellers showed radiation levels
increase as Isabelle's car approached each one. Her hands and face
glowed bright-yellow on a live satellite image. "Good work, Kato,"
mumbled Tasha under her breath. A smaller screen at the clandestine
commander’s fingertips showed Kato's bank accounts frozen. A few
strikes of the keyboard and Tasha returned them to active status. A
couple of mouse-clicks later, Tasha had added 50,000 Kroner to his
balance.

Isabelle was arriving in the museum parking
lot. A few parents had brought their children, but most of the
visitors and their cars were Tasha's Troopers. Isabelle took one of
the many empty spots and walked to the museum entrance. Two of
Tasha's Troopers pulled in after Isabelle had walked off and parked
on either side of her car. One of the cars had German plates, the
other was Norwegian. Isabelle walked into the lobby of the museum.
She paid the machine at the entrance ten Kroner and walked through
the automated turnstile. The inside was more reminiscent of an
amusement park that a place of learning. Several exhibits lined the
perimeter of the foyer. A few families were interspersed among
Tasha's Troopers. A wide stairway ascended from the center of the
lobby to the mezzanine. A brand-recognition game just to the right
of Isabelle featured Michael Leese's face prominently as a backlit
image in its center. The object of the game was to identify
products that belonged to the same brand, and covered food and
household products from hamburger mix to toilet brushes. Isabelle
recognized the five major brands that were given as choices, each
of them was an Apophis subsidiary. Isabelle had expected arcs of
electricity and smoking mini-volcanoes. This was not at all what
she considered a science museum. A ditzy-looking museum guide stood
across the colorful foyer, blowing bubbles. Isabelle didn't want to
waste any time looking around and decided to go straight to the
source. She walked over to the woman, who was peeling a popped
gum-bubble off her face.

"Excuse me, do you have any exhibits on
radioactivity?"

The guide had moved to the island the summer
before the mysterious mine collapse and worked at the museum ever
since. She remembered how difficult her training had been just
before Apophis had remodeled. Management had replaced the exhibits
she agreed were too difficult to comprehend. The bubbly woman never
understood why anyone needed to know how a battery worked or where
oil came from. She remembered one of the old exhibits that had
remained and what she learned about it in her first training class.
The exhibit was somewhat spooky, so it was one of the few old
displays that didn't get changed. She was getting distracted by the
aroma wafting across her nose from the hands-on pizza exhibit. It
was time to get rid of Isabelle and see what the kids had made.

"There's one exhibit. Actually, it shows how
radioactivity causes the glow in green phosphorus. It's upstairs
and to the right."

The guide turned on her heels and made a
straight line for the pizza that was coming off the belt in an
exhibit that once taught how the firing process changes the
chemical makeup of pottery. Isabelle climbed the broad staircase to
the mezzanine. The level was fairly dark, most of the ambient light
came from an abundance of interactive screens and projections.
Isabelle walked past exhibits offering retina scans, body-fat
analysis, and IQ tests. It felt more like the testing ground for
military recruits than a museum.

In the far corner, past a few aerial-combat
simulators, was what Isabelle had sought. The exhibit looked a bit
like a photo booth with room for about five people. The entire
structure was painted black, a dark curtain covered the length of
its entrance. To the side of the entrance, a plaque described the
experiment inside. It explained the reason green phosphorus was
used in watch dials and emergency signs.

Isabelle pushed the black curtain aside and
walked inside when a mother and her child were briefly illuminated
by the flash of a strobe. The wall opposite the light was coated in
green phosphorous. The pair cast stark shadows onto the greenish
wall. Their outlines remained glowing bright green everywhere the
wall had been exposed to the flash of light. The luminous image
slowly faded. The duo walked off. Isabelle remained in the
pitch-black booth. She placed her right hand against the
phosphoresced wall. For a few beats, the wall was illuminated where
her skin had made contact. Isabelle had actually caused the
phosphorus to glow. Aside from the photons in a beam of light,
radioactivity could have such an effect. The strobe flashed and the
entire wall radiated green light, washing out the luminous outline
of her hand.

Isabelle wasn't too surprised, she had always
had faith in Tonati's judgment. Few people would have ever noticed
being tagged by a radioactive marker. In so many ways, Isabelle had
an edge over most who Tasha hunted without even having to try.

While Isabelle felt like she was getting a
step ahead with her relentless pursuer, Tasha and her Troopers were
busily working on their trap. The commander’s orders emanated from
her Troopers' earpieces and cell phones. "Purple 17 and 23 you're a
German couple on vacation and your daughter has just gone missing.
Let's create records for a family of three. Report to command post
in costume on the double!"

Minutes later, the two Troopers entered the
garbage truck's interior through a door concealed by a recycling
poster. "Passports of the von Strauss-family are in the printer,
DNA of the package is in the fridge," barked one of the Troopers by
the console. The Trooper dressed as the fictional child's mother
produced a small vial out of the vehicles mini-refrigerator. It
contained Isabelle's blood from the dentist's office in Los
Angeles. The other Trooper who was sporting a Tyrolean hat,
complete with feather, removed three German passports from a
printer. He handed the female Trooper one with her image and one
with the computer-generated picture of a small girl, whose facial
features were a composite of the two make-belief parents. The
privatization of European Union passport offices had made it easy
to create or delete digital records. After all, Apophis ran each
nation's passport authority. An identity created here would be, as
far as the authorities could tell, an absolutely real person.

"This is what the suspect was wearing."

Tasha handed each Trooper a list of clothing
items that another female Trooper was seen wearing on the museum's
security cameras. The Trooper captured on-screen wore an English,
bola-type hat that was a few sizes too small and sat on top of her
head in an almost comedic manner. She was dressed in tan
snow-pants, a red-plaid lumberjack shirt and a rugged-looking dark
green jacket. The covert woman was handing out candy and stuffed
animals sporting the
Pin the Ponytail
-logo to some
youngsters who had come without their parents. One of the parents
saw his daughter taking a chocolate bar from the oddly-dressed
woman and ran towards the Trooper, who hurriedly slipped out the
door. The father yanked on his daughter's hand causing her to drop
the gift bear. He fell into a lecture about not accepting gifts
from strangers. Moments later, the Trooper stole through the
command post's secret entrance. Tasha barked, "Have the costume
ready to ship on the double!"

A brief "Aye!" signaled compliance. Within a
few moments, the clothes in which the Trooper had been captured on
the museum's security cameras were in a bag. She was dressed in a
new outfit from one of the truck's compartments. The Trooper's
dark-brown hair looked just like Isabelle's for the moment. A head
of red hair was revealed when the Trooper pulled off, what went
into a compartment labeled
Package Wig
.

"I'll take your post."

The Trooper that had disguised herself in hat
and Isabelle-wig tapped the shoulder of her brother-in-arms working
at the console. He rose and exited the truck as she took his
station. The female Trooper’s face could not be seen again at the
museum. The parking space to the right of Isabelle's car was
occupied by Tasha’s fake family-roadster. The two Troopers had
arrived at their car. The false husband pushed a button on his
key-ring remote and a few seconds later, the power locks on Fuji's
SUV popped up. The female Trooper opened the door to her car and
took out a teddy-bear that looked exactly like the ones the other
Trooper in the bola hat had given to the children earlier. With a
sharp twist of her wrist, the Trooper tore the toy's head off and
chucked its body on the ground between hers and Isabelle's car. A
few candy bar wrappers from her pocket followed. The Trooper hid
the bear's head under Isabelle's passenger seat together with some
more candy wrappers. The male Trooper reached into his pocket for
the vial of blood that the phony dentist had robbed from Isabelle's
gums. He snapped the cap off the little plastic tube and poured its
contents into the open door of Isabelle's car and on the ground
beside it. A few red splatters formed a trail across the body of
the headless plush toy by his feet. The trail of droplets continued
up a few inches against the Trooper's car. Any judge or jury in the
world would have found compelling evidence in even one of these
items to condemn Isabelle, the terrorist. Tasha had been watching
the two Troopers via their hidden cameras, his in the Tyrolean hat
and hers in a button on her thick jacket. It was easy for Tasha to
set her ambush unnoticed in the unsupervised parking lot. Gene’s
politics of fear hadn’t brought the need for increased security to
the remote island. The trap was set. It was one typical of Tasha’s
style. The hunter gave her prey a visible enemy and a way to
escape. That was the dark genius of her plan. If the police were to
capture Isabelle, she'd be sure to spend the rest of her life in
prison. Tasha would see to it that Isabelle knew this. Fuji and his
spaceplane posed likely candidates for a getaway. The complete lack
of customs or immigration formalities would surely entice Isabelle
to utilize this mode of transportation. From there, the
blood-thinner would do its job.

Isabelle was still inside the museum, on her
way to the exit. From the railing of the mezzanine, she could
overlook a canvass painting which depicted the history of Norse
agriculture. The work of art stretched the height of the lobby,
from the ground floor to the level where she was standing. Isabelle
did not know how to read the inscription of Viking runes. She did,
however, recognize one of the characters she saw on both tablets.
It was the leaf-glyph from the seed bank. The same symbol appeared
in pairs of the two-story painting before her. Each pair was
stealthily nestled among intricate patterns. Fortunately, Fuji had
taught Isabelle to see the world with different eyes.

She studied the mural-size canvas for a
while. Several parts of the painting that depicted a variety of
historic scenes were the same shape.

Isabelle's years of chanting and studying
with Fuji had elevated her mind to a level where she was cognizant
of her consciousness. She had gained the ability to access some of
the hidden thoughts and information within it. In her mind, she
pictured the three areas layered over one another. The detail
hidden within each of the shapes provided separately the outline,
texture and color of another, hidden scene. Several of the
leaf-glyphs formed a row, diminishing in size towards infinity.
Another moment and Isabelle’s mind blended the images together into
a moving sequence,. The image from the three shapes together with
the illusion of movement made a three-dimensional animation appear
before Isabelle's eyes.

The people of the world starving on barren
fields. Agony filled humanity's face. The world was occupied by a
dark entity that bore a striking resemblance with Gene. The entity
had the people of the world pushed to one side of the planet which
was shrouded in darkness. Next to the evil entity hovered a
luminous orb. The brilliantly-bright orb was locked in a tungsten
cage. Like a lantern, it illuminated its surroundings. It was
Gene’s enormous shadow that cast darkness over the world.

The luminous orb seemed strangely familiar to
Isabelle. It reminded her a little of the Apophis-logo, but it was
more than just its appearance. Isabelle knew the orb was of great
importance. Her concentration broke away from the painting.
Isabelle was reminded of her surroundings when she took in a
nose-full of smoke from a failed experiment at the pizza exhibit
below. A guy walking past her with a large hat looked a lot like
the gentleman who was waiting at the dentist's office. Isabelle
rarely forgot a face, it was a sign for her to forge ahead. She had
too much to find out. She could see the scale on which her opponent
operated. All of the dark army's efforts though, dwarfed in
comparison to the epic significance of her vision. Thousands of
people must have passed this canvass since it had been chosen to
adorn the museum's atrium. All these people must have looked at the
ancient art and it seemed Isabelle was the first one to recognize
the prophecy embedded within. “Why was it there? It must have been
meant for someone to find, but for whom?” Isabelle wondered. The
familiar-looking man with the hat was still facing her direction.
He wasn't moving around very much. She had learned more than
expected at the museum. Isabelle turned towards the nearby
stairs.