Ransom X

  *****

  Legacy woke from a dreamless sleep at sunrise. He had so much to do after wasting six hours the day before explaining his work. He was six hours farther away from finding the director’s daughter. He especially liked the midnight call from Wilkes. After hearing the phrase “you need to substantiate,” used in conjunction with every conclusion that Legacy had put onto paper, he reached his flashpoint, and made his own judgment. He would not be submitting any more reports. He told Wilkes as much before an abrupt disconnection.

  Legacy had a reputation for icy control in the room, followed by bursts of temper outside. If he had been an operatic tenor, he would have been called a diva. However, as the only man who could perform surgery on the human mind without shedding a drop of blood, he was too unique to fall into a category.

  It was not quite every mind, actually. Early in Legacy’s work with the CIA he was presented with a child of twelve, daughter of the ambassador to the Baltic republic of Estonia. She had been delivering her father’s coded messages back to the embassy in the Soviet Union. They were hidden inside her dental work and she was presumed to be the mule.

  When they caught her, the state department brought Legacy in to see how far the damage extended. Legacy entered talks with her to determine if she had any knowledge of the information that she had been transporting. By the end of their first session, he was convinced that she was a pawn, and he even protected her from further questioning with his reputation. He found out, years later, that she had been the architect of the smuggling operation, and was her own dentist. She sent him a Christmas card every year from her dental practice in Maryland. She moved back to the US under diplomatic immunity after communism fell.

  Legacy remembered the way her face expressed nothing during their conversation. It wasn’t like she was covering anything; it was as if there was no actual thought put into any answer. The neutrality of that face stayed in his mind. It wasn’t innocence, he knew that even back then, it was a void.

  Why was he wandering back into those waters? Legacy knew his own mind and had become accustomed to being led by its whim. In his own private philosophy whim was like a breath of air that became substance when in contact with a mystery ingredient that he called “wham.” He was waiting for the wham to hit him.

  The wham came suddenly. The camouflage the Vinyl Men wore! Of course, why didn’t he see it before?

  The full body vinyl did more than color the perversion, having a complete second skin was somehow important to the safety of the group. Considering all of the complications of getting the materials, and preparation and application before each session – it must have been vital, because the process was far too complicated to be simply fetish. There was something identifying on their bodies or maybe just on one of their bodies of the male participants. Every body part was covered – it had to be important - but what was the catch? How would less than full body covering give something away, what was he looking for?

  His breakthrough ran right into a brick wall. Blue had shown himself to be a master of misdirection. He was the kind of person who would go to ridiculous extreme to hide something unfathomably small. He’d start a forest fire to kill one tree. The body suits might be painted onto the entire group to hide a single identifying mole on one of them. There were so many alternatives open that Legacy couldn’t close in on one for fear of letting a wider range of possibility go unnoticed.

  Blue knew the angles of incidence - abduction was experimental science for him. He must be pleased with himself, satisfied, smug and ready to kill again to throw spice back into his dreary, unchallenged life.

  Legacy pulled out a folder with a familiar name on the tab. Laura Doorner was a better student than almost anyone in her class. Her studies showed an aptitude for languages. Laura’s beauty poured out of her smile like white silk against bronze skin. Men probably looked at her and thought that with a face like that, she didn’t need anything more.

  There was more. She graduated from Columbia at seventeen with two majors, ancient literature and pre-law. The picture on the front page of her file was taken at her graduation. The blue polyester mortarboard fitted below the hairline and the royal blue in her eyes presented a rich film-worthy chroma. Looking into her eyes, Legacy saw there was error in anyone who underestimated her. It might not be enough to match Blue on his home turf, but if she saw a weakness, Laura was the kind of person who could exploit it.

  Legacy looked at the clock. It was almost time for Laura’s first broadcast. Everyone had been accelerating their efforts knowing that something had to happen soon if they had any hope of avoiding it, but he knew it wouldn’t. He knew exactly what was happening in the lead up to the broadcast, he knew everything he could about the rituals and routines and yet Blue was still winning. He felt like he might never be closer to Laura than in those moments before the world would become intimate with her – Legacy felt like she might be slipping away.