Episode III - Hunted
Life can be really stressful sometimes, when things come at you from all sides. Things like bills cropping up at the same time as renewal subscriptions, and being asked to add substantial amounts to somebody"s leaving gift.
The run up to Christmas is always stressful with shopping, Christmas cards, office parties and the like. In terms of stress levels it ranks with divorce and the death of a loved one on one of those lists people incessantly publish.
So on this stress level where would you fit, failing to protect a sixteen year old minor spirit of virtue, who has taken the human form of a young girl of the same age, from some trigger happy officer with a taser, being kidnapped by a gun toting leprechaun, by the name of Crandal McTuckle of Dublin, driving like a mad thing for just over an hour in chase of a helicopter, with said minor spirit held captive, and doing an emergency stop out side Catterick, on account of being laser targeted by a Westland Super Lynx 300
Well I have never seen that on any of those lists!!
Crandal and I sat in silence as we stared at the Super Lynx, I expected Crandal was seething at me for leaving my mobile phone on. Once Special Branch had establish, to who ever they were working for, that they had missed me, they must have put their tech guys to work tracking me down. This was not
Scrying in the Mystical Realms sense, where they used mirrors, crystal balls or special fountains, this was the high tech version, the same way they once tracked a US citizen in Germany who had gone off with a young teenage girl. Even when not being used, the cell phone would have been telling the various cell towers along our route that we were in its footprint. Add to that spy satellites, and I assumed that the car dealership had processed my car with the DVLA. This was the
surveillance society, every bit as pernicious as the Mystical Realms form of scrying, except a protection from magic spell would not work.
"Occupants of the car" boomed a voice from a TannoyTM on the Super Lynx 300, "Switch your engine off, get out of the car and place your hands on the bonnet"
I was about to ask Crandal if he had any ideas, when the voice from the helicopter boomed out again.
"Any attempt to use magical devices or powers will result in us opening fire"
"I told you Graeme" Crandal whispered, "They can somehow detect us"
It looked like we were snookered, so I went to turn the engine off, suddenly I heard the sound of a lorry"s horn coming in the opposite direction from us. An Eddie Stobbart van was also driving South.
Where the helicopter was hovering, there was not enough clearance for the lorry. So the pilot had no choice but to break hover, climb and try and get out of the way.
"Now"s our chance, get driving" Crandal screamed.
I released the clutch and hit the accelerator and sped off south, for all the good it would do. The lorry thundered by as the helicopter had just got out of the way and flew over one of the fields. I wondered if there was any point in driving any further, as the helicopter would just make another pass now the lorry had gone by and catch us again. Helicopter gun ship versus a second hand Mini, even if it was a new model mini, no contest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Crandal was concentrating on something, then above us in the sky, it looked like a dimension door was opening up.
"Catch up with that lorry" Yelled Crandal,
Suddenly out of the dimension door, three red dragons flew out, each belching fire, and each moving towards the helicopter.
I could not see what was going on as I was trying to draw up to the lorry, but, in the distance I could hear the helicopter firing off it"s ordinance at the dragons. After about three minutes, I managed to get up to the lorry and enter it"s slip stream. If nothing else I would at least save on fuel. I had seen this on that Mythbusters show Crandal had mentioned as well. Hopefully the helicopter would not risk an encounter with the lorry, unless it decided to fly up behind us and take us out.
Crandal was in rapt concentration, then after about ten minute he broke out of it.
"That was lucky that was" he uttered.
"Did you arrange the lorry", I asked
"Oh no, that was just serendipitous" he replied
"So you summoned the dragons then" I ventured.
"There were no dragons Graeme" he answered, winking his right eye. He then went on to explain that as soon as the helicopter had broken hover, and what ever magic detector they had was no longer on him, like all leprechauns he created the illusion of dragons coming out of a dimension door. In fact there had not even been a dimension door. He had got the illusions to force the helicopter to do an emergency landing. It would be a while before it could get airborne and as dragons were magical anyway, how could their detectors discern the real thing from the illusion. What was clear, as we were driving south, towards London and this facility, he mentioned, where they were taking Fidelity.
We were able to drive down to near
Allerton Mauleverer where the A59 intersected the A1 when the lorry we were shadowing turned off for York.
Once again we were on our own, and hopefully, with both our mobile phones switched off, less traceable. The question though, was, would whoever was running this show trust the local traffic police to stop us, just as they had put their trust in Special Branch.
By now it was mid morning and there was lots more traffic on the road, hopefully we could hide in plain sight as just another car travelling to London. I switched on the car radio, and manually tuned it to one of the police frequencies, it was probably illegal, but for reasons unknown Crandal and I were being hunted by somebody.
The only people that could get Special Branch to do their bidding, organise a military airlift by helicopter, of for all intents and purposes a sixteen year old girl, gain access to cell phone towers and send out a gunship after us, had to be some secret government agency. I was not even sure it was British, especially seeing to the two people who had driven right up to the heliport. At least one person there was American. He had been wearing a long grey coat and sporting a close haircut. I could not identify the woman in the car, save for the fact she had slightly reddish hair, possibly a secretary? Maybe this was a CIA operation or even NSA, though how they got Special branch to do their bidding was a mystery.
From the A59 turn off it would in theory be a three and a half hour drive to London, but who knows who would be hunting us? More helicopter gun ships, unmarked police cars, marked police cars. One thing was certain, I had to make sure I drove in such a way as to blend in with other traffic. Even though Crandal wanted me to step on it, and even though I wanted to step on it and try somehow to save Fidelity, we could not risk capture. Who knows what they would do to us as well.
At junction 35 of the A1 we left the A1 and turned onto the M18 to get onto the M1, all the time, listening to the radio for either police bands or the news reports. So far nothing. If the general police was looking for us, the organisation hunting us could have issued a
D Notice (known since 1993 as a DA-Notice) there was no way to tell.
Crandal continued to be evasive, when I asked him about why they were after us and how he had known of Fidelity, but he had the gun, and had warned me of the Special Branch raid, so I was forced to trust this leprechaun from Dublin.
We followed the M1 down passed Nottingham, still no pursuers and more evasive answers from Crandal. It was obviously pointless trying to wring anything out of him.
Due to the call of nature, we had to break our journey at
Leicester Forest East services. We had to, but it did not feel right, who knew what was going through Fidelity"s mind, as she had suffered so much already. I just hoped that they were keeping her sedated.
What did they want with her? " her true powers not that great, all she could do is deflect the occasional energy blast from a major spirit of Vice or empathically influence people to remain faithful to a partner, place or cause or whatever
Crandal appeared to everyone as if he was a man with
Dwarfism, it was quite a clever way of hiding in plain sight, very
Edgar Allan Poe. There was the odd stare, but mostly people just walked around him, it was fascinating to watch. We found the men"s room, and after making use of the facility, Crandal suggested I grab us something from one of the eateries; his personal preference was a burger and fries.
Burger and Fries? " A leprechaun from the Mystical Realms, now living in Dublin, one of the most cultured cities in the Republic of Ireland, and he goes for burger and fries, oh and I almost forgot, a Pepsi Max.
Just before I went to collect the food, I found one of the few remaining pay phones left, most people had mobile phones, but after the incident earlier with the helicopter, I did not want to risk them tracking me through mine again. I fed the phone with what acceptable coins I had and rang the coffee shop where Fidelity had worked, hoping to get the Manageress. I got Trevor. I asked for the manageress, and Trevor passed me across.
The manageress was still quite shocked at how Special Branch had fired a taser at a 16 year old girl with out warning, but was a bit more lucid. She was glad I was asking after her, and then added that two Americans had been round asking about me, and Fidelity. They were accompanied by two plain clothes officers. She had told them that I was just a customer, and that I had rescued Fidelity from a bar fight in which her abusive guardian had been killed, basically the truth, in case they had some way of detecting lies. The Americans had told her that I was being pursued on unspecified terrorist charges. At least the manageress had the sense to realise that was a lie. My coins ran out, so I said my goodbyes and hung up, then went to get the food order.
Burger and fries with Pepsi max for two, that would kep things simple.
When I returned to the car, I saw Crandal on his mobile talking to someone. He looked at me, spoke some more then hung up. As I got in the car he pre-empted my reprimand by telling me how his mobile could not be traced as easily as mine had, then said he had arranged for us to meet someone in Luton, near the airport.
As I drove down, what the coffee shop manageress weighed heavily on my mind, there was nothing on the news stations, yet she had been told I was being sought in relation to unspecified terrorist charges, by two American agents. Visions of
Extraordinary Rendition and being shipped to
Camp X-Ray in Cuba went through my mind.
Finally we arrived at the address Crandal mentioned, I parked the car in a hotel car park in Luton. Crandal went in ahead of me.
As I approached the door of the hotel, Crandal came to the door, looking very defensive.
"Now you are going to be very shocked, but you really need to trust me on this" he told me.
For a moment I could not understand what he was going on about, but then as I entered, there were the two Americans we had been trying to evade. The man in the long trench coat shirt and tie, with grey hair, and the woman, just a foot shorter, with red auburn hair were here, and Crandal had lead me right to them.
To be continued