Chameleon

Chapter 20

He decided to take the tube.

It was the commuter rush. Crowded, Just the way he liked it. Ideal for window shopping.

Payne found his way into a corner seat, closed his eyes and opened his mind. A psychic pickpocket, he dipped into thoughts, sampling, testing and moving on. His fellow men never ceased to amaze him with their diversity. Sitting there with their folded arms. MP3's glued to their ears, eyes closed or fixed on newspaper or book. "Keep Out", the signs said, I'm an individual. Don't crowd my space, don't dare to assume that because we share this same high speed sardine can, that I wish to know anything about you, and I certainly won't let you know anything about me!

If only they knew how much I know already! He mused. For instance: a mousy woman in the corner was a murderer. No question. She had killed her own mother. Smothered her with a pillow when she could take the old woman's nagging no more.

A respectable solicitor in his pin-striped suit was secretly a flasher who exposed himself to schoolgirls.

A young woman was pregnant by someone other than her husband. Someone who was a different colour to her husband! Hard to explain when the baby is born.

The usual round of petty thieves and moral aberrations.

And one gem. A mind like his own. No, perhaps not that exactly. He'd never found a mind quite like his own, but this one was certainly not the norm. It knew it was being spied upon. It resented it.

'Go away!' it screamed. 'Keep out of my mind or I'll hurt you!'

Payne didn't take the threat seriously. It was a reflex action, a mental tape loop; the individual didn't even know it was happening, not consciously. He'd encountered many like this. The barriers were there for a reason. It could be mental discipline or mental aberration. He could break down the barriers. Take a psychic axe to those mental doors. He'd done so lots of times before. Sometimes for payment, sometimes for pleasure. Sonia had been for pleasure. Hers as well as his. She was unusual; she knew the barriers were there and wanted them removed. It hurt, but she wanted it to hurt, wanted to see what lay behind those closed portals in her head. This one didn't want to know. Payne didn't have the time or the curiosity to probe deeper. He rattled the door and let it go.

He opened his eyes. His telepathic jog had left him refreshed and invigorated. Like wearing someone else's cast-offs. He soaked up the left-over vibrations, clothed himself in their dreams, wore their lives on his back. It charged his batteries, compensated for the damped-down feeling the pills generated. He needed the pills, of course. Otherwise the input of raw vibrations would swamp him. As he grew older, more experienced, he needed the pills less and less. And when he was on assignment, he didn't need them at all.

He brought his mind back to his current task.

Chameleon.

Such an intriguing case. His physical ability was as remarkable in its own way as Payne's mental skills, but his mind, alas, was definitely below par. His short-term memory was good, but long-term was patchy. By nature he was compliant, childlike, trusting, sometimes acutely incisive. He could be taught; in fact, he picked things up very quickly, but forgot them just as fast. Abandoned at birth by some poor cow who thought she'd given birth to a Martian, he was lucky to be talent spotted by Warlord, otherwise he might not have survived. Warlord knew how to nurture such a rare talent; he'd had practice. Chameleon, however, was tricky, his usefulness strictly limited until Payne was assigned to his case. All it took was the right programming really. Much like a trained dog, he could be taught to do tricks, to sit up and beg, to die for the Queen, to kill for your master. He still needed close control in the field, of course, and for three years, Payne and Chameleon had been a veritable double act. It sickened Payne now to think of it. The boy had been just twelve years old when he made his first kill. Physically, he'd grown up fast. Of course, his ability made that possible. Payne had programmed him in to assume a false identity, planted seeds of another man's destruction in Chameleon's head. Gave him a reason to hate. A reason to kill. Wound him up and let him go. He'd been good at it too. But afterwards. Oh, my, there had been a price to pay. Removing the memories, the fake identity had been much harder than Payne anticipated. It had been brutal work and the backlash had been enough to plunge Payne into a black pit of despair that had eventually led to a complete nervous breakdown and his retirement from active service.

Payne sighed. He really hoped he wouldn't have to kill Chameleon. They were similar in so many ways. Granted, Payne had been twenty before being institutionalised. For his own good, they told him at the time. It was probably true. Before that, Payne had been a wild youth. A very bad boy.

It was Warlord who had really saved him. Recognised his potential, trained him, nurtured him, made sure the boffins perfected the drug affectionately known as Olympian Blue, to keep his power in check. In many ways, Warlord had been like a father to him, far more than his own father anyway.

Morgan Payne's wife had died giving birth to their son. Morgan tried not to hold it against the child, but remained aloof and distant, letting the boy run wild. A boffin seconded to the Denby research facility, he administered the prototype for Olympian Blue when his son started to develop strange mental aberrations in his teens. He had no idea, of course, what the real problem was and the drug, in that form, was not nearly as effective as it should have been. Even so, it was, perhaps, his most important contribution to his son's upbringing.

Morgan Payne had died of a heart attack when Harry was twenty. Or so they thought. No-one knew about the blazing row between father and son that had triggered the seizure that claimed Morgan Payne's life. To this day, Harry was not sure if he actually caused his father's death or not. It was not something that bothered him either way.

In those days, Warlord had simply been "Uncle Joe", a friend of his fathers who was "something in Whitehall". When things began to get really out of hand, Uncle Joe had visited Harry and made him an offer he just couldn't refuse. Warlord looked after him from that day on. More, he understood him. Certainly, he used him, but Payne never held that against him; he was enjoying himself too much. In his time he had been an interrogator, a de-briefer, a mole and an assassin. All under Warlord's watchful eye and careful tuteledge. He had excelled in every role.

Now, it seemed, he was to be a hunter, but at least he now knew where to start looking.

DO YOU PLAY CHESS?

It stood out like a beacon.

The police, of course, had not released that bit of information to the general public, but it was in the copy of the report that had found its way across Payne's desk earlier that day.

He had him now.

A general location anyway.

I wonder what triggered the response this time? he mused.

Not that it mattered. The target was now sighted. It was just a matter of time.