The Prelude - Chapter 1

Christopher Blanche

            I often found my life to be boring; sitting at a desk doing the paperwork assigned to me and signing papers of confidentiality. Though eventually I grew to learn that it was a necessary part of the job, and had I pursued a different career I'd be doing far more paperwork. I studied psychology as a teenager at McGill University, and originally thought that a position as a psychologist would do me good. But I was sucked into something different. Far different.

            In a way, working for CSIS was better for me. Sitting at a desk made me restless, and going on the occasional covert mission gave me an outlet. Though, how that outlet affected my psyche.... I'll think of that later, I thought.

            Berlin had a dark past. Considering everything, it's not surprising. I had visited once or twice before, usually on leisure, so I've seen the city well. That time, rather, I was given the task of following around a Canadian official with some suspicious connections. The Canadian government suspected him of trading secrets with someone in the German underworld. I had been given the task of catching him in the act. His name was Robert Michelson, a foreign affairs minister with close ties to the Prime Minister himself. I had been following him for weeks, and I'm grateful for my telepathy for keeping me hidden. Ah, the telepathy. I'll get to that.

            Over the past fifteen years, the existence of super-powered humans seemed to have risen dramatically. Or at least, they've all come into light. There weren't many statistics prior to the year 1990, partly due to the Cold War. Since then, there've been many, many thousands. Myself, my sister Estella, and a few of my close friends belong to that group. Mind you, I say friends sparingly. My sister has a basic form of telekinesis, though whether she knows it's telekinesis isn't something I've bothered to find out.... As for myself, I'm a telepath.

            I ordered myself a glass of wine and broke into the loaf of bread that was on the table as I sat at an expensive restaurant in downtown Berlin. It was a high-class restaurant, bustling with activity. Mr. Michelson was a few tables in front of me. He was a tall man with a worn, friendly face and fading brown hair. He was sitting with a man wearing a severely formal suit and a smiling woman with long blond hair falling in curls over her shoulders. I knew both of them from files I had been given before: Dietrich Fleischer and Isabel Frost.

            "Hey." I looked up to see Victoria Stewart, my partner for the mission. She smiled, pulling out her chair and sitting down. She wore a satin blue dress and had long red hair. She was a close friend of my sister's, and a shapeshifter. "That them?" she asked, taking a piece of bread and buttering it.

            I nodded. "Yeah."

            "She... doesn't look that dangerous," said Victoria, taking a bite out of her bread and opening the menu. "Damn, it's all in German.... Oh hold on, I think I found the English."

            "I can translate if necessary, Victoria," I muttered, taking a drink from my glass.

            "How many times have I told you, Christopher? Call me Tori. It's shorter." She frowned, then flipped through the menu.

            I sighed. I've known her for years, but the amount of contact between us was always rather... small. I have always called her Victoria and never shortened it.

            A few moments later, a waiter took our orders – I had to order for Victoria as she didn't speak German – and we waited for the opportunity to take some pictures of Michelson at his meeting.

            "They don't look like much," said Victoria while we were waiting for the food. "I mean, Fleischer I can see as being a criminal, but Frost looks so... innocent."

            "There are plenty of innocent-looking people in the world who are anything but," I said. "Your gut instinct isn't going to save you all the time."

            "It's saved me plenty of times before...." She grew quiet as the food came, and muttered an attempted "Danke" as the waiter placed the food on the table. I waited until he left before I continued.

            "You think with your animal instinct too often, Victoria...." I sighed, then watched as one of the tables between us and Michelson left. Victoria pulled out her phone and pretending to text someone, but I knew the phone was meant to be used to take pictures with.

            "What am I supposed to do about that?" she protested, once she took a few pictures.

            "Learn to use your brain." I stabbed a fork into the steak and cut a piece off. "The file we've been given puts them in an organized crime ring here in Berlin. We don't need to know what their positions are exactly. We just needed to get proof. That's it."

            "I know, I know...." There were a few moments of silence as we both ate. "Wait," she said finally, as if coming to a realization. "Don't we need a video? Or an audio file?"

            I shook my head. "No, just the pictures are enough proof."

            There was a loud beeping noise before I could say anything else. Victoria and I looked around, and as it beeped a second time, I saw Robert Michelson pick up his cell phone. I saw his face pale as he nodded faintly to the call. He put his phone into his breast pocket, picked up his napkin from his lap and stood to leave. At that moment, I heard my own phone, which sat on the table, go off. No, there were two phones ringing. My own and Victoria's. I checked it and found a text from Estella.

            Bombing in Toronto & Ottawa, it said. Unknown death toll just yet. You have orders to return to the country.

            I felt my heartbeat accelerate and I looked up to see Victoria.

            "Was that from Estella?" she asked me, her face drained of all colour.

            I nodded. "Toronto and Ottawa...." Merde, I thought. What the hell happened? "We should go," I said, putting my napkin on the table beside my plate.

            Victoria put her phone in her purse, then stood up. "You got the bill?" she asked.

            I called for a waiter, answering the question for her. "We need to get home."

            #

            We boarded the first flight we could get, though we had to land in Montreal. Pearson International was closed – due to damage, we didn't know – and the Ottawa Airport was closed as well. We got the last flight into Canada. Most other planes were grounded for security measures. I bought the tickets for the business class, to give us some privacy. Victoria sat beside me on the plane with a laptop open trying to catch the headlines.

            "Blanche..." she stammered, "It's not just Canada."

            "What?" I asked, looking over her shoulder. She had open a news site (there's internet everywhere these days), and the first sentence to catch my eye was New York and Washington DC Devastated in Bombing.

            "New York, Washington DC, London, Paris," Victoria was saying. "What the hell happened? Hold on, Estella's on." She started a video call with Estella, who, to my relief looked fine. My sister was older than me by two years, with dark brown hair and bright green eyes. We never looked much like siblings, me with my blond hair and brown eyes. I took after my father, apparently.

            "Christopher! Tori!" she grinned. "You got my text, then?"

            I nodded, and moved the laptop in between us. "What happened?"

            "Better question," started Victoria. "Are you okay?"

            "I'm fine," replied Estella.

            "Oh thank god."

            I cleared my throat. Not that I wasn't glad my sister was alright, but rather, I was looking for information. "What happened?" I repeated.

            "The media's calling it a nuclear bomb," said Estella. She looked grave, I thought. A nuclear bomb.... Hold on.

            "Calling it? So it wasn't one?"

            Estella shook her head. "Geiger counters' aren't picking up anything aside from the usual," she said calmly.

            "Thank god," sighed Victoria. "So it just acted like one?"

            "Basically, yes. I haven't gotten the chance to see the site, it's only been a few hours and I'm still in Montreal."

            "We're on our way," I said, closing the laptop. Victoria glared at me.

            "Why'd you close it?" she demanded.

            "I'd rather get the information in person," I replied calmly. "Until then, try not to think too much about what happened. We need to hit the ground with sane minds."

            "Who said we'd even be assigned to the case?"

            She had a good point. There was the chance that the RCMP will get the case and we'll never hear another word about it. But... "I have a feeling we'll get it," I said.

            "What makes you so sure?" There was a slight hint of steel behind her voice, challenging me.

            "I'm always sure, Victoria," I told her, looking her in the eyes and smirking.

            She stared at me for a few seconds, then shook her head, looking away. "If you say so, Blanche...."

            The rest of the plane ride was mostly my own attempts to sleep. I had the seat beside the window, and as much as I would rest my head against it I'd always end up looking out, to see what the world was like. I think the thought of a major terrorist attack bothered me too much for me to sleep at all during that trip. Victoria, on the other hand, slept without issue, despite being the one who said she couldn't sleep. People deal with stress differently, I knew. I could never sleep myself. I listened to music to calm myself down. Well, that was my original intention. Eventually, it became a way to stop thinking and to drown out my thoughts. I didn't want to think about the bombings, I didn't want to think about what it could mean, and I didn't want to imagine the chaos that'll follow. No.... It was too much to handle at one time. And if I didn't keep up a psychic block, I told myself, I may not sleep for days.

            My sister and I have been working for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for several years up until that point. We were hired as teenagers, and, as unorthodox as it may sound, it made sense at the time. Only a few months prior to our employment, there was a sudden craze in the superhero. Not the fictional ones that existed in comic books and movies, but rather the real life supers coming out of hiding to help people. But the reality is, there were always more people with powers and good intentions than there were people with powers and bad intentions. The so-called superheroes were hunted down by the media. They were given names they didn't want, and a newfound attention that eventually people started fearing their neighbours, suspecting them of having superhuman powers. It started in the U.S. and spread across North America, then Europe....

            I was eight when my powers manifested. Telepathy on a child had devastating effects. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't hear my own thoughts and I was bombarded with headaches that would last for days on end. Eventually, I learned to block out the thoughts, and I learned to control what I heard. My sister, on the other hand, had less physical attributes to hers. She was telekinetic, though restricted to creating something akin to a force field. When the government got a hold of the information, they brought us together and gave us a choice: face the media like the Americans were, or work for the government and gain immunity. My sister and I, teenagers at the time, considered our options. We weren't the youngest ones there. A friend of mine, Connor Bradley, was invited as well. So was Victoria Stewart. We were teenagers, though I was the youngest at thirteen years old. We were told we'd only get small-time jobs, or ones that would be suited for our abilities. We decided that evading the media was our best option. It would shift the attention away from us and our father, a professor of physics at McGill University. I was put immediately in the field, whereas my sister's technological genius was put to good use in making weaponry. Thanks to that, I was free to attend university without attracting too much attention to myself and I had found a good use for my telepathy in the field.

            Eventually supers became incredibly common in the military, and I recall a protest in the States one year. The Americans weren't happy to find out that their "patriotic men and women" were being "denied" positions in the military. As it turned out, they were just unhappy in general about the sudden abundance of super-powered humans in modern society. Some people refused to believe they even existed. Others started hate protests. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the subject when I was seventeen. None of my professors knew I was a telepath.

            The airport when we arrived was a terrified rush of people. Our plane was the last to land, and getting through customs was not an easy task. The security officers were trying to keep everyone calm, and the crowd was ushered along through the scanners. I showed them my passport and my badge along with it, hoping that it would speed up my re-entrance into the country.

            "Vous deux?" the officer asked me. You two? He was a slim man with hollowed hazel eyes and brown hair that fell lazily over his face. I assumed he was stressed due to the extra security measures that had to be taken.

            I nodded, then replied in French, "Is there any way to let us get through faster?" By then I could feel the fear from the crowd behind us, and the anxiety coming from the security officers. Sensing it was one thing, but I felt the fear and the anxiety and before I let myself be overwhelmed by it, I put up a few psychic blocks. The woes of being a telepath.

            Victoria stood beside me, herself an inch taller than myself, looking around the airport. I could sense quite a bit of anxiety coming just from her, but when I looked over to her, raising an eyebrow, she glared at me.

            "Oh don't give me that look, Blanche," she said, grimacing. She gave the security officer her badge and he examined it for a moment.

            "Bien," he said, nodding. "Come along this way."

            I assumed Victoria knew enough French to follow along as the officer unhinged one of the barriers and let us through to a quieter area. The airport was dead quiet, I noticed then, except for a few murmurs and the cries of the security officers trying to keep everyone in check. There were no welcome greetings played over the intercom, no music playing in the background, just the sound of machines and scared people. Airports probably weren't this bad since 9/11, I thought.

            The security officer brought us to get our luggage, then escorted us outside. Montreal during the early spring was just as cold as its winters. Having lived in Montreal my entire life, I was used to it. I wore a light winter coat and a scarf. It was only the wind that was cold, and even then, I suppose, it wasn't that bad. I watched as some of the new arrivals pulled in their heavy winter jackets and wrapped scarves around their young. Some people just weren't used to the weather, I thought. It was April, but nevertheless snowing outside. I dragged my luggage through the salt and slush, and we waited for a taxi.

            Victoria pulled out her cell phone almost immediately once we were outside. She dialled a number and anxiously waited for someone to pick up.

            "Calling family?" I asked, not even bothering to look at her. It was starting to more heavily snow now, snowflakes piling up on the ground.

            "Yeah," she replied. "Dammit, pick up!" She put her phone away and sighed. "I hope they're okay...." A taxi pulled up in front of us, the driver looking at me through the window.

            "You live in Toronto, correct? And your family?" I walked up to the passenger window and asked the driver if he was available. He nodded and I went to put my luggage in the trunk.

            "Scarborough," she said slowly, lowering her eyes. She pulled her luggage around the back of the taxi, picking up snow and salt as it went.

            "Then there's a good chance they may be dead," I said, walking to one of the seats.          

            Victoria dumped her bags in the trunk and slammed the door closed as she sat down. "You're an insensitive bastard, you know that?" she exclaimed, half glaring at me, half looking at me in surprise. I rolled my eyes.

            "What do you want me to say?" I asked. "Telling you they might still be alive would be a lie."

            "You never have problems lying to people before," Victoria muttered, buckling herself in.

            "You're right, I don't." I shrugged, then gave the taxi driver the location. I sat back and put in my earphones. Taxis always had that mixed smell of body odour and air freshener but the stale smell of body odour was always the strongest. I took out my cell phone and texted Estella.

            We just landed, it said. We'll meet you at CSIS.

            Victoria grew quiet after what I said. I imagine she was contemplating whether her parents were still alive, or perhaps how much she wanted to harm me.... She's known me for long enough, I thought. Nothing should be surprising.

            We were dropped off a block from CSIS's Montreal office. I paid the taxi driver and took out our luggage from the trunk. By then the snow had stopped, but the wind hadn't. I buttoned my jacket and started walking. Victoria didn't say anything to me for the rest of the trip. While waiting for the stoplights, though, I recall her fumbling with her cell phone, trying to call her parents once more. The lights turned green and, with a frustrated groan, she put away her cell and continued walking.

            We arrived fifteen minutes later. The building itself wasn't anything impressive. It was an office building with a plaque on the front beside the door. It was a bronze, with the engravings "Service canadien du rensignment de sécurité" and the English equivalent "Canadian Security Intelligence Service" along with the emblem above it. I pushed open the door for Victoria and we walked toward the elevator. The man at the front desk didn't ask for I.D., I've walked through those doors often enough for him to recognize my face. Victoria, on the other hand, got through by mere association with me. I hit the button for the third floor and waited for the elevator to stop.

            Victoria was the first to leave the elevator, as if she were trying to get away from me as quickly as possible. Admittedly, I wouldn't doubt that were the case. She headed straight to Estella's office, whereas I went to mine first, to drop off my luggage.

            It had been a month since I set foot in my office. The northern wall was covered with a bookshelf and several of my old psychology textbooks from university, along with books on sociology, criminology and even a few written by the founding members of the FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit. At the bottom of the shelf there was a collection of physics books, courtesy of my father. He was always slightly disappointed that I didn't follow him into the field. But all in all, I prefer psychology.

            I noticed a pile of files on my desk and I took a moment to organize them. They were all previous cases; some that had gone through review and came back for my personal reference, others were new case files, though I thought that because of the situation they were all going to be on hold.

            Someone knocked on my door.

            "No hello for your sister?" It was Estella standing there. She wore heels, as usual, to make herself look taller, a blazer and a blouse beneath it. She was grinning, but there was still a hint of sadness in her eyes. I shrugged. "You miss the office that much?" she asked.

            "No," I replied, leaning back in my chair. "I came to put my luggage down, then I saw the pile of papers...."

            "It's fine, Christopher," she said, walking over to the desk. "How did it go?"

            I smiled. "It went rather well. Victoria has the pictures, though."

            "Oh, I know." My sister grinned. "It's uploaded into the system already."

            I felt something at the back of my mind go off in annoyance, but I didn't say anything in regards to that. "Then why did you ask me how it went...?"

            "You need to make small talk a bit more, Christopher," she said, rolling her eyes. "I think we've tried to make you more social since what, you were thirteen?"

            I glared at her. It was the truth, I understand, but I'm perfectly capable of faking a pleasant conversation and... she had a point. I sighed. "Do we have to go over this again?"

            "It's been eight years and you still can't get it right." She crossed her arms and shook her head. "Fine, be that way," she said. "There's a meeting with the director being broadcast in the conference room downstairs."

            "About the terrorist attacks, I assume," I said, standing up and walking towards the door. Estella joined me.

            "You'll be briefed on the situation then." We walked out into the hall, but Estella paused for a moment. "What did you say to Tori?"

            "Hm?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

            "She's been quiet lately.... Did you say something?"

            "Oh, that's right.... She was worrying about her parents, and I just told her that there was a good chance they were dead." I shrugged, and would have carried on had Estella not hit me on the head. I glared at her. It didn't hurt, but was nevertheless an annoyance. "What was that for?"

            "For being insensitive," she replied. "Sometimes I wonder how anyone puts up with you...."

            "Few people do," I muttered, walking to the stairwell. I paused before opening the door. "And you're one of them. Why don't you ask yourself?"

            Estella sighed. "Did that doctorate in psychology do you nothing, Christopher?"

            "Possibly.... You are never to self-diagnose."

            I heard my sister groan as I made my way through the doors on the second floor and down the hall.

            Conference room three was the only one ever used. I noticed this when I first started working here. It was a very modern-looking room with dark grey table in the middle, equally grey chairs, a flat screen TV at one end and a projector at the other. In the middle of the table was large touch screen – something I knew my sister had designed for the office. I remember the first I used it, you can place any form of technological memory on it and open its files. The table itself was an opaque grey at first, but would turn into a computer screen when activated. It wasn't as if these features were only for conference room three. The others had it as well. I had never bothered to ask why this was the only one ever used.

            At that moment there were four people sitting around the conference table. Six, once Estella and I sat down ourselves. The other four were Victoria Stewart, the head of the Montreal department Gabrielle Dumont, and two agents I had worked with before, Victor Harman and François Lévesque. Gabrielle was a tall woman in her mid-forties with steely blue eyes and dirty blond hair. She's held her position for years, and in fact I don't remember anyone else ever being there. François was an older man, in his fifties with greying hair and serious brown eyes. We were undercover once, as father and son. Whether my own father ever found out.... Well, he knew I worked for CSIS, but he never knew what I actually did there. The last man, Victor, was in his late thirties wearing a crumpled shirt and large glasses covering his green eyes. They were bloodshot, I noticed, then I remembered that his wife lived in Toronto. Perhaps she had died in the blast....

            The flat screen TV flickered into life. There was a woman there, with bleach blonde hair tied back in a bun and watery blue eyes. The scene behind her looked like the back of a car. Her name was Rachel Orwell, the current director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. She was the first woman to receive the position, and she was not willing to let it go any time soon. A terrorist attack on her watch meant that the Ministry of Defence was going to be watching her very carefully from now on. She looked tired, I remember thinking. But considering the circumstances, one couldn't blame her.

            "How is everyone?" She sounded distant. "I'm on with the other departments." The screen then split into four, showing three other conference rooms filled with people. The top left was Vancouver, I could tell because it was still bright outside where the sun was starting to set in the bottom two.

            There was a murmur among the four conference rooms. Rachel Orwell nodded, then continued. "I'm sure you all know what happened," she said. "The bombs are being broadcast as nuclear, but tests have come back with normal readings of radiation. How they were capable of simulating a bomb that acts just like a nuclear bomb is beyond my area of expertise." She paused for a moment. "Estella Blanche is attending this meeting, correct?"

            "Yes ma'am," replied my sister.

            "Good. I'm putting you in charge of figuring out how those bombs worked." Estella nodded, but said nothing. "As for the Toronto and Ottawa locations.... They were destroyed due to the blast, but much of our equipment is still in-tact, thanks again to you, Miss Blanche. We've lost several of our agents in both cities." No surprises there, it was to be expected. "And the civilian death toll is increasing by the hour." The director sighed, closed her eyes and recomposed herself. "I don't need to remind you of the statistics, but if the bomb has reached all of the GTA and Ottawa and its surrounding areas, then we've lost more than a quarter of our population."

            The conference rooms were silent still. A few nods here and there, but it was common knowledge. The Greater Toronto Area has always had the largest population in a single area in the entire country.

            "The Ministry of Defence has asked both the RCMP and CSIS to begin an investigation, which special emphasis on CSIS creating a reconnaissance team of my choice." There was some quiet discussion among the agents in the meeting. I wondered, looking at the bottom screens, where they were broadcasting from. Then I remembered the recently reinforced basements of the Toronto and Ottawa locations. They probably made sure all of the important members were safe, and the rest collateral damage. Had Miss Orwell known about the bombing ahead of time, I figured she saved herself and the more important intelligence officers. The rest were likely killed.

            One of the men from the Vancouver office stood up. "Director, with all due respect, I'd like to nominate several of my own agents to be a part of your team." I couldn't make out his face due to the position of the camera, but that didn't matter much.

            "That won't be necessary," said the director, waving the proposition aside. "I already have certain people in mind."

            "Will we be informed of the decision?" asked a woman from the Toronto location.

            "You will be informed when I have assembled the team, but not necessarily of whom it's composed of." Estella, beside me, was staring blankly at the wall. She seemed troubled, but I didn't bother seeing what was wrong. The director continued. "I had been told that I needed to inform you of the situation, and that CSIS is indeed pursuing our own investigation. Anything else isn't necessary information, understood?"

            There were muttered "yes ma'ams" and a few "ouis" coming from the room I sat in. I found myself merely nodding to the information given to me. Having worked for CSIS long enough, I knew not to open my mouth during these meetings. I had to keep quiet, for a single word out of line could mean the loss of my job.

            "Good," said the director. "I'll get in touch with you if there's any more you need to know." Rachel Orwell leaned forward to press something and the screen went blank.

            Gabrielle looked around, sighing. "We're done here," she told us in French. "You're all free to go home and await any further instructions."

So yeah, this is kind of a rewrite of the other stuff I have here... Things I know I overuse! Ellipses and "then". And I also know that the first thousand words have quite a bit of an info dump, I apologize I can't start off well x.x Also! Length, I'm sorry .-.