Gregg stopped, shaking his head, and he let the gift swell and build until the sympathy of the audience threatened to burst. "Hannah knew that if she came forward with this, she would not be believed. She knew that she didn't have the clout to force those in power to listen. At best, her hard work would be swept under the rug and buried. She also knew that if she waited too long, the Sharks would find her and her evidence, and they would ... well, that's best left unsaid. So, in wisdom or folly, she looked for a voice who would speak for her. She came to me."
Gregg smiled at Hannah. She nodded back to him. Gregg held the pose long enough to know that the cameras caught the interchange, then turned back.
"I think Hannah thought she'd made a mistake there at first." Gregg gave the half-smile that had been the political cartoonist's icon for him over the years. "You see, like many of you, I couldn't just accept what she'd given me. I had to do some investigation of my own. I had to check and verify all the facets of her story. And I could do one thing Hannah couldn't. I immediately confronted the man whom Hannah's evidence cites as the current head of the Sharks. Why? Because, like you, I needed to get rid of that last little shred of skepticism. I laid out what Hannah had given me, and I dared him to tell me that it was a mistake. I challenged him to refute the evidence. He did not. Instead - "
Gregg stopped. He took a long breath. They were hanging on his words now, leaning forward. The mingled emotions of the audience cocooned him. He was a chrysalis, waiting to break out of the self-made shell of years of failure.... redemption ...
"Instead, he coldly admitted that it was true," Gregg finished.
The howl of outrage drowned out anything else he might have said, and the power of their anger surged back through his Gift, nearly too powerful to handle. Gregg gaped momentarily, open-mouthed, then clamped down on his ace, slammed the mental floodgates. Careful ... This was not as easy to control as Puppetman's power had been. He felt like he was wearing mental mittens - he hadn't wanted the emotions to peak so fast. "Who is he?" someone shouted in the audience, too loud to ignore. Gregg cursed under his breath, shaking his head. Too early ...
"We can't tell you that yet. Not until we have all the evidence we need to convict him," he answered. The answer was clumsy, out of sequence in the script they'd planned. Gregg was momentarily lost.
"Why this forum, Gregg?" Peregrine asked, saving him. One of her wings fluttered softly; a snowy feather drifted to the stage floor. "Why come here?"
"I can answer that very simply, Peri," Gregg said, finding himself once more. "First, I did it for safety, for the safety of all of us here tonight. Hannah already knows that these people will go to any lengths to stay hidden. If Hannah had been killed before she came to me, this whole mess would have stayed in the shadows, in the darkness it likes so much. Not now. Now it's too late to hide."
He turned away from Peri, letting his gaze travel over the audience as the gates of his power opened and touched the chord of their emotions. "And because we need help. We need the aid of all people of conscience, and we need the courage of those who have already been touched by the Sharks. Now that all of you know that the beast exists, we hope that more of you will come forward with your own stories, and more and more light will glare down until everyone can see exactly what horrors this prejudice and hatred bring."
The audience erupted into applause, and Gregg reveled in the sound, an orgasm of support. He let the power loose fully now, let it rip open the last restraints on them. Now ...
"More importantly," he continued, "as a lawyer I look at what we have, and know that legally the only ones we can touch are the little people. I don't want the goons and the subordinates, because they mean nothing. That would be like trying to catch a lizard by the tail - all you'll get is the tail while the lizard scurries away to grow another. I want the whole creature. To do that, we need more; to get more, we need each and every one of you. We have to know that none, none of you here will forget. We have to know that you will not permit this to continue even one day longer."
A wordless shout of affirmation came from several voices within the audience, and the reverberation made Gregg lift his head and smile. Yes ... he exulted, and echoed the word aloud.
"Yes. That's why we came here. Because true power lies within the people. Within you, and you, and you." With each word, he stabbed a forefinger toward the audience. Where Gregg pointed, people rose in support, shouting back to him, screaming. "With your help," he concluded, "we will snare the head of this beast, and when we do ..."
They waited, hanging on his words, the power, this Gift of his redemption seeming to sizzle and spark around him.
"We. Will. Slay. It." He finished each word as a thundering concussion.
They roared, they shouted, they screamed back at him. Inside, another voice shouted over the din. Remember what the Gift is for, Greggie, it warned. Remember that it's to be used for atonement, for penance, for redemption. Never forget that ...
Gregg nodded.
Redemption, it seemed, was very, very tasty.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Gregg could already imagine the headlines in tomorrow's papers: HARTMANN UNCOVERS CONSPIRACY AGAINST WILD CARD. HARTMANN INDICTS HIGH-LEVEL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS IN PLOT.
The floor director was waving to him as he left the stage. "A phone call for you, sir," he said. Gregg took the proferred phone.
"This is Gregg Hartmann."
There was a click on the other end. He heard the popping hiss of a recording - a lone low tone, then another a half-step higher: daaaaaahnhhhh-DUM. The sequence repeated again, then again a little faster and more urgent until it was a pounding, insistent rhythm. Gregg suddenly realized what the music was: the theme from Jaws. A sudden chill prowled his spine.
He hung up the phone as if something was about to leap from the receiver and devour him.
My Sweet Lord
by Victor Milan
Walking with great deliberation, conscious of his destiny, and the eyes of the world - in the form of half a hundred news cameras - upon him, the man in the saffron robe entered the space between the shouting, cheering mob, and the armored personnel carrier that barred its entrance to the joker quarter of Cholon. The morning sun that leaned upon Saigon like a surly giant pressed sweat to his face and highlights to his shaven skull. The news services usually stayed away from the anti-wild cards riots in favor of the more politically correct demonstrations before the Presidential Pad, but today they had been tipped off, and were out in force, jostling the rioters and poking boom-microphones at the monk like dung-beetle antennas.
A man burning himself to death live and in color was what TV news was all about.
The BMP's commander watched the Buddhist monk and his assistant warily from his seat, half out of the turret, in case they got frisky with the red plastic jerricans of gasoline the assistant carried. The monk ignored him as serenely as he did the mob and the ungainly, pale-faced newsfolk. Turning his back to the armored vehicle he assumed full lotus on the griddle-hot pavement.
Visibly torn between self-importance and dismay, the assistant took the cans of gas one at a time and doused the monk with them, being careful not to get any of the fluid on himself. Then he stood to the side and drew himself to his full height, which wasn't conspicuous.