Further Discoveries...

“Knowing what you must about know about Drake, why have you helped him in his search?”

She hesitated before answering, but she did not look away. “That is not an easy answer to give. When you get to ‘know’ people in the way that I do when I use my Talent, you learn that nearly everyone is more complex than they seem. When I first met Drake Kampmann, I knew him only as a wealthy foreign scientist who was looking into the same field that I wanted to go into, the ancient past, into the very origins of human society. It wasn’t until I touched him though, that I got that first glance into incredible complexities of a person who was ALIVE at that time. I couldn’t believe my own senses and thought that I must have been dreaming when I received the first images of his youth and the incredible drive that had kept him...alive, in some way until the present.”

As she spoke, she seemed to come alive herself in a way that neither I, nor Daniel, had seen since he had first ravaged her. I wanted to ask more questions, to get the answers I truly wanted, but I felt it was more important to let her keep talking...

“It wasn’t until the second time I touched him that I discovered that he was actually a direct ancestor of mine. He was probably the first person I had ever touched that could sense what was happening when I touched him, but he was definitely the first to have the ability to shield things from me that he didn’t want me to know, at least after the first time anyway.”

I couldn’t restrain myself at that point. “But surely, you must have seen the evil that he has done throughout his...existence?”

She sighed. “When you have the ability to know the deepest, darkest secrets of everyone around you for all of your life, and you get to relive them every time you touch someone, you come to know that we all carry the seeds of both our own destruction and our redemption within. Yes, I could see much of the evil he had made within this world, but I could also see that there is goodness in there as well.

“When I touched you, Mr. Bones, I sense that you contain within you the seed of a great Evil, the remnants of a being so ancient and so powerful that I fear that one day your humanity will no longer be able to hold it back. But I can also feel that for now, you have found ways of coping with and containing that Evil.”

It was my turn to look away for a moment, to collect my own thoughts. She had learned so much in one momentary touch!

“The man you call Drake is your enemy, he started the process to create what you have become, but it is you who have taken that beginning and become so much more than even he could have imagined. But that man is my ancestor, my patron, the one who taught me that there are other people in the world who have strange talents like I do, people who use those skills for good and bad. He was the first person who I felt safe with all of the secrets I had been keeping. You see, there are many taboos in this part of the world against people with powers like I possess. People with unexplainable powers get stoned to death here, if they are discovered.

“Drake taught me that I could use my powers in small, secret ways to further my career. It was he who convinced me to use my abilities to become an archaelogist and an agent within the Mukhbarat.”

“Why would you serve in that agency, as an agent of Saddam Hussein’s government?”

“It’s simple, really. As an agent I could keep other archaelogists from selling away Iraq’s heritage to the highest bidder, but I could also control which secrets I actually revealed to the other, more enforcement minded agents. I could get information from suspects with no harm being done to them, and I could protect the secrets of those who truly needed and deserved protection because I had such a reputation for finding the truth.”

“You know, you really aren’t making my decision any easier.”

“In the faith of my people, Shaitan, there are no choices, but the will of Allah.”

“Well, if there is an Allah, then he has left you in the hands of a pissed off dead man with an axe to grind with your damn ancestor...”

“Hopefully, that is better than being in the hands of living rapist who had an axe to grind with my damn ancestor.”