Read Online The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four by Randall Farmer - Free Book Online

practice, neither
of which you’re getting here.”  That is, he would most likely get himself
killed if he tried any damned fool stunt like that.
    Yes, this was the aspect of his work with the Focuses he
disliked the most. 
     
    Memories
(1959)
    “Quite an eclectic group we have here today,” Hank
whispered, wiping the sweat off his forehead and wishing for a breeze through
the two story windows.  Special Agent Tommy Bates nodded and eyed the other
students, likely attempting, as did he, to identify them.  Hank took a moment
and scanned the audience again.  He still didn’t recognize anyone else stuck
here in the gym of this dusty run down closed-for-the-summer Trenton High
School.  “I’m surprised you’re here, though.” 
    Tommy grimaced and took a drag on his Camel.  “I hate
this crazy spook shit.  After the FBI Academy I haven’t spent a day working on
domestic surveillance cases.  This Cold War crap is not my specialty.”
    His specialty, if Hank remembered correctly, was
homicide.  Well, solving homicides, not causing them.
    “Unfortunately Gauthier, damn him, knows this all too
well,” Tommy said. 
    Special Agent Paul Gauthier was the one arranging this,
well, lesson.  Gauthier and Hank went way back.  They met first in Korea, and
formed a standard wounded Major befriends the interesting doctor relationship. 
A few years ago, after Transform Sickness showed no sign of going away, Paul
sought out Hank and invited him to help the Quarantined Focuses and their
Transform Households.  By then, Paul was already a rising Special Agent with
the FBI, with Transforms as relatives, and a bug up his ass about how badly
society treated these disease victims.  Hank had already been working on
Transform Sickness when Paul contacted him, but from an epidemiological
prospective.  He hadn’t yet met a Transform.  To prove his point, Paul gave
Hank a tour of the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center, and introduced
him to the Focuses and the Transform households stuck there.  The plight of the
Transforms and their utter strangeness hooked Hank immediately.
    Paul had just received a promotion to Major Case
Inspector, giving Gauthier more than enough pull to arrange a meeting like
this.  If Hank read the tea leaves correctly, the Focuses and their households
had found a way, through Paul, to secure their own clandestine FBI backing. 
Officially, the Transforms were on the lam, illegal escapees from the Transform
Quarantine for five months now, but unofficially, the last thing the Eisenhower
administration wanted was to capture the newly free Transforms.  Cutting
support for the expensive-to-run Transform Detention Centers had freed up quite
a bit of free cash in a budget squeezed tight by the ongoing recession.
    When Gauthier walked into the gym, a young and forceful
Oriental woman accompanied him.  “Shit,” Tommy said, with not as much of a
whisper as would normally be socially appropriate.  Hank gave him the eye, and
Tommy shook his head.  “That’s Woo.  She’s ex-CIA.  One of Focus Fingleman’s
Transforms.”
    Well, this was going to get interesting, now wasn’t it,
Hank thought.
     
    “Okay, Dr. Zielinski, it’s time you and I had a little
chat,” Dahlia Woo said.  He was surprised it took her until the third day of
this impromptu training course to pick him out of the crowd and drag him off
somewhere private.  Dahlia was young, late twenties, short and wiry, a mutt,
likely with an Anglo father and Chinese mother.  She had her black hair tied
back in a tight bun, and she walked with a posture that screamed martial arts
training.  “You’ve seen far too much of what we’re teaching already.  These
aren’t the first forged IDs you’ve made, either.  So…who are you?”
    Hank chuckled.  “I have my history, the same as you
do.”  He had looked forward to this conversation.  Yet another lecture on the
intricacies of tailing, not so much.  ‘If the target ducks