Thief (6 page)

Being caught in the nude had been merely embarrassing, but staring at her for perhaps twenty minutes in the middle of a burglary – that was straight out suicide. Mikel had spent decades training himself - perfecting his operations and planning them to the tiniest detail - and yet in a single day, a single moment she had undermined everything. Mistakes could not be tolerated.

First, on a hunch, he began with the halo. He focused on her with one of the security cameras, almost surprised it was still working, and studied her.

At first he’d worried the halo would be entirely in his mind, but seeing it there in the camera reassured him it was actually there. He wasn’t completely mad. Until he tried to spectrally analyse it with the computer. Far from breaking it down into its different light components, the computer couldn’t even find it. That made his head pound furiously as he tried to understand how that could be. He saw her halo even through remote electronic imaging equipment, but the equipment itself couldn’t see it.

Logically he finally decided, it meant that the halo wasn’t actual light after all. If it was, the cameras would see it. Neither was it some form of psychic projection. Otherwise, how could he see it through a camera, when she couldn’t even know he was watching? Instead it had to be a product of the viewer’s mind, but one that related to the viewer’s perception of the woman as an angel, rather than the angels’ own being. The viewer saw it but the angel didn’t project it. As an explanation it made no sense at all. But then what else about her did?

Just to be absolutely certain of his sanity, Mikel had the computer scan a photographic image of her and then reduce it to a tracery, which thankfully it did. The outline sketch although not particularly flattering, showed a woman with wings. He let out a small sigh of relief.
Computer cogito, ergo sum.
The computer thought it could see her, therefore she existed. It was the best proof of her reality he was likely to get.

Next he decided to study her speech. Not that she could, or at least, did speak with him. But whenever she was around he’d listened to her making a fantastic variety of sounds. Her voice was incomparable to anything he’d ever heard. It stood somewhere between birdsong and whale song, but with a few splashes of other creatures thrown in, and a large dash of something else all together. It flowed from her sometimes in response to him, sometimes to the animals that worshipped her, and sometimes without any reason. Whatever it was, it was wondrous, surely the sound of the ancient sirens as they lured sailors to their watery graves. Of course they too were mythical creatures. Did that mean, he wondered, that they too might exist?

Microphones a thousand times more sensitive than mere human ears, recorded her every note for about five minutes, while the most advanced voice analysis software started breaking it down. But even as he was waiting for the final results, he knew it would be a lost cause. Looking at the early data, he could see clearly that she was cooing and whistling at ranges far beyond human ability to hear let alone utter. It slowly dawned on Mikel that she didn’t speak not simply because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t. Her vocal cords weren’t even close to human. Assuming she actually had vocal cords.

On a hunch he tried some of the experimental cetacean speech analysis software he’d been donated by one of his research institutes. He didn’t support a lot of environmental concerns; he simply didn’t have the resources, but he’d always had a soft spot for whales. So when a bright young marine biologist had spoken publicly about his belief in their intelligence, and his dream of communication, he’d found himself an anonymous backer and in turn Mikel had gained access to some of his research.

Thus far the programme hadn’t been very successful in communicating with the huge creatures, but it had managed to decode some basic emotions, and a few whale words. Things like ‘food’ and ‘liking’. Mikel had always suspected a lot of the problem was that whale song wasn’t a true symbolic language in the human sense, and hence wasn’t analysable in the same way as speech. But that didn’t stop him hoping. Nor had it stopped the scientists from trying.

The programme didn’t have a lot more joy in decoding the angel’s tongue, but at least it detected most of the syllables she used, even if it couldn’t describe them as anything other than a mathematical model or a series of wave patterns. Her speech he finally accepted, wasn’t simply out of the vocal range of humans, it had sounds in it which couldn’t have been made by any known throat.

Infra red analysis at least gave more useful data. Her body temperature read a completely normal 37 degrees Celsius. Or normal for humans that was.  He had no idea what was normal for an angel. He could see her wings there in the screen, the blood pulsing through their massive arteries in giant orange throbs, and returning as dark blue waves. While the size of the arteries involved was staggering, with some being even larger than a man’s aorta, he was still relieved to see them. Whatever else she was, she had a mammalian circulatory system at least. Therefore, whatever else she was, she was a living creature, a mammal.

And therefore perhaps, she was vulnerable.

A thought that had been dancing senselessly at the back of his mind finally hit him between the eyes. The previous day as he’d desperately made their escape, he’d assumed she was in danger from the bullets. Yet he knew no church doctrine would ever have accepted that, - she was an angel and was therefore above mere physical danger.

If he’d thought about it at the time he might have been tempted to leave her to fend for herself. It would have been the smart thing to do. But he’d never thought about it. He’d known absolutely then, that she too was in danger, that she’d placed her physical life in his hands, and he’d reacted accordingly. Now, looking at her blood pulsing smoothly he realized he’d been right, she was vulnerable to the same dangers as him.

It still didn’t explain why she hadn’t left when the shooting started, and returned later. Even without her angelic powers, the gift of flight should surely have put her safely beyond all reach in mere seconds. One question at a time he decided.

Next he considered the biological impossibility of a women with wings.

Breaking down her image as she flexed her wings he built a three-dimensional topographic map of her body, and studied the muscles as they rippled. It was a most impressive map. The angel was probably the most muscular woman he’d ever heard of, and that was based upon only the muscles he could see. Somewhere in her torso, probably around her kidneys, he realized she had to have enormous flight muscles. They probably connected to her buttocks much as the quadriceps did in a man. She also had to have massively developed pectorals. Two sets; one for the arms, and one for the wings. Her sternum surely had to be shaped like a bird’s bursa with raised crest for muscle attachments. The inter-scapular and shoulder regions also ought to have their own anatomical mysteries.

Yet if that was so he conjectured, they should show. Even through her gauzy, puffed out dress he should be able to see the bursa muscles, but there was nothing. She looked to his male eye, like feminine perfection, totally human, with wings attached. Her body defied the laws of bio-mechanics.

Then there were the wings themselves, massive surely beyond use. Their twenty plus foot span could only be achieved by having each of them double jointed so that when she stood there was a three foot segment to the top arch, a seven foot drop almost to the ground, and then another three foot segment curving back up to the wing tip. Such wings couldn’t be designed by nature. They should weigh a ton, and be far too massive for any creature to flap. And yet he’d seen her fly with them. Not just fly but also hover, wings flapping gently and showing not the least sign of strain. What sort of muscle could support such a strain over such a wing span? Surely she couldn’t be mammalian. Yet her form argued otherwise.

Also strangely, the wings didn’t weigh that much. He’d held her, carried her, and even then known that she was surprisingly light. Wings and all she’d be lucky to weigh a hundred pounds. Yet how could that be?

Not an expert in anatomy and physiology, he still found her body structure fascinating. If only she hadn’t been wearing that white dress he cursed, he could have studied her better. And then he thought of what he’d asked for and crossed himself hastily, the distant memory of a Catholic upbringing rearing its ugly head even after so many years.

Hastily he turned his attention to other things. Specifically, the databases. If he couldn’t discover anything that made sense from her, perhaps others might have. After all, angels had been spoken of for at least as long as recorded history.

An avid reader, he’d taken the liberty of building his own library decades in the past, and then over the years had extended it and extended it again. Then finally he’d scanned it on to computer. As a result he had an extensive knowledge base, larger than most city libraries and it was completely searchable. It also should have considerable information on biblical things. After all, some of the treasures he’d stolen and returned to their rightful owners in the past, were religious artefacts. It was amazing how much gold and silver the churches had stashed away over the years.

It occurred to him briefly that perhaps that was why she’d come. He’d returned the churches’ treasures all right, when he’d occasionally recovered them from the crooks, but he hadn’t returned the money. It had largely gone to charities rather than churches. Call it a philosophical difference of opinion he had with organized religion. Money should go to feed the poor on earth, not enrich their souls for the afterlife.

Could she have come for it, a sort of heavenly debt collection agency? He shook his head and rejected the idea instinctively. Surely not. While nothing else made sense, it still seemed completely wrong.

His initial search turned up over fifteen hundred references to angels, and he spent the next hour or so searching through them, picking out the morsels that related to his predicament, and discarding the rest as the ramblings of the insane and delusional. But each time he discarded some other piece of fantasy, he kept returning to the central knotty problem. How did he know they were fantasy? There was an angel in his garden. She was real. It was all fantasy. And quite possibly it was all real.

While he learnt a lot about angels in general, always assuming any of it could be considered as accurate, he learnt little of the specific, and nothing directly related to his situation.

Where did she come from? It was surely the first question he had to answer and it had an obvious answer, but one that was completely useless to him. He didn’t have the geographical coordinates for heaven, nor the ability to make any use of them should he find them. He wasn’t alone in that. Long ago Voltaire had found the same answer.

“It is not known precisely where angels dwell—whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode”.

Three centuries later, with an angel in front of him and with every technological advance known at his fingertips, he found he was unable to add a single thing to that simple statement. It was more than a little depressing.

However, he did glean two facts during his research. Firstly, nowhere in the bible, not in any of the five versions he held, nor in any of the other holy books he held, was the name Sherial written. He quickly checked all the other versions of her name, Latin and Greek especially. Not a thing. Was she new, or had she simply been overlooked by history? On a hunch he ran a query on the internet, searching for her name, and again found nothing that related to the angel. Yet such was its size he could have found thousands of articles about the history of even an unknown street urchin. Was he her first assignment?

The other thing he discovered was not a fact but rather an omission. Nowhere in any of the references was there a description of an angel as being sexy. They were; glorious, wondrous, beautiful, spiritual, radiant, marvellous, miraculous, stupendous, admirable, and exquisite. They were also overwhelming, awesome, awe-inspiring, and breathtaking, fearsome, terrifying and frightening.

Reading between the lines, he guessed some of the authors would have classed them on the same order of magnitude as a nuclear mushroom cloud, every bit as glorious and twice as scary. But nowhere were they ever described as sexy. It was a trap, said his paranoia, and it was usually right.

He became discouraged early on his reading, unwilling to believe that anybody really knew much about angels at all. They had just dreamed it up as they went along. How else could he explain how vague were the things that were written, and how often they contradicted each other? If it wasn’t for the fact that he had an angel sitting outside his house at that very moment, he would have described many of the authors as irrational naval gazers.