Cuff Lynx

by Fiona Quinn

  “Yes or no, right or wrong. . .”

  “Yup, or, buy or don’t buy, when it comes to business applications. There are other methodologies and protocols the Stanford folks developed for when we were trying to remotely view and describe a specific area. Elliot tasked Herman Trudy — Herman Trudy is the name of the guy tasked to find you. He’s the HET at the tops of the reports. Coming up with a GPS coordinate is all but impossible, but by starting off with the structure, then moving out into space at increments and using various maps, it’s easy to hone in.”

  “Like using the zoom in and zoom out feature on Google Maps?”

  “Exactly. So, let’s see, what else… Sequences of numbers, names of locations, unless they are unique, reading words on a page… those are all extremely difficult to remotely view, and our view of them is not reliable.”

  “But, for example,” I asked,“if a remote viewer happened to be in a meeting and saw a battle plan drawn on a white board with simple geometric shapes. . .”

  “Oh, yes, that would be easy to read and replicate into a report. And the remote viewer wouldn’t have to ‘happen to be’ there. You see, time is of no consequence. When tasked, the remote viewer would simply go to the time and place where he could obtain information about the planning for the XYZ campaign. At lightning speed, he would be there in the time frame when the schematics were drawn out.”

  My hands came up to cover my mouth as the breadth of impact offered up by that sentence permeated my consciousness. “Oh, my god, the implications of that statement—”

  “Are mind-blowing, I know. That’s why many of our trained remote viewers couldn’t continue. Doing this day in and day out, perpetually blowing their paradigms to smithereens, can play havoc with your mental health and stability.”

  “So if a team planned a mission in the morning and left immediately to execute it. . .” Was this how Strike Force got caught at Fuller Mine with the D.O.A. when Striker and Jack were shot? I remembered thinking at the time it was like the shooters had a playbook or script. Holy smokes.

  “Okay, let’s take that example. The enemy has something up their sleeve. They want to know if our guys are going to intervene and how, so bad guys have a chance to change things up. The date, the time, maybe even put a counter attack in place. The tangos can’t go to the remote viewer and task them by asking what will happen, because the outcome depends on the new information and the response of the combatant. No, what they task is something like ‘go to the time where I can best understand the Americans’ plans.’ Now, say those plans were put up on a board like a football play, which often happens so the soldiers can study them and ask questions, well, then you copy that down, gather what you can from the conversations, and boom, you have the data you need. Doesn’t matter if it’s past, present, or future.”

  A shiver raked through me. “Wow,” I whispered.

  “Wow indeed.” He nodded with conviction. “Hence the importance of protecting your site and limiting knowledge to need-to-know. Hopefully, the people who need to know have their shit together, like Elliot and Spyder.”

  General Elliot. This brought me to another horrible thought. “Sir, you mentioned something earlier about wannabes, lookyloos, and influencers. I read a little bit about influencing.”

  “Influencing is a very dangerous development. CIA found out that the Russians were working on evolving the ability to plant suggestions into someone else’s mind. That’s where the whole damned goat thing came up that got into that damned book, and later into the movies. The Men Who Stare at Goats. The influencers weren’t trying to stare a goat to death. That’s just fucking absurd. The idea was that we would plant the thought seeds, either to change someone’s mind on some topic of political import, or to create illness in a person. The end game with implanting an illness was that we had the ability to remotely kill our enemy – stroke or heart attack, for example.”

  “Or semi-comatose state?” I asked.

  He dipped his head left, then right as he weighed the possibility. “Maybe. It’s not something I really worked with. We got closed down before much came of that project. You’re too young to remember, but back in the ‘90s there was a chess match between Karpov and Kasparov. Karpov had a parapsychologist on his team.”

  “True story? And that made a difference in the chess match?”

  “Absolutely. It was almost impossible for Kasparov to think and strategize through the pollution that filled his brain. The Russians used this diplomatically, as well. In 1988, for example, Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev to hash out a treaty about limiting nuclear stockpiles. Reagan wasn’t on his game. He was nauseated and sick the whole trip. They had influencers working on making him too ill to think clearly, but not ill enough to prevent the talks. They walked a fine line, and it showed the incredible dexterity of the Russian influencing team.”

  “Holy moly. And we do that? Influence?”

  “Stanford developed the protocol. Only two people were chosen, and they were picked for their altruistic outlooks because. . .well, in the wrong hands, these skills could be devastating. They were Nelson Scott and . . . huh, isn’t that funny? Can’t recall the other guy’s name right off. Nelson Scott and . . .” General Coleridge shook his head. “Huh,” he said, pulling off his hat and rubbing his hand over his hair. He looked up at the stars with a frown.

  “But, sir, did you know that General Elliot is semi-comatose, and there is no physical or mental reason for his state?”

  General Coleridge gave me a long hard look. “General Elliot?” He turned his gaze to Spyder. “How’d this come about, Spyder?”

  “General Elliot and his wife went on a vacation where he became more and more tired each day. When they came home, his wife insisted that he go to the hospital. While in the hospital, he seemed to be improving. Once they left, though, Mrs. Elliot felt he needed quiet and took him to his hunting cabin. The doctors who visited him there said there was no point in going back to the hospital, as all of the tests showed nothing of concern. He was very healthy until he suddenly went into this state. Mrs. Elliot was unable to care for him, so she put him in a long-term care facility.”

  “Could someone have influenced General Elliot?” I asked Coleridge point-blank.

  “Nope. Don’t think it’s possible in the least. Our two influencers were chosen for their altruism. Damned shame about Elliot, though. Good man.”

  “Sir, when you do this work, can you do this remote work alone, or would it take two to partner on it?”

  “I don’t do solo flights. My wife’s my helper.” He pulled their laced fingers to his lips and kissed the back of her hand. “I’ve been at this nigh on thirty years, and these are the choices I make. It’s not to say that someone couldn’t or wouldn’t remote view on their own. A lone remote viewer could still function well and get excellent results. Now, you need to understand that in remote viewing, anything better than chance in considered an excellent outcome. Most of us work around the 65% range. If a remote viewer is tenacious, has all the time he wants, and can approach again and again, hitting the target from different angles, I’ve seen those rates budge up to around the 90% mark. But that’s remarkable and uncommon.”

  “How does one make decisions off of this information if there is a 35% risk of it being erroneous?”

  “Boots on the ground. What we collect offers a starting point. Then it takes the other people involved to review the information and say whether it’s valid and actionable or not.”

  “Like when General Elliot included his notes on the tasking log about me.”

  General Coleridge nodded. “Exactly. When Elliot was able to corroborate some of the information, it gave more credence to the times when he didn’t know the facts – can you see the logical problem with that?”

  “Well sure. Trudy might have gotten a portion correct and been confused later, but that might cloud Elliot’s decision making if the correct information actually gave weight to incorrect information. It would be an easy trap
to fall into. In this case, though, I think Herman Trudy did a remarkable job. During the times I was lucid, the information is totally correct. I can’t speak to his speculations during my illness.” I shifted around. This subject matter was disturbing on so many levels. The complications and consequences of the Galaxy program were so profound. “There weren’t many of you, were there? How many people do you think were trained to follow the Stanford protocol for remote viewing?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’d say over the years, no more than three dozen were involved in Galaxy.”

  Mrs. Coleridge gathered up our dishes, waving me back to my seat when I tried to get up and help. “See you back at the ranch when you’ve talked your way through all your questions.” She climbed into the front seat, and headed back over the field.

  I moved over to General Coleridge and picked up the reports. “Sir, do you recognize who the monitor 91449715 could be?”

  “No clue. That’s not one I’ve seen before. But usually it’s not a difficult thing. It’s a simple code or cipher.” He stared down at the paper and spent some minutes muttering and counting on his fingers. I filled everyone’s mugs with hot chocolate from the thermos Mrs. Coleridge had left for us while he sorted it out. I settled back down and took a sip, happy to have my gloved hands wrapped around the steaming mug.

  “Uhm, yes,” General Coleridge said. “I’d say this is a cipher that simply uses a number to represent a letter. The monitor has put down the name Indigo as his name on this report. I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  I chanced a peek over the rim of my cup at Spyder. Spyder nodded his head like the general had just said that the birds had all flown south for the winter. Information, but nothing special or surprising.

  “Herman Trudy said ‘winking.’ What does that mean?”

  “That’s just him honing in on you.”

  “And he suggested that I might be a remote viewer?”

  “Remote viewer – that’s someone trained in our protocol, but who does the job on their own, without a monitor. You’re not from the program, and I seriously doubt you had training. But from, these findings, I can say you’ve had an OBE—an out of body experience—before, right? I do. It’s not at all the same as remote viewing.”

  “I have left my body before, yes.”

  “Head trauma?”

  “I’ve had a few.” They weren’t the catalyst for the out of body experiences for me, though, when I walked behind the Veil. Walking behind the Veil was something I trained in with Miriam Laugherty. But I knew what he was talking about. One of the autobiographies I read was about a man who had a brush with death via a bullet to the head. It was okay with me that General Coleridge misunderstood what I was saying. Information about my psychic abilities was absolutely need-to-know only.

  General Coleridge pulled at his lower lip. “Hell of a thing. I hope you can get some control over that. It can make life hard.” His eyes searched over my face. “I bet you have a lot of trouble hiding your emotions – do you tear up easily? Do your emotions seem to have more steam than other people’s?”

  I nodded. I had been working on the trademark stoicism exhibited by my team, but truth be told, I walked around all the time masking the emotions that I wore like a second skin. Being emotional held a great deal of vulnerability to it that the general seemed to understand. The compassion in his voice brought a tear to my eye, and I wiped it quickly away, lest it freeze there. The temperatures were dipping further. I leaned into Spyder and he put a fatherly arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

  “Yup, me too. It’s not the head trauma that causes the emotions, it’s being plugged into the collective unconscious. Hell of a burden, and not very good for a military career, I can tell you that for sure. Now, what else did you need to know?

  Twenty-Seven

  Two days later, back in a much more temperate DC, Spyder and I sat at the end of a cul-de-sac with our binoculars trained on a warehouse. Zero two-thirty and even the neighborhood dogs slept too deeply to alert their owners that strangers loitered on the road outside. Syder saw no problem at all with this plan. I, on the other hand . . .

  While we sat on the Wyoming battlefield, Spyder and I spent a long time discussing what came next. We decided that getting the artwork back and protecting Iniquus from Indigo — or whatever other remote viewer he had working on the project of destroying us — was our highest priority.

  Reconnaissance was step one. Spyder’s hacking skills provided the property’s schematics. He’d pulled everything–electrical, plumbing, alarm systems and codes, payroll, scheduling, employee profiles . . . What we didn’t have was a decisive answer to the question, “Was our art still here?” That was my job.

  Spyder would produce the distraction, and I would shadow walk inside and peek into boxes. Ta da - our plan in a nutshell. Simplicity at its best. On a Tuesday night, the warehouse staff couldn’t expect much to happen. It was the lightest shift of the week, with only three men in the whole place. We were waiting for the changing of the guard at zero three hundred. The graveyard shift was—well, I’d call them the less athletic of the bunch, weighing in around the four-hundred mark. I knew I couldn’t throw one of them over my hip, but I could probably outrun them. I hoped none of them was particularly trigger-happy, but I wore a bullet-proof vest just in case.

  Our strategy was for me to head inside dressed in various shades of grey from the soles of my running shoes to the balaclava that rubbed my nose raw. Spyder had dressed in jeans and a gray hoodie. When I asked him about his distraction plan, he grinned broadly, and gave me nothing by way of information.

  Zero three hundred. Spyder turned the engine over on our electric car, and we motored noiselessly toward the storage facility. Driving without his lights, Spider left me off at the dark edge of the parking lot. It had been a while since I’d practiced shadow walking on a mission. I’d be relying on muscle memory to get me through.

  As he drove away, I scaled the fence, dropped in behind a black 4Runner, and took in the scene. Peeking up at the sky, I waited for the clouds to spread over the Cheshire Cat smile of a moon. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, Striker’s SEAL mantra repeated in my mind. As soon as the moon’s glow dimmed, I moved toward the door like a phantom, exactly how I remembered doing it when I trained these skills with Master Wang. I became one with my environment. It was as easy a breathing. Light on the balls of my feet, I rounded the corner and slid to the door.

  With a steady hand, I tumbled the lock, then depressed the toggle to release the door’s clasp. I heard the roar of an engine and loud music with an eardrum-annihilating bass, pounding out a beat. As it drew closer, I timed the sounds of the door opening and closing with the rhythm. I tapped the alarm code into the box, wondering what kind of ruse Spyder had going on, and hoping it didn’t raise suspicions and therefore vigilance.

  The hall that I paced was black as coal. There was an art to pacing that Spyder had worked with me on for long hours during his mentorship. Each footfall was an exact measurement. My stride during this activity could not be any longer or any shorter than the last. Centimeters could accumulate and would make a difference over a distance. That difference could put me at the wrong door. I moved my feet exactly eighteen inches from heel to heel. Never rushed. Just an exact eighteen inches so I knew that when I came to pace one hundred and twenty-three, I would turn right and, counting from that corner, move forward another one hundred and ten steps, where I would find a door to my left that needed to be picked and a code entered before I turned the knob. It was a numbers game. Always. Distractions, a mind floundering and questioning—none of that could happen. It threw off the count. It made the numbers for the first code box versus the second versus the third all jumble into a pile of uselessness.

  I had typed all of the numbers into my phone–but that meant light, and light could very well mean detection if whatever Spyder was doing outside didn’t have the desired effect. I touched the grip of my Glock 19 gen 4 pistol. I didn’t want to ha
ve to use my gun. Despite the warrant I had tucked into my pocket, I was the trespasser, and if someone tried to stop me, they were doing their job. These guys weren’t criminals. Just employed by criminals.

  I held my breath as I twisted the knob and pushed forward. Laughter outside suddenly punctuated the driving beat of the music. A woman’s voice. No, two women’s voices. Then a man gave a whoop that coincided with the downbeat as I let the door slide back onto its catch.

  I moved over to the boxes lined up in rows. I pulled my Gerber tool from its carrier on my back, using the downrange tomahawk to pry open the lids. I winced as the nails shrieked in resistance. I had two boxes left to check when boot-clad footfalls sounded in the hallway. I dropped to prone, lining myself up against the box, making myself as long and as thin as I could. The door popped open, banging off the wall, and a flashlight swept the room.

  The man’s heavy body progressed past the doorframe toward me. He panted from the exertion of movement. The flashlight’s arc brushed over the room and included long pauses in the corners – novices at insertion often mistakenly move to the corners when they try to conceal themselves, like a child playing hide-and-go-seek. That, or they moved behind the doors. The first time Spyder showed me how the security guards pop the door open to break the intruder’s nose cured me of that bad choice. That was exactly what the guard did tonight when he banged the door open. As I lay very still, using my combat breaths, I made my mind go over the details and talk through the strategies of my actions as Spyder had trained me to do. Logical thinking appeased the fear drive that would otherwise cause tunnel vision and missteps. I needed to stay rational and controlled.

  A call came over the guard’s radio that included giggling—a man’s giggling, hyper and high-pitched, like someone being tickled. Then the radio voice beckoned this guy to the front. “Come on, man, you gotta see this.”

  The man made his way back out through the door. Now I applied the other kind of math Spyder taught me. The thirty breaths math. Not short breaths, puffing along like a freight train, but a slow and steady in-for-four, out-for-six of tactical breaths; because surely, someone almost catching me in the act would trigger my hypothalamus to react. My adrenaline and cortisol would climb, drawing blood from my hands and feet to feed my vital organs and keep me alive – except that that was usually not the case, I lectured myself as I worked my breathing technique. Typically, what happens when blood gets rerouted from the head, hands, and feet is that you get dizzy and clumsy and make fatal mistakes—as in, not waiting long enough to see if someone was trying to fake you out, like this guy did when he sprang the door back open and shot his flashlight wildly around the storage space. Had I been standing, I would have been blinded, caught with one very blocked exit, and now I’d be fighting instead of listening to the door click and once again beginning my slow steady breaths until I reached thirty.