Virtually His

by Gennita Low

  “And who are these ‘they’ that you have in mind?”

  Helen glanced up at Jed McNeil sharply. Those weird silver eyes could be so unnerving to look at, especially if they looked back as if they knew exactly what she was thinking at that moment.

  “These people appear to know about me, so I’m going to assume that they know about the experiment. If it’s not an insider, or someone who has somehow gotten leaked information, then it’s the other agencies,” she said.

  “Oh great, you have to bring up all the agencies. That really narrows it down,” Jack Sullivan spoke up for the first time.

  Helen shrugged. She had never talked to Sullivan, so she couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic. He looked the most normal of the whole group, actually. Not that average meant ugly or anything, not with that square jaw, boy-next-door attractiveness, and football-star build. He just looked like a regular American boy, with his backward cap and wrinkled flannel shirt.

  “Just throwing out possibilities,” she said.

  “We can narrow it down to agencies which have similar remote viewing programs,” T. said quietly. “I have something that’s of interest to Hell and Dr. Kirkland.”

  Helen turned to her chief as the latter pulled out sheets of paper and passed them around. She frowned as she read the page given to her. She looked up when she was done. It was about the ring T. had taken back from her.

  “The ring? An…energy alarm?” she asked.

  T. nodded. “At GEM, we have info that years ago the CIA created energy alarms at some point during their remote-viewing program when they were fully funded that could detect the presence of remote viewers who might be spying on their meetings. I suppose they were paranoid after their own CIA-trained operatives were successful in penetrating other agencies. Intel has also shown that this paranoia was also present in other countries. We have quite a lot of information on the old KGB programs. They were also experimenting with high-tech energy deflectors. I’m sure Dr. Kasparov is familiar with early versions of it, if we ask him.”

  “So according to your chart here, the ring you gave me was responsible for that seizure or whatever it was that happened in the stairwell?” Helen scratched the side of her forehead. Her head was actually aching a little from the memory of it. “It’s not the serum, then. But why didn’t you tell me?”

  T. shook her head. “First, you shouldn’t have felt anything, Hell. It’s not an alarm system to warn the remote viewer. When the CIA had it installed in their secret rooms, it acted as a deflector. They’d tested it with their own remote viewers at that time. None were able to get enough information about the meeting when it was happening or ‘see’ the room the usual remote-viewing way, according to the papers, and none reported any seizures or reaction like the one you had. This test was repeated several times through the years, and other than a good success rate of blocking out unwanted entities in their meetings, there were no reports of it being a health hazard to the CIA viewers.”

  “Okay, my RV classes must have forgotten to warn me about energy alarms,” Helen said. “You’re telling me that these things can stop me, too, and yet they didn’t try this on us when we were training?”

  “No, she didn’t say that,” Alex Diamond cut in. “Tasha’s only affirming the fact that the CIA had a good success rate of blocking out unwanted entities in their meetings at that time.”

  Her chief’s blink of surprise didn’t escape Helen’s notice. Why did Alex still refer to her as Tasha, when she was Tess now? Tasha was just one of T.’s many personas.

  “So what’s wrong with my logic that it can stop me, too?” Helen countered.

  “Because the CIA never established the fact that they’d stopped any other remote viewers except their own,” Alex said. “If they did, Tasha would have said so in this report, isn’t that right, T.?”

  Ooooh. Back to T.

  T. smiled. Helen noticed she didn’t even glance in Alex’s direction. “That’s right,” she agreed. “With new technology, we’ve managed to create a miniature version and we were charting Helen’s and her monitor’s surroundings just to test how sensitive it is, and whether it works.”

  “Apparently it does,” Alex said, “and apparently, according to the activity in the chart here, the same time Hell had that attack, we can establish a new fact, that there are remote viewers who sense it differently.”

  “No, it establishes that something set off GEM’s version of the energy alarm and when that happened, it triggered some kind of reaction in Agent Roston,” T. said.

  “Would that something be another entity, let’s say, and can GEM’s people establish that there was another remote viewer in the area and somehow that bothered Agent Roston?” Alex asked, in a very polite voice.

  “I’m taking care of it,” T. replied, and for the first time, she looked at Alex.

  “You didn’t bring this up last night when we were being updated about what happened to Helen in the stairwell.”

  Helen’s own tension meter went up about ten notches watching those two eye each other. She could safely rule out Alex Diamond as the person in her room last night, that was for sure.

  “I wasn’t sure since we haven’t run tests on the ring yet,” T. said, her beautiful eyes narrowing slightly.

  “I meant the fact that GEM has this kind of device in its possession and that you have given one to one of our operatives to wear. I thought GEM was our partner?”

  Helen’s gaze quickly swept around the table once, gauging the other commandos’ reactions. They seemed to be sitting back and watching, enjoying it as much as she was. Obviously, like her, they’d never seen T. on the verge of losing a battle.

  Her chief leaned back in her chair. “We aren’t full partners in everything, Alex. I realize that the merger was done in your absence and you probably don’t have the full details, but the written agreement is somewhere in this building, I’m sure. GEM has retained quite a bit of its independence, and—” she paused, before continuing softly “—will continue to do so with its operatives.”

  Whoa, T. had drawn first blood. No way were they arguing about her and GEM operatives. There was a wealth of hidden challenges in this exchange for an interested observer to mine and sieve. No one said a word during the small silence that followed.

  “Nonetheless, Agent Roston is our operative, as per her contract, and your giving her that device meant you’d kept certain information to yourself that could have jeopardized our operation, and future missions as well. As a partner, it’s your responsibility as co-operations chief to at least tell the operations chief on the COMCEN side about certain things that might affect the ongoing operation. I’ll, of course, bring this up as a suggestion during the council meeting between our agencies, but I think this is an issue we could easily solve during our own personal time.”

  Helen bit her lower lip. T. sharing information with Alex Diamond would mean meeting or talking with the man a lot more, and from all accounts, T. had been keeping her distance, in some case, even keeping several continents between herself and Alex Diamond.

  She had to give it to Alex Diamond, though. She’d never seen a man able to keep T. on her toes. She wanted to snicker at the “personal” time comment. She wasn’t going to sit by and not help out her chief, though. After all, T. had shown up to help her last night. She cleared her throat, tapping the tip of her pen on the paper in front of her, as if to make a point.

  “The device, as explained here, wasn’t supposed to have an effect on me but on interfering entities,” Helen said. “I see it as protection gear, something like a bulletproof vest, except it was made for a remote viewer. So do you boys report on every piece of protection gear on you during an operation? I’m sure, if the device had worked normally, without my strange experience in the stairwell, this chart would have read the same. T. would have brought back the same results and none of you would care because there wouldn’t have been any proof that it actually happened. So my having this reaction at the same ti
me as shown on this chart shows that it was actually I who was interfering with the overall mission, and T. wouldn’t have known that in the first place.”

  There was a chuckle from the end of the table. It was Flyboy. He was scratching his nose, probably hiding a grin. “What I want to know is, when are we going to be issued our very own magic decoder ring?” he queried, tongue-in-cheek.

  Jack Sullivan snorted. “Rings are for sissies,” he drawled. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve found out tracking the satellite, Flyboy, so I can get out of here and take a shower? It’s gotten mighty stuffy and I’m running behind with…operation duties.”

  “If you’d start your day earlier, you’d have all that done already,” Shahrukh said.

  “Oh yeah, some of us just love the crack of dawn like you do, right, Armando?”

  “Early bird catches the worm,” Armando said, twiddling his pen between his fingers like a majorette’s baton, “but better late than never.”

  “Just love a dude,” Jack said blandly, “who can speak from both sides of his mouth. Let’s hear the satellite findings, Flyboy.”

  Helen loved the exchange. It showed they were a lot more relaxed with each other than they pretended to be. She glanced over at T. Her chief was also smiling at the talking men. Helen looked back at Alex, who was studying her chief with brooding eyes. He hadn’t said anything else after her own comment. It appeared that he wasn’t that concerned with her “device” jeopardizing the operation after all. More likely, he just wanted to rile a reaction from T.

  “Satellite tracked that van to a fake identity, of course. But it has CIA marks all over it. Easy to track when they had the vehicle delivered to a well-known CIA landing strip, you know. Why they would take the time to give a fake identity and not even bother to at least mask their entry points…”

  Listening, but a little distracted by what she’d found out, Helen looked down at her ringless finger. Energy alarm. Did she somehow sense its warning through her “danger” sense? And somehow, it was amplified to the point that it affected her. Something did happen at that moment and it wasn’t because of the serum.

  The idea of another remote viewer in her vicinity had occurred to her before, and had been the subject of discussion during training. From Q and A sessions, she’d learned that it took a very high-level remote viewer to see different forms of energy, such as another remote viewer, and it took a lot of energy for one remote viewer to even communicate with another. That was why RV was a solo thing, with many remote viewers working the same event on their own, in separate modules. Too much energy working together destroyed their concentration as well as objectivity. She let go of the idea and returned her attention to the commandos.

  “I’m going to call our liaison, Steve McMillan, for information from his CIA contacts at TIARA. He’ll get us the names of the people who requested the use of the plane at that time.”

  “Do you suspect rogues or was it a sanctioned CIA operation?”

  “Too early to tell. But either way, we have to deal with it. We can’t have them interfering, especially with something like this. None of the big brass are going to take it seriously when the departments are fighting over remote viewers. No VIP’s going to want to be arguing over that on record.”

  Helen frowned. The other possibility of actually being spied upon by a remote viewer from the CIA was disconcerting. It was no fun being on the other end of the game. They had trained her, so why were they after her now?

  There was so much she still had to learn about her newly-acquired skill. There was so much more she didn’t know. Her CIA monitor had told her that practice and time would help her achieve higher levels, even without a personal trainer. But she had Hades as her monitor now, and she had a feeling that he knew a lot more than he was telling her.

  “Actually, let me talk to Nikki Harden and set up a meeting with her husband, Rick, from TIARA.” Jed McNeil spoke for the first time since the meeting started. “I don’t want Steve McMillan reporting back to Admiral Madison about this yet.”

  Helen looked at him. Nikki Harden was a retired GEM operative, a legend among her sisters because of her background. On her return from her training hiatus, she’d learned that Nikki had gotten married recently, but the details were lost among a hundred other pieces of news she had to absorb.

  “I’ll let her know so she expects your call, Jed,” T. said. “You know she doesn’t like to be surprised.”

  Jed’s lips curled up at the corners. “Just because Diamond’s spoiling your fun, you don’t have to spoil mine, too.”

  “Darling, you’re having entirely too much of that lately. Now that we’ve established that our attackers were actually one of our own agencies and not a foreign entity, what’s our next course of action?”

  “We divide into two groups. One takes care of finding out the CIA culprit. The other takes care of our current operation, which is still ongoing, by the way. We need the other half of the Cummings. He isn’t to be allowed to escape or he might barter for his wife’s release with his information. Heath, you’ve interviewed the woman, what’s your take on this?”

  Because it was still ongoing, Helen refrained from asking questions about the electronic key she’d retrieved. If the powers-that-be decided to test her again, she didn’t want any chance of them saying that her RV was contaminated by information.

  Besides, it was more interesting watching the COS commandos. Her training had isolated her for two years. She’d forgotten how much prep there was in between operations. She was also a GEM operative, essentially trained to work alone, so working with a group of men was something new. However, she hadn’t been away from the field so long that she couldn’t sense that these were all dangerous men. They were sitting here listening to one of their own calmly dissecting the psyche of their prisoner. “Interview,” they called it. “Interrogate,” T. had said last night.

  She felt a small shiver running down her back at the thought of Heath Cliffe in a room alone with the woman she saw. She’d spent last night with one of them, had practically enjoyed relinquishing control to him, and for the first time, she understood a little of these men’s training. It wasn’t all physical strength and macho stuff like the guys against whom she’d been pitted. These men were—she searched for a word—untamed. Working outside the boundaries, and given the freedom to live in the shadows like they do, would be bound to unleash a certain wildness in a man.

  Yet, studying them, she saw that they were bound to some kind of duty, or at least, they appeared to be bound by responsibility because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be here. She wondered about each of these men’s backgrounds—who they were and what brought them here to black operations. The more she learned about them, the more this world of shadows fit them well. Each of these men, sitting here looking so civilized around a table, was not quite tamed. The few times she’d been alone with one of them had shown her one thing. They disregarded rules and ethics when it fit their purpose, and their agenda, she realized, was never black and white. Not Armando’s. Not Heath’s. Not even Diamond’s. And definitely not whoever Hades was.

  At that precise moment, Flyboy caught her eye and signaled to her that he’d call her later. He gave her another one of his devastating smiles. When exactly had he returned from his satellite tracking? Surely it hadn’t taken that long once he found out that the CIA used one of their own secret landing strips? She smiled back sweetly. They were her wild beasts and she would learn to train them.

  CIA secret medical facility

  The voices were faint but he heard them. They were discussing their next step. It always paid to pretend not to be aware of everything.

  “They’ll track back to our department but I think we’re safe for now. They’re going to think it’s the RV department anyway.”

  “I can’t believe she’s that good. She’s just achieved Level Two, according to the reports.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget it’s her physical training that’s gotten her ou
t of this. She beat out the rest of the candidates, you know, so she’s got to be damn good.”

  “What we need is to find one of these candidates and get him to kill her for us. We can’t afford this. She’s a threat to our network in the CIA, even more so than the fucking admiral’s internal investigations and committee overviews.”

  “We need to lay low for a while. We have our own remote viewer, hell, a whole hospital of them, if we need more. We have our own serum. We have what we need to counter any of their moves, if they’re going to use her to spy on our activities. Don’t worry. We’ve been around for over a decade. No one’s going to dig us out that easily. Meanwhile, we have to hide him. He’s still useful. Did pretty good back there.”

  “Yes, but look at him staring into space like a madman. Not going to last, man.”

  “Like I said, the facility has plenty of candidates.”

  He was afraid. Mad. Not that kind of mad. He wasn’t a lunatic, no matter what those fuckers think. He was pissed-off mad.

  All his beautiful collection of images…gone. They were gone! Ever since his remote viewing self had bumped into that woman in the stairs, ever since that awful experience—whatever it was—he hadn’t been able to rewind. Empty. Like a blank tape. There wasn’t one image left. Empty. That other viewer had sucked it out of him somehow.

  It had been what had kept him going all these months when they’d abandoned him in this stupid hospital, the images and all those feelings he’d collected from the people from whom he’d taken them. The memories of their sex lives—how he loved the glow of their lust rushing in him. And he had collected some really sexy ones this last time too, especially from that woman everyone was after, the one who had a husband. She was mighty fine and what a hot lusty kinky babe. Always wanting sex, that one…oh the lost images! He could remember them, but who the fuck cared about memories when he couldn’t rewind and taste the energy?

  That woman he’d bumped into—he had to somehow find that woman and get it back. It had to be inside her still and she was probably enjoying his collection. Somehow, she’d stolen it from him. He’d heard his monitors talking about her, that she could remote view and then physically lead a team into action without her needing any downtime, so that meant she was on the serum, too, only something better. Something way stronger because she had fucking stolen his images without being in remote-viewing mode! How the fuck did she do that?