Trial Run

by Thomas Locke

  “Nothing but strong,” her security chief added.

  “You were right to go down there,” Karla agreed.

  Reese settled into her chair before the monitor panel. She pulled the mike’s metal cord over close to her mouth. “You have the kids and Elene on different channels, right?”

  “The newbies are on one, Elene on two.”

  “Okay.” Reese willed her hands to stop shaking. She took a steadying breath. Another. Then she keyed the mike and said, “Here we go.”

  29

  Reese did not need her notes to guide the four new team members through their transit. “You are going to transit now. Remain in the transit room. You are in complete control. You are completely safe.”

  The Italian scientist, Gabriella Speciale, and her research group referred to these events as ascents. Reese had dismissed the name out of hand. She wanted to disassociate her operation from theirs. Plus the term reeked of higher aspirations. Reese had no interest in searching out the higher possibilities of anything. Her orientation was much baser.

  Thus the term transit.

  The panel’s monitors showed the EKG patterns for each trial subject. Ditto for heart rate, oxygen consumption, the works. Cameras focused on each face. All these images were repeated in the flat screens that rimmed the ceiling. Reese gave the four a moment longer, repeated her instructions for them to hover and remain where they were, then keyed the mike’s controls and said, “Okay, Elene, I’m counting you up now.”

  A year earlier, Reese had considered herself as close to invulnerable as was humanly possible. She had been second-in-command of security and intel at one of the world’s largest industrial groups. A new high-level threat had been identified, in the form of a research team led by Gabriella Speciale. Her security had been limited to one former Ranger named Charlie Hazard and a motley collection of untrained aides. Reese had been ordered to take them out. With all the forces at her control, the task should have been straightforward. She had done it dozens of times before. A simple eradication. Instead, Speciale and Hazard had demolished her team. Sixteen months later, Reese remained in recovery mode, trying to refit her fragmented life together and erase the nightly dose of tremors. Dawns were minefields. Remnants of memories still erupted with destructive force.

  This project had come to Reese via one of the shadow organizations that operated in the grey zone between DOD and the outside world. One of the Italian scientist’s team had asked for Reese by name, then offered to become her own personal in-house spy and supply them the complete package—technology, full instructions, research data, the works. In return, he wanted his own lab, total control over his research, total freedom to publish, and a full professorship at UCLA. Reese said yes to all but the last. She had no swing inside the UC system. Her spy accepted the terms without a quibble. Clearly he was thinking the same as she. If the project was as successful as initially indicated, he could name his ticket to any school on the planet.

  Then just as they planned an extraction, their spy within the research organization had gone silent.

  Reese and her associates could only assume the spy had been caught by Charlie Hazard and eliminated. Given what Hazard had done to Reese, she felt a real pang of sympathy for the scientist she had never actually met.

  Reese’s superiors were mildly concerned about this possible threat to their clandestine world. More than anything, they wanted it to all just go away. Colonel Morrow represented the faction that felt Reese and her team were nothing but an expensive waste of time. There were others, however, who were not so sure. Preliminary findings from numerous interviewed trial subjects suggested that Gabriella Speciale had actually managed to establish and control situations where human sensory awareness was no longer restricted to the human body. Reese’s bosses needed to know if this impacted their ability to hold and maintain secrets. They needed to determine if these experiments could be channeled to stealing other people’s secrets. And they needed to know this first.

  The intensity of their concerns, and the opposition Reese faced inside the group, came through loud and clear. As well as their unspoken aim. And it was at this point, the issue that was never discussed, where Reese and her new bosses were in complete harmony.

  The ultimate goal was simple. If it worked, no one else could be permitted to obtain this capability.

  Reese needed to annihilate the opposition. Obliterate Gabriella’s entire group. Wipe them off the face of the planet. Erase their very shadows. Salt the earth. And walk away.

  When Elene Belote had transited, Reese keyed the mike to the off position, shifted the page of instructions over, took another breath. And still hesitated.

  Karla glanced over. “We’re good to go.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve done everything you can.” When Reese continued to hesitate, she said, “Green lights across the board.”

  Reese keyed her mike so she spoke to the four. She said, “Follow my instructions. On my say, transit to the Baghdad palace. Enter the safe, read the sealed document, come home. Accomplish the job and return. Remain perfectly safe and in control throughout. Those are your orders. Stick to them.”

  She keyed the mike over, said, “Elene, I am about to send them out. You are to track their progress, but only so far as it is comfortable. That is the primary objective. To go where it is absolutely safe. To observe. And to return. Safely.”

  She returned the mike to the position for the new team members and said, “Here we go.”

  There was actually almost nothing for the observers to see.

  The first few times, Reese had regretted her decision to allow her team not transiting to observe. But when they moved from the initial trials to the first attempt to infiltrate the Baghdad safe, and two of the three subjects remained in a coma, Reese’s tension became shared by everyone. That was the one good thing that had come from losing her people to comas. Those team members who survived became as intent and focused as frontline troops.

  The group inside the control room was utterly silent. There was nothing to see through the glass except the five inert bodies, four clustered together in a tight row and Elene by herself against the rear wall. The monitors showed no change. Heart rates steady and very slow, oxygen levels down 80 percent from normal wakeful state. Brain-wave patterns steady and particularly strong in the alpha signals. Everything in sync with a deep meditative state. The left-hand wall held a large clock. There was also an electronic timer between the control panel’s two center terminals. Karla had started the timer the instant Reese launched her team. Everyone watched the second hand. When it hit five minutes, Karla lifted one finger in a silent alert, but Reese was already keying the mike so that her voice was heard by both the four and Elene.

  “You will now return to home base. You will do so in utter safety and complete control. You will return home now. You are home. You will reenter your bodies. The transit has been successfully completed. You are safe and in total control. You are now counting back to full wakefulness. I am counting you now. You are coming awake. You will open your eyes. Welcome home.”

  And for once, she could say the words with total sincerity. Because for the first time since she had started her trials, four sets of eyes opened and stared upward. Four sets of limbs moved in jerky motions. Four voices chattered in vivid excitement. This was another of the discoveries Reese had made, how thrilled the returning transiters were. No matter that some of their mates did not awaken, the mystery and the danger on vivid display. The thrill, the excitement, the electric high was so intense that in that first moment all they wanted was to shout, to scream, to dance. In that instant of wakefulness, they were no longer trial subjects confronting the greatest of all human mysteries. They were a unit.

  Just like the four of them were doing down below.

  And for once, Reese wanted to join in. Though she wasn’t sure how, clearly she had taken a major step toward achieving her goals.

  Then Karla said, “We have a problem.�
�

  Reese looked beyond the four. And instantly her elation was demolished.

  Elene Belote was not moving.

  30

  I’m going after her.”

  “Joss, no, wait.”

  “Woman, you got one choice. One. Either you help me or I toss you out the way and find somebody—”

  “I’ll help you. Calm down.”

  Joss was not a big man. But there was a new quality to him now, a murderous cold that darkened the chamber’s energy. He did not raise his voice. He spoke in little more than a rasping whisper. But the man’s other nature was laid bare. The same nature that had stained his personal file with the six men who had tried to take him down in a bar fight. All six had been blooded members of a San Diego gang. Joss had been the only one to walk away. But the bar had been filled with the gang’s buddies, and they all claimed Joss had started the fight. It was a bogus charge, but the SD police had been forced by strength of numbers to file charges. Which was how Joss had wound up standing in the center of the monitoring room, breathing deadly danger. His two comatose buddies had come to Reese by similar routes.

  The security chief said, “Take it easy.”

  Joss did not even glance at Jeff. “I’ll give you easy. You rise from that chair, you’ll find out easy death can come your way.”

  “Stay where you are, Jeff. Joss, look at me.”

  “My code is my code. I don’t leave a buddy behind.” Joss did not raise his voice. “I’ve got two mates downstairs lost to comas. I didn’t know enough to go back for them. I do now. Elene needs me and I’m going.”

  “Of course you are. And I’m going to help you.” Reese kept to a similar calm, something she would never have thought possible under the circumstances. “I’m glad to see you think it’s important to be there for your team. Really. But first there’s one thing we need to do.”

  “There’s nothing happening here but me going out and bringing the lady home.”

  “This is about saving her, Joss. We need to debrief the survivors. Do you see? We’re in uncharted territory here. We need to find who the enemy is and where he’s hiding. You with me?”

  Joss decompressed slightly. Enough to say, “We need to hurry.”

  “I know.” She said to the security chief, “Bring the crew up here.”

  “But—”

  “Do it, Jeff. Fast.”

  But as the security chief passed through the side door, Karla pointed through the observation window and cried, “She’s coming out!”

  Joss moved faster than Reese thought humanly possible. When Kevin and the rest of her crew started to follow, Reese snapped, “Stay where you are.”

  They watched Joss leap down the stairs and fly across the room and scoop up Elene, who clutched at him frantically and sobbed so hard her body convulsed.

  Reese was still watching when Jeff brought the four crew members into the room. She said, “I want you to tell me what just happened.”

  “It was amazing.” Consuela was alight now, almost singing the words. “I went out there—”

  “I could smell you,” Eli said.

  “I knew you were there! I went to the safe, and I read the note, and I felt you reading it with me! How amazing—”

  Consuela stopped speaking because Reese stepped in close enough to freeze her solid. “Calm down. I want you to listen very carefully. We’ve had a crisis. We don’t know how, but the agent we sent to monitor you almost didn’t make it back. Now, I want you to skip over how cool everything was, and how great you feel, and focus. Can you do that? Okay. Now tell me what happened after I told you to come back.”

  Eli was the first to answer. “I did exactly what you said. Came out, stayed downstairs for a second, then took off. Got to the palace, knew exactly where the safe was, went in, read the note, then you called me home. I came. End of story.”

  “Good. Anybody feel otherwise?” Reese saw how the girl grew sulky. “Look at me, Consuela. No, not like that. Those days are over. I’m not the cops and you’re not in trouble. We’re a team. You’re vital to our work. Raise your face. Good. Now tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I left the palace like you said. Then something happened and I started to move away.”

  “When precisely did this happen?”

  “You said come back. I came. I was almost inside the room down there. I felt like it was just up ahead. Then something called to me.”

  “Who?”

  Consuela shrugged. “I got no idea. I don’t even know if it was a who at all. But . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “It sounded like my own voice. Kind of, anyway. But different.” She shrugged a second time. “I can’t say it any better than that.”

  “I heard it too,” Eli confirmed. The other pair nodded. “Kind of.”

  “Consuela’s voice, or your own?”

  “Mine. But now, I don’t know, it wasn’t me. It was like an echo. But deadly.”

  Reese noticed Kevin and the others closing in but resisted the urge to snarl them away. “Describe the danger zone.”

  The two kids who rarely spoke shared a look, their gazes hollow. Eli said, “Like a giant tornado turned on its side.”

  “More like an octopus,” Consuela said, trying hard to keep her voice steady. “All these different arms, wanting to suck me in.”

  “For one moment, it was all I could see,” Eli recalled.

  Consuela said, “I felt like I was being dragged away. Not dragged. But it was easy to go. And it was so totally hard to hear you.”

  “I got sooo scared,” one of the other kids said softly.

  “But you’re here now, and it’s all good,” Reese said. “Tell me what happened then.”

  “The other person showed up.”

  “Was it Elene? Look down through the window. Was it her?”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t have idea one.” Consuela sounded certain enough about that. “I didn’t actually see anything except that thing waiting to eat me.”

  “But this other person was there.”

  “Oh, totally. I could smell her. Or him.”

  “Me too,” Eli confirmed. “I thought it was an angel.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The other person said, ‘Go back.’” Consuela shrugged. “I went.”

  Reese turned back to the window. She watched Elene clench Joss in tight and repeat something over and over. Reese said, “Turn on the speaker. I want to hear her.”

  Over and over and over, Elene said one thing. “Thank you.”

  Joss clearly felt uncomfortable with being cast as the hero, when he had done nothing except offer to put his life on the line. But he stayed where he was, locked in her frantic embrace, and said, “I’m here and you’re safe. It’s done.”

  But Reese knew the man was wrong. The problem was not behind them.

  In fact, the danger was only just beginning.

  31

  Let me get this straight.” Kevin Hanley leaned against the monitor station to Reese’s right. To her left, Karla’s chair was empty. Through the glass Reese could see her down on the floor, prepping Joss. Reese wanted to be down there as well. But she knew Kevin was going to raise a stink. And this was something she needed to handle herself.

  Kevin went on, “You’re sending the guy into a red-alert situation, and for what? To rescue a woman who is already safe?”

  Reese replied, “You’re too locked into the twentieth century. Isn’t that something you have to tell your computer geeks?”

  “We’re talking about a man’s life.”

  “Actually, it’s two lives.” Reese had never been affected by other people’s anger. It had been one of her earliest traits. Her mother had found it absolutely infuriating, how Reese had never shown any response to shouts or fury or even spankings. Her reaction to rage was uniform and cold. Just like now. “I want you to take a deep breath. And calm down.”

  Kevin started to snap at her. But something in her expression gave h
im the clarity to ease off a notch. “This is serious.”

  “Listen carefully, because this is absolutely crucial to what we’re facing. Time isn’t linear.”

  He blinked. “That’s just theory.”

  Reese turned to where the crew huddled beside Jeff. They were wrapped in blankets and drinking coffee. That was another common result of transiting, the sense of communal weakness once the initial high wore off. Some felt cold, others simply disconnected from reality. As though a strong wind might separate them permanently from their bodies. The blankets were pashmina, a silk and cashmere blend, soft and reassuring. The coffee was hot and sweet and strong.

  Reese said to the four, “Tell this man how long you were out there.”

  Eli replied, “Days. Weeks.”

  Consuela could not quite suppress her shivers. “Longer.”

  Kevin said uncertainly, “So the sensations were intense enough to distort perceptions. It happens all the time under live fire.”

  “This isn’t just an awareness issue, Kevin. Time changes.”

  He didn’t like it. But he was listening intently to her now.

  “We haven’t conducted controlled experiments to prove this because we operate under the gun. Maybe later. But not now, while the colonel is breathing down our necks. All I can tell you is, every debriefing, every transit, every trial, the results are the same. Time as we know it ceases to hold control over the matters at hand.”

  Reese stopped, struck by the sudden thought that she needed to insert the instruction into her initial commands for the transit crews to hold to a proper perspective on time. Or not. At least to control this like they did their destination. She made a note to herself on the pad. When she looked up, Kevin was watching her intently. She had to think a moment to remember where she’d been headed. “Okay. So what we’re facing is this. When Elene made it back, what was the first thing she did?”