“Sure, but I hope he comes soon.” Quinn crosses and uncrosses his legs as if in discomfort.
Khan and Sofia set off down a hallway, with the zebra-haired technician and me following behind. This time I’m the one who crosses my fingers behind my back, because I bet that as soon as we’re out of sight, Quinn will be up and searching for a good spot to plant his bug.
The CBT room is a tiny office with nothing more than a desk with a PC, keyboard and mouse, and a chair where the tech tells me to sit. He enters my assumed name and intel cadet category into the system and reads a set of instructions off a printed card.
“You are now about to complete a computer-based testing program which measures your performance on tasks of recall, recognition, response times, speed and accuracy. Please try to do your best on every task. The full program should take you approximately one hour to complete. Click the start tab on your screen when you are ready to begin,” he reads, sounding seriously bored. How many times has he done this?
“I’ll come check if you’re finished in an hour from now,” he adds before leaving the room and closing the door behind him.
Here goes nothing, I think, and click start.
Chapter 23
Out of my depth
The program is a mix of straight-up timed tests interspersed with sniping, intel, code-breaking and programming sections from The Game, which a pop-up window announces with a message reading: And now for some fun! To give your brain a rest between tests, please enjoy gaming for a few minutes. The program will redirect you to the next task in a short while.
A rest? Yeah, right. I’m damn sure they’re also testing how well we perform on The Game tasks.
I obviously fail at the programming sections — I couldn’t write a line of code if my life depended on it. And with the puzzles and codes and pattern-prediction tasks, I’m so out of my depth that I have to look up to see bottom. I really do try my best, because I’m supposed to be a brainy intel cadet, but I’m pretty sure I fail most of them.
I make a deliberate effort to screw up when I play as a sniper or do tests I think might be related to those skills. Hopefully they’ll think I’m an all-round dud, rather than an intel cadet who performs suspiciously well at entirely the wrong subsection of tasks.
I finish in forty-five minutes flat — I guess because I flunked out of so many tests without getting to the end of them — and I’m determined to use my fifteen-minute window of opportunity before the tech returns to do some snooping.
I turn the handle of the door, easing it open a few inches to check the hallway. One way is clear, but the other is not. A gray-haired man in a dark business suit is leaning against a wall, talking on his cell phone. Looking directly at me.
“Hold on,” he tells the person on the other end of the line. “Yeah?” he asks me.
“Uh, I’m finished with the tests,” I say.
“Just wait inside the room. Someone will be along shortly, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” I say.
I duck back inside, leaving the door open a crack in the hope of overhearing something useful in his conversation, but a moment later, someone on the other side closes the door firmly. I wait an impatient few minutes and try again. The man is still in the corridor, still talking on his phone, but this time his back is to me.
He’s not saying much. Mostly it’s just “uh-huh” and “yeah,” and one “the more data we collect, the more we’ll know how well it’s working.” So I decide to try sneaking down the hall in the opposite direction. I’ve taken only three steps when he says something that makes me halt mid-stride.
“I understand the urgency, Roberta, truly I do. No one knows better than me that the thirty-first is only two weeks off.”
My mind jumps straight to the only Roberta I know. Could he possibly be talking to Roberta Roth? Probably not. There must be loads of people in the world with that name. Still, it’s enough for me to turn around and listen hard.
He says, as if in response to a question, “From the abundance or paucity of neural connections in localized regions.”
The reason I hear each word clearly is because as he speaks, he turns around.
Glaring at me, he covers the bottom of the phone with the palm of a hand and says, “Well, what now?”
“Shouldn’t I be moving on to the next test?” I ask.
“I told you to wait in the room,” he says, clearly irritated.
“Okayyy. Chill!” I draw out the words and inject my tone with heavy teenage snark. “Sorry for trying to be helpful.”
I return to the room, and this time I stay put until the tech arrives.
“You finished early,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a question.
Maybe when the program ended it notified him somehow. Or maybe the suit in the hallway did.
Sofia’s seated in the waiting area when I get there, but there’s no sign of Quinn, and we have no chance to talk before Khan arrives to take me to my next test which, she tells me, she will administer herself.
In the EEG room, Khan cleans spots on my scalp with alcohol swabs then applies some kind of gel glue to a bunch of wired electrodes and sticks them to my scalp. This must be the source of Quinn’s wild hair.
“What are those for?” I ask.
“An electroencephalogram measures the electrical activity in your brain. Sit here, please.”
Khan attaches me to a machine and seats me in front of a PC. She switches on the camera in the corner and sits on a chair behind a desk opposite me, from where she issues directions and presumably observes my brainwaves on the sophisticated setup in front of her.
The EEG is the quickest of all the tests I’ve had this morning. The tasks are similar to the ones in the previous test, though there are way fewer of them, and I only have to play one unit of The Game — as an intel agent. I must be flunking again, because Khan looks increasingly perplexed. At one point, she actually stops the test and pins me with her beady crow’s eyes.
“Are you doing your best?” she demands sharply.
“I’m trying, but I’m not feeling well, and I have a bad headache,” I say, squinching my eyes as if in pain. “Maybe I’m coming down with Tyrone’s bug.”
“We’re nearly finished. Just … try harder.”
I blunder through a few more puzzle-solving tasks, and then I’m told to breathe deeply and quickly.
“Do you want me to relax?” I ask.
“I want you to hyperventilate.”
“Oh.”
I puff and pant for a few minutes while she leans forward and stares hard at her screen. After that she gets me to close my eyes for a few minutes and then to keep them open while a strobe light flashes on and off rapidly.
“Right, we’re done,” she says and helps me pull off the electrodes.
My hair feels gummy with the residue of the gel, and I try to smooth it down on the walk back to the waiting area. This time neither Sofia nor Quinn is there.
“Wait here, please,” Khan says. “The others will be another ten to twenty minutes. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and have something to eat while you wait.”
She points to a tray of sandwiches. My stomach growls loudly at the sight and I realize I’m famished.
“Tell Kenny to come call me when the others are finished. I’ll be in the staff room up the hall,” Khan says.
“Who’s Kenny?”
“The technician with the striped hair.”
“Okay, sure. See you later.”
I grab a cheese and tomato on rye bread and munch while I watch Khan walk down the long hall and enter a room at the far end. I swallow the last bite of my sandwich then, moving as silently as I can, I walk up the corridor after her. The door of the first room along the hall is open, and the clicking sound of keyboard keys tells me there’s someone inside who might spot me when I pass. I hesitate. I can risk being discovered, or play it safe and turn back now.
Screw it. If I’m discovered I’ll just say I needed the restroom, too.
Ready to make excuses, I risk a glance inside the meeting room, but it’s empty, and I sneak closer to my target room. When I’m almost outside the open door, I crouch down with my back pressed to the wall — so that I can monitor both directions — and pretend to tie the laces of my sneakers while I eavesdrop.
I hear a man’s voice, possibly the suit from the hallway earlier, but it’s too low for me to make out more than a couple of phrases: “individual capabilities” and “neuroimaging”.
Now Khan speaks, loud and clear enough for me to hear every word. “There are some surprising results from today’s measurements. One of the candidates doesn’t fit the expected pattern at all.”
Oh, crap. I bet that’s me, with my brain which is useless at doing intel tasks.
“It’s unprecedented in our testing of the specialists so far,” she says.
The man mumbles again. I catch a word I think is “concerning” but might be “discerning” or even “returning”.
“Indeed.” Khan again. “It might mean there are exceptions who are unresponsive to current development protocols. Or that there may be errors in selection tests. Or both, I suppose.”
She sounds worried. Obviously intel cadets who were recruited through The Game because they were gifted at discerning patterns and making sense of seemingly unrelated information, and who have been trained to further develop those skills at ASTA, have one type of brain, and I have another, completely different kind.
“Excellent visual-spatial abilities, no seizure patterns in the EEG,” she continues, “but substandard performance in many of the specialized tests. Those neural pathways are simply not as developed as they should be given the measured levels and categories of programmatic exposure.”
Another woman speaks. Her voice rises at the end, so I gather she’s asking a question, but she talks too softly for me to hear what it is.
“The amygdala activity was, if anything, under-reactive to distressing stimuli,” Khan replies. “Overall, that subject shows general hypo-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system compared to the norm group’s median. In fact, no other testee has calmed themselves down so quickly after the stress cues. Well, except for a couple of the specialists in the sniper unit. And we all know they verge on being sociopaths, so that type of response isn’t atypical for their category of brain. I mean, it’s what makes them perfectly suited to their jobs.”
The soft female voice says something, and they all laugh.
“I’ll tell you what else is strange — all three of today’s subjects show reduced responsivity in the desired direction to supraliminal presentation of images of target number one.”
Number one. Could they be talking about Hawke?
“I wonder if they have enough game time at the training center?”
“I’ll take it up with the task team. Maybe when the new Go!Game comes out, they can all get it.” That’s the man speaking again, and I can hear every word, which tells me he has probably moved closer to the door and may come out at any moment. I cannot risk him catching me a third time.
I spring up and sprint back down the hallway, flinging myself into a chair just in time. At the far end of the hall, Khan and the suited man are just coming out of the room.
When they get to the waiting area, the man summons the elevator and gives me a long, evaluating look while he waits.
Khan looks at me with more concern than she’s shown all morning. “You’re looking sweaty and clammy. I think you may indeed be coming down with something.”
Chapter 24
Out on a limb
The trip back to Neil’s house is noisy with chatter and slightly hysterical laughter as we come down from the excited high of the mission. I waste no time in removing and disposing of the irritating contact lenses. We collect Neil, Cameron and Evyan from their hiding place in the undergrowth and fill them in on the details of what we accomplished.
Quinn managed to stick his bug under the desk in Khan’s office (“It very helpfully had her name on the door”), while Sofia stuck hers under a basin in the ladies’ restroom (“Hey, you’d be amazed what secrets get traded in restrooms,” she says, exchanging a knowing smile with me). Bruce says someone from inside the building came out to bring him some coffee and snacks, and checked his paperwork, but seemed to be satisfied. I tell them what I overheard, and we all pitch in, trying to make sense of what it might mean.
“It means they’re poking around in our brains, man, like we’re lab rats or something. I don’t like it,” Bruce says. It’s what we’re all thinking.
But still, we’re pleased with our success.
“We got in and out of bad guy central. The nation’s most wanted were right under their noses, and they didn’t recognize us,” Sofia says.
“And we should get some good stuff from the bugs,” Quinn adds. “How long will they stay live and transmitting, Neil?”
“They have a twelve-day battery life.”
“How cool is that!” Sofia says.
I’m not as giddy with success as the others. If they haven’t already discovered that we swapped out with the real intel cadets, they soon will — Dasha, Natalie and Alejandro should be coming around about now. It won’t take them long to figure out what happened, and when they do, they’re surely going to ramp up the hunt for us even more.
When we arrive at the house, Beth greets us with obvious relief, not even complaining when we all dump our bug-out bags in a messy pile at the bottom of the stairs and head in a noisy throng directly for the kitchen in search of a late lunch.
Sofia goes to update Robin on the mission and returns from the basement, saying, “I’ll make him some lunch and take it down. He says he’s too busy to come up and join us right now.”
Translation — he’s still sulking at not being allowed to come with us to Stapla.
We’ve just hauled smoked ham, mayo, pickles, lettuce and a six-pack of sodas out of the fridge when a buzzer sounds.
“There’s someone at the gate,” Neil says, sounding alarmed.
In the two weeks we’ve been here, I’ve never heard that buzzer once. Neil doesn’t encourage visitors.
Quinn and I follow him to the front door, where the control panel for the property’s security systems is. The monitor with the video-feed from the end of the driveway shows a vehicle idling outside the front gate. A hand protrudes from the driver’s window, repeatedly pressing the buzzer, but my attention is riveted by the vehicle itself. Huge, black, sitting high on enormous tires, with roof-mounted lights and a front bull bar big enough to ram through any gates — it’s an armored car for a tactical response team.
“Bug out!” I scream. “Bug out now! We’ve been followed.”
“Enemy at the gate!” Neil shouts, manically punching at the keypad. I assume he’s doing whatever he can to arm the systems and keep the gate locked.
Everyone rushes into the entrance hall, Bruce and Cameron cocking their firearms, as a deep male voice comes through the intercom. “Open these gates now. Your property has been designated for a security search under Emergency Regulation 2021.3.7A.”
“Go through Neil’s room and through the trees!” Beth yells. “The bug-out vehicle is beyond the last tree.”
Robin! I need to get him from the basement.
“Open the gate immediately! We have legal access to this property,” the man’s voice commands.
Evyan and Neil snatch their bags and run up the stairs after Beth. Bruce and Cameron follow suit but take up positions on the landing of the first floor, covering the entrance with their weapons.
/> “No!” I yell at them. “Just go! We don’t want a firefight we can’t win.”
I seize my duffel bag and run for the basement door, but stop when I realize that Quinn and Sofia are following me.
“Go, both of you. Go!”
“But what about Robin?” Sofia asks.
“I’m not leaving you,” Quinn says.
“I’ll get Robin. Quinn, please get her out of here.” I slip my arms through the straps of the bag so that it sits on my back. I need my hands free.
Quinn looks like he’s about to refuse.
“Have you still got your knife?” I ask him.
“It’s in my bag.”
“Cut the rope ladders on the trees, so they can’t get up from the yard and follow us,” I tell him.
“We said we’d stick together. I’m not leaving you,” he repeats.
“You’re not helping me!”
I hear a loud bang and crashing noises coming through the intercom system. They must have rammed through the gate.
“They’re here. Please, run!” I wrench open the door to the basement and scream down, “Robin! Come quickly, there’s a SWAT team, we’ve got to go — now.”
Sofia takes a step back, but Quinn stands firm. Time to play dirty. “Look,” I say, pointing up the stairs to where Bruce and Cameron still crouch, weapons at the ready, “the boys are covering me. I’ll be safer and can move faster without you two.”
With a last unhappy look, Quinn grabs Sofia’s elbow and steers her back to the stairs. I scramble down into the basement, yelling at Robin all the while. He’s seated in front of a computer monitor, wearing noise-canceling headphones.
“Robin!” I yank the headset off. “They’re here, they’ll be inside at any moment!”
“Who? What —”
“It’s an intercept team, we’ve got to go now!”
He leaps up, and I grab a fistful of shirt, trying to drag him to the stairs.
“No, wait!” He pulls free and gathers up a laptop awkwardly in his left hand — his right is still immobilized in the sling. “We need to destroy this stuff first.”
The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel Page 60
