Virtually Hers: Virtually, Book 2

by Gennita Low

  “They’ve already contacted us on Cummings, confirming his death,” the man said immediately, without greeting.

  Helen watched as Jed appeared to connect something to his wristwatch. “I took pictures of the sailing vessel for the file. Eight Ball?”

  “Downloading them, sir. Analysis within the hour.”

  The woman smiled. “I see we’ve got Lord Eight Ball with us today.”

  “That’s supposed to be the business side of him,” Jed said dryly. “Better not give him a title. He might get ideas.”

  “Pshaw,” the computer said, followed by a sniff that gave Helen an image of some dour-looking balding British actor on some British TV show.

  The man on the screen shook his head. “Retrieving the SEED was important but we’re now worried about what Deutsche International was trying to decode when Helen Roston showed up.”

  Helen sat up straighter at the sound of her name. That was her first assignment; retrieving the SEED was the first test of her remote-viewing abilities and the serum. She’d had no problem locating the decoding device. With Hades’ help in virtual reality, she added. She looked at the back of the dark head in front. Jed, she amended.

  “Agent Roston destroyed the laptop they were using and T. is still in there. She might find out something,” Jed said. “It is strange for a think-tank that’s associated with peace foundations to buy a hot market item like the SEED and use it. I agree we should try to find out what they’re after.”

  “Is that your next avenue of action?” the woman asked.

  “No. It’s more important right now to locate and retrieve the different missing weapons and devices.”

  “Jed, we’re pleased that you finally caught up with Jack Cummings. It wouldn’t have been good for us if he had been successfully smuggled into Russia,” the man said. “He’d have gotten very wealthy by selling everything he knew to the highest bidder.”

  “His price wasn’t that different from his wife’s,” Jed said. “Freedom.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t choose to steal Intel and weapons for freedom, Agent McNeil. This network was deliberately set up to stay in place for a long time so that their agents could work themselves high in our system,” the woman said. “In fact, they’d created their own Virus System, infecting parts of our government from the inside.”

  “Yes, they’ve taken various facets of the Virus program but with a big difference. They’re after our technology and secrets. They sustain themselves through profiting from what they can steal.”

  “Point taken, Agent McNeil,” the man said, “but the problem remains. They’re in our system. The only thing going for us is that we’ve caught on and are trying to eliminate the problem.”

  “But the damage done is tremendous,” the woman added. “Stopping Agent Cummings took a little pressure off. He had very high clearance. His quick disappearance, along with other key personnel, after Washington’s scandal came into light has surely warned their shadowy counterparts to move faster, don’t you agree, Jed?”

  “Yes,” Jed said.

  “It was fortunate then that Miss Roston was able to locate Agent Cummings, wasn’t it?” she continued.

  Helen stiffened at her name being mentioned again. It had been her fault, of course, that Jack Cummings had managed to escape the first time, during the initial operation in Frankfurt. Jed had used up some precious time to help her out. She bit her lower lip.

  “I didn’t have any doubt that she wouldn’t,” Jed said.

  “From reviewing the video feeds, she should have canceled the man instead of tying him up,” the man said, his voice getting a bit sharper. “Then you wouldn’t have had to go down there and finish the job for her. Have you and the other commandos addressed this problem internally?”

  Helen chewed on her lip some more. Uh, no, since she’d sucker punched Number Nine and had distracted everybody instead.

  “We didn’t have any problem with her decision,” Jed replied enigmatically.

  Helen frowned. They didn’t? Or was her monitor just being protective of her?

  “You should assess the damage at your end,” Jed continued.

  “All damage control is our business, Jed,” the woman said smoothly, “even yours.”

  “There’s nothing going on at my end that’s of any danger to my people,” Jed said. “As long as you can keep those eight other departments off our backs, we’ll find those weapons. I’m not comfortable about their being constantly updated on the operations.”

  “They all have a hand in creating your supersoldier-spy, Agent McNeil,” the man pointed out. “A little feedback can’t hurt.”

  “It irks them that they lost.” He paused. “To a woman. And it irks them that she belongs to me.”

  “To COS Command,” the woman corrected. There was another pause, then the woman pressed, “She’s COS Command’s, right?”

  “She’s an independent contractor,” Jed said, “who’s agreed to work with the Viruses. I’m her monitor and trainer. Therefore, she’s mine.”

  “That’s a very strange way of looking at it since she signed the contract with COS Command,” the woman pointed out.

  “Read the contract,” Jed said softly.

  “I think I will.”

  Helen looked on with interest. She wasn’t sure what was happening but her being at CCC looked to be more interesting than a mere contract job. Now she wanted to reread her contract too.

  “Macedonia for you next, then,” the man said, changing the subject.

  Jed nodded. “Yes.” He leaned forward and pressed some buttons on the panel. “Listen to this uplink from Hawk McMillan, our asset there.”

  One of the earphones started blinking and Helen picked them up and inserted the buds into her ears.

  “It’s partly in Serbian,” Jed’s voice came on over the channel. “He’s talking to Dragan Dilaver. Eight Ball is providing the translated transcript on your screen now. Read the highlighted parts as you listen to the conversation.”

  Helen looked at the screen to her left as a word processing document appeared. Without waiting, she used the mouse to click on the start window prompter. She was getting the hang of this debriefing business.

  Two men were speaking in the recording, sometimes in English, sometimes in Serbian. She knew that Dragan Dilaver was a notorious drug- and human-trafficker in Macedonia. It was easy to pick out his gravelly voice as he spoke with the undercover American. She wasn’t particularly good at Serbian, but it was similar enough to Russian in parts that she caught the gist of the conversation. Weapons, women, dangerous liaisons. She followed the scrolling text on the screen, reading the parts that were highlighted as she listened in.

  “Your government’s sneaky, Hawk. They negotiated to have the KLA take over what’s left of Yugoslavia and they make drops in big crates called ‘Relief Aid’. Some of these crates are actually filled with weapons and they’re dropped at specific locations for me.”

  “How did they choose you? Do you have a direct line to the U.S. Armory? Come on, Dilaver. Don’t tell me you’re an agent for the American government.”

  “No, you have it backwards. I have an agent in the United States…” Male laughter.

  “Your aunt?”

  “She’s high level, got the authority to approve shipments or something… She said there’s some problem moving the weapons from her end right now and she might need my help. What do you say, Hawk? Help me out?”

  Eight Ball interrupted in the ear phone, “End of snippet One.”

  Helen pulled out the buds and returned her attention to the big overhead screens. The man appeared to be talking to someone off-screen with his mic off. The woman was taking notes. Jed remained silent, apparently waiting.

  While he waited, Helen mulled over the recorded conversation. That was probably the operation the commandos had been talking about in the meeting she’d interrupted. From what she could gather, there was a list somewhere with some big important weapons that were missing.
Jed and his men’s task was to find and retrieve them. One of them was the decoder she’d helped locate recently. The other was this shipment in Macedonia. She frowned. Dropped by the CIA themselves? Whoa. She’d missed that part while watching the nightly news.

  The man shifted his gaze back to the camera. “We’ll work on the identity of the female relative.”

  Jed nodded. “Affirmative. Easier at your end. Get Ricardo Harden from TIARA in on it. He has resources inside the CIA.”

  “I know he’s your friend and that he’s a major part of Admiral Madison’s investigative council, but can we fully trust him?” the woman interjected. “He’s still CIA.”

  “Once a bureaucrat, always a bureaucrat,” the man observed.

  “Harden wasn’t always a bureaucrat,” Jed said. “Besides, this is personal to him. His wife, GEM operative Nikki Harden, was a victim of the CIA moles.”

  “All right, McNeil. I’ll update you on any conversations with him.”

  “In your opinion, is the Virus unit still overextended, now that you have Admiral Madison’s SEALs to help you out?”

  Helen frowned. She knew, from T.’s briefing and some reading, that the COS commandos—the original nine—had undergone an intensive experimental training program called Virus, so this “Virus unit” must be referring to her team. There were seven of them now, excluding her. Like her, two of the others, Armando Chang and Shahrukh Kingsley, were relatively new additions. It’d never occurred to her till now why there was the sudden merger between certain parts of CCC and GEM. She’d figured the need to avenge for lost teammates came into it but, in this room, she saw that the merger was more than that. The big explosion that had killed a few of the COS Commandos and her sister operatives so many years ago had effectively shut down many ongoing operations and pushed CCC to the limit.

  So now they were back to eight, if they counted her. She rubbed her nose. She wondered what “number” she’d be assigned. The thought made her roll her eyes. Why couldn’t men be more creative and use gems and jewelry instead of stupid numbers?

  She looked thoughtfully over at Number “so-I-can-still-freak-you-out” Nine. He projected the aura of a man who very seldom failed. How galling it must have been for him to see his men die, to acknowledge that he’d failed them. His job was to close a mission. It suddenly dawned on her that he’d never “finished” that particular one. Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t know where the feeling came from, but she’d bet a whole week of coffee that Number Nine had been working toward some end game he wasn’t revealing to whoever these two debriefing him were.

  So many layers to this man. Could she ever have the time to peel him apart like he did her?

  Chapter Eight

  Secret test facility, Virginia

  “Five-One, are you ready?”

  Of course he was ready. He was beyond ready. When he’d been told about the test run, he’d wanted to kiss his so-called monitor in gratitude.

  “Yes,” he said crisply. “No alcohol or caffeine in my bloodstream. No contaminants. I’m fully rested.”

  So that was a white lie. He’d managed to bum some cigarettes from the few patients he’d befriended because he needed a buzz. They were so lucky not to be in any program that cut off their goodies. Downtime had been the pits. He hadn’t been able to sleep well at all, not with the headaches and nothing to soothe him.

  His heart was beating so loudly in anticipation that he was afraid his monitor could hear it. He so, so wanted this, needed this. But he had to be careful and not let the bastards see what the serum was like for him. If they knew, they would probably use the knowledge against him.

  And this was perfect. They were going to look in on the bitch and now he could retrieve his cache. He’d been thinking of how she’d done it, hadn’t quite figured that part out yet, but since she took from him, he couldn’t see why he couldn’t take from her too.

  “Now you know what your assignment is, right, Five-One?” his monitor prompted him, holding up a sealed envelope.

  “Yes, the universal agreement is to go immediately to where the winner of the supersoldier-spy program is and make sure she isn’t in Macedonia. That way we’ll be sure she isn’t in our way this time when we’re there.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Do the best you can to describe what you see, and then come back immediately because we’re going to need all your strength for the next assignment. It’s going to be a tough one and we’ll need you one hundred percent.”

  One thing he had to say about his monitor, whatever his name was—Thin One, as he called him—he was very succinct in his instructions and knew how to keep him focused. If it had been Fat One, things would have gone disastrously wrong from the get-go. He couldn’t focus when there was such impatience and ridicule around him.

  He glanced at Fat One. Maybe that was why he was sitting across the room this time and not taking up so much of his personal space. Maybe Thin One told his friend to shut up for once.

  “Not a problem,” he told his monitor. “I’ll focus on her and make sure she’s nowhere in Macedonia, or going there.”

  If he could, he’d make damn sure she would feel as lost as he was right now.

  “Good. Take a deep breath. Focus on the soundwaves while I inject the serum into you. There you go. Five-One, think of the envelope and tell me when you’re where you’re supposed to be. Details, please.”

  He did as he was told. Remote viewing wasn’t a complicated process for him any more. Once his brainwaves went to theta, he could bilocate—go to the agreed universal location—without even being conscious about it.

  The heat of the serum. Oh, God, the rush, the rush. He felt his head go back as the heady feeling spread inside him. Trigger code…

  Switch to channel three. Set programming time. Set channel.

  Timer on. Record.

  “I feel the coordinates,” he announced.

  “Bilocate,” his monitor ordered.

  He hoped he wasn’t shouting his joy as power surged through him. Fast forward! Fast forward!

  And there the bitch was, right in front of him.

  ***

  Jed beckoned to Helen with a slight shake of his head. He was done. He quelled the amusement that rose up as he watched her affecting an exaggerated shuffle, dragging one foot behind her while holding one hand against her chest as if she was disfigured, and awkwardly swinging the other hand, in such perfect imitation of a hunchback that there was no mistaking who she was impersonating.

  She was something else. No woman who knew him here would dare make fun of him in quite that way. The bold ones flirted. The married ones gossiped. Those who disagreed with him were still careful with words and actions. No one had ever pretended to be the classic Igor to mock him.

  “Your leg must be hurting you more again,” he commented. “I must not have taken care of it enough the other night.”

  He enjoyed the way her eyes narrowed, the way her lips curled down into that sinfully sexy pout. She had no idea what she did to him every time she came close. In fact, neither had he anticipated it, since all he’d ever done was watch her on-screen and interact with her through virtual reality.

  Meeting Helen Roston in real life was like watching HDTV for the first time. Everything about her was more vibrant, taking his breath away. He’d never get tired of looking at her. Of wanting her. His desire was like a freight train. One could see it coming; one could even brace for it; but there was no avoiding the oncoming collision.

  Also, her sassy and quirky humor made him see something in a different light. Like now, for instance. What woman would mock herself as Igor to his Frankenstein?

  “Who are those two?” she asked.

  “Checks and balances.” He keyed the door open and they both exited.

  She frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Show any deficit or overextension, and someone somewhere will find a reason to put you more behind.”

  “I mean their names,” she said.

  H
e glanced at her. “They change faces, so it’s easier to just remember them as checks and balances. You’ll see what I mean the more you deal with them.” He glanced at his watch. “One more appointment.”

  “Can we first pick up some food? I’m starving.”

  So was he. But then he’d never liked to eat much after finishing an assignment.

  “We’ll be eating with Admiral Madison,” he told her, watching the surprise in her eyes. “So that should take care of that problem.”

  “The same admiral from the group of department heads watching me during the test run? The one with the nice voice.”

  Amusement filled him again. He’d bet the admiral—a tall, distinguished man, with medals hanging out his ass, and whose valor on the field earned him the nickname “Mad Dog”—had never been recognized for just his “nice” voice before. “Yes. The SEALs we’re conducting the joint venture with are his boys.”

  “Ah. Makes sense now. Do I just show up with you? How does one dress for a meal with an admiral, anyway? Not that it’s going to matter, since I don’t have any change of clothes at Center other than workout and casual.”

  Jed glanced at her again. She was talking quickly. There was a faint blush on her cheeks, as if she was aware that she’d given herself away.

  “It’s coming back again,” he observed. “Our time in the elevator alleviated your condition for a while, but it wasn’t enough to stop it.”

  Her cheeks went even pinker. “You’re making it sound as if you did that to help me out,” she muttered. “I’d feel a lot better if I didn’t feel so helpless against it. It makes it impossible for me to think, and you’re using it against me.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged.

  “I should’ve seen it coming,” she continued. “I knew you were up to something but I kept getting distracted by all that techy stuff.”

  He could tell that she wasn’t really talking to him, that she was trying to distract herself now. He frowned. He didn’t want her to suffer. After feeling a little bit of what she was going through while they were connected in VR, he understood her distress. The inability to control one’s impulses would frustrate him too.