It had been a while since she’d been to the range. She had to qualify every sixty days while a member of SORC, but usually came every weekend just to stay sharp. Now as part of the DRC there was no official protocol. But she still planned on keeping her skills sharp.
Everything about her being tapped for this position was odd. Not only the timing, but her age and experience. It wasn’t often anyone her age, with only one unit of experience, was tapped. There had to be some reason beyond the obvious. She was hoping this meeting with the managing secretary of the committee could shed some light.
After reloading with some fresh .40 caliber rounds, she headed down the long, white, glossy hallway and came to the heavy wooden doors. This New York City office of the DRC was one of several satellite offices around the country. The new phones they gave her were packed with nondescript contact information. To anyone that found a lost phone the information would be virtually meaningless even if they did break the pass code.
She took out her metallic silver identification card and swiped it through the slot. The doors clicked loudly and she pushed them inward revealing a stunningly simple but meticulously clean round foyer. The floors and walls were sleek white marble with no decorations or pictures anywhere except for the brass plate on the wall that read DRC.
There was a round desk in the middle and four women, all with black hair, spaced evenly around the twenty foot wooden desk presumably at the four cardinal directions.
Kayci stood there for a moment. In all the government and civilian intelligence buildings she’d been in this was probably the strangest one she’d ever seen. After a deep breath, she walked up to the girl facing her at the east desk, and with a smile the girl said, “Hello Miss Taylor. Director Fisker will see you in room four.”
“Director? I thought I was meeting with Secretary Morris?”
“You’re scheduled to meet with the director down hallway four, room number four.”
Kayci looked around quickly and headed down the wide hallway number four until she came to room number four. After she crossed the threshold, a pocket door slid almost silently closed behind her.
A middle-aged woman with short brown hair, wire rimmed glasses and a burgundy pantsuit stood from behind a long desk. “Kayci Taylor, so good to see you again.”
Kayci walked towards the woman, searching her memory for who this was but she had no idea. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
The woman smiled, and instead of shaking Kayci’s outstretched hand, she moved in for a hug. Kayci was not a hugger, so this was a very awkward moment. It seemed like an infinite amount of time before this stranger pulled away. She took hold of Kayci’s hands, stepped back and looked at her. “You grew up so beautiful.” She let go and walked over towards a seating area with a potted palm near a large window, taking a seat in one of the two black, plush leather benches.
Kayci stood for a second before following. “I’m sorry, but have we met before?”
“Please have a seat.” She motioned to the chair opposite her. “I suppose I should explain myself.”
Kayci sat in the low seat, wishing she’d have bought these jeans a size bigger.
After a moment, she said, “I’m Colleen Fisker. You probably don’t remember me, you were so young.”
The name Fisker suddenly sounded slightly familiar. “Who are you?”
“I was your father’s partner when he first came to the NSA. We were good friends with your parents, my husband and I. We used to come to your birthday parties. We were there for holidays. You and our little girl Britney were the same age and quite literally joined at the hip for a few years.”
Kayci was skeptical at first but then all of a sudden a bunch of memories came back to her. “Britney Fisker? You had that little brown dog, Milo. Wait, were you Aunt Leena?”
Colleen nodded. “Yes, you remember, people—and when I said people I mean your father, used to call me Leena back then. He hated the name Colleen. Milo was our little terrier, that dog loved playing with you kids, he was one sad puppy when we stopped coming over.”
Kayci was so young she never made the connection that the Fisker’s worked with her father. She just assumed they were neighbors. “Huh, now I remember you—you used to come over all the time. What happened?”
Colleen shrugged. “Well at first, it was my reassignment. Your father didn’t take it well. We were both up for the same position, and I got it. He resented me and didn’t talk to me for a year. Looking back, I think that was the first seed of doubt he had about advancement opportunities. It was just one thing after another that turned him bad.”
Kayci crossed her legs. “So, it was you, that set this up, that got me in. But, are you an energy practitioner? I’m really lost here on the details. Were you in SORC?”
Colleen smiled. “You’re probably wondering why you haven’t seen my frequency signature.”
“I’m definitely intrigued.”
“Well, when you’ve been doing it as long as I have, it’s very easy to hide. Just like your father fooled you, for years in fact. It wasn’t because he was so unimaginably good, although he was a powerful practitioner, it was because as you get older you learn new tricks. When you get to a certain age, you learn the true meaning of limitless is to remain limited in a sense. And to answer your other question, yes I was part of SORC, just like Cayden was. I was the managing agent that preceded Avery Von Strieder.”
“How did I not know about you?”
“Protocol prohibited you from knowing any of the retired agents by name. You probably heard stories and didn’t even know it was me.”
“So you appointed Avery?”
“Avery was a cocky little punk when I picked him on terms of temporary probation to take over SORC for me. I thought he would mature, he never really did. If not for his hold over Fletcher he’d have never been put in charge of that unit officially. In a twisted way, it’s my fault that SORC imploded.”
Kayci smiled. “And here I thought I was all alone in this.”
Colleen smirked. “Oh, no, you’re not alone. I have a few others in my reach committee.”
“So, how did I get in? Why me? I mean besides the obvious.”
She smiled. “Well, admittedly our personal history played a significant role. But when SORC started to fall apart I watched closely to see if you did the right things, making sure you stayed on the right side of it. And you did. Almost.”
“Almost?” As soon as Kayci said it, she knew. “You mean the money.”
Colleen nodded. “I mean the money.”
Kayci and Jordan ended up taking around two million dollars in cash that Nathan had stolen. She didn’t expect anyone would know. “I, umm…”
Colleen waved her hand. “Kayci, don’t worry about it. Nobody knows but me and no one will ever know. The way you did it was smart, you gave back the hard traceable money on the boat and that’s all the matters. You picked up the scraps of a fifty million dollar recovery. It actually made me think you were ready for the DRC. You made an executive decision to sustain your personal mission. The DRC doesn’t officially exist, there is no hazard pay. Our spies have to improvise within reason. You showed you know how to exercise that reason and you showed you had the integrity to do the right thing when no one was looking. You weren’t greedy you were calculated and smart. You two could have walked with the entire bulk of cash and Cayden’s off-shore accounts and no one would’ve been the wiser.”
Kayci firmed her lips and nodded. “Thank you, for believing in me.”
“You’re quite welcome. I know you will be an invaluable asset to my team, I’m glad you’re on board. And I want you to know that if you need any help, at any time you can contact me. There’s also someone in my reach committee who’ll be happy to help should you get into a fix, her name is Rose Giacco, and she’s a wonderfully gifted practitioner of energy. You can find her contact on your phone under R. M. G.”
Kayci leaned forward. “Are you running a kind of pseudo SORC?”
“You have the list?”
“Someone had to take it. The executive who sits as the DRC oversight chief is—”
“Monty Fisker.”
Colleen nodded. “Appointed by executive order. No one in intelligence has more pull. He runs the entire shebang, all eight branches of the DRC and sits on JICA staff.”
Kayci leaned back and laughed. “Boy, I really had the inside track.”
“Monty was always so fond of you.” Colleen started to tear up a bit and Kayci, for the first time, felt her frequency, and the sadness.
She dabbed a tissue on the corner of her eyes. “You and Britney were so cute together, just the perfect little angels.”
“When did it happen?” Kayci asked.
“Just a year before your father pulled his disappearing act.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I would’ve known. What happened?”
“They were coming back from soccer camp. She was a great player, wanted to play in college. There were eight kids in a minivan on route eighty-one in upstate New York just outside Binghamton. There’s a bad curve there and a tractor-trailer lost control and caused a bad six-car pileup. Four of the eight kids in the van were killed.” She smiled uncomfortably. “We had a fifty-fifty chance, and we lost.”
“I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”
“You had your own problems at that time. Your family was falling apart and the families were hardly talking anymore at that point. Your mother would occasionally call to say hi for a few years but, she fell apart when Cayden…well, you know the story.”
“Life is an illusion, of an illusion.” Kayci said to herself.
“I don’t know what Cayden told you, but the NSA never demanded he fake his own death. That wasn’t part of our protocol at the time or ever since. Your father went rogue long before he claimed.”
“So he was off the grid for a long time.”
Colleen nodded. “Very long. You didn’t know it, but he was on the list under five different aliases.”
“Guess they never found him.”
“There was no way anyone in SORC would have ever caught him, he was too good. And Nathan and Avery obviously weren’t looking since they were in cahoots with him. Outside of you, there’s never been anyone with your father’s ability inside the NSA.”
“Inside? You mean Jordan.”
Colleen leaned forward. “Kayci, he’s so good it’s scary.”
“I know. And he’s quickly figuring it out.”
“That’s why I gave him the asset card. It would bode well if you kept him close. Have you ever heard the stories of Jesper Dahlgren?”
Kayci shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
“He was a brilliant young practitioner and we tried to turn him into an asset. But at some point he got drunk with the power and it ate him alive. He was left alone to his own devices. You know how the negative energy can be destructive. He started to become aggressive and it drove him insane. He ended up leaping off a twenty story building in midtown. Supposedly. I had my doubts it was a suicide all along.” She waved her hand. “But that’s neither here nor there.”
Kayci nodded. “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with Jordan. In fact, I worry that he won’t come to grips with his powers and end up losing some of what he might be capable of.”
“You should teach him to balance that line.”
“I’d love to, but that’s part of the problem. He’s operating on another level. Sometimes I don’t even see what he’s doing. He literally thinks outside the box constantly. He’s teaching me things. At first, I tried to discourage him from trying the things he’s doing but, he’s kind of an independent thinker. Besides, his odd techniques, they seem to work. I honestly think he’s going to change the way psychics operate. Adapt or die I guess. We’re going to have to switch away from the basic blueprint the military learned fifty years ago. I see what he’s doing and I see the old book is no longer valid.”
Colleen narrowed her eyes. “You’ve slept with him.”
Kayci didn’t deny it. “We operate on the same exact frequency, it was inevitable.”
“But it’s more than that. You love him too, don’t you? So you benefited greatly too.”
“If I hadn’t I’m not sure I’d have been able to take on Nathan and Cayden the way I did. A couple weeks prior they would’ve crushed me.”
“When I met Montgomery, all this frequency stuff was so raw. We had no idea what we were feeling for each other had something to do with the synonymous frequency markers, we just thought it was some intense chemistry like most people. But Monty is not very gifted. He’s a touch wired but nothing special, he would’ve never made it into SORC.”
“You guys were part of that pilot program I’ve read about.”
“We were. There was another couple, Edward and Jackie Ford, they’re long retired now but they were the ones that really unearthed that little truth. They were both quite gifted. If they’d been able to conceive a child who know what it could’ve been like, two powerful psychics like that? Sky might have been the limit for that child.”
“Amazing.” Kayci looked to the window. “Was Britney showing signs of being gifted in that way?”
Colleen smiled. “She would have been pretty amazing. Even as young as five years old she was showing signs. You don’t remember, but you two were progressing until you stopped playing together. Your father wanted you to remain latent. He had no intentions of cultivating your gifts, and your mother, wasn’t gifted in that way that we knew of.”
“Why did he want me to shy away from it?”
“Well, there’re some adults that fear a gifted child. Children see things in adults that the adults don’t want seen.”
Kayci nodded. “Children see innocence but they also see evil.”
“Kids see the world for what it is. Adults can’t hide their true intentions from children, and when the kid is able to read that negative energy...”
“My father didn’t want me knowing his secrets.” Kayci sighed. “God knows he probably had a lot of them.”
Colleen pulled out her phone and started swiping the screen. “I’m sending you a file.”
Kayci looked at the picture of the odd-looking honeycombed device. “What is that?”
“That’s The Nugget.”
“I don’t follow.”
“That’s the result of fifty years of R-and-D and an untold number of billions in black budget coin. It’s from a program called Project Pyrite. It was working towards long range manipulation of targeted subjects.”
Kayci studied the picture. “Project Pyrite, I remember hearing about that one through the grapevine. Wasn’t that a JICA mind control thing? But did it actually work?”
“To a fair degree. But it’s never been as precise as they wanted. It’s suggestive on most subjects but it’s far from being like the movies where you can force Joe Superdad into killing the president or anything. It doesn’t work like that. But it does have some promising properties that we know of.”
Kayci blew up the image with spanning fingers. “But if you’re already a mentally disturbed individual with a gun.”
“The hold is fleeting and temporary, it’s short-lived. We haven’t reached the level of full manipulation they want but they were close.”
Kayci thought she knew the answer but asked anyway. “So why does this concern me?”
“Because there is one caveat that they discovered with Project Pyrite, the nugget, in the area of a person with psychic proclivities can actually enhance the ability of the practitioner tenfold. It works like an amplifier, taking energy and boosting it.”
Kayci leaned forward. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s even worse. It’s been stolen and missin
g for several years.”
Kayci moved her head back in surprise. “You’re kidding me.”
Colleen sighed. “I wish I were.”
“How did that happed?” She asked rhetorically.
“It’s been bouncing around the black market for a long time. We’ve been chasing it down always a step behind, but about a year ago, we lost it completely.”
“Why didn’t I know about this before?”
“SORC couldn’t be trusted with this. It was cross agency, this is a DRC issue because Project Pyrite was a joint operation between the NSA, DOD, CIA and the DHS. So no one agency wanted to be responsible for cleaning up the mess. They washed their hands and walked away.”
Kayci shook her head. “I don’t under understand how something like this can get stolen.”
Colleen smiled. “Well, in the vicinity of that device, a powerful psychic can manipulate anyone.”
Kayci’s jaw fell open. “Don’t even tell me.”
“Your father was part of the original test field for Project Pyrite. It was the last project he worked on before he went rogue. We believe he planned on stealing it all along, it may have been the impetus for his going rogue in the first place.”
“What did he do with it?”
“We’re not sure. We believe at some point he sold it and stole it back, and kept doing that all over the world for years. It’s how he stayed financially solvent.”
“Why did he stop?”
“We don’t believe he was making much money on the sale of the device because of the nature of it. Not many people would understand the practical applications and even fewer would be able to make it work. We think he just ran out of customers. So when he and Nathan decided to take the piggy bank from SORC, we think he sold the device one last time to someone he knew perhaps, with the idea that he would eventually take it back. Or he just gave it to that person to hold it. We really don’t know we can only guess.”
“So someone has had it all this time, learning how to use it.”
“You’ve noticed the increase in random violence, shootings and such. We think they’re related.”
Soul Frequency (Frequency Series Book 2) Page 8
