Tessa (Tessa Extra-Sensory Agent Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  NOTES ON REMOTE VIEWING AND MIND READING

  Meet the Author

  Books by Kfir Luzzatto

  Copyright Notice

  T E S S A

  Kfir Luzzatto

  Copyright © 2020 by Kfir Luzzatto

  Published by Pine Ten, LLC at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition: 978-1-938212-91-8

  CHAPTER 1

  I gazed at the man asleep in bed with me. I couldn’t see his face, but from behind, he looked good. He was strong, tanned, and sexy. Unfortunately, I had no idea who he was or how I had wound up there. Then I looked at my body. We were both naked, and my milky-white, slim body, with silky skin, was pressed against his back, making my breasts look really big. Problem was, my skin is golden-honey, not pale, and my bra size is a 32A.

  Then I remembered.

  “Welcome, Miss Tessa,” said the smiling young uniformed attendant, as he removed my blindfold. “Apologies for that—protocol, you know …”

  I knew. Some of the rules that our agency’s top brass love seem pretty stupid to me. Let me rephrase that: most of their rules seem terminally stupid to me. Still, they insist that those rules have helped to keep a few of us alive, so I guess they can’t be all bad.

  The attendant was gaping at me, which annoys me every time it happens, so I decided to stare back and did so looking straight in his eyes, until he blushed and lowered his gaze. I know I’m pretty and sexy, and sometimes I think I’m wicked, to take advantage of my looks to hold sway over people I meet. But I’m not that amazing, and usually men don’t trip on their feet because I got them confused.

  “I … I’m sorry,” he stammered “I didn’t mean to be impolite, but …”

  “What? Is this the first time you have seen a woman?”

  “No, of course not,” he stammered some more. “It … it’s just that we heard that you were coming … and we’ve been looking forward so much to meeting you. We’ve heard of the achievements of the Remote Viewing Project, and you’re kind of a legend around here.”

  I had no idea who he was referring to as “we,” nor did I care. I was too tired for that, so I cut the conversation short.

  “Thank you. You’re cute,” I said. “Now I wish you’d take me to the director.”

  “Yes, yes. This way, please,” he said and led me through a long corridor until we reached a door marked only by the number 317. He knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation.

  The director was standing with his back to the door, gazing out of a window that opened onto unkempt greenery. He turned to face me with a welcoming smile. For a moment, I was thrown off balance—Ihadn’t seen him in a while, but it felt like it was yesterday. He still looked the same, except he had put on some weight and his hair, which he kept short, had started to thin at the top, with a little gray at the temples that hadn’t been there before, if my memory served me right, which it usually does. He was only slightly taller than me, and I’m five foot three short on a good day. He didn’t derive the pull he had on people from his physique but from a magnetism over which I had stopped puzzling.

  “Welcome, Tessa. Good to see you again.”

  “Thank you. It’s been quite some time.”

  I’ve never known his real name. To me, during basic training, when he was my direct supervisor, he had always been “ESA15” and nothing else. “ESA,” by the way, stands for Extra-Sensory Agent, which apparently defines me as well. I’m ESA54, for the record. He never loosened up or talked about anything other than training, and in spite of having spent the best part of one year training with him and others and then working as an RV, a remote viewer, I realized that I really knew nothing about him. I hadn’t been told who the director I was going to meet was, and not for want of asking. All I was able to get from Human Resources, back at headquarters, was that I had to report to a high-security intelligence facility and meet its director, so here I was.

  I was glad that the unnamed director had turned out to be ESA15. True, he was a sadistic bastard whom I had come to hate on account of his training methods, but the devil you know …. At least, he was professional, and he never minded my open hostility. In fact, I think he enjoyed it, in some twisted way, as a testament to a job well done. Besides, he was bright enough to know that rebellion against authority is a given at 14, which is when he had taken charge of me and started to turn a healthy, almost normal teenager, into the operative that I had become.

  He made a quick gesture in the air with his hand, and the attendant left, closing the door silently behind him. I gazed at the director, waiting for him to say something. I had no clue what to expect, and my best strategy right then was to wait for him to explain. That’s another rule I had learned in training: don’t talk before you’ve had an opportunity to listen.

  “Won’t you sit down?” he said at last. “You must be tired.”

  “Yes, I am,” I conceded. The room reflected ESA15’s personality well. It was bare, with only a clean, empty white desk with a glass desktop and a pair of uncomfortable chairs facing it. I took one of them, and he seated himself beside me in the other. That was a concession of sorts, him not going to sit in his tall chair behind the desk, and it didn’t go unnoticed. “It was a long trip, but I managed to catch some sleep.” I paused and took a couple of breaths. He waited for me to go on. “Now that we have been nice to each other, do you mind telling me why I’m here?”

  “Of course. I was coming to that. But first, I wanted to thank you for volunteering for this project.”

  “Volunteering? Are you trying to be funny? I don’t have a clue what you are talking about. I was instructed to report to this facility and I did. That’s not volunteering.”

  “You could have refused. They told you it was for a top secret project. You can still refuse.”

  “I’d rather hear what the project is about, and then I’ll tell you if I’m coming on board.”

  “Hmm, no. Once you hear about the project, there is no backing away from it.”

  He was serious and, as usual, maddeningly self-assured. I hated his “take-it-or-leave-it” approach. I always had. I got up and smiled at him.

  “Then it was nice seeing you again, sir,” I said in my most pleasant tone. “Please ask your attendant to show me the way out.”

  “Sit down, Tessa. This is no game. It’s the top of the top and then some. If you join this project, the result will take you to a level of extra-sensorial perception that you have never dreamed of. Think well before you walk out of that door and throw this opportunity away, because if you do, you’ll never get another chance to see it, or to reach that height.”

  I sat down again. I knew one thing for sure: ESA15 was a bastard, but not a liar … well, except when lying was part of the drill, but then it was always explained in the end. If the opportunity I was being given was really unique, wouldn’t I be crazy to let it pass? I repressed my instinctive anger at his superior ability to play mind games with me. He had won that hand, and I wanted to hear more.

&n
bsp; “What can you tell me?”

  “I can tell you a little. You are not here by chance. I have followed your work very closely since you left basic training. There is nobody as good as you at remote viewing. When the Defense Intelligence Agency shut down Project Stargate and stopped developing the Remote Viewing Project, the best viewers were nowhere close to your ability. The information you gathered for us has served your country immensely—much more than you know. And here’s the crux of the matter: the fact that your remote viewing ability is strengthened by your telepathic power, is what makes you a perfect choice for what we are doing here.”

  “But telepathy only happens erratically, and I can never tell when a subject I run into during my remote viewing task will connect with me sufficiently, to allow me to read some of his thoughts. It’s not controllable. It happens when it happens, so I wouldn’t call it a real gift.”

  “I know, but it’s the best any of our agents has ever accomplished.”

  “So how’s that related to the project?”

  “Let’s put it this way: the project will make your gift controllable.”

  “Are you saying that I will be able to do controlled telepathy?”

  “That for sure and, I hope, much more.”

  He didn’t have to sell me more than that. Remote viewing is good, but it’s kind of solitary, and, frankly, boring. You sit in a room, and you try to see what is happening at a certain location—say, a Russian atomic reactor—and images pop up in your head. You sketch them, and you write down anything else that occurs to you, without really knowing what it all means. Then, some intelligence geek takes the notes you have scribbled and figures out what it is all about. Usually, they don’t give that information back to you, and the best you get is someone telling you that “you did well” or that the drawing you made was “right on spot.” Most of the time, it’s a bummer.

  Telepathy is different. On the rare occasions when I managed to read somebody’s thoughts, I felt involved and knew what I was seeing. We mostly think in images, so even if the subject I was picking up was a Chinese or a Russian, and the words passing through their mind were gibberish to me, I would still see what he was seeing and would understand what he was thinking about it. But as I said, it only happened once in a blue moon, and I never knew when I was going to click. If this project could give me the ability to control it, to do a telepathic reading on demand, I wanted in. Actually, I wanted in so bad by then that my heart rate had accelerated with excitement at the thought of it.

  “You’re not bullshitting me to trick me into it, are you?”

  “No. Have I ever been less than truthful to you?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but what do I know …”

  “You have my word.”

  I didn’t need more than that. I know I’m impulsive, but when something feels right, I tend to charge in without wasting time, and banging my head against walls has never stopped me from making a similar mistake next time.

  “All right. I’m in,” I said, and I noticed that he was making an effort to hide a smile. “So what do I have to call you now that you are a big shot?”

  “People around here call me ‘Director,’ but you can keep calling me ‘ESA15,’ if you prefer. That’s still my official designation.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. Now I need some shuteye. I’m wasted.”

  He pushed a button on the desk and an attendant—a different one, a woman this time—walked in after a few seconds, and I realized that she must have been waiting for this call outside all this time. She was in her twenties, blonde and curvy, her nice body accentuated by an elegant, blue dress. Looks seemed to be important around here. Well, they would have to put up with my knee-ripped jeans and my T-shirt. I wasn’t going to get all dressed up for them.

  “Liv, please take Miss Tessa to her quarters and see to her needs,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at nine,” he added, turning to me. “Be on time.”

  I sighed. His old trainer persona was surfacing again.

  CHAPTER 2

  I woke up feeling refreshed. The room assigned to me was comfortable, with a large bed and a small living area. The bathroom was clean and the few toiletries that I found there were passable. Overall, I had no complaints. I have stayed at worse places, but if I were to remain there for long it would need sprucing up. I made a mental note to ask for the whereabouts of the base exchange and commissary.

  Liv had taken me to my room and showed me where to go for ice and beverages. Then she had left, promising to come for me in the morning in time to get some breakfast before meeting the director again. She was a girl of her word, and the clock showed a minute to eight when I heard a knock on the door. I went to open and imagine my surprise when Liv showed up in a white Navy uniform.

  “What’s the costume in aid of?” I asked. “A dress party?”

  She smiled, apparently enjoying my surprise.

  “That’s me, Lieutenant Liv Ellman.”

  “Yesterday you were simply Liv. How did they turn you into this?”

  “We are allowed to dress down after hours. But now I’m on duty, so here I am,” she said, running her hands in a sweeping motion that accented her uniform.

  “I like you better after hours. If you’re in the Navy, what are you doing here on dry land?”

  “Approximately half of the staff here is military. We have been assigned to help with different projects that are developed here by civilian scientists, each because of his or her particular talents.”

  “So what is your talent, besides looking smart? And how many military are here? And what do they do?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to discuss these matters. You’ll get information on a need-to-know basis, I guess.”

  She looked away while speaking, which gave me an unpleasant feeling, you know, like when everybody else knows what’s going on and the joke is on you. After a brief pause, she said, “Now we must hurry if you want to have time for breakfast.”

  I saw that she wasn’t going to blab to me just because I was asking, so I postponed the third degree and followed her out, locking the door of my room behind me. She walked in silence, as if she was embarrassed that she had refused to answer my questions, until we reached a mess that could easily sit four hundred, but at the time only had about fifty people eating there. Approximately half of them were military, as she had said.

  Breakfast was decent but not memorable. Liv seemed to enjoy it, though, and limited her conversation to have me please pass the salt and pepper, and did I want some more coffee. That worked fine for me because it gave me time to think and observe. When I am in a new place, I like to absorb as much as I can from the people I see, and so I spent time checking up those seated at nearby tables and listening in to whatever snippets of conversation I managed to catch.

  As soon as we finished cleaning up our plates, we took the trays to the appropriate stand and left. Liv had long legs—I couldn’t help noticing them the previous night below her short dress—and they looked good and proportionate to her lissome body. She used those legs now to walk really fast, gazing straight ahead.

  “Someone chasing you?” I asked.

  “What … Ah, oh, sorry. You mean that I’m walking too fast? I’ll slow down.”

  She blushed, which made her look cute. Cuter, I should say.

  “No. No problem. I’m probably in better shape than you are. It’s just that I don’t like to run, if I don’t have to.”

  “Just force of habit, I’m sorry. We have arrived, anyway.”

  We had reached a large door marked “Top Secret – No Admission Without A-Grade Clearance.” Liv placed her thumb on a reader and after it beeped, she pushed the digit into a hole beside it. The door beeped again, and this time it opened.

  “What did you do that for?” I asked.

  “The thumb hole? This is a top security area. The thumb hole checks your blood circulation. That ensures that the thumb is attached to your body, so nobody can cut it off and carr
y it around in his pocket to open doors.”

  “Gross!”

  “Yeah, but smart.”

  Two more doors that opened with Liv’s fingerprint got us into a roomy laboratory. The director was standing beside a tall civilian, next to a machine that looked like a gigantic slipper. The “insole” was a bed, the hospital testing type, and a broad arch loomed above the pillow area.

  “Here you are,” the director said. He checked his watch, and I guess he was disappointed to see that I was on time so I couldn’t be reprimanded, which is a hobby of his. “Meet Doctor Alexander,” he said at last.

  “Nice to meet you,” said the civilian. He was almost a head taller than the director, with a bristly mustache that looked ridiculous and a face that showed the signs of badly treated acne. He gave me his hand, which I took and shook. It was sweaty and flaccid, and I found it repulsive. I rubbed my palm against the fabric of my jeans to wipe away the feel of that handshake, without making too much of an effort to hide what I was doing. Then, I waited patiently for the director to speak.

  “I’ll let Doctor Alexander give a basic explanation of what he is doing here. Please proceed, Doctor.”

  “Yes, this is the laboratory that I head, and this machine is perhaps the greatest achievement of this century …”

  “Can we stick to the information that we need to tell our agent, Doctor?” the director interrupted.

  “Certainly, certainly. So, what you see here is the MWA machine, which stands for ‘mixed wave amplifier.’ We have been able to identify a precise combination of brain waves that is generated when telepathic activity occurs. It is a mix of beta, theta, and gamma waves in very specific proportions. I understand that you have experience with telepathic phenomena. For telepathy to happen, your brain must generate that particular combination of waves.”

  “But how do you know that? The director tells me that I’m the best telepathic subject he knows, and I never know when I’ll have a telepathic event.”