Tessa (Tessa Extra-Sensory Agent Book 1) Page 4

“I know. I realized that afterwards. But I don’t know how you did it. I didn’t know that you could possess me,” she said, smiling for the first time.

  “I’ve no idea. I didn’t know either.” Her words had made me think. “Was that really possessing? Like a demon or something?”

  “Well, properly speaking, it wasn’t possessing like in horror movies, because I was still fully aware of what was happening, but I don’t know how else to describe it. You owned me. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t control my movements—nothing. As long as it’s you, I don’t mind, but what if somebody else can do it too?”

  “Apparently, I am the only known freak who can do it. Don’t worry.”

  “You’re not a freak,” Liv said, speaking softly and stroking my arm. “You’re a sweet, gentle girl.”

  “I like it when you talk dirty to me,” I said, smiling at my own joke.

  “No, really. You know I like you … in more than one way.”

  “Yeah? Then lock the door and show me how much.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said Liv, smiling broadly.

  A thought occurred to me, and I had to ask. “You said that each of the military personnel is here because of his or her own particular ability. What is yours?”

  “Oh, nothing special, really. I have a degree in brain sciences—neuroscience and things like that.”

  “That’s nothing to you, brainy girl? But why you are here, and what are you supposed to do?”

  “I’m training with you.”

  “Give me a break! The director wouldn’t waste a scientist like you to be my puppet. There has to be more to it than that.”

  Liv’s face turned all serious, and she kept silent for a full minute before speaking again.

  “Can we not talk about it? You’re right that I have other duties, but I can’t discuss them with you or with anybody else. My role is to follow people who engage in experiments that involve brain functions and record their brain activity. It’s nothing exciting, so let’s leave it at that. It’s also nothing for you to be concerned about, okay? I can promise you that, but I can’t say more; you know the rules as well as I do. Please don’t force me to lie to you.”

  “No, never lie to me! Just tell me what you can.”

  “All I can tell you is that I have special knowledge in brain science, which in the broad spectrum of this research facility is believed to be valuable.”

  “Bright girl,” I commented, and she smiled modestly. “I’ll ask no more. I trust you.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply, and then she got up, locked the door and turned the dimmer to a lower, softer lighting. And then … then the rest is between us two, you nosy Parker!

  CHAPTER 6

  The director kept me busy during the next few days, with new drills and tests. I learned how to possess the body of my telepathic subject at will. Apparently there was no shortage of volunteers for that, even though some of them were not told what they were actually volunteering for. I found taking control of a male body much harder than with a female body, because it felt different, and controlling some of the male muscles wasn’t intuitive to me, but after a few attempts I got the hang of it and even enjoyed “being” a man for a while.

  My main complaint was that Liv wasn’t around as much as before, although she still dropped in afterhours most days. I didn’t say anything to the director, though, because I was sure that he would have made it a point to keep her away from me at the first hint that I wanted her near.

  The doctor was right about one thing: after a couple of days, working with the slipper became natural, and I no longer felt wasted after training. It seemed that I had enough in common with his rats, after all.

  Then the director called me to his office, and things started to heat up.

  “Tomorrow we are going to run a critical test,” he said. “I want you to know that, but don’t put yourself under pressure.”

  “Critical meaning …?”

  “Meaning that if you fail it, this project is finished.”

  “Why, thank you for not putting any pressure on me.”

  “At seventeen you are no longer a child. You act like one, but you are not one, so you are entitled to the truth.”

  “All right. Give it to me.”

  “All the subjects you have worked with are people you have met. Tomorrow you will be given details of a woman unknown to you. You’ll know her name, you will see her photograph, and will be given the approximate coordinates of her whereabouts. You must make telepathic connection with her and report all you see and learn.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s an employee of ours. She has been given a day off and told to keep herself available because we may need her, so she is to remain at home. She knows nothing of the project, and she won’t be helping you in any way.”

  “So we are invading our own people’s privacy now? Is that even legal?”

  “You leave the legal problems to me. This person has signed a release that covers that. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

  “I’m glad that you don’t have a conscience, otherwise it might get in the way of the project,” I threw at him.

  “When vital interests are at stake, my conscience doesn’t matter. Now go and get some sleep. I need you to be at the top of your form, tomorrow.”

  I got up and left without another word. It’s not that I have too many scruples as a rule, and I understood the need for this test, but somehow, I felt bad about it all. I guess that being a pawn in a big game doesn’t make you feel good, particularly when you don’t know what the game is.

  The next morning saw me up early. I pride myself on never getting nervous before a job, so something else must have interfered with my sleep. I had a lengthy breakfast—alone, since now I was familiar with the place and didn’t need to be nannied—and then I got to the lab ahead of time. Pushing my thumb into the “live finger receptacle” still felt weird, but on the other hand, having an A-grade security clearance felt good. The director and the doctor were already there, and a package with the details of my target was also waiting for me. I picked up her picture—she looked fiftyish and rather plain. I studied her coordinates just to be polite, since I had no idea how to use them. That had always puzzled me during my time as a remote viewer. They always gave me the target’s coordinates, insisting that it was important, and I never did anything with them. It was the same this time, but I did look at the map where the location of her house was marked. Then, without any argument, I climbed onto the slipper and lay down.

  Five minutes later I snapped out of my telepathic trance—if that’s what it is when you feel zonked out with your eyes closed although you’re still awake—and as I did it, my heart beat fast. I sat up, disoriented for a moment, and gazed around the room, reconnecting with the people in it.

  “What happened?” was the director’s quiet question. His voice was low, but I could sense the tension in it.

  “I … I don’t know. I made contact with her … sort of, but I couldn’t read her. It was like a TV with bad reception.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard snippets, and then white noise, and then again some thoughts or words, and I couldn’t make sense of what I saw or heard because the image and the audio waved too quickly. That’s the best I can explain it.”

  I sat there in silence waiting for the director to say something, but it was the doctor who spoke.

  “That’s what I feared,” he said.

  “What is?” the director asked peevishly, which wasn’t characteristic of him.

  “When you connect with a target that you know personally, for some reason distance is less important. It’s like you already have an open channel to that person that is free of interferences. But if you never connected with that person before, and the target is too far away, you may have trouble establishing a channel of communication. Here we are talking more than one thousand miles.”

  “But this doesn’t make sense,” I said. �
�During my remote viewing I got images from much farther away, like China or Russia. And then I didn’t have the slipper to help me with it.”

  “But you only saw unclear images, right? Even more confused and unclear than what you experienced today. Am I right?”

  I searched my memory and, comparing today with some of those experiences, I had to admit that he was right.

  “Yes, that makes sense,” I conceded. “So what do we do now? Has the project failed? I mean, if you want me to spy on someone I never met before, who’s far away, I may or may not get results, right?”

  Doctor Alexander murmured, “I need to study the data. I must study it.”

  The director ignored him and gazed at me with his usual inscrutable, impersonal expression.

  “You can go to your quarters now. We’ll let you know what’s next,” he said.

  It didn’t look like I had anything useful to contribute, so I jumped down from the slipper and left.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next few days counted as a vacation. The director hadn’t got in touch, and I wasn’t going to chase him. I learned that the compound in which we worked was located near a beautiful lake surrounded by woods—courtesy of an air force captain who made it a point to show me around, hoping to cash in, the poor sap! I did let him kiss me, though, on the boat in which he took me one afternoon, but that was it.

  I also learned that the government had appropriated a big chunk of land, and that the woods were surrounded by heavily guarded fences, which I didn’t get to see because I didn’t care, in spite of the fact that another eager officer offered to show them to me—a major this time, as I seemed to be rising in the ranks. When I said “No thanks,” he made a face, and silently melted away.

  Believe it or not, that place also has a tennis court. I always loved playing tennis, although I don’t get to do it often, and I talked Liv into coming to play with me. She is a good player, but the crowd we attracted would have come to see us in our tennis attire even if we never hit the ball.

  So I took boat rides, walked around the woods in the company of eager officers, played tennis, and slept a lot, all of which was swell up to a point. After a while, I realized that I was bored beyond endurance. I don’t know what I would have done if it had gone on for much longer. Luckily, just when I was about to burst, the phone in my room buzzed, and the director was on the other end.

  “Tessa?”

  “You know very well that it’s me on my room phone. And since when do you use the phone yourself instead of sending for me?”

  The director ignored my comments entirely, of course.

  “I’ll see you at the lab in half an hour. Be on time,” he said, and hung up.

  I must admit that I was curious. Had they solved the distance problem? Or were they going to tell me that the project had officially been shut down and I was going home? Well, in a little while I would know.

  I got to the lab right on time and saw the usual picture: the director and the doctor were waiting for me, speaking in undertones. The doctor held in his hand something that looked like a pisspot with spikes coming out from within.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “This is a miniature slipper,” said the doctor, again smiling when he said “slipper,” which apparently had become our little private joke. “Come here, and I’ll show you how to use it.”

  I took the thing and put it on my head. It fit well and wasn’t too uncomfortable, so I had to find something negative to say.

  “This is ruining my hairdo,” I complained.

  I keep my hair quite short, so I can comb it with two quick brush strokes without wasting too much time in the morning, and there isn’t much of a hairdo to ruin there. Not a witty comment on my part, but they let it go.

  “You turn it on with this switch here, and you increase the power sliding that knob there. The battery works for five hours running. I am working on a smaller version that shall be more convenient to wear, but for the time being we can make do with this one.”

  “And what are we supposed to do with it?” I asked.

  “We want to make sure that it functions as well as the original, full-size machine,” the director said patiently. “Since it is portable, the distance becomes less of an issue, because we can get closer to the target if we need to. We have to test it first, to obtain distance versus quality data, however.”

  I turned it on and played with the volume.

  “It seems to work. I hear a lot of background noise. Let me try and tune into Lieutenant Hellman,” I said and closed my eyes to concentrate. Soon Liv’s thoughts reached me loud and clear and I turned the thing off.

  “It works,” I ruled, and I saw the relief clearly spreading on both men’s faces. “I don’t know how good it is, but it does something. I guess we’ll have to find out.”

  “As you can imagine, we have a detailed testing plan. We start tomorrow at eight in the morning. We have wasted a lot of time and need to speed things up.”

  “Yes, sir!” I said, making a mock military salute. I handed the pisspot back to the doctor and left.

  I was glad that the wasting-time period had ended, but I knew that the director would make me work without mercy from now on. I had one more leisure evening, and I was damned if I was going to miss the party to which a truly cute, young marine had invited me. True, I couldn’t remember his name, but I am never a stickler for formalities.

  The party was fun, and the young marine (I still can’t remember his name) was sweet, so I ended up going back to his room after the party. Alcohol was limited by base policy at public events, so we had to make up for the missing shots privately. Just as I was leaving the party with him I saw Liv dancing with someone who could easily have been her father. She saw me leaving with my date and gave me two thumbs up and a big smile. I was relieved that she wasn’t being possessive or offended, and I hoped that she would have a good time, as I was planning to.

  I did. Have a good time, I mean. Actually, a great time. But it was also time for me to get to work, so I set the alarm for seven a.m. Even my getting up early to leave didn’t cancel the broad smile on the young marine’s face, which he had kept on since waking up, and I didn’t want to ruin it for him. So, I gave him a quick kiss at the door and didn’t tell him that we weren’t going to have a repeat date. He would find that out for himself soon enough.

  The new training plan was a boring repeat of the old one: Liv in the room, Liv outside the room, Liv on a hilltop far away (this time without stumbling and falling, but with planned “body possession”), volunteers of various types, and so on. The only variation was connecting with two volunteers I had never met before, who were some 300 miles away, and that worked fine too. This stage went on for five days, in spite of me telling the director—several times a day every day—that the pisspot felt exactly the same as the slipper, which should have meant to every person of average intelligence that we had validated it and didn’t need to go jump through all the hoops again. I’m sure that the director knew as well as I did that we could stop training and move on. He was probably going through the program just because he hates to admit that a plan of his may need changing.

  On the sixth day, I was summoned to the director’s office right before dinner. When I walked in, an elderly gentleman got up from one of the director’s seats and turned to face me. He was smiling, but his eyes were cold. The director also got up from his seat and, for a moment, as I stood there, this looked like a frozen scene in which the three of us were lifeless mannequins. Then, the director spoke.

  “Tessa, please meet Undersecretary Quinn.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tessa. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Likewise, sir. I mean, being pleased to meet you. I’ve never heard about you.”

  “Little wonder. I make it a point to stay behind the scenes. This operation, as well as that to which you belonged before, reports to me. We have been allocating substantial resources to set it up. It is vital to our security, and that�
��s why I decided to oversee this stage personally.”

  “Given that I know nothing about the operation, I can’t comment on that.”

  “You know what you are able to do, and in a moment you will have all the details. I can assure you that the country is counting on you and that you will be very proud of having been instrumental in serving it as you’re going to.”

  I hate it when government people talk high to me, and it makes me suspicious. It usually means that there’s something bad in store for me.

  “I’m sure,” I said, making it clear with my posture that I wasn’t ready to buy any cats in sacks, “but right now I could use some details.”

  “Director, will you please explain to Miss Tessa?”

  “Of course. Look at this screen, Tessa. The woman that you see here is Mary Payne, 35 years old. Her official title is undersecretary for defense, in charge of international bi-lateral relations. She’s also spying for our adversaries, or so they think. In reality, her title is merely a cover for her actual role in our organization; she is our top agent and they only think that she is working for them. So, she’s a double agent working for us, but we worry that, unlikely as that may be, she could be a triple agent, who in fact is working for them.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re making my head spin. Is she working for them or for us?”

  “She’s working for us, but given the circumstances that I will explain in a moment, there is a slight possibility that, in fact, she is or will be working for them.”

  “You see,” Quinn intervened, “her counterpart in the bi-lateral strategic weapons talks currently underway is Vladimir Vilikov, with whom Mary has a forbidden and undisclosed romantic relationship, which she has developed in a number of occasions. His title is also a bogus one and, in reality, he is very high up in their intelligence service. Of course, this relationship was our idea, and Mary is doing it with our blessing. She’s my colleague, and we’ve been working together for years, so I know how capable she is. The plan is to compromise Vladimir and to convince him to turn. Mary thinks that he is almost there and needs a last push before he’s ready to come to us. He has information of vital importance to us.