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

  “Nevertheless, our experts, who analyzed her body language when Vladimir is around, raised the concern that she seemed to be enjoying his companionship in a way that is too real to be faked. Vladimir is quite attractive and charismatic, and we wonder whether it might be possible that he’s turning our own agent and operation against us. Mary has access to extremely delicate information, and that would be a disaster. The stakes are high, as you can understand.”

  “So you want me to get into her head and see if she is really liking him or just doing her job?”

  “That’s part of it, of course,” said the director, “but there is more to our operation than that. Mary is supposed to obtain critical information from Vladimir that will prove that he is sincere and really wants to work for us. Mary needs to get that information to us quickly, to allow us to check it, and if it’s genuine she will conclude the deal with Vladimir. She is playing a very dangerous game of chess with Vladimir and with his superiors, who are no less sophisticated than we are. If they realize what’s going on, both Vladimir and Mary may be doomed—if they are not playing us and have turned Mary, that is.”

  “But how can I help with that, besides finding out if Mary is on the level?”

  “At first, that was all we were hoping for. Our plan was, if you found out that she’s a traitor, to eliminate her on the spot. You see, all this is going to happen next week in Switzerland, which is hosting our talks. Sending a termination squad to eliminate Mary, if need arises, which was our original plan, might also give rise to severe international repercussions. That was a danger that we had to budget for, but no longer.”

  “Why? What has changed?”

  “Now if she does something wrong, you can stop her. You can take possession of her body and nip the treason in the bud.”

  “And ‘nip in the bud’ means …?”

  “If conditions allow it, and you can take possession of her body and bring her to us, that would be best. But if for any reason that isn’t possible, you would need to stage a natural death. A fall from a high window suggests itself,” Quinn said, speaking in the same tone in which he would have talked about some mundane event.

  “Wow! I mean, wow! That’s quite a burden that you’re putting on my shoulders. I’m not trained in espionage, and I’m not sure that I am the right person to make a judgment call about what Mary will be doing. Besides, I don’t know that I will be able to kill someone. I think it would be a better idea to use a much better trained operative for this, now that we know that the slipper and the pisspot both work.”

  “I admit that we did think about that option,” said the director, “and tested potential operatives. Unfortunately, all the subjects we tested—and we did test many in the last week or so—didn’t come even close to your performance. The best one was only able to receive random thoughts, and that with the intensity of the amplifier at its maximum. No, as far as we know you are unique, so it’s you or nobody.”

  “Holy shit! I didn’t sign up for this. What I’m trained to do is hear or see things and report them. I never knew that I would have to be involved in stuff like this.”

  “Neither did we, neither did we,” said Quinn. “Sometimes, our fate sneaks up on us without our noticing, and that is when we are called upon to do great deeds.”

  “You don’t say …”

  “I appreciate that this is a bit sudden, so we’ll let you digest it. We’ll talk again in the morning,” said the director.

  I surely had a lot to digest and not only what they had told me. I had a distinct feeling that they hadn’t told me all there was to know. I nodded and left. I went back to my room and locked the door. That evening I needed to be alone and think. A couple of times someone knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer it. When I finally got to sleep, my dreams kept me from having a truly restful night.

  CHAPTER 8

  I woke up the next morning when the phone in my room rang. The director was on the line, which meant that he wanted things to run smoothly and didn’t trust that sending for me would get me wherever he wanted me, when he wanted me.

  “Mmm,” I mumbled into the receiver.

  “Please get to the lab in twenty minutes, Tessa. We can’t make the undersecretary wait,” he said, dryly.

  “Your never told me when to be there,” I argued, but he cut me short with a terse “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.

  It maddened me that he always expected me to jump through hoops at his order, but I didn’t think that annoying someone as important as Undersecretary Quinn was wise, otherwise I would have let the director wait. Instead, I got ready in record time and reached the lab as instructed. The whole gang, consisting of Quinn, the director, and Doctor Alexander, was waiting for me. The young marine with whom I had spent the night was also in the room, waiting at attention and gazing straight into the infinite.

  “Good morning, Tessa,” said Quinn courteously. “We need to run one more experiment. We know that you can take control of the body of a subject, but so far you have only done that for a few seconds, right?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “We need to ascertain that you have the ability to possess another body for a more extended period, and to function in it. We have a volunteer for that,” he added, gazing at the marine.

  I won’t bore you with the details of the experiment. It’s enough to say that it went well, and I ended up enjoying it. When I completed all the tasks on the menu, I couldn’t resist the temptation to make the marine stand in the middle of the room and speak my words. I know that sometimes I am a showoff, you don’t need to tell me that. Hearing myself speaking with a masculine voice was strange, but also fun. I said, “This is me, Tessa, speaking to you, even if I don’t sound like me.” I gave them a broad smile, and then I let go of the marine, opened my eyes, which I had closed to make concentration easier, and gazed at the trio. “How did I do?” I asked.

  “Good. Wait here,” Quinn ordered curtly. “Come with me,” he said to the others, and they left me alone in the room.

  I hadn’t turned the pisspot off and was still receiving background noise. With the men gone, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try to see what they had to discuss that couldn’t be said with me in the room. My ethics did not allow me to read the director, and I extended that courtesy to the undersecretary as well, but I owed nothing to Doctor Alexander. He wasn’t one of us. I probed the noise until I found him, and then his eyes and ears were mine. He was standing with the other two, listening to Quinn, who had a shell-shocked look on his face.

  “That was amazing,” he said.

  “She will do a perfect job,” the director said. “We need to get her on board about the need to terminate Mary, if it comes to that, but she will easily make her jump from a window or something like that. This is going to be neater than we thought.”

  “But after that, of course, we need to terminate her,” said Quinn, sending a shiver along my spine.

  “What?” the director said, looking incredulous. “She is going to be our most valuable asset. She has powers never heard of. Why would we want to waste all that?”

  “Can’t you see how dangerous she is going to be? She can get into anybody’s head. She could possess the president. We can’t let that happen.”

  “But,” Doctor Alexander objected, “she needs my device to do that, so all we have to do is take it away from her. There is no need to terminate her. Besides, she can’t use it for too long, you know that …”

  “With all due respect, Doctor,” said Quinn, interrupting him, “your device is great, but now that she knows how it works she can have somebody else make one for her. I’m sorry, I truly am, but we can’t take chances with her. Obviously, we’ll take care of her only after this operation is over. She’s essential to its success.”

  “That is regrettable,” said the director, his face expressionless, “but I see your point. Now I suggest we go back and give her our final instructions for the operation.”

  The bastard! I has
tened to turn the pisspot off and took it off my head. When they came back into the room they found me flipping through a scientific magazine that I had taken from a nearby table. I had been trying to figure out what the doctor had meant by saying that I couldn’t use the pisspot for too long, before he was interrupted, but it didn’t make sense to me so I let that go. I had much greater worries to think about.

  “Tessa,” said the director, “we are unanimous that the test was successful. Very satisfactory. Now we need you to understand the responsibility that you are taking upon yourself. Mary’s mission is critical to our nation’s security. If she convinces Vladimir to work for us, that may be the most important intelligence achievement of the century. If, on the other hand, she turns and cooperates with the other side, she will do some severe damage, and she must be stopped.”

  “You already explained all that to me,” I said. “No need to repeat.”

  “We must make sure that you understand how critical this is,” Quinn intervened. “You may have to make a decision to kill her, and we will not be there to help you make it.”

  You want me to kill her, so you can go ahead and kill me. That’s not gonna happen, but I’ll play along, for now, I thought. Lucky that they couldn’t read me. I put on a serious face and nodded gravely, to hide my thoughts and to let them think that I was on board with the plan.

  “I appreciate it, sir. I can’t say that the prospect of having to kill a woman appeals to me, but I’ll do my part if it comes to that.”

  “Good girl!” said Quinn. “Now let’s run through possible scenarios with you. You will have to learn the telltales of treason.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I’d never been to Europe before and didn’t know what to expect, but as it turns out, Switzerland is a pretty decent place. After we landed in Zurich, a nice limo drove us to a cottage near a place called Flims. The scenery there is pretty, and the air is good for your health, or so they say, but it’s the closest thing to a mortuary that I’ve ever seen. Except for a couple of cows grazing about, it’s difficult to see a soul outside. On the other hand, it’s no more than 30 miles from Flims to Davos as the crow flies, which is where my target was supposed to be, and so the place had been selected to ensure good proximity to her, as well as privacy for us. Given that the pisspot had been tested to work well at a distance of at least 300 miles from the target, they could’ve picked a livelier place for our base, but of course I hadn’t been consulted.

  Saying goodbye to Liv had turned out to be emotional—much more so than I had expected. For one thing, I couldn’t tell her what I had learned. Telling her might put her in danger and then, although even thinking of it made me sick, if I told her she might betray me if she had a misplaced sense of duty, and then I would be done for. No, I decided to say nothing to her, although I ached to share what I was going through, and the danger that I faced, with someone. Like most seventeen year old girls, I was bursting with the need to share my intimate thoughts with someone, but I had nobody to talk to, except Liv, and in this case perhaps even not her. I had no close friends or family with whom to share the burden, and that really bummed me out. I think that my face showed it.

  “So you’re leaving,” she had said, without looking me in the eyes.

  I guess that she wanted me to say something tastefully tender, but I am no good at goodbyes, so all I managed to say was “Yes.”

  “Will you be coming back?”

  “I’ve no idea. You know they never tell me anything.”

  “And … If you don’t get back here?”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Meaning that you will miss me? I’ll miss you.”

  “Dammit! You have to make me say that, don’t you? I’ll miss you like hell, okay? I’ll think of you all the time.”

  I gazed at the floor as I said that. Why am I so bad at expressing feelings?

  She came closer and hugged me, then she kissed me softly on the lips, and while she did that I had no choice but to look straight into her blue eyes.

  “Stop talking now, okay?” she said. “Just let me hold you and feel you for a while.”

  I kept silent for long enough to feel my old self again, and then an idea came to me.

  “You know what? We can still be close while I am away. Let’s agree on an hour when you can sit down and think of me, and I will make contact and read you then. You can tell me what’s going on with you, how your day was, and anything else in that way. The time difference must be nine hours, so if your lunch break is at noon I can read you at 9 PM—if I’m not working then, that is.”

  “I’m afraid that it won’t work. You will be more than 5,000 miles away from me, and we know that distance is a problem.”

  “No, it’s a problem if I don’t know my target, but even the doctor agreed that it shouldn’t be a problem with someone I know well. Anyway, no harm in trying.”

  “No, no harm. I like the idea, but how will I know that you’re actually listening to me, and I am not just gazing at the wall for nothing?”

  “I could speak to you through your own lips … but no, that’s not a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know if somebody is eavesdropping on you. When I was in basic training, ESA15 had microphones hidden all over the place.”

  “So?”

  “I know! I’ll give you a sign. Keep a legal pad near you and I’ll use your hand to tell you. I’ll make you draw a check mark, if I can read you. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds great. How smart you are!”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t make me blush.”

  “Blush away! You’re more beautiful when you’re flushed.”

  “Shut up and turn the damn light off,” I ordered. My breathing had quickened, and I realized that I was actually blushing. Luckily, she turned off the lights without more backchat.

  So, the first thing I wanted to do, as soon we settled in our Swiss cottage, was to test my ability to get in touch with Liv. Of course, the doctor had to schedule a briefing right at 9 PM, immediately after dinner. Our little delegation consisted of myself, the doctor, assorted security agents, and a housekeeper who had been lent to us by our local operation. I can’t say I was happy to know that I would be spending time with the doctor, but I understood that he had to be nearby to take care of the equipment, and besides, he was part of the machination against me. I didn’t think that he would be able to pull the trigger himself, the dork, but he would certainly play along with whoever was charged with doing it.

  The briefing mostly was about telling me what I was allowed to do, which was pretty much limited to sitting on the porch when not working. I was not allowed to leave the cottage, and if I needed anything, our security agents would get it for me. The one exception was if I wanted to take a short walk along the path from the back of our cottage that went up the hill. I would be able to do that if accompanied by one of our security details. The doctor made it quite clear that those were imperative orders of the director and that I was not there to have fun but to bring a critical mission to completion. There was no sense in arguing, so I limited myself to grimacing.

  But there was an obstacle that I hadn’t thought of: to try to talk to Liv, I had to use the pisspot, which I had no good reason for putting on at that time. Our mission only started in two days, when Mary and Vladimir were scheduled to arrive at Davos. But I never let small difficulties get in my way.

  “Oh, Doctor,” I said, “I want to be ready and at my best for the operation, so please give me the pisspot. I want to start to train myself.”

  “We need to follow protocol,” said the doctor, who looked a bit surprised at my sudden eagerness to do things. “According to the program that we developed, we have to start testing tomorrow. One of our security detail also volunteered to help us tune the system.”

  “I understand, but being here feels different than at the base, and I want to try and see what kind of background noise I receive from the surroundings, and t
o familiarize with it. I don’t know, maybe the cows have thoughts? There were no cows back at the base …”

  “I doubt it very much that the cows have thoughts, but I concede that the rats showed some activity … sorry, I know we agreed not to talk about rats. Anyway, I see no harm in testing the equipment. I have two identical devices with me, so we have backup if anything goes wrong with the one you are using. Wait here and I’ll bring it to you. When you’re done testing, bring it back to me so I can recharge it.”

  So easy—the more they think they are smart, the easier it is to play them.

  So I got my pisspot and sat on the porch with it and a pint of beer, only fifteen minutes later than planned. Swiss beer is great, by the way. The deck chair that I picked was comfortable, and I closed my eyes, switched on the thing, and opened my mind. The background noise was minimal, but I still had to concentrate to make it vanish. I pictured Liv’s face before my eyes and, as if by magic, in a moment I was in her head.

  She isn’t making contact. I told her it was too far away, came her thought, loud and clear. Liv was in her room, for some reason gazing at the door. When she turned her head toward her desk, I saw that she had placed a yellow legal pad and a pen on it, as I had asked her to. I concentrated and, as I had learned to do easily, I took control of her movements. I lifted the pen with her right hand and traced a check mark on the page, and then I let go of her.

  You’re here! I don’t believe it. I’m missing you already.

  I took control of her hand again and drew a sad emoji on the pad.

  Great news! Today the director asked me to volunteer again to train with you when you return. You see what this means? It means that you’re coming back here. He also wants me to join a group of volunteers who are going to be tested in the slipper, to see if they can develop some telepathic power. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could? Then we would be able to connect all the time. I immediately agreed and he couldn’t give me the paper to sign quickly enough.