Story of my life.
“There’s twenty minutes on your current time slot,” Watts told me, “and I’m available to train. If you want to practice, the Program provides the ammo.”
What I wanted was to go grab a bagel, but instead I acted like there was nothing I’d rather do but shoot at that confounding paper man, and with her coaching, took the time to work on my left hand. I don’t think it really helped, but at least I didn’t look like an idiot for turning down the opportunity.
When it was time to make way for the next shooter, I gathered my stuff and headed out—and ran right into Patrick Barley. No wonder the guy in the next stall would be lucky to hit the side of a bus. He was a civilian, carrying his weapon not in a concealed holster, but in its locked case.
“Hey, Vic! Are you heading over to the office? Mind if I hitch a ride?”
Weirdly enough, I decided I wouldn’t mind the company. “Sure. Let me just wash my hands.”
All kinds of crap blows back from a gun when you fire it, from primer to lead to minuscule fragments of metal. And that’s from a single bullet. I’d just emptied several magazines, and I didn’t want my car to smell like a charcoal grill for the rest of the week.
We found a restroom, and Patrick joined me at the next sink as I scrubbed off the stink of the range. “So that was you, right next to me? You’re a really good shot.”
“Evidently not as good as they want me to be.” And I could tell the thirty day window would be a major pain in my ass. Especially with Laura freaking out about those damn repeaters.
He said, “I didn’t realize how heavy a gun can get when you hold it out in front of you like that. And the recoil. I guess there’s really no way to prepare yourself for shooting your first gun.”
Firing handguns was no big deal. It was a motor skill, and it was teachable. Plus, there’d always be someone out there better than you, so you might as well hope they can give you a few pointers. Figuring out mediumship when our experiences differed as much as they did? Now that was a major challenge.
Especially since I was shaping up to be the ultimate authority.
* * *
I must have gone at the problem from every conceivable angle, given how long I turned things over in my mind the night before, waiting for sleep to come, but I came up empty-handed.
“D’you think Laura would be willing to help me brainstorm the whole mediumship test?” I asked Patrick as we pulled into the FPMP underground parking. “She’s one of the smartest people I know. Maybe she’s got a different take on the whole situation.”
“Director Kim?” Patrick gave a low whistle. “She seems awfully busy. Heck, I spend my whole day trying to avoid drawing attention to myself so that she doesn’t have buyer’s remorse about hiring me. But, hey, you know her a lot better than I do.”
“Oh.”
“If there’s anything I can do, though, just ask. I know I’ll never fill The Fixer’s shoes, but whatever’s in my power, I’ll do my best to help.”
Unfortunately, unless there was some newfangled medium detector he could obtain, I couldn’t really think of anything that would further our progress.
If such a thing did exist, however, I suspected Darla would have already requisitioned it. When I got to my office, I found a third desk had joined mine and Carl’s. Of course, Darla needed somewhere to work, but it was the mismatch that threw me. While Carl and I both had plain wooden work surfaces, Darla had chosen some complicated arrangement of black and chrome, with various levels and compartments, and a pneumatic lift to raise the keyboard and monitor up or down. She was currently standing at the station, arranging a very expensive-looking lamp to shine just so. “I don’t know how you can stand the fluorescents,” she said to me.
“Never gave it any thought.” In fact, I’d never even considered that I might have a preference. Probably because I wasn’t used to having any choice.
“So I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We’ll need a control group. And a room without any energy. And we’ll need to keep immaculate records”
She looked at me defiantly, as if she thought I’d voice some objection to that, but I just nodded and said, “Okay.”
“Okay,” she repeated curtly, then turned to her computer and typed. Darla might be a disgruntled government employee, and she might have a chip on her shoulder big enough to fend off anyone dumb enough to cross her path, but she wasn’t stupid. It was clear that her time in the FPMP hadn’t been wasted. I watched her coax suggestions out of Carl, brainstorming variables that would affect potential results. Time of day, time of year, presence or absence of psyactives—all of these things and more can throw off a medium’s game. I couldn’t argue with anything she came up with. Even when she looked at me and asked, “Well, Mr. Level Five? Do you have anything to add?”
Again, I could do without the attitude. But since she had it all covered, there was nothing for me to say.
“Then you might as well see about getting us some subjects to help block out a test run.”
Back when Richie was top medium at the FPMP, it was probably Carl who handled those kinds of details. But given that Carl had a tendency to give me a look over his reading glasses that made me feel like I’d been caught cheating on a math test, I decided it wouldn’t hurt for me to stretch my legs.
Patrick was back at his desk, studying a very complicated manual. I stared at it for a few seconds before I even recognized the diagram as a phone. Then again, I never was much good at following blueprints. My one hazy Christmas memory involved a cheap plastic airplane model glued to the tree in pieces. I asked, “How many NPs do you think Lau—uh, Director Kim—could spare?”
“Whatever you need, just say the word.”
Weird. Apparently, I was patently unused to getting my way. “Let’s start with two.”
“You got it.” Patrick opened a piece of unfamiliar-looking software, did some typing, and hit send. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Join me for lunch?”
He looked surprised, but not as surprised as I felt. Because Zigler had been my built-in lunch buddy, so these were entirely uncharted waters for me. It felt so incredibly awkward to ask, it was a wonder I didn’t just leave it to chance and hope for the best.
“Thanks for the invite, but today’s a no-go.”
My face didn’t just fall. Did it? Shit. I think it might have.
“I’ve got half a dozen errands to run,” he said. “But I’ll take a rain check.”
“Right. Cool. So…I’ll just, uh…I’ll wait for those NPs, then.” I gave him a stilted half-wave—such a dork—then retreated to the sanctity of the elevator.
My heart was palpitating a little. What was up with that? It wasn’t like I was hot for the guy. Totally the opposite. And I didn’t need to stay on his good side to get preferential treatment from Laura. So what difference did it make if he liked me? I wasn’t there to eat and make friends, I was there to spot ghosts and mediums. I headed back to the haunted office to wait for our subjects with Darla.
Our first guinea pig, according to the brief dossier we were given, was a fifteen-year veteran of the FPMP, top of his class at Northern, fluent in German, very good at keeping the servers running, and about as psychic as a doorknob. My plan was to have him walk the grid. Simple, but since I’d seen Laura dodging ghosts, why not? I started him in the far corner. “Go ahead and cross the room,” I said. It must not have been the first time someone at the FPMP had him do something baffling. He strode to the far wall. And brushed right up against Throat Bullet as he did. “Let’s try that again. Slower this time.” He turned, came forward, and walked directly through the repeater.
Darla leaned in and whispered, “Can I see you outside?”
We stepped into the hall, and she said, “You need to act natural. Every time he passes the window, you tense up all over.”
I willed away the impulse to chafe goosebumps off my arms. “Got it. Right.”
“So what’s over there?” she asked.
“A murder.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Not the foreign guy?”
“No. Different one.”
“Well, I’m surprised the IT guy hasn’t figured that out just by looking at your face. This room is full of cameras, right?”
“Isn’t everything at the FPMP?”
“Then while he’s walking the grid, maybe we don’t need to be in there at all.”
Frankly, if there’s ever a way to achieve my goals without interacting with other people, I’m all for it. We got permission to view the office feed, gave the IT guy instructions to continue walking the room, then retired to our office to watch him on the big screen. He did exactly as he was told, walked back and forth. And while I couldn’t see the repeaters on the screen, I’d spent enough time with them to know where they were—and this guy was just plowing right on through.
“Well, this is a bust,” I said.
Abruptly, Carl stood up and said, “Do you need me? Because I’ve got somewhere to be.”
I glanced at the clock. Five on the nose and he was antsy to leave, and he’d been coming and going all day.
I didn’t feel like I had the luxury to bail just because the clock was displaying some arbitrary number, but for every habit I’d picked up on the force, Carl would have learned a different strategy from playing Richie’s lackey. And I couldn’t imagine Richie staying at work a minute longer than absolutely necessary when there were TV shows to be watched and wings to be consumed. “Go ahead,” I said. “I don’t expect we’ll figure out what’s going on tonight.”
As the door clicked shut behind him, Darla said, “Most people truly are NP, after all. Maybe we shouldn’t expect much.”
Onscreen, the guy strode directly through the spot where Triple Shot took three bullets in a big, grisly pirouette. I sighed. “Maybe not.”
Carl might’ve been in a hurry to make himself scarce, but Darla had nowhere better to be. Ultimately, we tried the same method on five more FPMP employees in all, and none of them broke pattern around the repeaters. Possibly, they were so well-trained that when we asked them to walk, they simply suppressed the urge to avoid the hotspots. But statistically, it was more likely that they felt no evidence of the repeaters at all. Together, we zoned out to the world’s most boring TV show: a lab tech walking back and forth in precise, measured steps. “How could they not feel anything?” I asked.
“Expectation. Social conditioning. A million other reasons. The question is, why do we?”
I closed my eyes and tried to envision a world in which I didn’t see the spectral blood flying. “Maybe as infants we were dropped on our heads.”
“Speak for yourself.”
We went back to the haunted office after our last subject had walked their uneventful grid. Darla paused beside Throat Bullet and went very still.
“He thinks he was set up,” she said. “Whatever that means.”
“Hold on, how do you know that?”
“Earth to Vic. I am a strong level four.”
“I’m not questioning whether or not you know it. I’m asking you how.”
She planted her hands on her hips and faced me. “Because he said so. How do you know he’s there?”
I watched the repeater take yet another bullet to the throat, considered letting on how much I actually saw, then nixed the whole idea. “Just a…strong impression.”
“Well, you know what would impress me?” She looked pointedly at her watch. “Going back to my hotel room, putting my feet up, and letting the FPMP order me the most expensive thing on the room service menu. Unless you’ve got anything more for me, boss, I’m calling it a day.”
Chapter 7
Jacob was home already by the time I pulled up in front of the cannery. Normally I’d make a smart remark about him clocking out on time for once, but frankly, I wasn’t feeling it. Darla heard the repeater? The details she’d given were a hell of a lot more precise than the nebulous, “I sense a presence” horseshit you’d get from a table-rapper out to plunder your wallet. Not only gender and location, but the foreign language bit that even I didn’t know about until I matched the repeater to a photo of a missing Russian spy. I picked up on audio repeaters once in a blue moon, but Darla had hit two out of three without any guidance on my part.
Jacob was sitting at the dining room table staring off into space. Either he was thinking, or an alarming crack had appeared in our masonry. I checked the wall. Looked fine to me…then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d stared at something overly long because he was too proud to wear glasses. I even ended up grabbing him a pair of cheaters, which I left on the coffee table in hopes he’d break down and use them. But I supposed those were just for reading, not distance. I hung up my coat and told him, “I have absolutely no idea how to rate a potential medium.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” he said blandly. As it registered that he’d given me a patently un-Jacob-like response, he touched my forearm to signal that if we had anything important to say, we’d best say it where random electronic listening devices wouldn’t overhear us. I put my coat back on again, and we headed to the big supermarket.
I’m not sure exactly how much privacy there is in public places. After all, it would be easy enough to bribe or coerce a faceless corporate entity into letting you plant all the bugs you want. But we figured that crowded spots would at least provide some camouflage.
Jacob grabbed a cart and strode to the coffee aisle with great purpose, stepped up to the bulk bins, filled a bag, dumped it into the grinder and hit the button. It was obnoxiously loud…in fact, it was perfect. But before I could start ruminating about mediumship, he brushed his lips against my ear and said, “What do you know about Andy Parsons?”
Other than my immediate and visceral dislike of good old Officer “Andy”?
“Not much,” I admitted. “Why?”
“Someone’s been sending bizarre anti-FPMP manifestos to the press.”
“That can’t be good.” I watched coffee tumbling into the bag. “Possessed?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“And you’re thinking it’s Andy.”
“I’m not sure. We’ve got a guy in the news agency who intercepted it before it got out. He recovered a printed document, someone trying to cover their digital trail by using paper. What they didn’t know was that FPMP printouts are traceable. The printers at headquarters stamp the documents with a watermark that looks like a fleck of toner if you don’t know about it.”
The stream of freshly ground coffee ebbed, and the loud grinding noise slowed, then stopped. I filled another sack with beans, then dumped them into the hopper. As I did, Jacob fit himself against my back and spoke into the tender spot behind my ear. “I traced it to the printer. Parsons shares it with three other agents—and it could be any or all of them. But Parsons went out to lunch today and didn’t come back.”
His words buzzed against my skin and made me tingle in all the right places. I bumped him off me with my shoulder blade and said, “Careful, Mister, or you might cultivate a weird kink we’ll both regret.”
He eased back, marginally. “I was hoping you’d have some insight since you worked with him at the Fifth.”
“Only that he was nowhere near as slick as he thought.” I pulled down another stream of coffee beans so it was ready to go when the current batch was ground. “Let’s say it was him, and not a stowaway ghost. This information is so newsworthy that he was willing to trade his career for it?”
Jacob sighed against the back of my neck. I slipped a hand inside my overcoat to rearrange myself. The grinder stopped, and I poured another sack down the chute. When the noise-cover resumed, Jacob said, “A psychic conspiracy that goes back decades.”
“So, when he asked me about Stargate…I take it he wasn’t talking spaceships.”
“That’s the program officially on the record—it was all part of the arms race of the seventies. The Soviets supposedly had a remote viewer, the
US decided they needed to get in on that action. They didn’t realize that all the training in the world couldn’t help someone without the intrinsic clairvoyant ability. The program was a bust—maybe it was just too far ahead of its time. The Army declassified all the particulars, but the things Parsons was hinting at were a lot darker. Not the Army, but the FPMP.”
“I thought F-Pimp wasn’t even a thing until after the Ganzfeld experiments.”
“He alleged the FPMP has been working in the background for nearly half a century, since the Cold War, using genetic manipulation to make super-spies.”
Funny, I could still remember a time when that would’ve sounded like the plot of a comic book, or maybe the raving of a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, I’d be surprised if it didn’t have some basis in truth. Either way, the FPMP gag-order policy was clear, and whoever was telling tales might as well kiss their Lexus goodbye.
Of course, that concern didn’t stop Jacob and me from working off our frustrations together. As soon as we got home, we dropped eight pounds of freshly ground coffee on the kitchen counter and stripped out of our black suits, grappling and kissing and nailing each other with serious eye contact. Jacob is a knockout when he smiles, but his smoldering good looks are even hotter when he’s all intensity and hard-edged focus. I never really wanted to be a telepath, but right then, I wished that the two of us could talk, mind to mind in our own safe cocoon, and no one else privy to the things we needed to share.
Somehow, we made it upstairs and fell into our bed, me on my back and him straddling one leg to flatten me into the mattress. He rubbed his hard-on to life in the crook of my thigh. I fumbled a lube out of the nightstand and gave him a few slippery strokes, and before I knew it, that old familiar hardness was nudging toward my back door. My knees fell open as my whole body went limp, readying itself to be used.
I never was keen to be the guy that just lays there and lets someone else do all the work, but sometimes it seemed like my utter surrender pushed Jacob’s buttons as much as any clever new gyration. He buried himself in me, over and over, merciless and deep. I slipped a hand between us and pumped my dick in time with his thrusts. As one, we labored toward our common goal. And after countless thrusts, we scaled that precarious height, then plunged to our release. Wordlessly. Together.
Agent Bayne: PsyCop 9 Page 5