by Thomas Locke
“A hunch.”
“I’m not sure that was smart. You saw how tight he was with the colonel.”
Reese noticed the security chief on the balcony overhead, waiting for her. She gave Jeff a thumbs-up. She asked, “Do you ever operate on hunches?”
“No.”
“When I was your age, I didn’t either.”
“You’re not that much older than me. You make it sound like we’re generations apart.”
Reese smiled at her reflection in the elevator doors. “You have no idea.”
Washington loved its labels. The more misleading, the better. The clinic with the comatose patients was designated the Treatment Room. Which was absurd. They had no idea what the patients’ problem was, there was no treatment, and the patients were not getting any better. Reese and Karla passed through another set of security portals and entered the area called the Departures Lounge. Who came up with these names, Reese had no idea. Although, if they were successful, this particular label might actually fit.
Reese would have preferred Launch Site. But Departures Lounge was better than some of the things they might have come up with. As in calling the subjects’ tight, windowless cells the Barracks. The kids would no doubt have some choice things to say about that.
The Departures Lounge was split into four rooms. There was no actual need for a reception area, but they had one anyway. Reese assumed it was a throwback to the days when security personnel manned front desks. But the electronic systems they had in place were more efficient. The security systems never got bored and harassed the female staff. They could not be bribed or slip away for coffee and restroom breaks. The electronic system operated to a series of very strict protocols. Every incoming individual was to be double scanned and checked against records. Any unauthorized access was to result in immediate and total eradication. No warnings. No mistakes.
The foyer opened into two rooms. To her right was the control room. The security chief waited by the left door. “Hanley phoned through. He’s on his way.”
She heard the question in his voice, and Karla’s sigh of displeasure. Reese said, “Meet him at the portal and code him in.”
“You’re the boss.”
Reese amended, at least for another two days. She asked Jeff, “They all here?”
“Ready and waiting.”
The room she entered held two rows of plush leather seats rimming the curved rear wall. The chairs faced across a carpeted expanse to a long bank of electronic displays and controls. Above them stretched a glass window. Where the window met the ceiling hung a row of flat screens. Karla slipped into the left-hand seat and fired up the controls.
The four kids she had picked up the previous week were clustered in one corner. Reese studied them carefully, looking for cracks. To her astonishment, the young woman had held up well. Consuela Inez stared at nothing. Which, Reese had decided, was a very good thing. The ones who made it back tended to start each transit with a period Reese secretly called changeover. They disengaged from one life, making room for another.
The youngest of the four, Eli Sekei, was the only one who appeared totally alert. He rocked in his chair, scoping the room. When he caught Reese’s eye, he grinned. This time, Reese responded with a tight smile of her own.
The other two kids had shrunk into themselves. They did not so much sit in their chairs as crouch. They cast repeated glances to the room’s other side. Where Reese’s team was gathered.
Team was probably too strong a word for the other seven. But her crew was better than nothing. A lot better. As in, the difference between getting dumped and having a future. A chance at attaining her real aim.
Reese pretended to study the seven who had made it this far, and made an effort to hide the hunger that threatened to escape. The desire strong as lust. The reason she was here at all.
Washington wanted a team to steal secrets.
What she wanted was the best-kept secret of all.
Kevin entered, followed by the security chief. Reese said, “Seal us in.”
The chief coded the wall keypad. Through the open door came the sigh of a pneumatic lock sealing the main entrance. Kevin Hanley’s gaze drifted upward as the air conditioning overhead shut down and then sighed back, operating now as a self-contained system.
Reese addressed her new group. “You have now all been through twelve transits.”
“Twelve!” The loudest of her seven was a computer geek and convicted hacker named Neil Townsend. The other four hackers who had made it called Neil the Goremaster. “We got six!”
“You’re lucky, dude.” The guy seated behind Neil was Corporal Joss Stone, a seriously buff former Marine with razor-cut features and enough death in his gaze to freeze the kids seated on the other side of the room. Joss sat next to the lone member of Reese’s security crew who had volunteered for the team and made it. So far. Joss said, “We got three.”
“This is new to all of us,” Reese said. “We don’t know if additional transits make any difference.”
“Twelve, fourteen, two hundred, you do whatever it takes.” Joss cast another look across the room. “Long as you bring Lolita over there back safe and sound.”
The crushed rose burned him from beneath long lashes. “The name is Consuela. Not that it’s any business of yours.”
“Sweet. Why don’t you dance on over here, Consuela. Give me some of that Cuban sugar.”
“Not in a million.” She tossed her hair. “Besides, this lady’s from Nicaragua.”
Joss kissed the air.
From his place on the front row, Eli said, “I seem to remember something about getting the keys to the kingdom.”
Joss snorted. “You fell for that one?”
“I didn’t fall for nothing, dude.”
“Whatever.”
Reese addressed the four. “The preliminary trials were designed to make you increasingly accustomed to the experience of transiting. That phase is over. Today begins your real work. If you succeed, you get precisely what I promised.”
“Anything I want.”
“Yes.”
“I say the word, I get up and walk out the door back there.”
Reese looked at Joss. “Tell them.”
“Dude, you make it through today, there ain’t nowhere you’ll want to be but here.”
“I got a life, unlike some people.”
The Marine’s laugh was as sharp as the rest of him. “Man, you don’t got nothing, and you don’t even know that much.”
Reese said, “Karla.”
Her techie hit the controls, dimming the lights both in the Departures Lounge and in the room on the other side of the glass. A map flashed onto the screens rimming the ceiling. Reese said, “This is your destination.”
Neil snorted. “That old place?”
Reese told the four, “This is a palace inside Baghdad’s Green Zone.”
Neil’s whine was particularly invasive. “Why are you sending them back there? We already got that place down cold.”
Reese went on, “Inside the main ballroom, which you see here, is a safe. That is it there. As you can see, the safe door has been welded shut. Inside the safe is an envelope. Your job is to go to this room, enter the safe, read the sheet of paper in the envelope, and return back here.”
“This is nuts.”
Joss said, “Neil.”
“Don’t start on me. We did this—”
“You want me to put a sock in it for you, just keep it up.”
Neil slumped in his seat. “Boring.”
“That’s what I thought.” Joss waved a hand. “Go for it, boss lady.”
“This is not merely a test of your abilities,” Reese said. “This is vital work. The future of our program depends upon your being able to successfully achieve this task. Do this, and whatever you want, anything you want, is yours.”
Eli said, “Except no drugs, isn’t that what you said?”
“You do drugs, you can’t do this,” Joss said. “And once you
do this, man, you’ll know the same thing I do.”
“Which is?”
But the Marine had already turned away. “Sorry. I don’t talk about the field with recruits. You want the scoop, you come home with the goods.”
28
When Karla led the four new recruits next door, Reese said to her seven tested team members, “We’re still working on the attrition level.”
Joss said, “As in, why my buddies are out prone in the room down there.”
“I want a volunteer,” Reese said. “Somebody to monitor their transit.”
Neil said, “Is that possible?”
Reese glanced at where Kevin Hanley stood frowning by the back wall. “I have no idea.”
“So we could go out there, follow the wrong crew, and never come back?” Neil shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“You’ve all lost friends. We need to know why. Where do they go?” Reese gave that a beat. “If we track their progress, can we discover what’s going wrong? And if we find that out, can we bring them back?”
The final member of Reese’s team was the quietest person Reese had ever known. Elene Belote was a former mid-level CIA staffer and the oldest of the team, an operations analyst who had chafed at her desk, so much so that she had volunteered for a project that had neither name nor description attached. Elene was from a south Louisiana parish and spoke English with an accent that rang of shadowy bayous. “I’ll go.”
Kevin caught Reese by the coffee machine in the kitchen alcove off the front foyer. “Did I understand what that hacker said?”
“His name is Neil.”
“I want to know if it’s true. Have you already cracked that safe?”
The question confirmed Reese had been right to let him come. She hid her satisfaction in her cup. “Yes.”
“Your orders were to inform the colonel the instant you got inside that safe. Why in the world are you sitting on this?”
“That’s an interesting question, Kevin. Here’s another one. My assistant said I was taking a foolish risk, letting you in here. Is she right?”
Kevin shook his head. “What you really want to ask is, am I of any use to you.”
“I knew you were smarter than you looked.”
“Where did the technology for this project originate?”
“Not with us, if that’s what you’re asking. It was sold to us by one of the original research group. They have no idea we’ve obtained their technology. No one does, except the agency funding us, and now you.”
“So you stole it.”
“Actually, when we first learned about their work, we tried to shut them down. We failed. So yes. We used an inside source and stole their research. And we copied it. Do you have a problem?”
“No, Reese. There are times when ‘whatever means necessary’ actually applies. This is one of those times.” He glanced at the wall separating them from the Departures Lounge. “If it actually works.”
“It works.” Reese caught movement out of the corner of her eye. “Yes?”
Karla said, “We’re ready to go.”
“Two minutes.” She waited until the foyer was theirs, then went on, “This whole experiment was never about getting inside the safe.”
“Colonel Morrow has repeatedly stated—”
“The colonel is a parrot in a uniform. He’ll say whatever order is passed down from on high. You want an answer to your question, Kevin? Fine. Here it is. I don’t know what Washington is after. But even more important, I don’t know how far I can take this. What I do know is, there’s more at stake than reading some note in a Baghdad palace. And whatever that is, I want to have the answer for it before I walk into that Pentagon briefing.”
Kevin studied her. “You were right to trust me.”
Reese met his gaze. “Prove it.”
Reese knew it was against protocol to have her entire team observe these transits. And she didn’t care. Either she trusted them or she didn’t. Besides which, she had two further reasons for this inclusion. She wanted to build a tightly cohesive unit. And she wanted to develop a sense of normalcy within this core group. Perhaps someday when they’d discovered a way to stop losing so many subjects, her admin staff would want to volunteer themselves. It would be good to have team members who weren’t drawn from the more unstable fringes of society.
As she started to enter the main control room, Kevin asked, “Have you ever, you know, done it?”
Reese had no interest in ever discussing her own internal cauldron, or all the ghosts she could never confront. Which added cold force to her response. “You are here to observe. You don’t open your mouth. You don’t budge from your chair. You don’t make a sound. Is that clear?”
She turned away before he could respond. Karla Brusius cast Reese another of those looks, the one that said, This is insane, letting a stranger and possible enemy observe. Reese ignored her too. “How are the monitors?”
“All within the green, but number three is spiking on the heart rate.”
“I’m going to go down and have a word with them.”
“Are you sure that’s—”
“Open the door, Karla.”
Her number two unsealed the side door, and Reese took the stairs down to the transit room. The chamber was a muted cream color—floors, walls, ceiling, even the frames rimming the reflective glass windows to the control room. The control room was positioned half a floor higher, so that the monitors could observe all the subjects at once. Reese had never entered this room before a transit. But the loss of so many trial subjects bothered her a great deal more than she revealed.
The four trial subjects were laying twenty degrees off full prone in adjustable leather chairs. Padded straps were fitted around their waists and chests. These four were the youngest trial subjects they had yet used. Reese had no problem with their age. The vectors for a number of cutting-edge technologies were constantly shifting down the age scale. But laid out as they were, the four appeared both childlike and terribly vulnerable. Which was why she had insisted on coming down and speaking with them.
“We’ll start this the same way we have all your trial runs. I will count you up, then you will disengage and transit. I will hold you in the room here for final orientation. Then I will give you your destination. Five minutes later I will call you back.”
The youngest kid, Eli, asked, “Is five minutes enough?”
She knew she shouldn’t like this boy as much as she did. Their success rate hovered below 25 percent. Until they made it through the first real transit, Reese normally kept her distance. But something about Eli tugged at her heart. Especially now, strapped as he was in this chair. The room’s muted light masked his tattoos and made him look about twelve.
Reese replied, “Everything we have determined thus far suggests that time has no real importance.”
“You mean, like, we can control time?”
“Let’s leave these discussions until you return.” She included the others in her look. “And that is the key here. Our experience thus far shows this transit to be the real cutoff. Those who survive control their destinies.”
It was much too flowery a way to describe what happened. But she was shooting off the cuff here, and she wanted to have them identify the real goal. Which was, plain and simple, making it back.
Reese went on, “I want you to focus on one thing and one thing only. Each transit, the only voice you’ve heard through the earphones has been mine. One purpose of these trial runs has been to familiarize you with the need to recognize my call. It is vital that you remember this. Whatever you discover out there, whatever you face, follow my instructions and I will bring you home.”
With every other initial transit, at least one of the subjects had chosen this moment to bug out. Just go into a screaming fit, clawing at their straps like they were chains, demanding to be let out. Reese could see they were all very scared. But they also remained planted in their chairs. She allowed herself a tiny sliver of hope.
&nb
sp; “You heard what Joss said. There is nothing like the high of making a successful transit. You all have had a taste of this. Now it’s time to discover the real thing.” She gave that a beat, then continued, “The night we brought you in, you were on the road hunting death because the world you knew held no meaning. But that is a different world, and you are about to become different people. You have a purpose now. You were chosen for this project because you have trained yourselves not to fear death. You understand what most people in the world spend their entire lives running away from. You know that death is inevitable. You seek it. Not because you want to die. Because you want to overcome mankind’s deepest terror. Why? Because it gives you power. And that is what you will find out there today. A power that is all yours. Exclusively. A power that will transform a life you once called worthless into something that holds not just value, but potential.” She gave that a moment, then finished with, “Good luck, and good hunting.”
The transit room was large enough to hold a dozen chairs. Reese’s shoes squeaked softly as she crossed the padded floor to the rear left corner, where a fifth chair rested by itself. She looked down at Elene Belote and tried to put some genuine feeling into her voice. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” Elene’s voice was scarcely above a whisper.
“Your headphones will be on a separate line. I will count them up and instruct them to hold while I lead you through transit. Then I’ll send them off. After they’re on their way, I will give you instructions to follow and observe only. Do not approach.”
“Roger that.”
“If something does go wrong, your instructions will be clear. Go after them, but only so far as it is safe. At the first sign of danger, you return immediately. Is that clear? You do not go forward if you feel threatened in any way. I do not want to lose you.”
“That makes two of us.”
Reese patted her arm. “Stay safe. Come home.”
She exited the transit room and climbed the concrete stairs. The control room’s lighting seemed overbright. As she entered, Joss said, “I thought I’d been sent off on missions by the best. But that little speech you gave in there, that was top of the list.”