Trial Run

by Thomas Locke

  Trent nodded. Crazy as it seemed, uncomfortable as it felt to spend the money, he understood. “So what’s the other big reason for us being here?”

  “The lady said you’re going to have another experience tonight. I’m not missing that. I’m also assuming your room at the university doesn’t have space for me.”

  “There is no way,” Trent said, “you will ever see where I live.”

  “That’s what I thought. And I doubt my roomie would be very excited over you doing your thing on her floor.” She pushed her chair back. “You want to have a closer look at the lady’s bag of tricks?”

  The instructions were both precise and explained almost nothing. Shane was to put on the earphones and lay down. The iPod contained a new app marked simply by an X. Shane was to key that app and shut her eyes. She needed to be alone. She would hear an auditory program that would introduce her to a meditative state and a specific set of experiences. She would be guided by instructions embedded in the program. She would remain in total control and could stop this at any time.

  Shane was tempted to try the thing then and there. But she decided, “Maybe we should wait.”

  “Whatever you decide is fine.”

  “One mind-bending phenomenon at a time.” Shane turned the iPod over in her hands. “Do you think this might give me experiences like what you’re having?”

  Trent shook his head. “I’m still trying to get used to the idea of a woman I’ve never seen before walking over and telling me about things going on inside my head.”

  There was a double bed in the suite’s only bedroom. Trent insisted Shane take that and made a pallet for himself on the living room floor. He was already laying down when Shane emerged from the bathroom. She wore an oversized T-shirt from the hotel’s gift shop. With her face washed and her copper hair hanging free, Trent thought she looked like a pixie.

  Shane gave him a very solemn look and said, “I don’t have to worry about you, do I.”

  “Not now,” Trent replied. “Not ever.”

  “I knew that. I just needed, you know.”

  “You needed to put it out where we both could see it.”

  Shane danced across the room and bounced into bed. She propped up a second pillow so she could look down at where he lay. “Anything?”

  “I’m still awake.”

  “Just checking. I wonder if I’ll know. A beam of light from above. Green aliens flitting around your pillow. Something like that.”

  “I think other people in the graduate dorm might have noticed.”

  “You never know. They might have figured it was just another student flying off to the OD Corral.” She studied him for a time, then said, “Okay. Go ahead and ask.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’ve moved beyond phase one here. It’s time to let you ask your questions.”

  “Anything?”

  She crossed her arms. “Within reason.”

  Beyond the open balcony doors, the night continued to buzz with unfamiliar sounds. Trent thought he caught a whiff of her fragrance, soap and toothpaste and fresh hopes. “Will you tell me about your family?”

  “My parents were killed in a freeway pileup when I was fourteen and my sister was ten. We were split up and got bounced around the foster care system for about six months.”

  Trent forced himself to stop thinking about her being there in the bed and listened intently to what she was saying. “I’m really sorry, Shane.”

  “Thanks. It was awful for me, but worse for my sister. She’s never talked about what happened. But she came back a different person. Twisted up inside.”

  “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Billie.” Shane reached behind her and punched her pillows into submission. Then she lay flat and said to the ceiling, “My aunt finally won custody. We were never that close. When we were young, family gatherings were battlegrounds. And my sister was a real handful. But Aunt Emily saw us both to eighteen.”

  “Where is your sister now?”

  “Still in Bakersfield. That’s where my aunt lives.” Shane was quiet for a time, then, “Billie never made it out. Now she’s just counting the days, withering on the vine.”

  Trent nodded to the shadows made by the streetlights. He realized she could not see him, so he said, “I understand that all too well.”

  Shane reached over and cut off the light. “I don’t want to talk about my family anymore.”

  “I totally understand.”

  The silence lasted long enough for slumber to emerge from the corner shadows and creep across the room to where Trent lay. Then Shane whispered from the other room, “Anything?”

  “Good night, Shane.”

  39

  Trent had no idea when it happened. Only that afterward, everything had changed.

  His shout had woken Shane. Now she sat on the couch, watching him with a wide unblinking gaze. She had the blanket from her bed wrapped around her. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I don’t want to sit. I want to pace.”

  “Fine. So pace.”

  “You can’t imagine how nice it is to have the room to pace. It’s worth wasting six hundred dollars to have room to move around. I live in a dorm room the size of a packing crate. The flies don’t have room to pace.”

  “We didn’t waste anything.”

  He swatted the air. “That’s inconsequential. I went to bed as one guy, and I wake up and I’m in a different dimension. A different universe.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  “Tell me again.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I’m only asking because I’m pretty spooked by the whole thing.”

  Trent kept stalking from one end of the room to the next. “The image started the same as every time before. The same nightmare.”

  “You never mentioned a nightmare before.”

  He didn’t want to answer. But the words flew out of their own accord. “I was eight. My mom was in the trailer where we lived. She was keeping company with a bad guy. We’re talking seriously evil.”

  “Wait, you’re telling me this really happened?”

  Trent dragged down the collar of his T-shirt, revealing a deep crevice at the point where his neck joined his shoulder. “That real enough for you?”

  “What is that?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “He shot you?”

  “Shot us both.”

  “Oh, Trent.”

  He let the collar slip from his fingers. “I’ve had the nightmare for so long it doesn’t bother me anymore. Well, it does, but not a lot. After each nightmare, the scar burns when I wake up. Then it fades with the memory.”

  Shane slipped from her cocoon. She pulled the blanket off his pallet. Draped it around his shoulders. “Come over and sit down.”

  “I don’t want to.” He sounded petulant to his own ears.

  “I know. Do it for me.” She settled him down, wrapped him up tight, then slipped back into her own nest. She turned to face him. “So you had the nightmare.”

  “Then I was back again in the classroom. Seated at my desk on the corner of the dais. And the older me is there at the blackboard. He doesn’t speak, just starts his projector—”

  “Sorry, the what?”

  “That’s my name for it. A three-dimensional image system. It just hangs in the air between us. And every time I see a new image, it feels like nuclear fission.” He clenched his fists and pounded his thighs. “Only this time, I see myself destroying my doctoral research. Demolishing two years of my life, then walking away.”

  He looked at her. And whatever it was he saw in her face was enough to launch him from the sofa. It was either pace and rage at the night, or weep. “But that wasn’t the worst. It was how calm he was. He smiled at me. Like this was nothing.”

  Shane watched him make another pair of crossings. “Then what?”

  “Then he wrote out another formula on the board.”

  “
Do you think maybe you should write it down before you forget?”

  Trent choked on a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I never forget anything.” He fought with the air before his face. “I feel like I’m trapped again, just like the bad old days. Once again I’m stymied by life. They dress it all up by using a mirror image to hand me this myth of freedom. But they’re still thieves, and I’m still getting robbed.”

  “Partner, I’m trying hard as I know how to understand. But it seems to me that you’re forgetting one big thing here. You’ve just been handed chapter three in our corporate saga.”

  He rounded on her, so tightly furious he hardly saw her at all. “You’re saying I should just admit defeat? Give in to this bait and switch? Sacrifice two years of my life so I can parasite off this stuff from another galaxy?”

  Shane studied him. “You think this is coming from aliens?”

  Trent stared at the carpet, breathing hard. “I never yell.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I got all the yelling I needed growing up.”

  Shane smiled. “So now you’re saying I’m this great influence, bringing back all the worst of your early years?”

  “Oh, no.” When he looked at her, it seemed to Trent as though she was illuminated from within. “You’re the only reason I’m sure this whole thing is even partly good.”

  40

  Kevin greeted Reese with, “The colonel ordered me to join you today. It’s not my idea. I just want you to know that straight up.”

  Reese had taken the red-eye from LAX straight into Reagan National. Kevin had left the previous afternoon. He’d received an urgent summons while they were still scoping downtown Santa Barbara for the blonde ghost. He’d departed an hour later by private jet.

  Reese asked, “Do I want to know why?”

  “I was flown over for some high-powered conflab on encryption and national security.” Kevin pointed her toward an olive-green sedan waiting at the curb and followed her into the rear seat. “Imagine my surprise when I’m pulled out of the meeting by a call from Murray Feinne.”

  Reese guessed, “Trent Major has come up with another concept?”

  “The best so far.”

  “You don’t sound pleased about it.”

  “The kid has another algorithm. Specifically designed for code breaking.”

  “Which you receive while sitting in a meeting about that very same thing. Spooky.”

  “My team is supposed to be the best out there. Then here comes this kid. Not only is his work miles ahead of where we are. But he’s fast.” Kevin ground his heel into the sedan’s carpet. “It’s impossible, is what it is.”

  “So he’s getting help.”

  “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.” Kevin looked more than grim. He looked dangerous. “I offered him a job. His own lab. Signing bonus. A team to work for him. The kind of deal a young postgrad could only dream of. Trent Major turned me down flat. Wouldn’t even discuss it. The people I’ve been seeing are convinced he won’t come in because he’s getting fed this stuff by the outside. Moving into space we control would reveal his sources.”

  Reese realized where this was going. “You let them in on Elizabeth Sayer’s sudden appearance?”

  “I had to. I want to wrap this kid up.” Kevin looked at her. “Trent Major has shaken my world.”

  Reese understood with a pro’s clarity. “Now the colonel wants to know how my enemies are your enemies. He’s using this as another reason to shut us down. He thinks I’m potentially breaching your security.”

  “He didn’t actually say that. But I’m fairly certain you’ve pegged him to the board with your first dart.”

  The cherry blossom season was long gone. The parks lining the 395 were framed by minty green. Reese seldom noticed California’s largely monochrome landscape until she was somewhere else. She sighed. “Swell.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’ve done my best to make an end run around Colonel Morrow. We’ll soon know whether I’ve had any . . .” Kevin frowned at a passing sign.

  Reese asked, “What’s the matter?”

  Kevin leaned forward and addressed the driver. “Corporal, you’re in the wrong lane.”

  “No, sir. I am not.”

  “This will take us over the Fourteenth Street Bridge.”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Our meeting is at the Pentagon.”

  “Sorry, sir. The location of your conference has been shifted.”

  “Where are you taking us, Corporal?”

  “Sir, my orders are specific. Deliver you to your destination in no time flat.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you.”

  “Sir, I am very good at following my orders.”

  Reese watched the road rise above the Potomac. In the distance she could make out the towers of the Smithsonian castle. They crossed the river and headed down Fourteenth Street. When Reese had first come to Washington as a teen, Fourteenth Street had been one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. Fourteenth and U was the capital’s den of iniquity. Drugs, hookers, guns for hire, it was all there. Then the city spent a ton revamping the whole district. Now it was known as the U Street Corridor. The yuppies and the power groupies crammed the sidewalks.

  “Are we headed where I think we are?” Reese asked.

  Kevin nodded slowly. “It appears our meeting has been shifted to the center of the universe.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  He directed his shrug to the side window. “We’ll soon find out.”

  The soldier deposited them outside the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the Old Executive Office Building. The wedding cake structure was attached to the White House by an underground concrete umbilical cord and the restricted parking area for the president’s limos and his official guests. Colonel Mark Morrow waited for them just inside the OEOB entrance. He wore a formal dress uniform, his vast array of medals as imposing as his scowl.

  The colonel greeted Kevin without taking his gun-barrel gaze off Reese. “Glad you could make it, Hanley.”

  “What are we doing here, Colonel?”

  The officer offered Reese a predator’s smile. “It appears Ms. Clawson’s crash-and-burn exit is about to become an extremely public event.”

  A young blank-faced bureaucrat stepped forward and handed them badges on cords. “Wear these at all times, please.”

  Once they had signed in and passed through security, the young man led them up a flight of cracked marble stairs and down a long corridor. The hallway was wide as an avenue, a throwback to a different era. The marble tiles were grooved by a century and a half of use. Reese tried not to be impressed, but the place was designed to impose. They were led into a conference room overlooking trees of springtime green and the pearl-white palace beyond.

  A small woman sat at the head of the oval table. She was in her late fifties and wore a civilian-style suit of midnight blue. Reese doubted she weighed more than ninety pounds. Her hands looked fragile as a small bird’s claw. But her stature was rigidly erect, her grey-brown hair cropped tight to her skull. Her skin was taut across her features, her lips nonexistent. Her expression was military in its severity. She read from a stack of files. Otherwise the conference table was empty.

  The young man shut the door, walked to the corner behind the woman, seated himself, and vanished in plain sight.

  The woman said, “Have a seat, everyone.”

  “And you are?” the officer said.

  “Just a witness to the execution, Colonel.” She initialed a page, shut the file, set it aside, opened another. “Carry on.”

  “Am I not allowed to ask your name?”

  “I’m here representing the people who pull your people’s strings. That’s all you need to know.” She waved the hand holding the pen. “This is your baby, Colonel. Rock away.”

  Reese walked around the table and put the view behind her. The last thing she wanted was the
White House as a distraction. Kevin hesitated, then walked over and joined her. The move said a lot about the man’s character. Most Washington types would flee the scent of fresh carrion. Reese did not look his way. But what she thought was, I owe you one.

  The colonel seated himself, opened his file, said, “Before I shut you down, Clawson, review for us exactly what it was you were supposed to be working on.”

  There was no logical reason for Reese to feel any sense of hope. The unnamed woman had not even glanced her way. The colonel sat across from her, watching her with the expression of a satisfied executioner. Even so, Reese was fairly certain the show was not over. Not by a long shot.

  She said, “We are studying a potential cross between telepathy and teleportation.”

  “Well, which is it supposed to be?”

  “Both,” Reese replied. “And neither.”

  The colonel turned to the woman seated at the table’s far end and said, “Exactly the sort of answer I’d expect from this project. Nothing but smoke and mirrors.”

  The woman’s pen scratched through a line. She wrote something in the margin. Signed the bottom. Shut the file. Did not look up.

  Reese said, “A telepath can read minds. My team can’t do this. A teleporter would transfer their physical body from one place to another.”

  “Which your group can’t do either.”

  “No.”

  “So remind me why I was ordered to waste my time with you at all.”

  “Our stated objective was to achieve a measurable extension of conscious awareness beyond the body’s physical confines.”

  “Which you haven’t done.”

  Reese did not respond.

  “There was a specific test designed for your team,” Colonel Morrow said.

  Reese reached into her pocket. “That’s right.”

  “A message was put in an envelope. The envelope has your name on it. The message was set inside the communications safe in the US embassy in Baghdad. The safe was then sealed. Your team was ordered to read that message. And report back.”