Call Me Jane

by Ryan Maitland

  Earl eyed my outstretched hand, apparently figuring out what I was doing, and hesitated.

  “Sorry,” I told him in a tone that told him I was not sorry, keeping my hand outstretched, “but I don’t feel comfortable leaving with a stranger without some kind of confirmation that he is who he says he is.”

  Earl shrugged in concession and took my hand in a firm grip.

  “Now then,” I started, half my attention on my immediate surroundings, while the other half flew into his head, looking at myself through his eyes. It was more than a little disorienting because it seems that Earl has a lazy eye… Earl was focusing on his left eye, but his right eye wandered off to the side, so he was still getting the visual information, but he wasn’t paying attention to it. Earl was used to this, but I was not. I hadn’t known about this the night before because he had been using both eyes as he stared at the business card.

  Rather than get sidelined by this, I pulled out of his head a little and tried to concentrate on his thoughts.

  “Now then,” I started again, after recovering a little, “are you really with the CIA?”

  “I am,” he said amiably. His thoughts were tight, focused, and did not veer to any tangents. From my experiences, to this point, this was somewhat unusual. Usually people’s thoughts were kind of all over the place, jumping from one new thought to another, while the main line of thought is on whatever they’re trying to focus on. Earl, though, was focusing on me while replaying some song or other in his head to fill in the time.

  “Do you intend to hurt me or take me to others who intend to hurt me?” I asked, next. I had been brainstorming questions to ask him all morning.

  “Nobody wants to hurt you,” he answered, his thoughts echoing this statement. “We will do all we can to keep from hurting you.”

  Here, his thoughts slipped a little. Right after he said this, he thought about how his superiors would have his head if I was hurt. He, apparently, considered me to be quite valuable.

  “Will you hold me prisoner or hinder my freedom in any way?” I asked, next.

  “We will not hold you captive,” he hedged. I could feel he was trying to be careful about his wording. His thoughts slipped, again, and the word ‘monitor’ came up.

  “Do you intend to tap my phone lines or otherwise spy on me?” I asked in response to this thought.

  Here, Earl smiled a little before admitting, “You got me! We’ll likely monitor you. I can’t tell you how we’ll do it, but now that you are known to us, we’re going to keep tabs on you.”

  I was actually less concerned about this than you might think. If anyone tried to break in to plant bugs, Peter and Wendy would watch them and likely disable the bug as soon as the people left, assuming they didn’t use the gravel in the driveway as ammunition to prevent them from getting in, in the first place. As for tapping the phone lines, I had already circumvented that particular measure with my little trick with Sarah’s bracelet.

  “Okay,” I finally told him. “I believe you. Let’s go.”

  “Glad to hear it!” he enthused, motioning me to his car, a black sedan.

  We drove for kind of a long time. I’m pretty sure we drove into Iowa City, though I wasn’t certain. Earl didn’t talk the entire time, though I pressed him about what he meant about ‘sensitives’ and ‘broadcasters.’ He finally parked in front of a tall, steel and glass, building. “We’ve rented a floor,” he told me by way of explanation before escorting me into the building.

  We got onto an elevator and went up, stopping on some floor I don’t recall. He escorted me to a windowless room that had a few people waiting there. From there, I was given test after test after test. Some of them were IQ tests, there was a personality inventory, and a questionnaire about my past.

  Then there was the test that must have been written by psychopaths…

  This test had questions like, ‘If you had to shoot one of your parents or a sibling, which would you pick?’ There was no third option! By the end of that particular questionnaire, I was fuming!

  Earl saw this and started chuckling! “Don’t worry, your fury over that test is totally natural!”

  “Are you trying to find out if I’m crazy or something?” I asked, glaring at him.

  “It shines a light into your thought process,” he clarified. “Tells us about your loyalties and how easily you might be pressured to act against your interests or ours.”

  “Are we done, now?” I asked, ready for this to be done and over with.

  “The tests and questionnaires are done now,” he told me, taking a seat opposite me. “They’re mostly a formality, though. When I told my bosses what you did last night, they practically started salivating!”

  “Because you want me to spy for you…” I stated, dejectedly. By this point I was leaning heavily away from taking any offer they might make.

  “Because you’re a once in several lifetimes find!” he refuted, leaning in. “Usually the people we find are strong broadcasters or strong sensitives. Nobody has ever heard of a strong broadcaster and strong sensitive! Many theorized it wasn’t even possible! Not only that,” he added, “but your hit rate is perfect! On both broadcasting and receiving! That never happens! Not even with our best sensitives!”

  “There’s those words again…” I muttered, resentful that I still wasn’t clear what he meant.

  Earl smiled at this before going into a speaking mode that earned him his name in this book. “Sensitives are those that are sensitive to energies or other cues in the world around us. Spookies, shrinkers, RVs, BBs, mentals, and mystics all fall in this category.”

  “I guess I get what you mean by sensitives,” I told him, more confused after his answer than I was before it. “But I don’t know those other words.”

  “We’ll get to them in time,” he assured me with a slightly condescending smile. “Then we have broadcasters,” he went on. “Broadcasters are those that can influence others around them, either consciously or subconsciously. These includes mesmers, glams, screamers, culters, and damsels.”

  I glared at him again, and he, again, assured me that we would get to it ‘later’…

  I sighed at this, then sat silent for what felt like a long time, but was likely less than a minute. “I don’t feel comfortable being a spy,” I finally confessed.

  “Oh?” he perked up. “What would you feel comfortable doing?”

  “I dunno,” I told him, realizing this was a lazy answer. “I helped find a little girl… maybe something like that?”

  He considered me a long moment before he made the connection. “That missing girl, Jessie… That was you?”

  “You didn’t know?” I asked, teasing him a little.

  “We didn’t make the connection,” he confessed. “We should have, but it seemed out of your wheelhouse. Of course, at that time, we thought you were only a sensitive… Finding soldiers… we can definitely work with that!”

  “Finding soldiers?” I asked.

  “We can ease you into this,” he amended. “We can start with POWs, if you want, and go from there.”

  “I’m going to get a choice?” I asked, more than a little surprised.

  This surprised him immensely!

  “Jane,” he told me gently, “you have all the leverage, here. We’d usually try to put some pressure on you, but you basically don’t have a past! You have basically zero paper-trail! The most we could do is threaten your friends, but then you wouldn’t cooperate, or you’d give us bad information! We’d rather avoid that.”

  With each statement, my surprise grew, until he finally admitted, “Jane, the agency wants you… badly. What’s more, we want to keep you from going somewhere else. I’ve been authorized to offer you an annual salary just to get you under a legal promise not to go anywhere else. On top of that, you’ll be paid for each mission you complete for us!”

  “Missions?” I asked, feeling overwhelmed.

  “We’ll get to those,” he promised. “For now, we’ll do our chec
ks, get the paperwork together, you know, dot our i’s and cross our t’s, that kind of thing.”

  He opened his file, flipping to a few pages that were clipped together, with some pages marked with small sticky notes. He passed the papers to me and explained that they were a binding contract where I agreed to work for the CIA, with an annual salary serving as a retainer, plus bonuses for each mission I completed for them. He told me that the contract, technically, said that all this was dependent on the outcome of the tests I had signed off on and completed just before, but in actuality, those tests were more for their records than anything else.

  I regarded them carefully, trying to read them over as best I could. One of the forms was a non-disclosure agreement forbidding me from speaking about these proceedings or any dealings I might have with the agency on punishment of imprisonment. That form intimidated me, which I think was part of the point.

  I considered rejecting the whole notion of working for them, but what Earl had said about missing or imprisoned soldiers gnawed at me… There were people that had volunteered to put their lives on the line for their country and were now trapped in conditions worse than I had had growing up… These people deserved better than they got. They deserved to come home to their families that loved and cherished them. They deserved my help.

  That had been the clincher… I signed the documents, much to Earl’s apparent relief, and passed them over to him.

  I felt like I was signing my life away…

  “Welcome to the CIA, Ms. Doe!” Earl beamed. “I look forward to working with you for many years to come!”

  Instead of shaking his hand, I leaned into the table, putting my head in my arms and groaning slightly. Somehow, this was not as comforting as he likely meant it to be.

  Sarah had said that she didn’t think I was meant for a quiet life… looks like she was spot on, much to my dismay…

  And that, dear readers, is how I started my career at the CIA…

  Chapter 21

  First Mission

  Over a month went by before I heard from Earl again. It was a chilly February and the weather seemed torn between a snowy winter and a brisk spring. By this time, most of the snow had melted, leaving my gravel driveway and lawn barren.

  “Jane! Jane!” Peter called, flying in to float in front of me as I worked on one of the unfortunate necessities of adulthood: taxes. As I struggled to make sense of what the government wanted me to do and getting annoyed that they couldn’t just have a computer on their end do it all for me, Peter told me of a man that was driving his car up the driveway.

  “I can stop him!” Peter declared, looking ready to pulverize the intruder.

  “Hold off until I find out who it is,” I commanded, getting up from the dining room table to head to the front windows.

  “It’s that man from before!” Wendy gasped, after sticking her head through the solid wood of the door.

  “What man?” I asked, coming closer to one of the windows.

  “The one that took you away for a long, long, time!” Wendy answered, scowling to show her disapproval of the man.

  “Earl?” I asked, trying to remember if there were any other man she might be referring to and coming up empty.

  Wendy shrugged in answer.

  Finally looking out the window for myself, I saw a black sedan and a man in a black suit and fedora fiddling with his phone as he got out of the car hefting a large duffel bag.

  “Should we stop him?” Peter asked, his face and tone making it apparent which answer he would prefer.

  “No!” I scolded, but after seeing their faces of surprise and disappointment, I amended, “but keep an eye on him, okay?”

  “Okay!” they both shouted in unison before giggling, looking all too eager to play one of their pranks on the man.

  I opened the door before Earl could knock, adding, “I saw you drive up,” to forestall his question. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve got some good news for you!” he declared, looking excited. “You passed your security check! I’ve got your first mission, if you’re interested!”

  “What kind of mission?” I asked, skeptically, while blocking the doorway to prevent him from coming inside.

  “Got a missing soldier,” he told me, sobering up. “We’d like your help in finding him. Naturally, we’ll pay you for your services.”

  His face was that of a man that would pay any price to find the soldier in question. His mood had started off jovial edging on goofy, but as soon as he got into what the mission was, he turned dead serious bordering on grim.

  I turned aside and gestured him inside, closing the door behind him. Once inside, he gaped at the size of the house, whistling softly.

  “The Magus foundation paid well!” he remarked quietly.

  “The house was on the cheap side,” I rebuffed, leading the way to the dining room. “It’s believed to be haunted.”

  “And is it?” he asked. “Haunted, I mean…”

  I turned on my heel, facing him to see if he was joking. He almost ran into me but stopped short.

  “Why would you ask that?” I demanded. I couldn’t see a government-type working for the CIA believing in ghosts.

  Peter and Wendy hovered close to him, looking ready to push him over. The room took on a slight chill as they took in heat in preparation. This was an oddity I had found between the kids and Benjamin. Benjamin could never move objects, and he never affected the world around him. Peter and Wendy, on the other hand, seemed to draw strength from different kinds of energy, like heat or electricity, right before they started their poltergeist activities. When the air grew cold or the lights started flickering, the kids were likely up to something, from rearranging knickknacks to moving furniture. The more kinetic energy was needed, the more power they absorbed.

  Earl looked at me for a long moment before asking, “Are you a spooky?”

  “Spooky?” I asked, dumfounded.

  “Can you see ghosts?” he clarified in a no-nonsense tone, searching my face.

  My look of utter surprise seemed enough of an answer for him as he explained, “You’re not the first spooky I’ve ever encountered! Being able to see ghosts is surprisingly common. From what we can tell, having a near-death experience can often do the trick. Same with hearing ghosts, for that matter…”

  “So, others can see and hear ghosts?” I asked, my voice a bare whisper.

  “It’s usually one or the other, not both,” he shrugged. “Why? Can you see and hear ghosts?” he asked, his face showing surprised joy.

  I shrugged in answer to him and continued leading him to the dining room.

  I hastily cleared off my frustrating attempt at figuring my taxes before turning back to Earl and telling him, “I’ll need something personal of the person you want me to find.”

  “I’ve got a sweatshirt and a toothbrush,” he informed me, setting the bag on the table and pulling out two plastic bags. Looking at what else might be in the bag, I saw a video camera and a tripod.

  “Are you going to film me?” I asked him, getting nervous.

  “I’d like to,” he replied, going for nonchalant, and getting closer than I thought he could, given the circumstances.

  “Who else is going to see it?” I asked, watching him dig out the tripod and setting it at one end of the long table.

  “Fewer than you think,” he told me cryptically. “Just a few of the top brass with clearance. They want to see what they’re paying for. Just pretend it isn’t here.”

  “Easier said than done,” I muttered under my breath, grabbing the two sealed plastic bags and sitting at the other end, opposite the camera.

  I opened the first bag, the one with the large, smelly, sweatshirt, and grabbed it in a few different places, trying to find a spot that gave me a good connection. I barely noticed the red light of the video camera indicating it was recording.

  The shirt was… okay… but not as good as I thought it would be. There was… static is the best way I can describ
e it. I was picking up the mind of a man, but there was also… someone else. Imagine two radio stations trying to play over each other, with hissing, cracks, and pops punctuating the two songs as they battle it out with each other. I tend to get something similar with any item that has significance to more than one person that handles it, like Mr. Fluffybutt. The difference between this sweatshirt and Mr. Fluffybutt is that the stuffed animal is like a bunch of stations all playing a different version of the same song, whereas the shirt was two stations playing different songs. With Mr. Fluffybutt, all the different stations harmonize into one beautiful whole, whereas the shirt was nothing but discordant noise to my senses.

  The toothbrush, on the other hand, was considerably better. I held it in my hands as if it was a tiny handle of a sword and I was able to slip right into a man’s mind. My first impression was one of dry heat, like I was slowly being barbecued. My skin felt grimy, like I had gone days or weeks without a shower. I felt some sweat drip into my eye, stinging me badly even as a head that was not my own, shook it off.

  The lighting was dim, but I could make out thick steel bars. The air stank of fear and human misery. A quick glance around showed that I was not alone in this room. I saw several others in the cage with me. All were garbed in the tan and black camouflage uniform of soldiers. They looked like they had been locked up for days or more, their skin starting to sag from starvation. The painful rumbling of my own stomach told me I was in the same boat.

  My wrists were painful from being tied behind my back. I could feel the plastic digging into my skin. Too weak to break out of them, I sat in the corner of the cage that offered me the best view of the guard assigned to watch over the prisoners. He was a man with dark skin, a bushy black beard, and light clothing. He was holding a gun that the mind I was in recognized as an AK-47, with the strap over his shoulder ensuring he couldn’t drop it even if he wanted to.

  I conveyed all this to Earl, who I think was sitting to my right. He might have been on the phone. I couldn’t tell, as I had my eyes closed, focusing all my attention on the poor soldier trapped in a cage.