The trip down took longer than she thought it would, grinding to a halt slowly. The doors slid open silently.
“Our video feed shows there’s no one there, Hell. You’re clear,” De Clerq told her.
Helen wasn’t taking any chances. If they could steal and manipulate video feeds so easily, so could the other side. She peered out and looked to the left and right quickly. Nothing. She stepped out.
“I’m in,” she said.
“We don’t have any feed that shows any activity described in your remote viewing session—nothing that would indicate the key.”
“It’s here,” she said.
She didn’t know how she knew. She just did. Maybe it was because the surroundings looked like what she’d seen during her RV session. This was the first time she was at the target location she’d been told to remote view. In her beginning CIA training sessions, an outbounder—an agent at the target area—would call in to confirm her observations, and in those later ones when she and the other candidates were given targets without a point of reference, such as a walk around what was an off-limit nuclear site in a foreign country, nothing could be confirmed firsthand.
There was an awareness in her that she was doing something entirely new in RV—checking up on her own vision and accomplishing the mission herself. She noted, with an objective calmness that was unfamiliar, that she should be excited that she’d been right so far. Yet she wasn’t.
Target objective not in hand yet, Helen.She had to get that electronic key to prove to those big shots waiting back home that she was right.
The corridor was brightly lit. She turned to the left of the elevator. “Can you see me?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
“So if I open a door and pop inside, and if you see me on your screen, that’s not the room.” The one she wanted was obviously not even privy to the surveillance room.
“That would seem so.”
“Just give me an affirmative if you see my image.”
“Gotcha. Our computer has correlated each monitored room to their building schematics. The first three rooms are empty and not the one you described. Are you going inside them?”
Helen pulled out the small handgun and attached a silencer to its nose. “No.” She knew what she saw and she was sticking to it. She walked past the first three rooms and turned the corner. “I see two doors to the left.”
“There’s only one monitored room.”
“First one or second?”
“First.”
“Going into the second room. If there’s someone there, I hope they’re friendly.”
She pulled on the handle and swung the door open, pointing her weapon straight ahead. Two people turned. One of them stood up at the sight of her, reaching inside his jacket.
“Was—”
“Scheiss—”
Helen never missed this close. She shot the one who’d stood and pulled a gun on her, hearing the muffled thud of the bullet hitting him in the chest as he crumbled to the floor even as she swerved and pointed her weapon at the other man who was staring at her with wide, afraid eyes. She glanced around quickly. Yeah, this was the room—same shelves, same desk, everything looked the way she had seen it. There were some things she hadn’t been able to discern in remote viewing, especially the exact arrangement and size of the room. The desk she’d seen was to the left; during her RV session, it felt as if it was in the center. That was to be expected since her focus was on the missing electronic key which was still attached to the some kind of device on the same desk.
She walked into the room and kicked the door shut with her foot. She kept her weapon on the man and waited till he raised his hands in surrender before speaking. “I see my target, Center. And I have one hostile down, another one being obedient for now.”
“Where’s the key?” De Clerq asked.
“It’s on the table, hooked up to a decoder, perhaps? I don’t know. How should I retrieve it?” She watched as her captive listened to her conversation and addressed him,“Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
The man nodded but didn’t say anything. Helen kept her weapon on him as she made her way toward the desk.
“Cancel him,” a voice suddenly said in her earpiece.
“What?” she asked, stopping at the desk. The side of the device had blinking numbers.
