Yeah, which one of you came to my room last night?Helen shook her head.Don’t go there now.“No, I’m very happy to make your acquaintance,” she drawled out in a Southern accent. “I’ve heard so much but never seen all of you together.”
It was true. For a team, these men didn’t seem to hang out together much. They liked their space too much, she figured. All wild beasts chained together by…by what? She wasn’t sure yet, but she was going to find out one of these days.
“How are you feeling?” Alex asked. “I read in the initial report that you’ve been attacked by several hostiles. And shot at.”
“Tranqued, actually,” Heath interrupted, “and she kept running.”
“So whoever that was waiting outside wasn’t there to kill her,” chimed in Shahrukh.
Helen took a good look at Shahrukh. Big Swimming Guy. This was the first time she’d seen him this close-up. Dressed in a light orange cotton Indian shirt with elaborate Eastern embroidery, he was the most exotic-looking man she’d met, with his longish wavy locks of black hair and fierce deep-set black eyes. As usual, an image of him wearing some kind of medieval leather armor and swinging a big broadsword floated into her mind. He spoke with a slight accent that she couldn’t place. Maybe Turkish, with that name.
“Then it’s someone who knows about our Hell,” Flyboy said.
Helen looked from one man to the other. Our Hell? She caught T.’s amused gaze. She really had to ask her chief how she’d dealt working with these beasts on her own all these years.
“It’s also someone who wants to stop our Hell,” Jed said.
Did she imagine it or was there just a slight note of mockery in that man’s small emphasis ofour?She was finding it difficult to keep her mind from wondering about each of these men because of last night. Well, she was human. Of course she was going to think about that!
However, she was also the newest “member” here. She had to at least give the impression that she could keep up with the boys without staring at each of them and trying to see them naked. She stared down at her notepad. Now why did she think of that? It immediately put her mind to feverish work. Not good, especially when—
“What’s your take on this, Agent Roston?” Jed asked.
Especially when she was expected to speak on serious matters. “Maybe they were testing me, too,” she muttered.
“And who are these ‘they’ that you have in mind?”
Helen glanced up at Jed McNeil sharply. Those weird silver eyes could be so unnerving to look at, especially if they looked back as if they knew exactly what she was thinking at that moment.
“These people appear to know about me, so I’m going to assume that they know about the experiment. If it’s not an insider, or someone who has somehow gotten leaked information, then it’s the other agencies,” she said.
“Oh great, you have to bring up all the agencies. That really narrows it down,” Jack Sullivan spoke up for the first time.
Helen shrugged. She had never talked to Sullivan, so she couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic. He looked the most normal of the whole group, actually. Not that average meant ugly or anything, not with that square jaw, boy-next-door attractiveness, and football-star build. He just looked like a regular American boy, with his backward cap and wrinkled flannel shirt.
“Just throwing out possibilities,” she said.
“We can narrow it down to agencies which have similar remote viewing programs,” T. said quietly. “I have something that’s of interest to Hell and Dr. Kirkland.”
Helen turned to her chief as the latter pulled out sheets of paper and passed them around. She frowned as she read the page given to her. She looked up when she was done. It was about the ring T. had taken back from her.
“The ring? An…energy alarm?” she asked.
T. nodded. “At GEM, we have info that years ago the CIA created energy alarms at some point during their remote-viewing program when they were fully funded that could detect the presence of remote viewers who might be spying on their meetings. I suppose they were paranoid after their own CIA-trained operatives were successful in penetrating other agencies. Intel has also shown that this paranoia was also present in other countries. We have quite a lot of information on the old KGB programs. They were also experimenting with high-tech energy deflectors. I’m sure Dr. Kasparov is familiar with early versions of it, if we ask him.”
“So according to your chart here, the ring you gave me was responsible for that seizure or whatever it was that happened in the stairwell?” Helen scratched the side of her forehead. Her head was actually aching a little from the memory of it. “It’s not the serum, then. But why didn’t you tell me?”
T. shook her head. “First, you shouldn’t have felt anything, Hell. It’s not an alarm system to warn the remote viewer. When the CIA had it installed in their secret rooms, it acted as a deflector. They’d tested it with their own remote viewers at that time. None were able to get enough information about the meeting when it was happening or ‘see’ the room the usual remote-viewing way, according to the papers, and none reported any seizures or reaction like the one you had. This test was repeated several times through the years, and other than a good success rate of blocking out unwanted entities in their meetings, there were no reports of it being a health hazard to the CIA viewers.”
“Okay, my RV classes must have forgotten to warn me about energy alarms,” Helen said. “You’re telling me that these things can stop me, too, and yet they didn’t try this on us when we were training?”
“No, she didn’t say that,” Alex Diamond cut in. “Tasha’s only affirming the fact that the CIA had a good success rate of blocking out unwanted entities in their meetings at that time.”
Her chief’s blink of surprise didn’t escape Helen’s notice. Why did Alex still refer to her as Tasha, when she was Tess now? Tasha was just one of T.’s many personas.
“So what’s wrong with my logic that it can stop me, too?” Helen countered.
“Because the CIA never established the fact that they’d stopped any other remote viewers except their own,” Alex said. “If they did, Tasha would have said so in this report, isn’t that right, T.?”
