Secret Legacy (6 page)

“The elders know she’s capable of projection beyond Metting’s control. You won’t get another chance.”

“Of course we will,” the voice insisted. “The dream
patterns are in place. Her psychic strength is growing. Metting will champion her legacy. The council will be greedy enough to want more power at their command. Alpha is primed to reach for Trinity without Madeline to stabilize her. Once she does, the direction of the Temple Legacy will return to the center for good.”

“Control will return to the child, you mean.”

A circumstance he couldn’t allow to happen. Nor could he permit the Temples’ abilities to grow any further beyond Watcher safeguards.

“The child’s actions are under our guidance,” the voice assured him. “Her devotion to the work she’s begun is unshakable. Her motivation is strong, if a bit immature. She’ll handle Alpha’s impending psychic break as skillfully as she’s caused it. Trinity will be ready to take advantage when Sarah herself initiates their next dream contact.”

“ ‘The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world . . . ,’ ” he quoted.

He swallowed his disgust at his own part in using a six-year-old girl to wage psychic battle.

But Metting had lost his perspective. He’d left the Brotherhood irreparably vulnerable. If that meant staging a center victory in order to draw the Brotherhood into a battle they’d already have won if Metting had allowed the twins to be terminated along with Tad Ruebens—then so be it.

“We’re making the world a safer place for all children,” insisted his center contact.

This was the same shortsighted idiot who’d believed a Watcher could be lured into betraying his brothers with promises of fortune and a position of power within
the government’s psychic testing program. For now, he’d play along. But he had his own agenda, no matter the sacrifice.

“Realigning the twins with Trinity’s maturing abilities,” his contact said, “creates the capacity to protect all the world’s innocents from whatever evil strikes. The Temple Legacy’s promise can’t be allowed to languish because your council is too timid to take advantage of their potential.”

The Temple Legacy had foretold of the arrival of psychic twins whose gifts would preclude the arrival of an even more powerful mind—Trinity’s. Augmenting the twins’ psychic abilities with Trinity’s mastery of Dream Weaver technology would allow the center to implant lucid daydreams into any subject’s mind. Those untraceable commands could then be remotely triggered, inducing behavior—from forcing someone to wear a color they hated to compelling her to bring a gun into a crowded mall and open fire. The subject would be completely powerless to stop her programming and would have no memory of its source.

His contact’s rhetoric about protecting innocents was a cover for the center’s real objective—long-range weaponry, where any mind, anywhere, could become a government-targeted time bomb. And with the Temples fully under center control, the government would have secured an unstoppable mechanism for breaching other legacies like theirs. Other legacies that had just been exposed.

For the safety of humanity, Sarah’s and Madeline’s and Trinity’s minds had to be silenced for good.

“Just make sure,” his contact instructed, “your council
allows Sarah Temple to continue her dream work. It’s time for you to earn your keep. Make it happen.”

“Then my advice is to solidify the link between Sarah’s consciousness and Trinity’s as soon as possible. Metting’s going to be on a short leash. Even if the elders agree to risk another episode like today, their patience will be at the breaking point.”

“As I said,” the voice agreed, “everything is proceeding exactly as planned.”

“I felt something in Sarah’s dream,” Richard said to his second-in-command. He and Jeff had just arrived at the Brotherhood’s secure surveillance location in the woods surrounding the center’s main complex. It was less than an hour since Sarah’s dream, and Richard’s system was still battling the toxic aftereffects of the projection. “Something organized. Planned. It was the same consciousness that was trying to trap her in the dream. whatever it was, it’s not here.”

A mile to their left, a stretch of Massachusetts highway was a daily conduit for suburban commuters who spent a quarter of their waking life driving to and from Boston. But the center’s ten-year-old facility had been constructed at the heart of a thousand acres of government-owned property that was kept under constant surveillance.

Jeff’s finger went to the communicator clipped around his ear, adjusting his reception of the intel streaming from the bunker’s command center.

“Are you saying you sensed the source of our leak in the nightmare?” he asked.

“It wasn’t looking for Brotherhood intel,” Richard
answered. “It wanted Sarah, and it wasn’t happy when Madeline and I showed up to get her out.”

“You completely sure?”

Richard sighed. Being completely sure of anything could get a warrior killed.

“You should have let me deal with her,” Jeff said. “Seeing Sarah’s hands around your neck was enough to convince me that she’s a risk we can’t continue to take.”

“How would that have benefited the Brotherhood? Her mind is our only connection to whatever the center may be using Dream Weaver to do.” Richard stared at the complex through the leafless oaks, silently willing the building he’d infiltrated a year ago to reveal its secrets.

“You didn’t win yourself any points with the council. You should have alerted them as soon as her rogue dream started.”

Richard kept his mind tuned to the forest’s energy and to his faint connection to Sarah. “I’ve given them even more reason to question my loyalty to my oath.”

“Should they question it?”

“No.”

He’d proven his allegiance to his Brotherhood long ago. When he’d had to choose between following his parents’ misguided use of his gifts or helping stop them. His fight for Sarah’s chance to embrace her legacy didn’t change his commitment to the path he’d chosen on that fateful night.

“You have our reports.” Mike Donovan, the surveillance team’s lead, approached from Richard’s other side. “Nothing’s been missed here.”

“Your intel is in order.” Richard refocused on the task at hand.

Donovan’s team had detected no traces of psychic activity at the center, either while Sarah was dreaming or when the Brotherhood’s two satellite teams were exposed. Meanwhile, an energy spike had registered off the charts at an unmanned surveillance site on the other side of the state. A deserted but strategically significant location the Brotherhood couldn’t afford not to investigate.

Every Watcher team not currently entrenched in a level-one mission had been recalled pending further orders, all but the recon team the council was staffing to fly out within the hour. A team Richard had yet to be placed in charge of. Instead, he’d been directed to make a final, hands-on determination about the need for further observation at the center, to return to the bunker to debrief Sarah about her nightmare, then to advise the council on how to deal with the chaos his continuing dream work with the Temples was causing.

He turned toward a child’s distant cry making its way to him on the late-night breeze.

“You want a read from the inside?” Jeff asked.

Richard had helped vet a center infiltration plan the Brotherhood had yet to execute. After his time within the complex posing as Dream Weaver’s project lead, he knew every access point to the facility. How to disarm every sensor. There were hidden passageways and unmarked entrances to labs and storage rooms that he alone was aware of.

“They’d know we’re coming,” he said.

“What?”

“I can feel it.”

“And you’re sure of this how?” Jeff asked.

Richard wasn’t ready to admit that Sarah’s mind,
though momentarily sedated, was still speaking to him. That through their link, he somehow knew that making a move on the center tonight would be a mistake.

“Call it gut instinct,” he said. “We’re not going to find any answers here, not now. And they’re waiting for us to try. That gives them the victory before we step one foot inside.”

“You can’t go to the elders with nothing but your gut,” Jeff warned. “The council wants answers that will end this mess with the lowest possible body count, while keeping our other legacies intact.”

“Messes have a way of ending bloody whenever they damn well please.” Richard closed his eyes and listened to the sound of a lost child crying and an angry ocean laughing in victory. “We need the twins’ minds functioning and open to cooperating with us so we can understand what’s threatening the Brotherhood through them.”

“Are you ready to explain to the council exactly how you’re planning to guarantee Sarah and Madeline’s cooperation?”

“No.”

He’d promised Sarah they’d save Trinity. Following through on that pledge would garner her further cooperation with the Brotherhood, but the answers they needed to get the job done were still trapped inside her mind, memories that she refused to analyze. And she still didn’t trust Richard. Not enough to let him guide her back to her past, or forward into another pass through her ocean dream.

He headed toward their Jeep, leaving tracks in the damp ground that would be covered in frost come sunrise.

“Pack it up,” Jeff said when Donovan fell in step beside them.

“Is the council sending in a new surveillance team?” the younger lieutenant asked. Questioning his superiors was a breach of protocol, but Richard approved of his enthusiasm to understand tactical command strategy.

“No.” Jeff’s unfriendly stare discouraged additional questions as he and Richard opened their doors.

Donovan’s hands snapped behind his back. He silently awaited further instruction.

“Manned surveillance at this site is shut down,” Jeff said. “Leave your equipment here, battle shields in place.”

“Battle?” Donovan blurted. He checked himself this time, his “at ease” posture becoming more rigid. His gaze dropped to the ground.

“We’re to assume we’re under psychic attack until further notice,” Richard answered, cutting the kid some slack. “Monitoring the center’s stronghold won’t buy us anything until we know how they’re projecting center programming into Sarah Temple’s mind.”

“We have to assume they aren’t doing it from here,” Jeff added. “And we can’t send in a team to confirm until we can weaken the complex’s strategic advantage.”

Donovan nodded, his eyes narrowing as he absorbed the information. “Identify plans, alliances, weapons,” the newly trained Watcher recited, “before attacking an adversary.”

It was the progression of tactical warfare all Watcher recruits were taught. Battles could be lost along the way without conceding defeat, as long as an army’s priorities were clearly defined and set and implemented, regardless of the enemy’s progress toward their own goals. It
was the same logical path Richard had tried to follow while he worked with Sarah. Except she’d never been his opponent, and logic had never been all she really needed from him.

“Report back to the bunker once you’re done here.” Richard slid behind the wheel, leaving Donovan to disengage his team and eradicate the evidence that anything besides woodland creatures had set foot on the surveillance site. “The council needs you for a new objective.”

Jeff’s door shut soundlessly. After Donovan moved on, he pinned Richard with a hard stare.

“They would know we’re coming tonight?” he asked.

“Yes.” Richard started the Jeep and reversed into the path that in less than an hour would be erased as if it had never existed.

“And who are ‘they’ exactly?”

Richard accelerated. “A wolf, a child, and a homicidal ocean,” he said, wincing at the ludicrous sound of the only answer he had to give.

“You believe the child Sarah is hearing is real now?” Jeff asked when they’d reached the main road.

“The Temple prophecy predicted another psychic force emerging from their line.”

“Only vaguely. A prophecy can be twisted to mean damn near anything.” Jeff shook his head. “The damage the center’s done to Sarah’s mind is basic battle tactics—whittling away at a target’s resistance until they cultivate the means to attack an opponent’s operations from within.”

“What if it really is a child, not the center, calling for Sarah?”

“Does it matter? Her mind’s clearly been programmed to project a new Dream Weaver matrix, whoever she’s dreaming about. If that’s allowing someone to keep tabs on our activities, all of it undetectable to any of our sensors, we’re fucked. You’re going to have to come up with something more before you face the council.”

“It’s as if the presence I sensed was deliberately trying to drive Sarah over the edge. If she’s their link to us, what would they gain by unraveling her consciousness?”

He kept his speed to five miles beyond the limit instead of rushing back to Sarah, who was still sleeping off the effects of the nightmare and the drugs that had finally secured her and Madeline’s recovery. But the sounds and sensations and shadows he’d touched in Sarah’s mind were still calling to him.

“What if the person pulling all our strings is Sarah herself?” Jeff asked.