Virtually His (29 page)

H
elen mentally repeated their names. Alex Diamond, Shahrukh Kingsley (oh, fitting name for Big Swimming Guy), Michael Hunter—a shock to hear Flyboy’s real name—and he winked at her, with that smile that had probably generated a few thousand female sighs, Jack Sullivan, Armando Chang, looking half-asleep, Heath Cliffe (she arched her eyebrows slightly at his name, too, his brown eyes lighting up with amusement when she gave him a bland stare as his gaze traveled down to her leg), and Jed McNeil—is the man attached to that denim jacket?

They were the official COS commandos. She knew four of the original were killed in action during that mission a few years back, and only two of those positions had been filled—Jack Sullivan and Armando. They were finally formally introduced to her as a group, a sign that she was now part of the team. Right? She wasn’t sure,

Then there was Drew De Clerq, the team coordinator. She found out that he was just acting operations chief in the mission she had been on. Operations chief was actually Alex Diamond’s title. How interesting. When GEM and COMCEN formed a merger, T., her operations chief, had comanaged Alex’s job with different commandos when he went missing.

At the moment, her chief, taking a seat across from her, was studiously avoiding looking at Alex Diamond throughout the introductions. Or at least, it seemed that way to Helen. She wanted to laugh. Those two reminded her of two lions in a mating ritual. It took the beasts forever to get together but when they did—

She hid a smile.

“Any questions about who is who, Hell?” De Clerq asked.

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 of
our?
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.?”

Ooooh. Back to T.

T. smiled. Helen noticed she didn’t even glance in Alex’s direction. “That’s right,” she agreed. “With new technology, we’ve managed to create a miniature version and we were charting Helen’s and her monitor’s surroundings just to test how sensitive it is, and whether it works.”

“Apparently it does,” Alex said, “and apparently, according to the activity in the chart here, the same time Hell had that attack, we can establish a new fact, that there are remote viewers who sense it differently.”

“No, it establishes that something set off GEM’s version of the energy alarm and when that happened, it triggered some kind of reaction in Agent Roston,” T. said.

“Would that something be another entity, let’s say, and can GEM’s people establish that there was another remote viewer in the area and somehow that bothered Agent Roston?” Alex asked, in a very polite voice.

“I’m taking care of it,” T. replied, and for the first time, she looked at Alex.

“You didn’t bring this up last night when we were being updated about what happened to Helen in the stairwell.”

Helen’s own tension meter went up about ten notches watching those two eye each other. She could safely rule out Alex Diamond as the person in her room last night, that was for sure.

“I wasn’t sure since we haven’t run tests on the ring yet,” T. said, her beautiful eyes narrowing slightly.

“I meant the fact that GEM has this kind of device in its possession and that you have given one to one of our operatives to wear. I thought GEM was our partner?”

Helen’s gaze quickly swept around the table once, gauging the other commandos’ reactions. They seemed to be sitting back and watching, enjoying it as much as she was. Obviously, like her, they’d never seen T. on the verge of losing a battle.

Her chief leaned back in her chair. “We aren’t full partners in everything, Alex. I realize that the merger was done in your absence and you probably don’t have the full details, but the written agreement is somewhere in this building, I’m sure. GEM has retained quite a bit of its independence, and—” she paused, before continuing softly “—will continue to do so with its operatives.”

Whoa, T. had drawn first blood. No way were they arguing about her and GEM operatives. There was a wealth of hidden challenges in this exchange for an interested observer to mine and sieve. No one said a word during the small silence that followed.

“Nonetheless, Agent Roston is our operative, as per her contract, and your giving her that device meant you’d kept certain information to yourself that could have jeopardized our operation, and future missions as well. As a partner, it’s your responsibility as co-operations chief to at least tell the operations chief on the COMCEN side about certain things that might affect the ongoing operation. I’ll, of course, bring this up as a suggestion during the council meeting between our agencies, but I think this is an issue we could easily solve during our own personal time.”

Helen bit her lower lip. T. sharing information with Alex Diamond would mean meeting or talking with the man a lot more, and from all accounts, T. had been keeping her distance, in some case, even keeping several continents between herself and Alex Diamond.

She had to give it to Alex Diamond, though. She’d never seen a man able to keep T. on her toes. She wanted to snicker at the “personal” time comment. She wasn’t going to sit by and not help out her chief, though. After all, T. had shown up to help her last night. She cleared her throat, tapping the tip of her pen on the paper in front of her, as if to make a point.

“The device, as explained here, wasn’t supposed to have an effect on me but on interfering entities,” Helen said. “I see it as protection gear, something like a bulletproof vest, except it was made for a remote viewer. So do you boys report on every piece of protection gear on you during an operation? I’m sure, if the device had worked normally, without my strange experience in the stairwell, this chart would have read the same. T. would have brought back the same results and none of you would care because there wouldn’t have been any proof that it actually happened. So my having this reaction at the same time as shown on this chart shows that it was actually I who was interfering with the overall mission, and T. wouldn’t have known that in the first place.”

There was a chuckle from the end of the table. It was Flyboy. He was scratching his nose, probably hiding a grin. “What I want to know is, when are we going to be issued our very own magic decoder ring?” he queried, tongue-in-cheek.

Jack Sullivan snorted. “Rings are for sissies,” he drawled. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve found out tracking the satellite, Flyboy, so I can get out of here and take a shower? It’s gotten mighty stuffy and I’m running behind with…operation duties.”

“If you’d start your day earlier, you’d have all that done already,” Shahrukh said.

“Oh yeah, some of us just love the crack of dawn like you do, right, Armando?”

“Early bird catches the worm,” Armando said, twiddling his pen between his fingers like a majorette’s baton, “but better late than never.”

“Just love a dude,” Jack said blandly, “who can speak from both sides of his mouth. Let’s hear the satellite findings, Flyboy.”

Helen loved the exchange. It showed they were a lot more relaxed with each other than they pretended to be. She glanced over at T. Her chief was also smiling at the talking men. Helen looked back at Alex, who was studying her chief with brooding eyes. He hadn’t said anything else after her own comment. It appeared that he wasn’t that concerned with her “device” jeopardizing the operation after all. More likely, he just wanted to rile a reaction from T.

“Satellite tracked that van to a fake identity, of course. But it has CIA marks all over it. Easy to track when they had the vehicle delivered to a well-known CIA landing strip, you know. Why they would take the time to give a fake identity and not even bother to at least mask their entry points…”

Listening, but a little distracted by what she’d found out, Helen looked down at her ringless finger. Energy alarm. Did she somehow sense its warning through her “danger” sense? And somehow, it was amplified to the point that it affected her. Something
did
happen at that moment and it wasn’t because of the serum.

The idea of another remote viewer in her vicinity had occurred to her before, and had been the subject of discussion during training. From Q and A sessions, she’d learned that it took a very high-level remote viewer to see different forms of energy, such as another remote viewer, and it took a lot of energy for one remote viewer to even communicate with another. That was why RV was a solo thing, with many remote viewers working the same event on their own, in separate modules. Too much energy working together destroyed their concentration as well as objectivity. She let go of the idea and returned her attention to the commandos.