Virtually His (6 page)

“What name should I call you?”
Could one sound breathless in one’s mind? His fingers tickled sensuously. She could feel a frisson of awareness sliding like silk against her skin. She’d gotten used to him touching her. She should be mad as hell at what he’d put her through, but now wasn’t the time to challenge his way of introducing himself. After all, Dr. Kirkland was trying to get the goggles to work right. She was sure she’d foul up their equipment testing if she started kicking Naked Guy’s ass.

“You choose.”
There was mockery now in that voice, too, as if he’d read her mind again.

“No, you choose.”
She wanted to see how clever he was.

He leaned closer and she swore she could smell cologne on the man. This was freaking unbelievable. His breath even tickled her ear.
“Hades,”
he whispered.
“And you’ll come when I call.”

He snapped his fingers. There was that humming again and the lighting in the room dimmed.

“Miss Roston? We’re done for now. Please stand by while we take each sensor off.”

Hey, wait a minute! Where did he go? It was over? Helen looked around as the place returned to darkness. She hadn’t even checked him out thoroughly yet!
“Hey, you!”

Of course he didn’t answer. It was strange as she sat there, seeing nothing, trying to grasp the memory of what just happened. Damn. It left her feeling bereft. Hades. Hell and Hades. Damn smart-ass.

The goggles came off and she blinked again, her eyesight focusing back on Derek the programmer. He looked extremely pleased, as if something grand had happened. Oh yeah, of course. They had managed to sync brain waves today. Yippeedo.

“How was the avatar, Miss Roston? Everything like you ordered?” he asked.

Helen sniffed. She didn’t like the way it had ended. She was the one in charge still, wasn’t she? He was still her naked guy.

She shook her head as they freed her from the straps and sensors and whatnots. She swerved the seat toward the computer. Mr. Hades was going to get a big surprise.

“Not quite,” she said and tossed Derek a wicked look. “I found him lacking in the size department. I want to make some parts bigger.”

She had been watching Derek earlier and with her photographic memory, she repeated a sequence of typing on the keyboard. Then she played with the mouse and watched the cursor on the screen follow her movements.

She hated to admit it. Those times in the CAVE, when he’d chosen to put her in roles where she felt dominated, pushing at all her hot buttons, testing her emotions as if he wanted to learn how to switch her on and off, had sometimes left her feeling vulnerable. She didn’t like that at all, and the bastard knew it. She knew he was testing her mental strength, to see how far she would allow him to go.

She wrinkled her nose. She was going to push some buttons herself. Her forefinger tapped on one of the keys several times. And a few more. She laughed in naughty satisfaction. Revenge was satisfyingly sweet.

“Hell, yeah!”

P
hilosophy class was an odd course for them to inflict on her. After all, thinking too deeply would affect action. Analysis paralysis, that was one of her Special Ops. trainer’s favorite sayings.

“You start thinking about how dark it is in there, you’ve already lost half the battle, Roston,” he’d said, during one session when she had to belly-crawl into a pitch-black tunnel. “There’s active anticipation of danger and there’s passive anticipation. The second type will get you killed.”

But they insisted on philosophy classes at the Center. Helen hadn’t thought she would enjoy them. She wasn’t particularly interested in logic and reasoning; she reasonably explained to the tutor that if she had any logical brain cells at all, she wouldn’t have signed up for this experiment in the first place. Everyone had laughed at the workshop.

However, the sessions weren’t entirely useless. There was a method to their madness, she supposed. Command Center definitely had a different approach. Analysis, Helen found, was used to paralyze latent emotions, such as fear and anger.

She understood that fear could be a major stumbling block in the coming experiment. It could defeat her. It was important therefore that she learn to shape her fears into something tangible so she could overcome them.

Helen was getting so damn good at pretending, it should scare her. But it didn’t, really. Fear, as they had told her from the beginning, would eventually be under her control.

She applied fresh lipstick in the restroom, and made a face. She’d learned at GEM that reality had many faces. Often, what one saw in front of oneself was just part of the truth. What mattered most was the hidden agenda.

She knew from day one that she was different. She’d sensed the danger behind the reality around the friendly strangers who’d approached her, but food was a powerful tempter to a hungry kid. She had options—accept the food and go with those nice GEM agents or remain alone. Hunger could conquer anything, even fear. And something about the whole thing gnawed at her, so she’d followed them. And here she was.

Unanswered questions. Looking for the unvarnished truth. That was her driving force in life.

Pulling her loose hair into a ponytail, she fluffed the bangs away from her forehead. Her hand wandered on its own to the spot below her earlobe. How did he know she liked to be touched there?

That irritated her. She didn’t mind being psychoanalyzed by their team of head doctors; she was trained in NOPAIN—nonphysical persuasion and innovative negotiation—and she could easily evade questions she didn’t want to answer. She had even grown comfortable with them staring at her through their microeyes; it was in her contract. She had known when she’d agreed to this experiment that her life wasn’t going to be hers again. What was it Enrique always told her?
Ya gotta let the big boys think they’re bigger and stronger before you can whoop their ass,
Elena. She smiled at the memory of the older punk boy who was her sometime companion. At fifteen, Enrique—a name he’d chosen for himself—was more grown-up than most kids his age. Street wisdom still made a lot of sense in her world.

Her smile turned into a frown. She hadn’t counted on someone knowing little things like her erogenous zones, though. Again she wondered about this trainer behind the avatar. Was he anything like her creation? Did he remote view, too? And if so, how far along was he? Her training hadn’t taken her into some of the higher levels she’d read about—the government was too eager to try her out.

Helen looked at her reflection. She had to admit that letting her create her trainer’s avatar was insidiously clever. Psychologically, she would immediately have an innate response to him already. Maybe it was one of their tricks, to make her assume that it was a man—

Nah. Hades sounded too much like a man. A woman wouldn’t have said those last lines. She closed her eyes, recalled the scene in her mind with the quick vividness that was now so familiar…

Her instincts rose like a radar. Her eyes flew open.

“You know, I thought I smelled your perfume,” she remarked calmly.

“Liar. I don’t have any on today.” T. appeared from one of the stalls.

“Oh? Are you testing me, too?” Helen turned to give her full attention to her operations chief. “Or are you here to tell me who my trainer is?”

T. shrugged. “I don’t know everything.”

“Who’s the liar now?” There was no one higher in her agency here—she had the security clearance.

T. shrugged again, then turned to the mirror. “They’re very secretive here at the Center. Surely you’ve noticed that? I rarely get to talk with anyone other than the commandos I work with, and I’ve been here almost two and a half years.”

“This partnership GEM has with them—is it that great?”

Ever since the news had gone through the grapevine that their contract agency was now working with COS Command, there was rampant gossip that the “partnership” would become a merger, and that GEM’s independence could be history. So far, Helen hadn’t seen any difference in the way her agency worked, but then she had been deep in training and hadn’t had the time to really pay close attention.

Helen studied the tall blond woman who was her operations chief and mentor. Even after all these years, it was still tough to read T.’s emotions. T. was a chameleon, able to project whatever was needed for the situation, and when she was in her element, even Helen’s intuition couldn’t gauge her chief’s real feelings about anything.

But Helen trusted T.’s judgment more than anyone else’s. It was T. who told her she had a special gift, who had always encouraged her to use her special instincts during dangerous situations. It was T. who told her that she had far to go in GEM.

“It’s been highly beneficial,” T. told her. She smiled. “I just love the way we both seem to have our meaningful conversations in the ladies’ room.”

Helen wrinkled her nose and thumbed at the exit. “Out there is the macho man’s world. This Center is full of them. You know it, and I know it. Some of them are sexy as get-out but I don’t trust any of them.”

T.’s smile widened. Her brows arched meaningfully. “Not even your hot trainer?”

Helen let out a sigh. “Why are you trying to use NOPAIN on me? Just ask your damn questions outright, T.”

“Darling, you’ve been delightfully evading and dodging those head doctors all these months. Why can’t I try my hand on you?”

“Because you’re on my side.” Helen cocked her head. “I hope?”

“Yet you don’t want to tell me everything. I’m still your operations chief, Hell, even though you’ve been out of touch lately, what with secretive CIA RV training and disappearing for weeks without debriefing.” T. played with the many rings on her fingers. “They’re playing with your mind, and as a friend, I’m concerned that you might forget this is a contract, not a permanent thing.”

“Ha! How could I forget right now I’m the CIA’s and various government agencies’ favorite toy? I’m the most watched woman in the spy world now, barring a few hundred posters of calendar babes. I’ve been monitored, recorded, prodded and probed. They had me hooked up to devices that measure my pulse and pretty much every body function they could think of. I’m sure they’ve tried every available way to look into my mind while doing those experiments in remote viewing. T., darling, I’m the last person to forget what I’ve become.”

“Which is?”

Helen frowned. Damn. T. got her there. She hated it when T. won in NOPAIN. She shrugged, trying to evade. “I don’t quite know yet. After all, they pulled me out of training as soon as I finished Phase Two, and I’m still miffed about that! I was getting to be quite good at their stupid little tests. Why did they interrupt my remote-view training?”

T. continued turning one of her rings. Her amber-gold eyes were thoughtful as she studied Helen. “Maybe they were trying to keep within the time limit of the contract. Or maybe they didn’t want to lose you. You do know the high cost of the advance stages of the CIA program.”

T. didn’t mean in financial terms. She had been frank about the real dangers when the contract was offered but Helen had been intrigued. Getting a bird’s eye view of so many agencies was an operative’s fantasy. “Yeah,” she said, with another shrug. “The casualties end up in some mental ward and they didn’t want to risk me. Not too soon anyway.”

T. nodded. “You’ve been doing excellently. They’re eager to start with what you can do now. They told me those flashes you have are longer now.”

Helen turned back to the mirror. “I’m not supposed to elaborate too much about the project to anyone.”

“Darling, your state secrets are safe with you. When I want an update, the info I seek is your welfare. However…” T. paused, her eyes narrowing. “I can see I can’t depend on you for that.”

Helen met T.’s eyes in the mirror. Her reflex had been to be defensive because she had to be alert all the time and she knew she’d been doing the same with T. She allowed a part of herself to relax. “I can’t explain what’s happening to me, T.,” she said quietly. “It’s exciting and scary.”

“And it’s going to get more so, with this new phase. Remote viewing plus virtual reality is going to play with your mind even more. That’s why they decided that you needed to be connected with a real mind outside. This virtual reality trainer—he’s your anchor, Hell. You can trust him. You have to allow yourself to depend on him sometimes.”

Helen smiled and turned back around. It was now her turn to trap her operations chief. “Thought you said you didn’t know him?”

T. smiled back and took a few steps closer. “I didn’t say that,” she mocked. “I said I didn’t know everything. I could be talking to him through VR, too, you know. You have him looking like some blond beefcake. I myself prefer James Dean. Bad boys are more my style.”

Damn. Thought she had her. “What? You wouldn’t make him blond like your dear Alex Diamond? What will he say to that?”

The GEM grapevine was rife with gossip of what was happening between their operations chief and one of COS Center’s top commandos. Romance was the word being bandied around. A GEM sister had wittily called it Operation Covert Combustion, and it wasn’t too far from the truth, since T. appeared to be playing a game of total ignorance of a certain commando’s presence at the Center. Helen cocked an enquiring brow.

T.’s face was unrevealing, her gaze shuttered. “I’m sure he gets his fantasies taken care of, darling.”

Helen laughed. She bet. T. was also the master of disguises, a woman of a hundred faces. She could see how she confused her men, even Alex Diamond. She sobered. “I can tell you one thing, chief. Once you’re immersed in this program, you find that there aren’t any fantasies left in your life. Or maybe it’s one big fantasy now. Take your pick.”

She knew T. needed to know this. It was the operations chief’s job to make sure her operatives stayed as safe as possible. Any contract taken up by GEM had dangerous elements and right now, Helen’s was probably way up there on the list. She wanted to keep her chief in the loop as much as she could.

“Tell me how so?”

“Part of remote viewing is projecting imagery. Part of it is fortune telling. After a while you aren’t sure whether you’re doing that all the time unless you’re very strong mentally.” She gave T. a level look. “And I’m very strong. I’m going to get stronger. That’s what all these psychoanalysis and philosophy classes are for, to help me stay grounded.”

T. took one of her rings off and handed it to her. Surprised, Helen turned her palm out. “What’s that for?” T.’s rings weren’t just rings.

“Keep it on. It might be useful later.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“Nope. Trust goes along with it.”

“Ah.” More NOPAIN. Helen watched as T. slipped the ring on for her. “This would mean something entirely different if you had a dick, T.”

T.’s laughter echoed in the tiled room. She stepped back. “Soon you’ll have to convince a bunch of suits with a demonstration. Are you ready?”

Back to business. Helen played with her new ring. “Yes.”

“By the way, you’re spending the night here at the Center.”

“Damn, why?” She was already spending too many nights here lately. She loved being surrounded by lots of color, but colors created natural mental blocks for some reason. “I don’t like their sparse comfort.”

“It makes sense to. You’ll have another VR session before the show. Center wants to make sure everything goes smoothly. That means the more they monitor your brain waves while you sleep, the better.”

They had been doing that the last few months. Helen spent a few nights there every week, sleeping on some kind of bed with enough straps and electronic gear on it to qualify it for an S and M contraption.

“Today’s test run went well—you two connected. You don’t know how much this operation depended on that outcome. Believe me, darling, there were quite a few high fives today. They had actually expected more problems, but from what you described and what they could tell, the synchronization was delayed because of lack of sensory data. Once you’ve gotten used to sharing brain waves, communication will be better. He wants to do it one more time before your big show and tell.”

Helen hid her surprise. T. loved ending their meetings with unexpected news. Provoking emotional reaction was her hobby. “So soon? He misses me already, huh?” She couldn’t help smiling, though, at the memory of what she had added to the avatar. “May I ask why?”

“He wants to talk to you about the coming test.”

“Really? How interesting. He’s concerned about my well-being, too,” Helen said dryly.

T. waved her ringed hand, signaling the end of the meeting, and headed for the exit. “Oh, by the way, he told me to ask you to think about Greek gods and their stories. He said you’d understand. Ciao, Hell.”

Helen frowned at that last comment. That VR trainer obviously loved to play games, just like T. Greek gods. Well, he was probably listening in when she was talking to Derek about her ideal man looking like a Greek god—a blond Greek god with chocolate eyes was what she had ordered. Now it made even more sense why he had picked the name Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld. Recalling that he’d known her nickname, she growled under her breath. She should have named him herself. She could see that he was going to be a challenge. A mischievous smile formed on her lips as she opened the door and sauntered out. A big challenge.