I gazed at the man asleep in bed with me. I couldn’t see his face, but from behind, he looked good. He was strong, tanned, and sexy. Unfortunately, I had no idea who he was or how I had wound up there. Then I looked at my body. We were both naked, and my milky-white, slim body, with silky skin, was pressed against his back, making my breasts look really big. Problem was, my skin is golden-honey, not pale, and my bra size is a 32A.
Then I remembered.
“Welcome, Miss Tessa,” said the smiling young uniformed attendant, as he removed my blindfold. “Apologies for that—protocol, you know …”
I knew. Some of the rules that our agency’s top brass love seem pretty stupid to me. Let me rephrase that: most of their rules seem terminally stupid to me. Still, they insist that those rules have helped to keep a few of us alive, so I guess they can’t be all bad.
The attendant was gaping at me, which annoys me every time it happens, so I decided to stare back and did so looking straight in his eyes, until he blushed and lowered his gaze. I know I’m pretty and sexy, and sometimes I think I’m wicked, to take advantage of my looks to hold sway over people I meet. But I’m not that amazing, and usually men don’t trip on their feet because I got them confused.
“I … I’m sorry,” he stammered “I didn’t mean to be impolite, but …”
“What? Is this the first time you have seen a woman?”
“No, of course not,” he stammered some more. “It … it’s just that we heard that you were coming … and we’ve been looking forward so much to meeting you. We’ve heard of the achievements of the Remote Viewing Project, and you’re kind of a legend around here.”
I had no idea who he was referring to as “we,” nor did I care. I was too tired for that, so I cut the conversation short.
“Thank you. You’re cute,” I said. “Now I wish you’d take me to the director.”
“Yes, yes. This way, please,” he said and led me through a long corridor until we reached a door marked only by the number 317. He knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation.
The director was standing with his back to the door, gazing out of a window that opened onto unkempt greenery. He turned to face me with a welcoming smile. For a moment, I was thrown off balance—I hadn’t seen him in a while, but it felt like it was yesterday. He still looked the same, except he had put on some weight and his hair, which he kept short, had started to thin at the top, with a little gray at the temples that hadn’t been there before, if my memory served me right, which it usually does. He was only slightly taller than me, and I’m five foot three short on a good day. He didn’t derive the pull he had on people from his physique but from a magnetism over which I had stopped puzzling.
“Welcome, Tessa. Good to see you again.”
“Thank you. It’s been quite some time.”
I’ve never known his real name. To me, during basic training, when he was my direct supervisor, he had always been “ESA15” and nothing else. “ESA,” by the way, stands for Extra-Sensory Agent, which apparently defines me as well. I’m ESA54, for the record. He never loosened up or talked about anything other than training, and in spite of having spent the best part of one year training with him and others and then working as an RV, a remote viewer, I realized that I really knew nothing about him. I hadn’t been told who the director I was going to meet was, and not for want of asking. All I was able to get from Human Resources, back at headquarters, was that I had to report to a high-security intelligence facility and meet its director, so here I was.
I was glad that the unnamed director had turned out to be ESA15. True, he was a sadistic bastard whom I had come to hate on account of his training methods, but the devil you know …. At least, he was professional, and he never minded my open hostility. In fact, I think he enjoyed it, in some twisted way, as a testament to a job well done. Besides, he was bright enough to know that rebellion against authority is a given at 14, which is when he had taken charge of me and started to turn a healthy, almost normal teenager, into the operative that I had become.
He made a quick gesture in the air with his hand, and the attendant left, closing the door silently behind him. I gazed at the director, waiting for him to say something. I had no clue what to expect, and my best strategy right then was to wait for him to explain. That’s another rule I had learned in training: don’t talk before you’ve had an opportunity to listen.
“Won’t you sit down?” he said at last. “You must be tired.”
“Yes, I am,” I conceded. The room reflected ESA15’s personality well. It was bare, with only a clean, empty white desk with a glass desktop and a pair of uncomfortable chairs facing it. I took one of them, and he seated himself beside me in the other. That was a concession of sorts, him not going to sit in his tall chair behind the desk, and it didn’t go unnoticed. “It was a long trip, but I managed to catch some sleep.” I paused and took a couple of breaths. He waited for me to go on. “Now that we have been nice to each other, do you mind telling me why I’m here?”
“Of course. I was coming to that. But first, I wanted to thank you for volunteering for this project.”
“Volunteering? Are you trying to be funny? I don’t have a clue what you are talking about. I was instructed to report to this facility and I did. That’s not volunteering.”
“You could have refused. They told you it was for a top secret project. You can still refuse.”
“I’d rather hear what the project is about, and then I’ll tell you if I’m coming on board.”
“Hmm, no. Once you hear about the project, there is no backing away from it.”
He was serious and, as usual, maddeningly self-assured. I hated his “take-it-or-leave-it” approach. I always had. I got up and smiled at him.
“Then it was nice seeing you again, sir,” I said in my most pleasant tone. “Please ask your attendant to show me the way out.”
“Sit down, Tessa. This is no game. It’s the top of the top and then some. If you join this project, the result will take you to a level of extra-sensorial perception that you have never dreamed of. Think well before you walk out of that door and throw this opportunity away, because if you do, you’ll never get another chance to see it, or to reach that height.”
I sat down again. I knew one thing for sure: ESA15 was a bastard, but not a liar … well, except when lying was part of the drill, but then it was always explained in the end. If the opportunity I was being given was really unique, wouldn’t I be crazy to let it pass? I repressed my instinctive anger at his superior ability to play mind games with me. He had won that hand, and I wanted to hear more.
“What can you tell me?”
“I can tell you a little. You are not here by chance. I have followed your work very closely since you left basic training. There is nobody as good as you at remote viewing. When the Defense Intelligence Agency shut down Project Stargate and stopped developing the Remote Viewing Project, the best viewers were nowhere close to your ability. The information you gathered for us has served your country immensely—much more than you know. And here’s the crux of the matter: the fact that your remote viewing ability is strengthened by your telepathic power, is what makes you a perfect choice for what we are doing here.”
“But telepathy only happens erratically, and I can never tell when a subject I run into during my remote viewing task will connect with me sufficiently, to allow me to read some of his thoughts. It’s not controllable. It happens when it happens, so I wouldn’t call it a real gift.”
“I know, but it’s the best any of our agents has ever accomplished.”
“So how’s that related to the project?”
“Let’s put it this way: the project will make your gift controllable.”
“Are you saying that I will be able to do controlled telepathy?”
“That for sure and, I hope, much more.”
He didn’t have to sell me more than that. Remote viewing is good, but it’s kind of solitary, and, frankly, boring. You sit in a room, and you try to see what is happening at a certain location—say, a Russian atomic reactor—and images pop up in your head. You sketch them, and you write down anything else that occurs to you, without really knowing what it all means. Then, some intelligence geek takes the notes you have scribbled and figures out what it is all about. Usually, they don’t give that information back to you, and the best you get is someone telling you that “you did well” or that the drawing you made was “right on spot.” Most of the time, it’s a bummer.
Telepathy is different. On the rare occasions when I managed to read somebody’s thoughts, I felt involved and knew what I was seeing. We mostly think in images, so even if the subject I was picking up was a Chinese or a Russian, and the words passing through their mind were gibberish to me, I would still see what he was seeing and would understand what he was thinking about it. But as I said, it only happened once in a blue moon, and I never knew when I was going to click. If this project could give me the ability to control it, to do a telepathic reading on demand, I wanted in. Actually, I wanted in so bad by then that my heart rate had accelerated with excitement at the thought of it.
“You’re not bullshitting me to trick me into it, are you?”
“No. Have I ever been less than truthful to you?”
“Not to my knowledge, but what do I know …”
“You have my word.”
I didn’t need more than that. I know I’m impulsive, but when something feels right, I tend to charge in without wasting time, and banging my head against walls has never stopped me from making a similar mistake next time.
“All right. I’m in,” I said, and I noticed that he was making an effort to hide a smile. “So what do I have to call you now that you are a big shot?”
“People around here call me ‘Director,’ but you can keep calling me ‘ESA15,’ if you prefer. That’s still my official designation.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. Now I need some shuteye. I’m wasted.”
He pushed a button on the desk and an attendant—a different one, a woman this time—walked in after a few seconds, and I realized that she must have been waiting for this call outside all this time. She was in her twenties, blonde and curvy, her nice body accentuated by an elegant, blue dress. Looks seemed to be important around here. Well, they would have to put up with my knee-ripped jeans and my T-shirt. I wasn’t going to get all dressed up for them.
“Liv, please take Miss Tessa to her quarters and see to her needs,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at nine,” he added, turning to me. “Be on time.”
I sighed. His old trainer persona was surfacing again.