I woke up the next morning when the phone in my room rang. The director was on the line, which meant that he wanted things to run smoothly and didn’t trust that sending for me would get me wherever he wanted me, when he wanted me.
“Mmm,” I mumbled into the receiver.
“Please get to the lab in twenty minutes, Tessa. We can’t make the undersecretary wait,” he said, dryly.
“Your never told me when to be there,” I argued, but he cut me short with a terse “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.
It maddened me that he always expected me to jump through hoops at his order, but I didn’t think that annoying someone as important as Undersecretary Quinn was wise, otherwise I would have let the director wait. Instead, I got ready in record time and reached the lab as instructed. The whole gang, consisting of Quinn, the director, and Doctor Alexander, was waiting for me. The young marine with whom I had spent the night was also in the room, waiting at attention and gazing straight into the infinite.
“Good morning, Tessa,” said Quinn courteously. “We need to run one more experiment. We know that you can take control of the body of a subject, but so far you have only done that for a few seconds, right?”
“Correct,” I said.
“We need to ascertain that you have the ability to possess another body for a more extended period, and to function in it. We have a volunteer for that,” he added, gazing at the marine.
I won’t bore you with the details of the experiment. It’s enough to say that it went well, and I ended up enjoying it. When I completed all the tasks on the menu, I couldn’t resist the temptation to make the marine stand in the middle of the room and speak my words. I know that sometimes I am a showoff, you don’t need to tell me that. Hearing myself speaking with a masculine voice was strange, but also fun. I said, “This is me, Tessa, speaking to you, even if I don’t sound like me.” I gave them a broad smile, and then I let go of the marine, opened my eyes, which I had closed to make concentration easier, and gazed at the trio. “How did I do?” I asked.
“Good. Wait here,” Quinn ordered curtly. “Come with me,” he said to the others, and they left me alone in the room.
I hadn’t turned the pisspot off and was still receiving background noise. With the men gone, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try to see what they had to discuss that couldn’t be said with me in the room. My ethics did not allow me to read the director, and I extended that courtesy to the undersecretary as well, but I owed nothing to Doctor Alexander. He wasn’t one of us. I probed the noise until I found him, and then his eyes and ears were mine. He was standing with the other two, listening to Quinn, who had a shell-shocked look on his face.
“That was amazing,” he said.
“She will do a perfect job,” the director said. “We need to get her on board about the need to terminate Mary, if it comes to that, but she will easily make her jump from a window or something like that. This is going to be neater than we thought.”
“But after that, of course, we need to terminate her,” said Quinn, sending a shiver along my spine.
“What?” the director said, looking incredulous. “She is going to be our most valuable asset. She has powers never heard of. Why would we want to waste all that?”
“Can’t you see how dangerous she is going to be? She can get into anybody’s head. She could possess the president. We can’t let that happen.”
“But,” Doctor Alexander objected, “she needs my device to do that, so all we have to do is take it away from her. There is no need to terminate her. Besides, she can’t use it for too long, you know that …”
“With all due respect, Doctor,” said Quinn, interrupting him, “your device is great, but now that she knows how it works she can have somebody else make one for her. I’m sorry, I truly am, but we can’t take chances with her. Obviously, we’ll take care of her only after this operation is over. She’s essential to its success.”
“That is regrettable,” said the director, his face expressionless, “but I see your point. Now I suggest we go back and give her our final instructions for the operation.”
The bastard! I hastened to turn the pisspot off and took it off my head. When they came back into the room they found me flipping through a scientific magazine that I had taken from a nearby table. I had been trying to figure out what the doctor had meant by saying that I couldn’t use the pisspot for too long, before he was interrupted, but it didn’t make sense to me so I let that go. I had much greater worries to think about.
“Tessa,” said the director, “we are unanimous that the test was successful. Very satisfactory. Now we need you to understand the responsibility that you are taking upon yourself. Mary’s mission is critical to our nation’s security. If she convinces Vladimir to work for us, that may be the most important intelligence achievement of the century. If, on the other hand, she turns and cooperates with the other side, she will do some severe damage, and she must be stopped.”
“You already explained all that to me,” I said. “No need to repeat.”
“We must make sure that you understand how critical this is,” Quinn intervened. “You may have to make a decision to kill her, and we will not be there to help you make it.”
You want me to kill her, so you can go ahead and kill me. That’s not gonna happen, but I’ll play along, for now, I thought. Lucky that they couldn’t read me. I put on a serious face and nodded gravely, to hide my thoughts and to let them think that I was on board with the plan.
“I appreciate it, sir. I can’t say that the prospect of having to kill a woman appeals to me, but I’ll do my part if it comes to that.”
“Good girl!” said Quinn. “Now let’s run through possible scenarios with you. You will have to learn the telltales of treason.”