“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