The Dead Drop (6 page)

Looking up from her typewriter, Gilda peered out the window to check for any interesting activity in the apartments across the courtyard. She was pleased to discover that at this hour of the day, she could actually see directly into a few apartments.

In one window, a tall man wearing a business suit talked into his cell phone as he paced through his living room. Gilda had seen this man in the elevator, and he seemed to be one of the few people in the building who greeted her with a friendly “Hello!” She didn’t know his name, but she thought of him as “The Politician” because of his fierce, broad smile. In another window, a young man who had the disheveled look of a college student studying for final exams thoughtfully picked his nose while he stirred something in a pot on his kitchen stove.

Gilda gasped when she glanced up at a window on the next floor. A mousy woman wearing glasses stared directly at Gilda.
How long has she been watching me?
The woman didn’t avert her gaze. She didn’t wave. Something about her stare seemed in explicably hostile.

Feeling her pulse race, Gilda jumped up and pulled the blinds shut.

Why was it so unnerving to discover her looking at me?
Gilda wondered
. After all, I’m sitting here looking at other people, too. I guess it’s funny how I love people-watching, but I hate the idea of someone spying on
me
.

Gilda cautiously opened the blinds, forcing herself to take another look. But when she looked back at the window, the woman was gone.

7

CIA Project MINDSCAPE

The psychic spy emerged from his trance. It always took several minutes for him to reorient himself—to feel connected with his immediate environment and the people around him. Just minutes before, he had transported his mind from a condominium building in Washington, D.C., to the bowels of a government building in Iran, where he had searched for evidence of a clandestine military program. During the past few weeks, his mind had traveled the globe—Russia, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan—while his body reclined in a leather easy chair.

He had been secretly hired by the government as part of its top-secret “remote viewing” program—an attempt to access foreign intelligence through psychic techniques. The official CIA program had been terminated years ago amid public ridicule at the notion of “out-of-body” spying, but the psychic spy had been more recently recruited as part of a newer, top-secret program headed by a CIA intelligence officer named Loomis Trench. Project MINDSCAPE was an effort to continue researching and exploring the possibilities of using psychics to spy on people and places that were formerly inaccessible.

The room from which the psychic spy worked was spare—almost clinical. It contained little more than his reclining chair, charts, a computer, and notebooks. Loomis, the spy’s supervisor, was a longtime CIA intelligence officer with a penchant for wearing dark suits and bow ties. He took detailed notes of the objects, people, and even documents the psychic spy observed while in his trance state. Sometimes a military doctor came to monitor the psychic spy’s pulse, brainwaves, and other vital statistics, but most often it was just the two men—the psychic spy searching for targets around the world, his CIA observer taking notes and passing the information along to higher-ups in the CIA and military.

At first, the project was a success: the psychic was amazingly accurate in his remote viewing sessions, and Loomis was excited about such an intriguing and seemingly magical way to gather information.

Sometimes Loomis scrutinized the psychic very intently, as if trying to see into the man’s brain—trying to learn the secret of psychic knowledge. “Someday we’ll develop a pill or an injection that gives anyone in the military power to do what you do,” he said. He regarded the psychic with a fixed stare—with something close to envy.

“Perhaps,” said the psychic, feeling annoyed at the comment. “And that will be either a wonderful day or a very frightening day.”

“So how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“What’s the trick? Why can’t I do what you do?” More than anything, Loomis wished he had psychic powers to know things that others didn’t—to know what others were thinking—particularly what others were thinking about
him
.

“For me, it’s like channeling a spirit,” said the psychic. “I make contact with an entity who takes me to the locations we want to view.” The psychic spy did not mention something important—a potential problem. Recently, his spirit guide had been failing to turn up as she always had in the past. He didn’t mention the inexplicable visions that had begun to muddy his field of vision, confusing his ability to search for the targets Loomis gave him. He assumed some form of counterespionage must be the problem.
Maybe some other psychic spy from a hostile country or terrorist organization is attempting to thwart my remote viewing sessions,
he thought. At any rate, the last thing he wanted to reveal was his greatest fear—that he was losing his precious psychic skills.

His supervisor held a report in his hand. “According to this report, the targets you viewed last time didn’t check out at all when our men on the ground went to investigate. They were disappointed because your first sessions were so accurate.”

The psychic spy felt his skin grow cold. His field of vision narrowed: objects around him flattened and blurred slightly as they sometimes did preceding one of his migraine headaches. “Nothing checked out?” His voice shook
. I’m wasting their time,
he told himself. “If my readings aren’t yielding anything useful,” he said, “then maybe we should go our separate ways. Far be it from me to waste taxpayers’ money.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no! It’s not a waste at all.” His supervisor peered at him earnestly through rectangular glasses; his eyes were the color of evening fog. “On the contrary, our work together is incredibly useful. No—we mustn’t stop. Now—let’s move on to the next target.”

The psychic spy leaned back in his chair and did his best to relax his body and release his fears—to allow himself to focus on the target. He had the usual floating sensation that preceded his ability to view a distant place, but he was disturbed by the stray images that emerged. He abruptly pulled himself out of his trance when
that face
appeared again: the cold white skin, the dead stare of those eyes, and—most disturbing—the star-shaped blood stain.

“Something wrong?” Loomis asked.

“No—not really. I just need to start over.” For the first time in his life, the psychic spy felt he couldn’t be honest. He was under pressure to find a specific target and he couldn’t let his country down.
The face is irrelevant,
he told himself.
It’s a distraction.

The psychic spy closed his eyes, slowed his heartbeat and breathing. Gradually, his brainwaves changed and he felt as if his body were floating, moving swiftly through the misty realm from which he would attempt to perceive objects and people around the globe. He knew he was drawing closer to his tar get—a suspected terrorist training camp in a mountainous region.

But as the mist cleared, he didn’t see mountains.
I’m in the wrong place
, he told himself. He found himself in an apartment building, but he saw no signs of weaponry or combat training. For a moment, his spirits lifted, because he spied a girl in the apartment—a girl who resembled his spirit guide.
She came back,
he told himself.
She’s back to help me.
But confusion and disappointment returned when he realized this girl was not his spirit guide at all: this girl sat at a typewriter and wore cat’s-eye sunglasses.

8

The Acquisition

Gilda sat at her desk in a corner of the cluttered office space she now shared with Matthew Morrow, April, Janet, and Marla. The last employee to use the desk was now on maternity leave: she had left a photograph of herself wearing a purple wig, dark sunglasses, and displaying a cheesy grin along with a group of kids who appeared to be about ten or eleven years old. Gilda guessed it was a picture from one of the “spy camps” that took place at the museum during the summer.

After wiping a film of dust from the desk and arranging her belongings, Gilda leaned back in her chair and took a bite of the “disguise dog” she had purchased at the Spy City Café—a hot dog loaded with spicy chili. She loved the feeling of sitting in a real office and having her own desk—a desk far more inspiring than the desks at school with their tiny, insufficient writing tables attached. She had her own telephone, stapler, Spy Museum coffee cup, and hanging file folders filled with museum program brochures. She also liked sitting near Matthew Morrow because she got the feeling he was the kind of person who
knew
things about espionage—things he might be willing to teach her if she could convince him she wasn’t just an ordinary high school intern.

“Did they give you the test yet?” Matthew leaned back in his chair and stared at his computer screen as he spoke.

“What test?”

“You know, the museum test.”

Gilda spun around in her swivel chair to face Matthew, who still tapped away on his computer. “April didn’t tell me about any test.”

“You’re kidding me. You haven’t taken the test yet?!”

“He’s teasing you,” said Janet, who seemed to perennially sit on the floor, now busy cutting cipher wheels from construction paper and affixing the decoder rings together with metal clips. “You have such a deadpan sense of humor, Matthew; nobody can ever tell when you’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. I wouldn’t joke about the test.” His eyes twinkled but he didn’t smile.

Welcoming an opportunity to strike up a conversation with Matthew, Gilda decided to play along. “So what is this test about?”

“Oh, just a few questions to find out whether new interns are paying attention.” He turned around in his chair to face Gilda.

“I’ve been paying attention.”

“Then you should be prepared.”

“You’re awful, Matthew,” said Janet, clearly enjoying the exchange.

“I just like to see what the new interns learn when they go through the museum for the first time. It helps me find out if we’re being effective in our educational outreach.”

“So lay it on me,” said Gilda. “I’m ready.”

“Okay—what’s the CIA?”

“Don’t make me laugh. The Central Intelligence Agency, of course. Their job is to find out foreign secrets, and they have agents all over the world.”

“And what about the FBI?”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation focuses on criminal activity inside the U.S. They also dabble in counterespionage.”

“‘Counterespionage’ is a pretty big word.”

“I’ve used bigger.”

“What do you mean by it?”

“Well, duh. Catching foreign spies inside U.S. borders and then trying to ‘flip’ them so they work for us and spy on their countries of origin instead.”

“Nice work. I guess you were paying attention in the museum.”

“I knew most of that stuff before I even got here.”

Janet and Matt exchanged a brief glance and Gilda thought she saw Janet roll her eyes.
They think I’m bragging,
she thought.

“Well if those are such easy questions,” said Matt, “what about the KGB?”

“You mean the spy organization of the former Soviet Union? What about it?”

“What does ‘KGB’ stand for?”

Gilda wasn’t sure about this. “Kids Gone Bad?”

Janet snorted. Matthew’s mouth twitched as if a small chuckle might be lurking somewhere, but he only fixed Gilda with an unblinking stare. “It stands for
Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopas nosti,
which is Russian for ‘Committee for State Security’.”

“That was my next guess.”

“Two out of three isn’t too bad,” said Janet.

“She
should
do better. We don’t usually have interns listing ‘solving mysteries’ as one of their extracurricular activities.” He spoke with a wry grin.