The Shadow Project (5 page)

H
e looked old. The cadaverous features were deeply lined. But it was the Skull, all right, all six feet four inches of him, flanked by two bodyguards carrying automatic rifles. Opal closed the distance between them so she could look into his face. To her surprise, he had kind eyes.

The Skull moved forward, deep in conversation with a man in battle fatigues. Opal stepped back hurriedly, and he passed her so closely that she could have reached out and touched him.

Opal fell into step beside them, so excited now, she could scarcely breathe. She could hear every word they were saying and kicked herself for the fact that she couldn't speak more than a word or two of Lusakistani. The truth was she was hardly a dedicated spy. If her father hadn't been with MI6, she doubted she'd have been a spy at all, despite her special talent. Actually, if it hadn't been
for her father, she'd probably never have discovered her special talent in the first place.

 

Amazingly, it had all started with a game. While Opal was still a little girl, her father, who was old-fashioned, read her Rudyard Kipling's novel
Kim
chapter by chapter as a bedtime story. Opal loved it. She loved the exotic locations, loved the adventure, and above all loved Kim's Game. In the book, the game was used to train Kipling's young hero for clandestine operations, and Opal couldn't wait to play it. You collected a number of articles—knives, spoons, pencils, pens, stones, coins, and so on—and laid them out on a tray, which you then covered over with a cloth. To play the game, you uncovered the tray for exactly one minute. When it was covered up again, players had to list as many articles as they could, and the one who remembered most won the game. Opal nagged her mother until she laid out a tray, then nagged her father until he agreed to play the game. Opal didn't know yet that he was a spy, didn't know he'd been trained in a modern military equivalent of Kim's Game. She just knew she could never beat him. (And typically, her father never let her win, even when she got upset.)

One evening two years ago, when he was complaining that she watched so much television her brain was in
danger of rotting, she challenged him to another round of Kim's Game, convinced she was old enough to beat him now. When she didn't, he finally taught her the trick of it. Instead of attempting to remember the items by rote, repeatedly listing them in your head, you had to relax and visualize each one, along with the position it occupied in the tray. Opal tried it and found she could remember every single item. The discovery excited her so much, she decided to try something more complicated and set out to remember every single item in their cluttered living room. While she was sitting with eyes closed, imagining she was walking around the room examining each piece, something clicked inside her head and she stepped out of her physical body.

It was the scariest experience of her whole life. When it happened she actually thought she'd died. But fortunately it didn't last long. Almost at once there was a metallic clang, and she was back where she belonged, panting with panic. Her father noticed her discomfort at once, and eventually, a little reluctantly, she told him what had happened. He thought about it long and hard, but a month later, he had her sign the Official Secrets Act and told her about the Shadow Project. A week after that, she was in the Project operating room, wide awake, but with a frozen scalp, getting the micro implants that would link her brain with the psychotronic projection
stimulator and allow her to leave her body to order—the device that had sent her to Lusakistan today.

 

With Opal just feet behind him, the Skull and his companion left the roadway to walk down a narrow alley and across a busy square. They paid almost no attention to where they were going—people moved briskly aside to let them pass, and she noticed that the bodyguards were not averse to shouldering away anyone who was too slow. But the Skull himself moved slowly. He took tiny, mincing steps for such a tall man, and she half wondered if he might be ill.

The party entered a building, and the guards slammed the door behind them. Opal passed through it without a second's thought. She already had the intelligence coup of the century, but if the Skull really was ill, that was important information in itself. A lot of people were going to be very pleased with her when she got back.

She was in a gloomy hallway and experienced a moment's disorientation, unsure where the Skull had gone. Then she passed through a second door and saw him lowering himself carefully onto a large pile of cushions. His bodyguards were behind him now, beside a hanging curtain. The man in combat fatigues was no longer in sight, but there were three other men in the room. One was a small, wizened Lusakistani in traditional
robes, squatting with his back against one wall, his eyes cast toward his feet so that he seemed almost asleep. To her surprise, the remaining two were wearing well-cut, Western-style business suits. One was in his late middle age with plump features, manicured fingernails, and distinguished gray wings to his hair. The other was younger and harder with the sort of wary air about him that made Opal think he might be a bodyguard as well, although he carried no visible firearm.

“It is satisfactory, gentlemen,” the Skull said in French-accented English.

“Good,” said the older man. “The question of payment…?” His English was more heavily accented than the Skull's, but Opal could not decide on his country of origin.

“As we agreed,” the Skull said.

“In bullion,” the younger man put in.

The Skull eyed him coldly. “As we agreed,” he repeated. “My men load it onto your helicopter as we speak.” He looked back at the older man. “Will you take coffee while we wait?”

“No,” said the younger man.

“Thank you,” said the elder. He glanced at his companion, who looked away. To the Skull the elder man said, “We appreciate your hospitality. It has been a pleasure doing business.”

The man in battle fatigues appeared, carrying a tray with three tiny steaming cups of Turkish coffee. He served the visitors first, then the Skull. The old man in robes looked up and seemed to stare straight at Opal for a moment before allowing his eyes to drift across the others in the room.

The elder of the two Westerners sipped his coffee and said, “May I inquire what you plan to do with…?”

The Skull looked up at him from under hooded eyelids. “Does this information constitute any part of our agreement?”

The other looked momentarily flustered, then covered it with a smile. “No. No, of course not. I merely—”

The Skull smiled back, thinly. “In that case, I must insist that my plans remain my business.” The man in battle fatigues bent down to whisper something in his ear. He nodded briefly, then began to push himself—rather painfully, Opal thought—to his feet. “I understand the loading of your helicopter is now complete. Doubtless you will want to inspect it.”

“I doubt that will be—” the elder man began.

But his younger companion cut in firmly, “As a formality, yes.”

The Skull shrugged and began to walk toward the door with his slow, small steps. His older companion rose to his feet and moved across the room. He stopped
directly in front of Opal, and though she knew he could not see her, she was hard pressed to suppress a shiver: for an instant he seemed to be looking deeply into her eyes. Then he turned to say something quietly in Lusakistani to the Skull.

“Something wrong?” asked the younger of his visitors at once.

The Skull shrugged. “Nothing that need concern you,” he said shortly, and pushed through the door, followed by the other men.

As the door closed, the old man turned back toward Opal and raised a closed hand. “American?” he asked in English.

It was exactly as if he'd spoken to her, and while that was impossible, she took an involuntary step backward. Then the man opened his hand to show an odd medallion nestling in the palm.

Suddenly Opal could no longer move.

D
anny swam slowly into consciousness. For some reason he expected to be in a hospital bed, but he was actually slumped in a comfortable chair. His head felt as if somebody had just put it through a mincer. When he forced his eyes open and persuaded them to focus, there was a man standing over him.

The man smiled and said, “My name is Harrington.”

That's the smile on the face of the tiger,
Danny thought sluggishly. He pushed himself upright in the seat and tried to get his mind to function. The last thing he remembered was the hospital and the young doctor coming at him with the needle. Now he was somewhere else. To play for time he said, “Won't get much of a ransom, Mr. Harrington—most of my friends would pay you to
keep
me.”

“It's Sir Roland, actually,” Harrington said dismissively.
And you've probably guessed this isn't about a ransom.”

What Danny guessed was that he was back in the big country house, although the room they were in was unfamiliar. He hadn't seen Sir Roland Harrington before, either, but he had the feeling His Sirship might be the Mr. Big of whatever was going on down below. Danny shifted in the chair and massaged his arm where the needle had gone in. “What is it about, then? Only I've got a sick grannie I need to be getting back to.” He glanced around the room. It was furnished with antiques. There was even a log fire.

“I heard about that, Danny,” Sir Roland said. “And I'm sorry. But it may be one of the things we can help you with.”

Danny!
So they knew he wasn't Lester Thomas. That hadn't taken long. Hadn't taken them long to find him and bring him back, either. These boys had connections. And the fact that they'd gone to so much trouble meant he was in a bigger mess than he'd thought. They
really
didn't want him talking about what he'd seen, even though he hadn't seen much. He tilted his head to one side, stared Sir Roland in the eye, and asked, “Who are you people?” Like they were going to tell him, but he had to ask.

To his astonishment, Sir Roland said, “We're a special
department of MI6—Britain's counterintelligence service. We're code-named the Shadow Project, although round here you'll usually hear it simply referred to as the Project. We're working in cooperation with the American CIA, which established the Project in the first place. Do you know what I mean by remote viewing?”

Danny shook his head. “No.”

“Do you know what I mean by the Cold War?”

“Of course I do—I'm not stupid.”

“It never occurred to me that you were, Danny. But you're young, and the Cold War must have ended before you were born.” Sir Roland was sitting in a wing chair on the other side of the lovely big fireplace. “During the Cold War,” Sir Roland began, “the CIA—”

“I know what the CIA is,” Danny said helpfully, but Sir Rollie ignored him.

“The CIA received information that the Soviets were recruiting psychics for espionage work. At—”

“Psychics?” Danny interrupted again, this time seriously. “Like Madame Sosostris with her wicked pack of cards?”

For some reason it stopped Sir Roland short. “That's from Eliot,” he said, and couldn't quite keep the surprise out of his voice. Another one who'd marked Danny down as an uneducated prat because he had the wrong accent and lived in the wrong neighborhood. Danny'd
had a lot of that, even after his Nan scraped together the money to send him to a private school.
Especially
after his Nan sent him to private school. Some of the other boys were all right, but most of them treated him like a freak, and the fact that he was bright made no difference at all. Which was the main reason he'd decided to pack the whole thing in. If private school was bad, Cambridge had to be ten times worse. So no university for him. He was quitting. After he'd paid back his Nan, of course, which was the reason he'd gone back to thieving.

He dragged his mind back to his present problems. “That's right,” Danny said. “
The Waste Land
. But it's what you meant by psychics—right?”

“Well, without the fairground connotations,” Roland said, “but essentially, yes. No one believed the reports at first. The Communists were militant materialists, so occult ideas seemed the last thing likely to interest them. But the reports persisted, and the Soviets scored some spectacular successes, and eventually we—the Western intelligence services—were forced to take them seriously. So the CIA set up its own program.”

“With
psychics
?” Danny let his eyebrows rise.

Sir Roland sighed. “That was exactly our attitude. And we were wrong. In any case, the initial approach was investigative. All this was CIA, you appreciate—we declined to take any of it seriously over here. But their
people looked into various forms of psychism and found more or less what you'd expect—a great deal of self-deception, fraud, and nonsense. But then they stumbled on remote viewing. Remote viewing is the ability to see distant places in your mind, places you've never actually visited or read about. There were people who claimed to be able to do this on demand. You can see the attraction to an intelligence service.”

Danny nodded. “It's a no-brainer. A spy never needs to leave his office. Can't get caught, either.” He hesitated, then added, “If it's true.”

“That's exactly it; and as it turned out, it
was
true. There really
were
people who could gather information from distant locations without, as you say, ever leaving the office. They could do it under test conditions, and some of the data they brought back checked out. Not all of it, unfortunately, but some. All you had to do was give them map coordinates. But the interesting thing was that the real stars, the one or two with high accuracy ratings, all claimed they did not do remote viewing in their minds at all, but left their physical bodies and
traveled
to the target.”

“How?” Danny asked. He caught Sir Roland's blank look and added, “What did they travel
in?
Mean to say, you leave your physical body, you leave everything behind, don't you—eyes, ears, everything. So how do
you see where you're going?”

“You're very quick, aren't you?” Sir Roland said admiringly. “They told us they separated out a sort of second body, an energy body something like a ghost. They traveled in that.” He may have thought Danny was about to interrupt again, for he pressed on hurriedly. “The thing is, they got results. So the CIA set up a special project to train others. That went well enough, but even the best of them was never one hundred percent accurate. In fact, very few of them came anywhere near. So after a while, the emphasis moved toward trying to
understand
the remote-viewing process. The theory was that if we knew how it worked, we might be able to get it to work better. The ultimate goal was to develop electronic equipment that could trigger the experience and make it more reliable. Which was where the trouble started.” He stood up suddenly. “Come with me and I'll show you.”