The Shadow Project (6 page)

Y
ou could hear everything. Couldn't speak, couldn't move, hardly breathe sometimes, but those young doctors came through clear as a bell. Now there was one talking about her condition to somebody, a nurse probably, talking about her operation and her chances of recovery as if she wasn't lying there large as life in the bed in front of them. That was the trouble. You lay there and you couldn't move and couldn't speak, and half the time they forgot you were there.

Apparently her chances weren't all that good.

“Dr. Miller seems optimistic,” the female voice said.

“Dr. Miller is always optimistic,” said the male voice, “but I had a look when Benson opened her up.” There was the sound of breath being drawn in through teeth.

“Bad?”

“The rupture wasn't too severe, but there'd been an awful lot of bleeding. My guess is she lay for a long time
before the ambulance came—before anyone found her, I suppose. I'm not sure what quality of life she'll have even if she does recover.”

Mind your own quality of life, you little brat,
Dorothy thought. But she still couldn't say anything, and after a while she heard shuffling sounds and a door and then a deep silence.

She was going to die here if she wasn't careful. She could see it coming in the tea leaves.

Dorothy wasn't too fussed about dying, not on her own account. Just passing over, wasn't it? She'd had proof of that often enough. Anyway, life hadn't been up to much since Stanley went. Never seemed to be enough money, arthritis played up in wet weather. Your taste went too, as you got older. But all the same, if she popped her clogs now, who was going to look after Danny? Who was going to keep him out of trouble? And there were other people who needed her. Important work, that; and she was the only one who could do it.

It was funny: Dorothy's eyes were closed, but sometimes she thought she could see the hospital room, end of the bed, bedside table (nobody had brought her flowers), tubes going from her arm up to a transparent bag of something hanging from a stand. Sometimes she could see all that, sometimes she couldn't. Mostly she couldn't. Mostly it was dark, the way you'd expect lying in bed
with your eyes shut. And then you were never sure if you were asleep or awake. It was very hard to judge the passing of the time, but at some point Dorothy must have slipped into a dream because she could see Stanley standing in front of her, plain as day.

“I think our boy Danny's getting into trouble,” Stanley said.

“T
hey're remarkable works,” Sir Roland said as they entered the library. “We have volumes dating back to the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, sometimes even earlier. There's a drawer over there that contains a Roman scroll from the time of the Emperor Claudius. And they all have one thing in common—”

“They give you the creeps?” Danny suggested. He loved books, but looking at some of the titles, they were seriously weird.

Sir Roland smiled. “Well, that, certainly, but I was actually thinking of the fact that they all deal one way or another with spirits or astral projection.”

“Those ones over there deal with magic,” Danny said.

“Ah yes, that's true—a great many of them do,” Sir Roland agreed. “But where does the magic come from?”

Danny shrugged. “Sacrificing goats?” They'd done
it in a horror movie he once saw. Actually he was feeling uncomfortable with the way the conversation had turned. The books he mainly liked to read were scientific. The irrational—magic, spirits and the like—made him uneasy.

“Or should I say, who is the sacrifice made
to
? Spirits, or gods—disembodied intelligences. All the magic, or what passes for magic, arises out of communications with entities that have no physical bodies—exactly the way our best remote-viewing operatives claimed to function.”

“Yes, but it's all superstition,” Danny said.

Sir Roland ignored him. “Now over there”—he pointed—“is a section on…”

It was getting to be like a museum tour, but Danny dutifully looked over there, where most of the books seemed new, in contrast with all the magic stuff:
UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse
;
Above Top Secret
;
The Roswell Incident
;
Alien Dawn
;
Communion
;
Abduction
;
Open Skies, Closed Minds
; a video of
UFO: The Final Warning….
“Flying saucers?” he asked skeptically. If there was one thing worse than the people who wrote about magic, it was the nutters who saw little green men.

“Can you see the connection?” Sir Roland asked. Danny couldn't, but Roland was in full flight now. “Read the flying-saucer literature,” Sir Roland said, “and
you'll find report after report of creatures who could pass through solid walls as if they weren't there. Our remote viewers, the ones who said they used a second body, also claimed to be able to pass through solid walls.”

Danny was beginning to get it—he'd have to be pretty stupid not to, and he'd been offered a Cambridge scholarship, not that it would be doing him much good. But at the same time he had no idea where it was leading. “Flying saucers come from outer space,” he said. Then added uncertainly, “Don't they?”

“I don't know where flying saucers come from,” Sir Roland said. “Neither does anybody else. But the point is, here was another whole body of literature that seemed to have some bearing on what the CIA was studying.” He wandered again. “Now, over here…”

This time the shelves had a mix of old and new books. Sir Roland pulled one down entitled
Astral Doorways
, flicked through it briefly, then pushed it back. “These are all books that deal with the experience of leaving your body—out-of-body experience, it's called: OOBE for short. Quite clearly what many of these writers experienced was similar, if not identical, to what happens to our remote viewers. So the CIA shifted the focus of their entire program to the investigation of magic, UFOs, and astral projection—and it worked. They extracted enough historical information to develop electronic aids.
In fact, they were beginning to develop a whole new remote-viewing technology when word leaked out about the historical research; and inevitably it was twisted. You can imagine how the press had a field day. ‘CIA Uses Black Magic in Intelligence War' and that sort of thing. A group of senators and congressmen from the Bible Belt decided this would never do at all and made such a fuss that Mr. Tenet was forced to close the Project down.”

“Who's Mr. Tenet?” Danny asked.

“Director of the CIA,” Sir Roland said.

“He really closed it down?”
Not the end of the story,
Danny thought.

“Well, in a manner of speaking,” Sir Roland told him. “What he actually did was move the operation over here. As I mentioned earlier, we had our own interest in remote viewing at MI6 by this time, so we were happy to cooperate. It gave us access to the very latest American technology, and we here were able to share one or two of our own discoveries in the field. All in all, a potentially fruitful partnership.”

Danny grinned at him. “Now you've told me all this, won't you have to kill me?”

“Only if you don't agree to join us,” said Sir Roland without cracking a smile.

T
hey kept her in a wicker cage that hung from a rope looped around a hook in the ceiling of one of their buildings. It was impossible that the thing could hold her—no Project operative had ever reported anything that could trap an energy body—yet it did. Opal crouched inside, unable to stand fully upright, unable to lie down, unable to sit except with her knees pressed up against her chin. Had she been in her physical body, the pain would have been excruciating. As it was, she experienced continuous discomfort, nausea, dizziness, as if she'd just stepped off a roller coaster and couldn't catch her balance. She'd never felt so helpless in her life.

They came back after a time. The Skull glanced up at the cage, then said something in Lusakistani to the old man in robes. The old man stared into Opal's eyes and smiled coldly. “He wishes to know if you are still in there,” he said in English.

How had this happened? There was nothing, nothing in her entire experience, to suggest that she could be trapped while out of her body. Throughout her training and on missions, she had cheerfully walked through walls in her second body, pushed into solid rock, stayed for hours underwater. In her second body, she was like a ghost flitting through the solid world, but no longer a part of it. She was invisible and indestructible. She should have been able to pass through the wicker of her cage like mist.

“Can you hear me?” she asked softly. Nobody could hear her. They'd told her that on her very first briefing—“No one can hear you, no one can see you.” She'd proven it herself during her very first RV projection, standing inches from a woman and shouting in her ear. Since then she had moved freely through city streets without anyone suspecting for a moment she was there. Of
course
he couldn't hear her!

“Yes, I can hear you,” said the old man. “But my master cannot. Nor does he see you.” He turned and murmured something briefly to the Skull, who bent his head to listen.

The Skull looked up again, staring into the cage, but his eyes fluttered as if he was searching for her; and when he spoke, he was not looking directly at her, but to one side and a little above her head. “Are you American?” the
Skull asked in English.

“My master wishes to know if you are an American,” the old man repeated.

“I heard him,” Opal said.

“I know you did,” the old man said. “But he cannot hear you. You must answer to me and I will convey your words. Are you an American?” He stopped abruptly as a cleaning woman slid silently into the room, then froze when she realized it was occupied. The old man waved his arms and shouted something that sent her scuttling away.

“Who are you?” Opal asked.

“My name is Hazrat Farrakhan, adviser to my master, Venskab Faivre, whom you doubtless recognize. He wishes you to tell him if you are an American.”

“How can you hold me here?” Opal demanded. “How is this possible?”

“I am a student of
ilmu al-hikmah
,” said Farrakhan.

“Who is Ilmu Al—?” Opal began, but the old man held up a sudden hand for silence.

“No more questions, prisoner. You must now answer my master.”

Prisoner?
It struck her with the force of a thunderbolt that this was exactly what she was. She was trapped in a wicker cage and now, incredibly,
under interrogation.
And there was nothing in her training to help her. Why
train operatives for something no one believed could happen?

Should she answer? What was it they said in war movies—name, rank, and serial number? Except she didn't have a rank or a serial number. She was a Project operative, not a soldier. So what was she supposed to tell the enemy? And what would happen if she refused to answer? If she was James Bond or Mata Hari, caught behind enemy lines, she might be beaten or tortured. But to torture somebody, you had to get your hands on their physical body, and her physical body was back at the Project, slumped in a chair with a helmet on its head. So no beatings, and torture was impossible.

Just as it's supposed to be impossible to hold me in a cage.
The thought brought her up short. Opal felt a chill of fear.

Did it matter if she told them she was not an American? Her nationality was hardly important. What
was
important was that the Skull should not discover she was a spy. Half the effectiveness of the Shadow Project was that no one knew of its existence. The secrecy of the Project had to be protected at all costs. What she needed was a cover story, something to convince these men she was…a civilian. She almost laughed aloud. An innocent, invisible, ghost of a casual visitor.

“I'm not an American,” she said.

“Ah good,” murmured Farrakhan, as if she'd told him something of importance. “My master does not like Americans.” He spoke a few words in Lusakistani to the Skull, then turned back to her. “Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?” the Skull echoed in English. His brown eyes were locked on the cage and this time he seemed to be looking directly at her.

There were scraps of cloth and paper woven into the wicker of her cage. It was the first time she'd really noticed them, but now she saw they were covered in curious, hand-drawn symbols. Cramped as she was, she reached out to uncover one of them, momentarily forgetting that she could not actually touch anything. The fabric of the cage
repelled
her hand.

“I don't know,” Opal said. “I don't know how I got here.”

“Elle ne sait pas,”
Farrakhan repeated to the Skull in French.

“What is your name?” the Skull asked.

Did it matter if he knew her name? Opal Harrington would mean nothing to him. Unless he knew of her father's position with MI6. Even then, he wouldn't know her father had a daughter. All the same, best not to let him know her last name. She took a chance that he simply wanted a name to call her by and said, “Opal.”

“Opal,” the adviser Farrakhan repeated.

To her surprise, the Skull smiled. “Like the jewel,” he said. “Are you a jewel, my captive?” He snapped off several staccato phrases of Lusakistani to the old man.

“My master wishes to know how you got here,” Farrakhan said. “He is a patient man, but now he grows
im
patient.”

One of the books Opal had read during her basic training was entitled
The Projection of the Astral Body,
written by a psychical researcher called Hereward somebody. It told the story of an American named Sylvan Muldoon, who had spontaneous out-of-body experiences throughout most of his life. He attributed them to the fact that he was a chronic invalid. He believed illness loosened his second body. She'd also read various reports of people projecting while in the hospital and after accidents.

“I was ill,” Opal said. “The doctor told me to stay in bed—I had fever. I think I must have fallen asleep because I dreamed I was here, in the mountains.” The dreaming business was sheer inspiration. Dreaming made her sound confused and innocent. Dreaming made it sound as if it might be safe to let her go.

“Where do you live?” Farrakhan asked.

Her accent would give her away if nothing else, assuming he was familiar with accents. She decided it was probably safe to tell him, in any case. “Great Britain.”

“
Great
Britain,” Farrakhan repeated with emphasis. He smiled a little.

Opal hesitated, trying to stay in character as a schoolgirl dreamer, then said innocently, “Can you let me out of this cage? It's very uncomfortable.” She half thought of adding that she wouldn't try to escape, but decided not to press her luck.

“In Great Britain where? Is it London?”

“Yes, London,” Opal said. It didn't matter anyway. The Project was located outside London.

The adviser Farrakhan turned to the Skull. “British,” he said in English. “A girl who is ill and dreams she is here visiting Venskab Faivre. A girl from London.
Ce qu'elle voudrait nous faire croire.
This she would have us believe.” He turned back to Opal, and the smile had left his face. “We have no more patience with such lies,” he said. He made a gesture with his left hand. “Now we must learn from you the truth!”

Opal's second body convulsed as it flooded with a tidal wave of agony.