Trial Run (12 page)

W
hen Gabriella answered, Charlie said, “It's me.”

“I asked Elizabeth to phone.”

“She's had a hard day. She asked me to fill you in.”

“I see. Just a minute, please. I need to record this conversation.”

“How is Brett?”

“No change. All right, I'm ready. Will you tell me what happened?”

Charlie related the day's events. When he was done, Gabriella said, “So Elizabeth offered two concrete predictions of the events before they occurred?”

“She didn't state them as predictions.”

“But that's what they were.”

“Actually, there were more. Her father being ill and laid out in a certain room. That was one. Her brother writing a five-million-dollar check while she waited, that's two. And then the dress.”

“I was not referring to the check or the amount, Charlie. She described that after the meeting with her brother was finished. The only
two clear foretellings were her father's illness and the company lawyers. She told you about the dress after she had purchased it.”

“Okay. I see what you're saying.” But his mind was hooked by the recollection of a woman who had willfully erased her armor. “I wish you could have seen her. It's like I was dealing with another woman inside Elizabeth's skin.”

“Certainly we are talking about more than changing the way she was dressed. Did the vision require this change?”

“She doesn't like that term. Vision.”

He could hear Gabriella's pen scratching six thousand miles away. The distance was heightened by her clinical tone. Detached and intent in equal measure. “Did she say why?”

“No, but I think she prefers to keep things on a clinical level. Like you.”

He heard the pen stop. “I need to maintain careful records of this, Charlie.”

“Sure thing.”

“We are breaking new ground here.”

“I'm not arguing with you.”

She was silent for a moment, then, “So in both cases, with her father and then again with her brother, she offered them what she had spent her lifetime refusing. An apology, and forgiveness.”

“Even though it was a wrenching ordeal.”

“Because the vision told her to do this.”

“Because the
image
in her ascent
revealed
her doing precisely that. Only, in the image, she said it came easily. Her exact words were, she sang to them.”

“What do you think that means?”

Charlie hesitated. “You're asking for my opinion?”

“You were the only other one of our team who was present. I would appreciate knowing what you think.”

The words emerged slowly. “I think maybe she was actually singing. On a level other than there in that room.” He stopped, then added, “It sounds ridiculous, what I just said.”

“No, Charlie. It is anything but.” The pen scratched in Charlie's ear for a time. Then, “The money surprises me. I have never met anyone who is less interested in money than Elizabeth.”

“She's giving it to us. The five million. All of it goes to our institute.”

“She can't—”

“She already has. I drove her by the LA branch of our bank. When I told her she should sit on the decision for a while, take time to recover, she said someday she'd have to tell me just how happy money had made her.”

“The poor lady.”

“Also, Elizabeth says we need it.”

“For what?”

“She doesn't know. But she said the image was definite about that too. She says we'll need more. A lot more.”

He listened to Gabriella's soft breathing. Then she said, “Is there anything else you think I should know?”

“Another hunch. Nothing more. Maybe it should wait until we return.”

“No, no. Tell me, please.”

“The timing.”

“You mean, how the image came on the same day as Brett's situation.”

“Actually, it was closer than that. She thinks she started her ascent pretty much at the same moment that Brett vanished. At first I thought it didn't mean anything. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I missed something.”

“You're suggesting the timing was not coincidental.”

“No, Gabriella. What if the purpose was
positive
? Let's just assume for the moment that this really is Elizabeth at some future point in time who is communicating with herself. What does that mean to you?”

“I'll have to give that some very serious consideration. But for now—”

“What if this future Elizabeth used the timing as a means of communicating with
all
of us. What if she was aware that you are thinking
about shutting everything down until this mystery regarding Brett is solved. But she knows that can't happen. So she sends this message as evidence. To all of us.”

Her voice deepened with the intensity of her concentration. “What evidence do you see that suggests a possible tie between Elizabeth's experience and Brett?”

“Come on, Gabriella. Brett was searching for a means of denying the chains of time. He saw this as a means of confirming that our ascents shift the human consciousness to a level defined by quantum theory. Elizabeth's experience proves Brett is right in his quest. The image's message might have been meant to say we need to continue with this. It's our responsibility.”

T
he next morning, as they passed through the security doors, Karla Brusius asked Reese, “Why are you allowing Kevin Hanley to watch the test transit?”

“A hunch.”

“I'm not sure that was smart. You saw how tight he was with the colonel.”

Reese noticed the security chief on the balcony overhead, waiting for her. She gave Jeff a thumbs-up. She asked, “Do you ever operate on hunches?”

“No.”

“When I was your age, I didn't either.”

“You're not that much older than me. You make it sound like we're generations apart.”

Reese smiled at her reflection in the elevator doors. “You have no idea.”

Washington loved its labels. The more misleading, the better. The clinic with the comatose patients was designated the Treatment Room.
Which was absurd. They had no idea what the patients' problem was, there was no treatment, and the patients were not getting any better. Reese and Karla passed through another set of security portals and entered the area called the Departures Lounge. Who came up with these names, Reese had no idea. Although, if they were successful, this particular label might actually fit.

Reese would have preferred Launch Site. But Departures Lounge was better than some of the things they might have come up with. As in calling the subjects' tight, windowless cells the Barracks. The kids would no doubt have some choice things to say about that.

The Departures Lounge was split into four rooms. There was no actual need for a reception area, but they had one anyway. Reese assumed it was a throwback to the days when security personnel manned front desks. But the electronic systems they had in place were more efficient. The security systems never got bored and harassed the female staff. They could not be bribed or slip away for coffee and restroom breaks. The electronic system operated to a series of very strict protocols. Every incoming individual was to be double scanned and checked against records. Any unauthorized access was to result in immediate and total eradication. No warnings. No mistakes.

The foyer opened into two rooms. To her right was the control room. The security chief waited by the left door. “Hanley phoned through. He's on his way.”

She heard the question in his voice, and Karla's sigh of displeasure. Reese said, “Meet him at the portal and code him in.”

“You're the boss.”

Reese amended, at least for another two days. She asked Jeff, “They all here?”

“Ready and waiting.”

The room she entered held two rows of plush leather seats rimming the curved rear wall. The chairs faced across a carpeted expanse to a long bank of electronic displays and controls. Above them stretched a glass window. Where the window met the ceiling
hung a row of flat screens. Karla slipped into the left-hand seat and fired up the controls.

The four kids she had picked up the previous week were clustered in one corner. Reese studied them carefully, looking for cracks. To her astonishment, the young woman had held up well. Consuela Inez stared at nothing. Which, Reese had decided, was a very good thing. The ones who made it back tended to start each transit with a period Reese secretly called
changeover
. They disengaged from one life, making room for another.

The youngest of the four, Eli Sekei, was the only one who appeared totally alert. He rocked in his chair, scoping the room. When he caught Reese's eye, he grinned. This time, Reese responded with a tight smile of her own.

The other two kids had shrunk into themselves. They did not so much sit in their chairs as crouch. They cast repeated glances to the room's other side. Where Reese's team was gathered.

Team
was probably too strong a word for the other seven. But her crew was better than nothing. A lot better. As in, the difference between getting dumped and having a future. A chance at attaining her real aim.

Reese pretended to study the seven who had made it this far, and made an effort to hide the hunger that threatened to escape. The desire strong as lust. The reason she was here at all.

Washington wanted a team to steal secrets.

What she wanted was the best-kept secret of all.

Kevin entered, followed by the security chief. Reese said, “Seal us in.”

The chief coded the wall keypad. Through the open door came the sigh of a pneumatic lock sealing the main entrance. Kevin Hanley's gaze drifted upward as the air conditioning overhead shut down and then sighed back, operating now as a self-contained system.

Reese addressed her new group. “You have now all been through twelve transits.”

“Twelve!” The loudest of her seven was a computer geek and convicted hacker named Neil Townsend. The other four hackers who had made it called Neil the Goremaster. “We got six!”

“You're lucky, dude.” The guy seated behind Neil was Corporal Joss Stone, a seriously buff former Marine with razor-cut features and enough death in his gaze to freeze the kids seated on the other side of the room. Joss sat next to the lone member of Reese's security crew who had volunteered for the team and made it. So far. Joss said, “We got three.”

“This is new to all of us,” Reese said. “We don't know if additional transits make any difference.”

“Twelve, fourteen, two hundred, you do whatever it takes.” Joss cast another look across the room. “Long as you bring Lolita over there back safe and sound.”

The crushed rose burned him from beneath long lashes. “The name is Consuela. Not that it's any business of yours.”

“Sweet. Why don't you dance on over here, Consuela. Give me some of that Cuban sugar.”

“Not in a million.” She tossed her hair. “Besides, this lady's from Nicaragua.”

Joss kissed the air.

From his place on the front row, Eli said, “I seem to remember something about getting the keys to the kingdom.”

Joss snorted. “You fell for that one?”

“I didn't fall for nothing, dude.”

“Whatever.”

Reese addressed the four. “The preliminary trials were designed to make you increasingly accustomed to the experience of transiting. That phase is over. Today begins your real work. If you succeed, you get precisely what I promised.”

“Anything I want.”

“Yes.”

“I say the word, I get up and walk out the door back there.”

Reese looked at Joss. “Tell them.”

“Dude, you make it through today, there ain't
nowhere
you'll want to be but here.”

“I got a life, unlike some people.”

The Marine's laugh was as sharp as the rest of him. “Man, you don't got nothing, and you don't even know that much.”

Reese said, “Karla.”

Her techie hit the controls, dimming the lights both in the Departures Lounge and in the room on the other side of the glass. A map flashed onto the screens rimming the ceiling. Reese said, “This is your destination.”

Neil snorted. “That old place?”

Reese told the four, “This is a palace inside Baghdad's Green Zone.”

Neil's whine was particularly invasive. “Why are you sending them back there? We already got that place down cold.”

Reese went on, “Inside the main ballroom, which you see here, is a safe. That is it there. As you can see, the safe door has been welded shut. Inside the safe is an envelope. Your job is to go to this room, enter the safe, read the sheet of paper in the envelope, and return back here.”

“This is nuts.”

Joss said, “Neil.”

“Don't start on me. We did this—”

“You want me to put a sock in it for you, just keep it up.”

Neil slumped in his seat. “Boring.”

“That's what I thought.” Joss waved a hand. “Go for it, boss lady.”

“This is not merely a test of your abilities,” Reese said. “This is vital work. The future of our program depends upon your being able to successfully achieve this task. Do this, and whatever you want,
anything
you want, is yours.”

Eli said, “Except no drugs, isn't that what you said?”

“You do drugs, you can't do this,” Joss said. “And once you do this, man, you'll know the same thing I do.”

“Which is?”

But the Marine had already turned away. “Sorry. I don't talk about the field with recruits. You want the scoop, you come home with the goods.”