Virtually His (3 page)

Hers had never been the easy way. Helen Roston was of the opinion that if she had to make a lot of money quickly by selling her body, she might as well do it training to be the world’s next mega-soldier-whatever. Which was about the hardest possible way to make a living but—she grinned wryly—at least her body would look good if she died from overtraining.

Her body
being the operative concept here. After all, there was no guarantee that she would come out of this alive. Oh well, Enrique had always accused her of having a death wish. Hellacious, he’d called her choice of living on the streets alone. He was learning English because the American dollar was strong and American tourists were easy victims. So “Hell” she had been called ever since. Russians loved nicknames, and it wasn’t long before everyone on the street knew her by that name.

She hadn’t been able to resist the contract, though. After reading the questionnaire, she’d seriously considered it for a month before she’d shrugged and answered “yes” to all the questions and then made an appointment to see the director. What harm was there to enhance one’s special abilities? Blame it on her being an orphan. There were always those constant niggling questions at the back of her mind about her background. Once and for all, she would be able to find out exactly how
special
she was. No more questions. Or unanswered dreams.

A lot of money would get her out of GEM quicker and she could…She shrugged. She hadn’t quite decided what she could do yet. But once she bought out her contract with them, she would feel a whole lot better.

Not that they were difficult to work for. Far from it. GEM had given her a life an orphan girl from the Russian ghetto could only dream about, had given her the means to be
somebody,
but she didn’t want to spend twenty, thirty years of her life playing spy games, or being a contracted liaison between agencies, or running different lives under different aliases. There had to be more to life than that.

She wasn’t made to live within a group anyway. Even when she was a wild child on the street, she’d refused to run with the gangs. She preferred to take care of herself, thank you very much. She wasn’t going to succumb to any of those boys asking for the usual nasty payments, so she had to learn to fight hard and run harder, because she didn’t always win.

Ha, if they could see me now.
Helen grinned at the ridiculousness of the old Broadway song running in her head. What she was being asked to do was show business of a sort, wasn’t it? So the song was appropriate.

Everyone wanted to see her, actually. It had been almost two years of training and now everyone wanted to see what she had become.

She wiped the perspiration off with a towel. What had she become? She asked herself that question quite a bit and had no real answer. She’d come close to a personal revelation the other night. She’d woken up in the middle of one of her too-darn-vivid dreams, sat up, and declared quietly to no one in particular, “I’m very close to
being.
”

It was one of those profound moments one couldn’t quite grasp, especially when one jolted up in bed suddenly. But Helen knew it meant something. She always had that voice-in-the-head thing that came out of nowhere, when something important was coming.

That was one of the reasons why she had been chosen for this project, of course. Having what they called psi—or strong intuitive abilities—was a definite plus. She didn’t care what they called it. Voice in the head. Psychic blah-blah. Intuition. That voice had saved her life a few times. She had explained to the CIA department that she wasn’t one of those people who communicated with some other presence or had any kind of power to; she just sometimes heard a warning or made a really good guess. Whatever. The CIA white coats seemed to have accepted her half-truth. She hadn’t told them about her dreams, but then, they hadn’t asked. Never tell them everything, that was her motto.

She was looking forward to her dip in the pool, more so than usual. That climb up the chain had tested her endurance and her muscles were pleasantly aching. A quick relaxing swim would make sure she didn’t cramp up later.

“Agent Roston, go to Chamber Two.”

Helen frowned at the electronic voice instructing her from the intercom. She walked over and activated the speaker. “Why?” Her training had stayed on the same schedule these last few months. “What’s there?”

“I’m just delivering the orders, Hell. Get your pretty ass over there.”

Helen chuckled. It was funny to hear a computer using her nickname with such familiarity. “If you weren’t a computer, Eight Ball, I’d find you and kick yours.”

Eight Ball was COMCEN’s computer. His programmer had given his mother program its own choice for personality and gender in certain communications feedback. For some weird reason, the computer had taken up a surfer’s easy laid-back drawl, although it tended to trip itself up while trying out surfer lingo. Eight Ball, she suspected, was another open-ended experiment on the loose in this place.

“If I had an ass, Fly Boy would say ‘go for it, dude!’” The computer mimicked the commando’s voice to perfection. “Chamber Two in twelve minutes, over and out.”

Helen frowned again. She didn’t have much time. She’d just have to go wearing her sweaty leotard and tights. At a sprint.

She dropped the towel, punched the buttons on the panel, and slipped out of the training area while the door was still sliding open. No time for the elevator. Chamber Two was three flights up. Trust them to pick a place that required climbing up instead of running down.

She pushed the door to the stairwell and starting running two and three steps at a time. She paused at the landing, taking a quick moment to flick her bangs away from her eyes.

“Test,” that voice in her head warned.

Her awareness immediately turned rapier-sharp. She pushed open the exit door that led into the corridors. She didn’t sense any danger around the corner. She didn’t think they were planning to kill her, not after investing all that time and money, but she couldn’t ignore that warning in her head either.

“Test.” The repetition was even more urgent now.

“They do that all the time, so what’s so different about this test?” she muttered. Realization came like sudden daylight.
They
weren’t testing her this time.
Someone
was. Maybe it was
him.

The corridor was dead silent and she knocked on Chamber Two. An envelope was stuck on it, with her name, Elena Rostova, written in bold font, along with
Do Not Open.
She raised her brows. Very few people used her real name. She peeled it off the metal. The door swished open. There was no light coming from within.

“Games, games, games,” Helen murmured and stepped inside. The door behind her sealed shut and it was pitch-black in the room. Every one of her senses reached out into the darkness.

“Walk ten paces forward,” a voice said from all around her.

Sen-surround sound. “Do I get to turn and shoot?” Helen joked. Excitement roiled in the pit of her stomach. It had to be
him
talking to her.

“No. Ten paces forward, Elena.”

She obeyed, counting aloud. It was unbelievably dark in there. She stopped when she encountered something with her feet. A thickly-padded mat. She stepped onto it and finished her count. “Now what?” she asked when she was done.

“Open the envelope.”

She carefully did so. “This isn’t easy in the dark, you know,” she complained. “There’s nothing inside.”

“You’re expecting a note. Never assume anything in here.”

She wished she could see the person talking to her. The voice was a projected echo, deliberately masking any recognizable tone. She slipped her finger into the envelope and felt something.

“It’s small. Roundish. Too small to be a button,” she said.

“It’s a pill. Take it.”

Her mouth fell open. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“It won’t kill you.”

She could have sworn she detected mockery, even with that amplified resonance. She looked around in the darkness. Not that she could see anything. “Look, this is getting irritating. Why am I in the dark and why must I take a drug?”

“It’s part of your training.”

“Usually, I’m given a set of instructions and my instructor tells me what’s going to happen,” she said. But she’d known this new instructor wasn’t going to be anything usual. He’d been watching her nonstop since her arrival. She’d felt him. He was everywhere. Funny thing was, she’d been more intrigued by the game than outraged at the lack of privacy.

“I see. Tell me, when you’re playing operative in the real world, do you have someone telling you what’s going to happen next?”

Helen narrowed her eyes, feeling just a twinge of impatience rising. “Training, I said.” She pivoted around. “I’m not taking any drugs unless it’s the serum that’s specified in the contract. This pill isn’t it, is it?”

“You won’t know till you try it. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I’m your instructor and yes, this is a training session. Take the pill, Elena. As specified in your contract, you’ll let your instructor direct you as he or she sees fit.”

“Within reason,” Helen argued. She’d added that part to the clause herself. “Tell me. If I take this, what’s going to happen to me? Besides not dying, I mean.”

“First you will fall unconscious.”

Her whole body went taut. “What? No f—”

“Then you’ll wake up in fifteen minutes. You’ll find that you can’t move your body. Certain parts of you will feel nothing. You’ll stay paralyzed for the duration of the session.”

In the two years of her training, even through medical tests, no one had given her any drugs to render her unconscious. She’d been extra careful to establish a mental block when working with the CIA; she didn’t trust them or their tendency to hypnotize certain subjects.

She rolled the pill between her thumb and forefinger. Why now? What did he want to do to her?

“Fighting what you can see is easy, Elena. It’s fighting what you can’t see that will be your ultimate challenge. Remember what’s coming up. A dose of the serum is just like fighting what you can’t see, isn’t it?” A tiny pause. “I can’t force you to take the pill, but you’ll be putting potentially more harmful drugs into your system. This one, I can guarantee you, is a common drug that I know to have very few side effects.”

Helen laughed incredulously. “I’m supposed to take your word for it,” she remarked.

Silence.

Whoever her instructor was, he was waiting.

She rolled the pill again, her thoughts going a hundred miles an hour. Test, that stupid voice in her head had said. He was testing her for something entirely different from her previous trainers. She chewed on her lower lip for a second, then, before she changed her mind, she popped it into her mouth and swallowed.

“Count from ten backwards when I tell you to.”

Helen noted that he didn’t seem to have any problems seeing her in this darkness. Special glasses with image-intensifier? But if so, he still wouldn’t be able to tell whether she had taken the pill. Her eyes searched the darkness. Where was he?

After a few minutes, he ordered, “Start counting.”

She turned around as she counted. “Ten, nine, eight…” There was just nothing to see, not even a hint of light anywhere. “Seven, six…” She had to stop moving. Could darkness spin? It felt like the darkness was swirling all around her. “Five, four…” She couldn’t feel her feet. “Shit…” She fell forward. So that was what the mattress was for, was her last thought.

Her eyes flew open. It was still that darkness but she felt strange. She tried moving but she couldn’t feel her body and she couldn’t see. She didn’t like this one bit. No reason to panic yet. He told her that she wasn’t going to be able to move, but she could feel a warm body against her. A very warm male body.

“What’s happening?” she asked. At least she could talk. “I feel funny.”

No answer. She could feel her vision swaying, like something was moving really fast around her. It suddenly occurred to her that she was being carried. And that she was upside down because her hair kept getting in her mouth when she tried to talk.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, spitting her hair out. “Answer me, dammit.”

Whoever it was seemed to be going faster and faster, until she grew dizzy. He couldn’t possibly go that long. Where the hell was she? No longer in the room, for sure, but why couldn’t she see anything? She could make out shadows now—light and dark shades of blackness. There were strange smells, like foliage and the outdoors, then the scent of clean laundry, then of burning wood, then of salty air. She frowned, totally confused, because she couldn’t see any forest or fire or anything that could give her any clues to her location.

She felt that floating sensation again and from the change of shadows, she could tell that her body was sliding off his as he swung her around. She stared up, trying to see who this stranger was, but it was that odd shadowy shape again.

He should be panting from that long run but she couldn’t hear him breathe at all. Suddenly, he jerked around and there were armed men all around him.

She could only watch in horror as they shot him and his body slid away from her view. She couldn’t help him! She gritted her teeth and tried to move but it was no use. She was totally at their mercy.

They surrounded her. She could hear them now—male grunts and cursing. She gulped in air as they pulled at her body. She could feel them pulling her legs apart….

She bit down on her lower lip. She wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t panic. She was going to find a way out of this. If she could only see—

The noise around her was jumbled, as if she was standing in a very crowded room. She breathed in as someone started a fight and everyone around her, including her attackers, became involved. The shadows made everything even more confusing since she couldn’t tell who was hitting whom. But she smelt the blood, heard screams of pain, saw bodies falling around her.

And there was nothing she could do.

There’re too many bodies. Just too many people. Those screams.