For several days Heather had felt the frustration building, but she continued to shunt it aside, walling it away from the work it threatened to disrupt. It wasn’t that she hadn’t made progress in her quest to establish a mind link with Jennifer. She had gotten very good at detecting Jennifer’s attempts at a link and had been able to establish an improved mutual awareness. But that awareness amounted to little more than an increased sense of presence, akin to catching sight of a ghost from the corner of her eye. When she tried to see it directly, it was gone.
Heather had begun to question her initial analysis of how telepathy worked. For one thing, if it had just been a form of normal electromagnetic wave communication, even directed by an extremely sophisticated neural phased array, the signal would have been attenuated by intervening objects and wouldn’t have worked at all in a facility replete with TEMPEST-approved Faraday cages.
Besides, when Jennifer and Mark had felt her thoughts when she’d been carried off by the Rag Man, she’d been a long way from them and without the line of sight required for a directed signal. It struck her that her initial assumptions had caused her to proceed down an erroneous path in her efforts to make a connection.
A baby didn’t learn to walk by mentally calculating which nerve endings to fire and which muscle fibers to twitch. He did it by trial and error, with a picture in mind of what he wanted to do, and then by releasing that desire into a brain that remembered little successes and built upon those. It happened automatically, but not instantaneously.
Rather than think about the night when the Rag Man had grabbed her, Heather let her thoughts drift to the morning at her mother’s breakfast table when she’d heard Jennifer’s thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud.
Suddenly Heather found herself back at the table, tasting the pancakes, smelling the warm maple syrup as it pushed melted butter down the sides of the stack. Jen’s voice in her head made it sound exactly as if Jen had spoken those words. Except something was missing. The auditory signals from her inner ear held no memory of vibrating under the sound waves from Jennifer’s voice.
It was more as if she’d been inside Jennifer’s head, with no distance separating their minds. It was like the alien headset link. Heather replayed the memory again and again, each time noticing some new detail of that mind link. The thoughts Jen had been thinking loudest were what she’d noticed at the time, but there was more. Drowned out by the volume of her surface thoughts were layers of thought and feelings, like whispers in a crowded room. Heather’s mind had shared all of that, it just hadn’t stood out.
But what had initiated the link? Heather felt the frustration bubble up again as she strove to understand it. The pattern was there, nibbling at the edges of her memory, but despite all her talents, she just wasn’t seeing it.
One thing each of the instances of psychic communion had in common: each time she’d managed it, Heather hadn’t been consciously trying to achieve a link.
Heather took a deep breath, slowly let it out and visualized what she wanted, then released it, pulling forth the memory of one of her favorite meditations, feeling her alpha waves smooth out in long, slow ripples. She felt her consciousness drift in blackness, zooming her perspective out until she was a distant, flickering flame, alone in an infinite black expanse. As she let herself drift deeper, she spotted another pinprick of light, then another, and another. As she became aware of these other tiny light sources, she noticed something else. The blackness that separated her from them wasn’t uniform. Waves rippled outward through the void from each pinprick, as if from pebbles dropped in a still pond. Only these waves radiated super-spherically.
Also, this void wasn’t four-dimensional space, but consisted of one or more additional dimensions, each of which touched all points in space. The void was full of these ripples, crossing over each other, waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes, most completely unfamiliar. Heather let her mind drift, scanning the wave sources in an expanding spiral until she recognized a familiar pattern. Jennifer.
Heather felt her as surely as if they had touched, the strength of the feeling jumping in intensity as she focused on the flame that was Jennifer. Rather than try to establish a connection, Heather relaxed further into the meditation, letting her mind center on the wave source in its own way.
Then it happened. It was as if their two candle flames merged, hers with Jennifer’s, and in that moment their minds joined as thoroughly as if they’d just slid into the alien headsets. Only this time neither of them threw up any mental blocks, joyously accepting the complete mental union.
In her padded cell, Heather’s readings underwent a remarkable shift, as if she’d suddenly entered a terrifying dream. As Dr. Jacobs turned his head away from the monitor to gaze into Heather’s milky white eyes, he was startled to see tears streaming down the sides of her face to dampen her brown hair.
He briefly considered trying to rouse her from the hallucination, but rejected the idea. Better to watch and see where this went. Perhaps whatever mental trauma Heather was experiencing in her fugue could be turned to some future advantage.
Leaning back in his chair, Dr. Jacobs let the electronic data collection continue.
General Balls Wilson was pissed, more than pissed. He was mad as hell. As he stared at his assembled staff, his usually jovial brown eyes seemed ready to spit bolts of liquid lightning that would leave only charred skeletal imprints of each person who had attracted the full force of that gaze.
“Who the hell authorized making this video and showing it to Mark Smythe?”
As the silence in the room acquired the density of a thick London fog, his long stride carried him around the NSA conference room, first clockwise, then counter-, until the weight of his presence became unbearable.
“Gentlemen. Maybe you aren’t hearing me. I want to know who gave the OK for this piece-of-shit video to be produced and shown to my prisoner without my direct authorization. Unless I get an answer in the next thirty seconds, every one of you bastards is going to be looking for a new line of work.”
Carl Christenson was the first to respond. “Sir, it appears that Dr. Krause ordered the video production and showed it to Mark Smythe in person.”
“Then he’s lucky he’s dead, because if he was still alive, he’d be mine.”
Balls Wilson’s powerful stride carried him back to the front of the room, where his hungry hawk’s gaze swept the assemblage. “Three NSA men dead. And you know what? After what I’ve seen, I don’t know how Smythe managed it, but I don’t blame him one little bit.”
His eyes turned on Dr. Jacobs. “How did Dr. Krause get the original video of Heather McFarland for his little greenroom production? Aren’t you in charge of her interrogation?”
“Yes sir, I am. Dr. Krause asked for access to the video. I assumed it was to assist with the Smythe interrogation.”
“You assumed.”
“Yes sir.”
“Goddamn it. I assumed I had a competent staff. I guess we’re all a bunch of idiots.” General Wilson’s chest heaved as he fought to bring his emotions back under control. “I’m not running some sort of half-assed Abu Ghraib operation here. If I find another instance of someone trying out an interrogation technique without my explicit approval, you’ll wish you never heard my name. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes sir!”
The thunderous response from all those in the briefing room lent credence to their answer.
General Wilson’s eyes locked, person by person, with each individual in the room.
“Good. Make sure you don’t disappoint me again.”
He let several seconds of silence hang in the air between them before speaking again.
“Dismissed!”
In less than thirty seconds the room, save General Wilson, was empty. Turning once more to the frozen image of Heather McFarland bound to her bed as three convicts were about to be released into her room, Balls Wilson hurled the remote control into the video screen with enough force to shatter the glass display into a thousand pieces, the falling fragments creating a sound like freezing rain on a car windshield.
Balls Wilson stared at the mess, his hands clenched so tightly that the muscles in his upper arms bulged with the effort. Then he turned and strode from the room.