Tell Me No Spies (5 page)

“Thanks. See you.” I
tried to control my face while I ogled him from close range. Those
damn riding chaps did it to me every time. A faint whiff of gun oil
and leather reached me as I jerked my gaze up from his well-endowed
crotch, and I swallowed hard. I could almost taste his skin again,
feel that hard-muscled shoulder under my teeth. Could almost feel
that magnificent…

“Call me if you need
me,” I added. My voice came out sounding husky, and I realized I’d
licked my lips unconsciously.

I lost what little
breath I had left when Kane’s eyes darkened. His hand moved as
though he would reach for me, but he gripped the doorknob instead,
his knuckles whitening. He stepped quickly out the door and closed
it behind him without a backward glance.

He revved the bike,
and I watched him spray gravel and disappear down the lane before I
collapsed into my chair again, knees trembling. Goddamn, he was
hot. And if I didn’t keep my hands off him, Sirius Dynamics would
take him down right along with me when the time came.

Life just wasn’t
fair.

I trailed into Sirius
Dynamics on Monday morning with a significant lack of enthusiasm.
When I realized my office was already crowded, I jerked to a halt
in the doorway, surveying the occupants.

Kane and Spider were
present, as expected. I kept my expression neutral at the sight of
Charles Stemp, Sirius’s civilian director of clandestine
operations.

Stemp looked up as I
entered, his reptilian features unreadable as always. “Ms. Kelly,
you have a new team member, effective immediately.” He indicated
the fourth man in the room. “He will be joining your team in an
attempt to analyze the unique interaction of your brain with the
network key’s circuitry.”

My cynical inside
voice finished the unspoken sentence: “…so we can figure out how to
decrypt things for ourselves and kill you as soon as possible.” I
shrugged off the thought. Same old, same old.

Stemp continued as I
reached to shake hands with the newcomer, “This is Dr. Sam
Kraus.”

A shock of recognition
paralyzed me with hand outstretched, mouth gaping. My stunned gaze
took in the short, roly-poly white-haired man smiling at me. The
red shirt and full, curly white beard. The twinkling, vividly blue
eyes and rosy cheeks.

My voice emerged as a
feeble croak. “…Santa Claus?”

He laughed, and his
belly shook like… a bowl full of jelly…

“Hello, Aydan. Have
you been a good girl lately?”

“No
way
! You’re
kidding me!” I stared at him some more. “Talk about a
self-fulfilling prophecy.”

He glanced down at his
red-clad belly and chuckled again. “I’m sure you planted this idea
in my subconscious mind and I fulfilled it,” he agreed. “I didn’t
know if you’d remember me, though.”

“I might not have made
the connection if you didn’t look so… so…”

“So much like Santa
Claus,” Spider finished for me, grinning. “I thought so, too, but I
didn’t want to say anything.” He eyed us eagerly. “Tell me the
story.”

“When I was a kid, Dr.
Kraus used to come by the house a couple of times a year,” I
began.

“Call me Sam,” the
doctor interrupted. “I think we can dispense with the formalities
under the circumstances.”

I shot him a smile and
continued. “I was pretty young. I can’t even remember how old I was
when we first met.”

“You were four,” Sam
supplied. “You’d started kindergarten a year early.”

“And you thought he
looked like Santa Claus,” Spider prompted.

Sam chuckled. “No,
when I first met Aydan I was about your age, and just as skinny as
you.”

“Oh. Right, I guess
that was a long time ago.” Spider flushed. “Sorry,” he stammered.
“I didn’t mean you’re old… Either of you. I just meant…”

“It’s okay, Spider,” I
assured him. “No, he didn’t look anything like Santa Claus. But the
first time he came, it was right around Christmas, and I didn’t
have a really clear concept of Santa Claus at the time. So when he
told me his name was Sam Kraus, I got all excited and blurted out
‘Santa Claus’ because I knew Santa Claus was coming soon, and it
sounded so similar. It became a family joke, and I always called
him Santa Claus after that, even when I was a teenager.”

“Talk about a small
world,” Spider exclaimed.

“Yeah…” A faint
thought nagged at me, but it fled as Stemp addressed us.

“You’ll carry on with
your normal activities, and Dr. Kraus will observe. You’ll be
working in the secured facility where the doctor has his lab set
up.”

Spider’s head jerked
up, his mouth opening, but Kane spoke first. “You know that’s not
acceptable. Aydan can’t work in the secured facility.”

Stemp waved an
irritable hand. “I realize it’s not feasible for the long-term.” He
turned to face me. “As soon as you begin to have difficulties,
we’ll find an alternate solution. But I know you can deal with it
in the short term, and by then, Dr. Kraus may already have the data
he needs.”

Kane made as if to
speak again, but Stemp overrode him. “This is not open for
discussion. You have your orders.” He turned and left.

Sam’s bright eyes
darted from Spider’s expression of pure dismay to Kane’s scowl to
whatever might be showing on my face. Abject terror, probably. I
wrestled for calm.

“What’s the problem?”
Sam inquired with concern.

“No problem,” I told
him. “I’m claustrophobic, so I’m not very happy in the secured
facility, that’s all. No big deal for the short term.”

“Aydan, the last time
you worked in the secured facility, you nearly died! Twice!” Spider
sprang to his feet and began to pace, his lanky limbs flailing
awkwardly. “He can’t make you do this!” He whirled and turned a
pleading face to Kane. “Can’t you talk to him? Or talk to General
Briggs? Make Stemp change his mind?”

Kane twitched a
shoulder. His face was composed again, but the gunmetal grey of his
eyes gave away his mood. “Briggs won’t override the civilian
director unless it’s military-related. We have our orders. Until
Aydan has a problem, we’ll follow them.” He turned to me. “Aydan,
now isn’t the time to be a hero. The instant you lose control of
the sim, the instant you can’t sleep or start having nightmares,
you tell me. That’s an order. Got it?”

“Got it,” I
agreed.

Sam’s jolly demeanour
had evaporated while he followed our exchange, and he turned to me
with a crease between his bushy white eyebrows. “You nearly died in
the sim? I didn’t think that was possible. What happened?”

I sighed. “How much do
you know about the virtual reality network?”

“I know the basic
structure and operation of the computer side of the network, but my
area of expertise is brainwave patterns and frequencies, and their
interaction with the fobs that provide access to the virtual
reality network. It’s my life’s work.” He eyed me with interest.
“That’s why I’m so interested in your brain’s interaction with this
mysterious network key that lets you sneak around undetected in any
network and decrypt files that are supposedly secure.”

Kane blew out a breath
and frowned. “That’s part of the problem. Aydan has to use the
special key to decrypt files. If she uses a standard fob with a
brainwave modulator, she can’t do it. And when she uses the key, it
hurts her every time she exits the network.”

“A lot,” Spider put in
unhappily.

“And this is
life-threatening?” Sam prompted.

“No,” I said. “It’s
just a nuisance. The life-threatening part happens if I get too
tired or stressed and I don’t control my thoughts inside the sim.
If you believe you’ve died inside the sim, you actually die in real
life.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed as
he worked his stubby fingers through his beard. “I’d heard rumours
of that. I didn’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Kane
said grimly. “I personally know of three people who have been
killed inside a sim. The cause of death looks like a heart attack
when their physical bodies are autopsied.”

“That changes things…”
Sam frowned at me. “But why would you think you were dying inside
the sim? And why couldn’t someone just wake you? Pull you out of
the network? It only takes a touch or a sudden noise to do it.”

“That’s the other
complication,” Kane explained. “When Aydan’s using the key to
access the network, you can’t wake her unless you actually hurt
her. And if that happens, if she’s forcibly woken from the network,
she goes through hell.”

“It’s awful,” Spider
quavered, his eyes haunted. “It’s like she’s being tortured. She
screams, horrible screams like she’s being burned alive, and her
whole body thrashes around, and you can’t do a thing to help her,
and it goes on and on…”

“Anyway,” I broke in,
thoroughly embarrassed, “I only lose concentration in the sim if
I’m overtired. And if I’m in the secured facility when I lose
control, my claustrophobic anxieties tend to take over the sim.
That’s when I have problems.”

“Little problems. Like
your heart stopping,” Kane added.

“Well… yeah. But I
should be fine for at least a week before it starts to get bad,” I
reassured them.

Sam eyed me. “Are you
sure?”

“Do I have a
choice?”

“Not really, at this
point,” he said regretfully. “I just spent the last several weeks
getting my lab facilities set up downstairs. Some of the equipment
can’t be moved easily. And this whole operation is so highly
classified that it shouldn’t be outside the secured facility at
all.”

I blew out a long
breath. “Okay. Well, let’s get at it, then.” We all rose and
trooped down the hallway.

My steps slowed as we
approached the heavy steel door. “You guys go on ahead. I’ll follow
you.”

Sam shot me a piercing
glance. “It’s okay,” I assured him. “It’s just that the time-delay
chamber is so small. It gets pretty crowded.”

“Okay,” he agreed, and
stepped up to allow the scanner to read his retina. When the latch
released, the three men entered the chamber, and I hung back in the
lobby, breathing deeply.

When the indicator
light showed the chamber was clear, I approached the door
reluctantly. The secured facility contained nothing but bad
memories and despite my best efforts at calm, my heart pounded.

I placed my face next
to the scanner and started belly breathing when the latch released.
In. Out. Slow like ocean waves.

I stepped into the
cramped chamber, twitching when the door locked behind me with a
muffled click. I let the next door sensor scan me, then stood with
my eyes closed, breathing and counting down the long thirty seconds
until the next latch released.

My knees wobbled at
the sight of the featureless concrete tunnel of stairs, and I
sucked in a shallow breath that tried to turn into panicked
panting. With an effort of will, I let my breath out slowly and
hurried down, clutching the handrail. At the bottom of the stairs,
I snatched the door open.

I managed to contain a
jerk and a yelp at the sight of Kane, Spider, and Sam clustered
near the door. Kane scanned my face and immediately stepped away,
pulling the other two men with him. They stood a couple of paces
down the hallway and three sets of eyes surveyed me anxiously.

“Fine, I’m fine,” I
gabbled breathlessly. “Let’s go. Where’s the lab?”

Kane eyed my shaking
hands. “You don’t look fine. You look like you’re on the verge of a
panic attack. I told you, don’t be a hero.”

“I’m fine,” I
repeated, trying to convince myself. “It’s just that damn time
delay and the stairwell that gets me. I’m okay down here with all
the glass and the air moving.” I forced myself to concentrate on
the white corridor, the openness of the glassed-in labs, the flow
of air from the cooling system. Fine. I was fine.

I took another deep
breath. “Let’s go.”

“This is stupid!”
Spider’s eyes were dark with distress. “This isn’t going to work,
we know it won’t work, and Aydan’s going to end up getting hurt. Or
killed…” He turned a beseeching face to me. “Aydan, just say you
can’t do it.”

“I can do it for the
short term. And the sooner we get started, the sooner I can get out
of here, so let’s go do it already! You guys are just making this
worse!” My voice came out tight and shaking, and I gulped back my
agitation. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

“It’s all right.” Kane
turned to Sam. “We’ll try it. For a while. Lead the way.”

In the lab, Sam
ushered me to a chair surrounded by electronic gadgets I couldn’t
identify. I probably didn’t want to know anyway. More adrenaline
spiked into my system at the sight of the sturdy straps on the
chair arms and at the feet.

“I’m not sitting in
that.” I backed toward the door, my hand reflexively twitching
toward my concealed holster.

Sam made calming
gestures. “It’s okay. The electronics just look a little
intimidating.” He eyed me worriedly. “I just need you to sit here
while I attach some electrodes to your forehead…”

“I’m not sitting in
that. I don’t care about the electronics, I’m not sitting in a
chair with restraints. No fucking way.” I jittered in the doorway,
ready to fight or run while cold sweat drenched my armpits.

“Oh! No, I’m sorry,
those aren’t for you!” Sam’s face cleared, and he detached the
straps from the chair and tossed them into a drawer.

“Who are they for,
then?” I glared suspiciously around the room. “I’m not doing this.
I could go into the network and never know you were tying me up
until I came out.”

“Aydan, I wouldn’t do
that to you. Don’t you trust me?” Sam’s brow was furrowed, a
sorrowing Santa.

“Fuck, no, I don’t
trust you. I don’t even know you. I haven’t seen you in what,
thirty years? Why the hell would I trust you?” I could feel my
composure slipping as my voice rose, and I held onto it with
difficulty.