Empire Games Series, Book 1(48)
“Tell me about it, sir.” She’d worked out early on that calling him “sir” put the Colonel in a more receptive frame of mind. “You aren’t here just for me, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Walk this way. We need to talk.”
Rita tried to keep up with him while wrestling with three months’ worth of baggage. It was a futile battle, adding extra stress on top of her irritation and the layer of stifling paranoia added by the Colonel’s arrival. What does he want now? she wondered. She knew she hadn’t done well on the FBI course, but surely it would take something more important to drag the Colonel out of his office for the day?
Smith headed straight for the drop-off lane in front of the terminal, then paused for her to catch up. A gray government car nosed into the curb beside him; the trunk and doors sprang open. “Let me help you with that,” he said, taking Rita’s suitcase to her chagrin. “Get in—we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
It wasn’t exactly a luxury limo, but there was a privacy screen between the passengers and the driver up front. The Colonel climbed in beside her, fastened his seat belt, then rapped on the partition.
“You’re probably wondering if this is about the course,” he told her as the car moved off. “It’s not. What’s happened is—” He paused, then rummaged for a bottle of water in the storage bin the car featured in place of an armrest. “Want one? No? Okay. There’s been a major new development, and I’m rearranging your training and operational preparedness as a result.”
“New development?” Rita echoed.
“We thought we had a year to put you through the standard clandestine ops backgrounder. But events are outrunning us. The original plan was to certificate you for basic fieldwork, then assign you as a trainee analyst for a year or two, before looking into provisioning you for autonomous para-time deployment. Unfortunately”—he grimaced—“shit just got real. So we’re rescheduling everything.”
“What kind of shit? What rescheduling?”
Smith opened his water bottle and chugged it. “Sorry. You need to be able to world-walk. This may be a false alarm, in which case it’s back to training as usual. But we need you ready for deployment at short notice. You’re going to be in the clinic for a month—”
“Clinic? What clinic?” Rita realized her voice was shrill. “What does this involve?”
“No brain surgery.” Smith flashed her a nervous grin, evidently startled by her response. “No knives, nothing like that. Just a couple of injections. Hmm. Well, actually there is some surgery involved—on your left arm. I’m assuming you’re right-handed? It’s an implant to control the ability. But my understanding is that it’s pretty straightforward stuff, and once you’re in control you can take some leave, or go straight back to studying Spook 201. It’s just that it can take up to a month, and in a worst-case scenario we may not have a month in which to activate you when we need you.”
“Worst—” Rita stopped. “You’re going to turn me into a world-walker because you might need me at short notice?”
“Pretty much. Unfortunately I can’t tell you precisely why at this point. Let’s just say, we no longer have the luxury of giving you a lengthy training period. And for now let’s leave a big fat question mark over where and what it’s all about.”
Oh great. Rita tensed. Her head was beginning to ache. “Is this optional?”
The Colonel’s fey grin was equally tense: “Not really, no.”
“Okay. Sir.” She leaned back, closing her eyes. “Where are we going?”
“You don’t need to know. Let’s just say it’s a private clinic in Connecticut, within chopper range of a bunch of high-end hospitals for backup if we need specialized help. First, you’ll undergo a couple of brain scans, MRI and PET, and a lumbar puncture. Then you sit around for a couple of days; then there’ll be some injections. Next you go into a special isolation suite, which is locked down to prevent you triggering by accident. After a few days they’ll begin testing you with a particular trigger engram in a safe space: if you world-walk successfully, you’ll find yourself in a mirror installation in the destination time line we’re using for testing. Then, after a couple of weeks of tests and training so you know how to work your new ability, they’ll implant you with an emergency beacon, show you how to use it, and that’s it. Oh, except for the legal formalities, which we’ll run you through before we activate you.”
“Legal…”
“World-walking is illegal without a court order issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court; they amended the law in 2004 … So before we switch you on, we have to haul you up in front of a judge, confirm you’re a DHS employee, and get you a shiny personalized certificate giving you carte blanche to commit a felony—as long as you do so on government business—that would normally carry up to twenty years in jail or an unlimited fine per occurrence.”
“Oh.” Rita fell quiet for a minute. “There’s a lot here that I don’t understand.” There’s a lot here I don’t want to ask you about, she added silently. Over the past few months a claustrophobic cynicism had settled deep into her bones: Trust no one, and verify everything, it prompted. She hated it, but—