The Shadow Project, page 5
The Skull smiled back, thinly. “In that case, I must insist that my plans remain my business.” The man in battle fatigues bent down to whisper something in his ear. He nodded briefly, then began to push himself—rather painfully, Opal thought—to his feet. “I understand the loading of your helicopter is now complete. Doubtless you will want to inspect it.”
“I doubt that will be—” the elder man began.
But his younger companion cut in firmly, “As a formality, yes.”
The Skull shrugged and began to walk toward the door with his slow, small steps. His older companion rose to his feet and moved across the room. He stopped directly in front of Opal, and though she knew he could not see her, she was hard pressed to suppress a shiver: for an instant he seemed to be looking deeply into her eyes. Then he turned to say something quietly in Lusakistani to the Skull.
“Something wrong?” asked the younger of his visitors at once.
The Skull shrugged. “Nothing that need concern you,” he said shortly, and pushed through the door, followed by the other men.
As the door closed, the old man turned back toward Opal and raised a closed hand. “American?” he asked in English.
It was exactly as if he’d spoken to her, and while that was impossible, she took an involuntary step backward. Then the man opened his hand to show an odd medallion nestling in the palm.
Suddenly Opal could no longer move.
14
Danny, outside London
Danny swam slowly into consciousness. For some reason he expected to be in a hospital bed, but he was actually slumped in a comfortable chair. His head felt as if somebody had just put it through a mincer. When he forced his eyes open and persuaded them to focus, there was a man standing over him.
The man smiled and said, “My name is Harrington.”
That’s the smile on the face of the tiger, Danny thought sluggishly. He pushed himself upright in the seat and tried to get his mind to function. The last thing he remembered was the hospital and the young doctor coming at him with the needle. Now he was somewhere else. To play for time he said, “Won’t get much of a ransom, Mr. Harrington—most of my friends would pay you to keep me.”
“It’s Sir Roland, actually,” Harrington said dismissively. And you’ve probably guessed this isn’t about a ransom.”
What Danny guessed was that he was back in the big country house, although the room they were in was unfamiliar. He hadn’t seen Sir Roland Harrington before, either, but he had the feeling His Sirship might be the Mr. Big of whatever was going on down below. Danny shifted in the chair and massaged his arm where the needle had gone in. “What is it about, then? Only I’ve got a sick grannie I need to be getting back to.” He glanced around the room. It was furnished with antiques. There was even a log fire.
“I heard about that, Danny,” Sir Roland said. “And I’m sorry. But it may be one of the things we can help you with.”
Danny! So they knew he wasn’t Lester Thomas. That hadn’t taken long. Hadn’t taken them long to find him and bring him back, either. These boys had connections. And the fact that they’d gone to so much trouble meant he was in a bigger mess than he’d thought. They really didn’t want him talking about what he’d seen, even though he hadn’t seen much. He tilted his head to one side, stared Sir Roland in the eye, and asked, “Who are you people?” Like they were going to tell him, but he had to ask.
To his astonishment, Sir Roland said, “We’re a special department of MI6—Britain’s counterintelligence service. We’re code-named the Shadow Project, although round here you’ll usually hear it simply referred to as the Project. We’re working in cooperation with the American CIA, which established the Project in the first place. Do you know what I mean by remote viewing?”
Danny shook his head. “No.”
“Do you know what I mean by the Cold War?”
“Of course I do—I’m not stupid.”
“It never occurred to me that you were, Danny. But you’re young, and the Cold War must have ended before you were born.” Sir Roland was sitting in a wing chair on the other side of the lovely big fireplace. “During the Cold War,” Sir Roland began, “the CIA—”
“I know what the CIA is,” Danny said helpfully, but Sir Rollie ignored him.
“The CIA received information that the Soviets were recruiting psychics for espionage work. At—”
“Psychics?” Danny interrupted again, this time seriously. “Like Madame Sosostris with her wicked pack of cards?”
For some reason it stopped Sir Roland short. “That’s from Eliot,” he said, and couldn’t quite keep the surprise out of his voice. Another one who’d marked Danny down as an uneducated prat because he had the wrong accent and lived in the wrong neighborhood. Danny’d had a lot of that, even after his Nan scraped together the money to send him to a private school. Especially after his Nan sent him to private school. Some of the other boys were all right, but most of them treated him like a freak, and the fact that he was bright made no difference at all. Which was the main reason he’d decided to pack the whole thing in. If private school was bad, Cambridge had to be ten times worse. So no university for him. He was quitting. After he’d paid back his Nan, of course, which was the reason he’d gone back to thieving.
He dragged his mind back to his present problems. “That’s right,” Danny said. “The Waste Land. But it’s what you meant by psychics—right?”
“Well, without the fairground connotations,” Roland said, “but essentially, yes. No one believed the reports at first. The Communists were militant materialists, so occult ideas seemed the last thing likely to interest them. But the reports persisted, and the Soviets scored some spectacular successes, and eventually we—the Western intelligence services—were forced to take them seriously. So the CIA set up its own program.”
“With psychics?” Danny let his eyebrows rise.
Sir Roland sighed. “That was exactly our attitude. And we were wrong. In any case, the initial approach was investigative. All this was CIA, you appreciate—we declined to take any of it seriously over here. But their people looked into various forms of psychism and found more or less what you’d expect—a great deal of self-deception, fraud, and nonsense. But then they stumbled on remote viewing. Remote viewing is the ability to see distant places in your mind, places you’ve never actually visited or read about. There were people who claimed to be able to do this on demand. You can see the attraction to an intelligence service.”
Danny nodded. “It’s a no-brainer. A spy never needs to leave his office. Can’t get caught, either.” He hesitated, then added, “If it’s true.”
“That’s exactly it; and as it turned out, it was true. There really were people who could gather information from distant locations without, as you say, ever leaving the office. They could do it under test conditions, and some of the data they brought back checked out. Not all of it, unfortunately, but some. All you had to do was give them map coordinates. But the interesting thing was that the real stars, the one or two with high accuracy ratings, all claimed they did not do remote viewing in their minds at all, but left their physical bodies and traveled to the target.”
“How?” Danny asked. He caught Sir Roland’s blank look and added, “What did they travel in? Mean to say, you leave your physical body, you leave everything behind, don’t you—eyes, ears, everything. So how do you see where you’re going?”
“You’re very quick, aren’t you?” Sir Roland said admiringly. “They told us they separated out a sort of second body, an energy body something like a ghost. They traveled in that.” He may have thought Danny was about to interrupt again, for he pressed on hurriedly. “The thing is, they got results. So the CIA set up a special project to train others. That went well enough, but even the best of them was never one hundred percent accurate. In fact, very few of them came anywhere near. So after a while, the emphasis moved toward trying to understand the remote-viewing process. The theory was that if we knew how it worked, we might be able to get it to work better. The ultimate goal was to develop electronic equipment that could trigger the experience and make it more reliable. Which was where the trouble started.” He stood up suddenly. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”
15
Dorothy, Saint Luke’s Hospital
You could hear everything. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, hardly breathe sometimes, but those young doctors came through clear as a bell. Now there was one talking about her condition to somebody, a nurse probably, talking about her operation and her chances of recovery as if she wasn’t lying there large as life in the bed in front of them. That was the trouble. You lay there and you couldn’t move and couldn’t speak, and half the time they forgot you were there.
Apparently her chances weren’t all that good.
“Dr. Miller seems optimistic,” the female voice said.
“Dr. Miller is always optimistic,” said the male voice, “but I had a look when Benson opened her up.” There was the sound of breath being drawn in through teeth.
“Bad?”
“The rupture wasn’t too severe, but there’d been an awful lot of bleeding. My guess is she lay for a long time before the ambulance came—before anyone found her, I suppose. I’m not sure what quality of life she’ll have even if she does recover.”
Mind your own quality of life, you little brat, Dorothy thought. But she still couldn’t say anything, and after a while she heard shuffling sounds and a door and then a deep silence.
She was going to die here if she wasn’t careful. She could see it coming in the tea leaves.
Dorothy wasn’t too fussed about dying, not on her own account. Just passing over, wasn’t it? She’d had proof of that often enough. Anyway, life hadn’t been up to much since Stanley went. Never seemed to be enough money, arthritis played up in wet weather. Your taste went too, as you got older. But all the same, if she popped her clogs now, who was going to look after Danny? Who was going to keep him out of trouble? And there were other people who needed her. Important work, that; and she was the only one who could do it.
It was funny: Dorothy’s eyes were closed, but sometimes she thought she could see the hospital room, end of the bed, bedside table (nobody had brought her flowers), tubes going from her arm up to a transparent bag of something hanging from a stand. Sometimes she could see all that, sometimes she couldn’t. Mostly she couldn’t. Mostly it was dark, the way you’d expect lying in bed with your eyes shut. And then you were never sure if you were asleep or awake. It was very hard to judge the passing of the time, but at some point Dorothy must have slipped into a dream because she could see Stanley standing in front of her, plain as day.
“I think our boy Danny’s getting into trouble,” Stanley said.
16
Danny, the Shadow Project
“They’re remarkable works,” Sir Roland said as they entered the library. “We have volumes dating back to the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, sometimes even earlier. There’s a drawer over there that contains a Roman scroll from the time of the Emperor Claudius. And they all have one thing in common—”
“They give you the creeps?” Danny suggested. He loved books, but looking at some of the titles, they were seriously weird.
Sir Roland smiled. “Well, that, certainly, but I was actually thinking of the fact that they all deal one way or another with spirits or astral projection.”
“Those ones over there deal with magic,” Danny said.
“Ah yes, that’s true—a great many of them do,” Sir Roland agreed. “But where does the magic come from?”
Danny shrugged. “Sacrificing goats?” They’d done it in a horror movie he once saw. Actually he was feeling uncomfortable with the way the conversation had turned. The books he mainly liked to read were scientific. The irrational—magic, spirits and the like—made him uneasy.
“Or should I say, who is the sacrifice made to? Spirits, or gods—disembodied intelligences. All the magic, or what passes for magic, arises out of communications with entities that have no physical bodies—exactly the way our best remote-viewing operatives claimed to function.”
“Yes, but it’s all superstition,” Danny said.
Sir Roland ignored him. “Now over there”—he pointed—“is a section on…”
It was getting to be like a museum tour, but Danny dutifully looked over there, where most of the books seemed new, in contrast with all the magic stuff: UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse; Above Top Secret; The Roswell Incident; Alien Dawn; Communion; Abduction; Open Skies, Closed Minds; a video of UFO: The Final Warning….“Flying saucers?” he asked skeptically. If there was one thing worse than the people who wrote about magic, it was the nutters who saw little green men.
“Can you see the connection?” Sir Roland asked. Danny couldn’t, but Roland was in full flight now. “Read the flying-saucer literature,” Sir Roland said, “and you’ll find report after report of creatures who could pass through solid walls as if they weren’t there. Our remote viewers, the ones who said they used a second body, also claimed to be able to pass through solid walls.”
Danny was beginning to get it—he’d have to be pretty stupid not to, and he’d been offered a Cambridge scholarship, not that it would be doing him much good. But at the same time he had no idea where it was leading. “Flying saucers come from outer space,” he said. Then added uncertainly, “Don’t they?”
“I don’t know where flying saucers come from,” Sir Roland said. “Neither does anybody else. But the point is, here was another whole body of literature that seemed to have some bearing on what the CIA was studying.” He wandered again. “Now, over here…”
This time the shelves had a mix of old and new books. Sir Roland pulled one down entitled Astral Doorways, flicked through it briefly, then pushed it back. “These are all books that deal with the experience of leaving your body—out-of-body experience, it’s called: OOBE for short. Quite clearly what many of these writers experienced was similar, if not identical, to what happens to our remote viewers. So the CIA shifted the focus of their entire program to the investigation of magic, UFOs, and astral projection—and it worked. They extracted enough historical information to develop electronic aids. In fact, they were beginning to develop a whole new remote-viewing technology when word leaked out about the historical research; and inevitably it was twisted. You can imagine how the press had a field day. ‘CIA Uses Black Magic in Intelligence War’ and that sort of thing. A group of senators and congressmen from the Bible Belt decided this would never do at all and made such a fuss that Mr. Tenet was forced to close the Project down.”
“Who’s Mr. Tenet?” Danny asked.
“Director of the CIA,” Sir Roland said.
“He really closed it down?” Not the end of the story, Danny thought.
“Well, in a manner of speaking,” Sir Roland told him. “What he actually did was move the operation over here. As I mentioned earlier, we had our own interest in remote viewing at MI6 by this time, so we were happy to cooperate. It gave us access to the very latest American technology, and we here were able to share one or two of our own discoveries in the field. All in all, a potentially fruitful partnership.”
Danny grinned at him. “Now you’ve told me all this, won’t you have to kill me?”
“Only if you don’t agree to join us,” said Sir Roland without cracking a smile.
17
Opal, Lusakistan
They kept her in a wicker cage that hung from a rope looped around a hook in the ceiling of one of their buildings. It was impossible that the thing could hold her—no Project operative had ever reported anything that could trap an energy body—yet it did. Opal crouched inside, unable to stand fully upright, unable to lie down, unable to sit except with her knees pressed up against her chin. Had she been in her physical body, the pain would have been excruciating. As it was, she experienced continuous discomfort, nausea, dizziness, as if she’d just stepped off a roller coaster and couldn’t catch her balance. She’d never felt so helpless in her life.
They came back after a time. The Skull glanced up at the cage, then said something in Lusakistani to the old man in robes. The old man stared into Opal’s eyes and smiled coldly. “He wishes to know if you are still in there,” he said in English.
How had this happened? There was nothing, nothing in her entire experience, to suggest that she could be trapped while out of her body. Throughout her training and on missions, she had cheerfully walked through walls in her second body, pushed into solid rock, stayed for hours underwater. In her second body, she was like a ghost flitting through the solid world, but no longer a part of it. She was invisible and indestructible. She should have been able to pass through the wicker of her cage like mist.
“Can you hear me?” she asked softly. Nobody could hear her. They’d told her that on her very first briefing—“No one can hear you, no one can see you.” She’d proven it herself during her very first RV projection, standing inches from a woman and shouting in her ear. Since then she had moved freely through city streets without anyone suspecting for a moment she was there. Of course he couldn’t hear her!
“Yes, I can hear you,” said the old man. “But my master cannot. Nor does he see you.” He turned and murmured something briefly to the Skull, who bent his head to listen.
The Skull looked up again, staring into the cage, but his eyes fluttered as if he was searching for her; and when he spoke, he was not looking directly at her, but to one side and a little above her head. “Are you American?” the Skull asked in English.
“My master wishes to know if you are an American,” the old man repeated.
“I heard him,” Opal said.
“I know you did,” the old man said. “But he cannot hear you. You must answer to me and I will convey your words. Are you an American?” He stopped abruptly as a cleaning woman slid silently into the room, then froze when she realized it was occupied. The old man waved his arms and shouted something that sent her scuttling away.
