Chapter 3
A my shifted uneasily in the new room, set up as a meeting area with no bed this time.
She took a measure of her surroundings. Five men were here, but four men stood farther back, not close enough to be threatening.
She sat at a table, with the fifth man seated across from her.
He seemed smug but not the leader of this group.
The angry burly man off to the side appeared to be in charge.
She looked over at him and gave him a tentative smile, probably ruffling his feathers that she had singled him out.
She wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but she heard something rattling around in the background.
She thought she’d heard Wallace, but that made no sense—and was hours ago. Since then there had been nothing.
When the smug man across the table held out his hand, she placed hers atop his, wondering what game they were playing at. He held her hand for a moment, his eyes closed, then looked over at the other men and nodded.
“So, what did I just do?” she asked. “Win a car?”
He snorted. “No, but I can read people’s thoughts.”
“No,” she countered. “You might intuit people’s thoughts, but you can’t read them. Reading would imply something visual to see.”
His gaze narrowed. “What I can read is the name Wallace .”
“That doesn’t take any mind-reading, just some spying, and we know you guys are watchers,” she stated, taking another dig at the group. “Wallace was at the meeting with me.”
He nodded. “But you were just thinking about him.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked curiously. “One of you guys mentioned something about missing him. So now it’s constantly in the back of my mind that you could be trying to trap him into whatever this craziness is that you’ve got going on here.”
He gave her a ghost of a smile.
She gave him a bland look in return, doing everything she could to increase the buildup of her defenses.
“And even now,” he added, “you’re trying to block me.”
“If you could possibly read my mind, why wouldn’t I be blocking you? Do these guys let you read their minds too?” One of the guys on the far side shifted uneasily. “If you can read my mind, then no reason you can’t read theirs.”
She wasn’t sure that she should be poking the proverbial bears in this room, but anything to distract the grandiose guy from her mind, while she threw up even more defenses, seemed to be a good idea.
Plus, she was sowing doubt into the minds of his buddies.
For some reason, it had never occurred to her that they might have some psychic, fake or real, on their team.
Then she gave a half laugh. “Besides, if you can do all that, what the hell do you guys need me for?” She turned and looked at the others, frowning. Then refocused on the guy at the table with her. “Unless they don’t think you’re the real thing. Otherwise, I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
“You don’t understand because we haven’t told you anything,” stated the angry burly man, who had been shifting uneasily on the far side.
Since he felt free to speak up, she had another reason to peg him as the leader of this group.
He glared at her with a hint of fury that he masked very quickly. “I don’t like anything about this.”
“Ah.” Amy nodded in understanding. “You’re very much the kind of person who likes to see and hear things for yourself then. It’s difficult to believe all this nebulous woo-woo stuff, isn’t it?”
He gave a clipped nod. “It sounds too much like fakes, charlatans, and total BS to me,” he stated bluntly.
“I agree,” she said, with a murmur. “I was quite surprised that MI6 was looking at doing something like that, but, of course, they’re just building on an old CIA program done during the Second World War. But then again, Russia had also been doing the same thing, so not much difference here.”
The three minions leaned forward, remaining silent—until now. One frowned, asking, “Seriously?”
She nodded. “Yes, quite a bit of research is online. They would have somebody sit in a room and mentally place themselves in these other buildings across the world—all to get an idea of what people were up against, what was happening to prisoners, thinking they could see things that would help them win the war,” she shared.
“I don’t think we’ll ever find the actual data on paper that gave the true results as they came about.
Much more likely, the papers they released are highly cleansed versions that they think the public can handle.
Because, if you can believe in all that, then what’s stopping us from believing in UFOs? ”
One of the minions in the back laughed and admitted, “I definitely believe in UFOs.”
The burly man glared at him and snapped, “Shut up.” The head guy returned his gaze to her. “If MI6 is doing a program like this, and you were brought in, then you must have some ability.”
“MI6 is basing that on some things that happened to me when I was a child,” she explained. “I woke up from a car accident, speaking about all kinds of stuff.… For a while afterward I did have abilities, things that I could do.”
“Like?”
“I could look at you and say, Hey, you’re wearing white underwear , or He’s wearing blue underwear , or whatever,” she shared, with a laugh.
“And it went on until I hit puberty. Then,… man, it all changed,” she said, with a shrug.
“Yeah, it was fun while it lasted, but it’s not as if it was useful at all. ”
All the men stilled as they contemplated that information.
Burly noted, “There’s no record of you having an accident.”
She stared at him. “Wow, so you checked out my history, but you didn’t do a deep dive into my background?
” she asked lightly. “Or you were just checking out my recent history as it pertained to England and the US? When all this happened, I was a child, living in Brazil, where my father was working at the university at the time,” she shared.
“I’m sure if you checked that history, or at least took your search in that direction, you would find that several newspaper articles were published back then.
My parents tried to squash as much of it as they could, not wanting it to become an unhealthy obsession,” she murmured.
Some of the men nodded.
The man across from her announced, “My name is Dominic, by the way.”
She looked over at him and nodded. “Thanks, Dom.”
His eyebrows shot up. “How do you know people call me Dom?”
“It’s hardly a paranormal thing,” she stated in exasperation. “Almost nobody will let that mouthful out all the time. Dominic is just way too long, so it’s bound to get shortened to Dom .” She shrugged. “That’s what people do, and it’s not psychic. More about common sense.”
He sat back and stared at her. “We’ve tested several other people in here before,” he murmured. “It didn’t go so well for them when they didn’t agree to the testing.”
“I haven’t been asked about any testing,” she pointed out, staring at him. “By the way, what do you mean, it didn’t go well for them ?”
From the back corner, the burly man snapped, “That’s enough. She doesn’t need to know anything.”
Dom nodded. “I guess I was looking for some reaction, something empathetic, something…”
“Like fear?” she interrupted. “That’s what you want, right?
You want me afraid. You want me terrified of what you’ll do to me, so that I start spitting out whatever it is you want to hear.
The problem with that technique is that people then spit out information in the hopes that it’s what you want to hear, but it’s not the truth.
It’s them just trying to survive. It’s them trying to save their sorry ass in order to not die or whatever it is they think you’ll do to them.
Is that what you want? You want people to start making up things in order to get you some answers that will hopefully make you stop this madness and leave them alone?
” She looked around the room, directing her gaze at each one.
The burly man glared at her.
She nodded. “I didn’t think so. Surely whatever reason you have for getting me here is because you want the truth, whatever that means. If I can’t help you, I can’t help you. If I can, then I can. It really is as simple as that.”
“It’s not that simple,” Dom declared. “People think they know something, but, in truth, they don’t.”
“They’ll know something ,” she argued, staring at him sharply, “but it’ll mean something to them, not necessarily to you.
If I look at you and tell you something about your life, it’s only because of whatever symbolism I see.
It doesn’t mean that I’m reaching into your mind and that I can see you and the folder that states, ten years ago, you did this, this, and this ,” she said.
“I’ll see an image, like a water cooler, and it’s telling me that your life is running away because that tap is broken, and the water is just filtering away rather quickly,” she explained, trying to describe the images that were in her head right now.
She continued. “That’s what I see, but that water cooler won’t mean anything to you.
If you can relate to the fact that the water is running away and that your life is running away, yet you have no control because it’s broken, then maybe you would understand what I meant.
Otherwise, it won’t mean anything to you.
So, it’ll sound false or made up, when in fact it’s not because it’s exactly what I see and how I interpret the information, versus what you know and receive. ”
The burly guy walked several steps forward and looked at Dom. “Is that correct?”