Jenny Plague-Bringer(86)

ASTRIA was not generally viewed as a desirable command. While the agency’s mission had been considered very serious between its founding in the early 50s and into the 1970s, it had become a dumping ground for dead-end careers by the end of the 1980s, when not even Nancy Reagan’s astrologer was taking the idea of Soviet psychic spies seriously anymore. Ward had no trouble getting himself appointed head of the agency, though it had required the small matter of also getting promoting to a lieutenant general. He could have used his unofficial, blackmail-based influence to gain himself almost any command around the world, but he had chosen the neglected Cold War agency instead.

Under his command, he’d been able to swell the funding from the Pentagon while giving only the vaguest description of his intentions, enabling him to build the research center of his dreams. Ward had one goal: to study others like him, those with a paranormal touch, in order to gain greater control and understanding of his own power without having to put himself under the scientists’ microscopes and scalpels. Whatever they learned from the other five, he could determine for himself how it might apply to him.

At the same time, he might succeed in obtaining powerful new weapons. He could imagine sending Tommy into a city to cause a riot...or, better, sending Jenny in to kill everyone in a targeted area. Esmeralda could gather secrets from the dead, including enemy spies and leaders. Seth’s healing power would be extremely useful on dangerous missions, to himself and others in his unit. If Mariella could see the future, that would be extremely valuable for gathering intelligence.

He could imagine using all of them, but it remained to be seen which of them might cooperate.

Ward looked through the window at the lab he’d designed just for Jenny. She was down there in the dimness, asleep in a hospital bed, already connected to her monitors—the computer screen in front of the window told him that her heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing were normal, and her EEG showed delta waves, deep sleep. When she awoke, she would find herself trapped like a spider in a bottle. It wasn’t the best way to recruit a person, but after the mass death she’d caused in Fallen Oak, he wasn’t taking any chances with her. Surely, she would come to understand his logic.

Ward felt suddenly dizzy, and he pressed a hand on the window to steady himself. He felt a strange prickling sensation as goosebumps swelled all over his body and the little hairs on his arms and neck spiked out. He felt a crushing headache, and then a feeling of vertigo, and he thought he might black out. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, trying to get hold of himself.

He felt like he was falling...and then he was walking along the same corridor, the observation deck, but the computers were replaced by file cabinets and typewriters, and there were many more people coming and going in this one room than Ward employed at the entire complex. The walls floor was bare concrete, instead of the white tiles he’d added.

Everyone wore black, even the typists and secretaries in their slim black skirts and jackets. He also couldn’t help but notice, everywhere, the swastikas—on the arms of men in black military-style uniforms, on lapel pins, on the flags that hung along the hall.

Ward himself wore a black uniform, coat, and cap. He walked along the corridor slowly, accompanied by a tall, attractive blond girl in a black-skirted uniform with a white shirt and black tie. Her eyes were a strange gray color, like clouds on a rainy day. She touched his hand frequently as she spoke, and each touch sparked an intense feeling of affection and desire inside him. He wanted her to keep touching him.

She spoke in German, yet he understood her perfectly.

“Has there been any news with Willem?” she asked. They paused in their walk to look down through a window into a lab. A young man in his early twenties sat on a stool, facing a metal barrel filled with bits of newspaper, wood scraps, and sawdust, a mixture intended to be highly flammable. Three researchers watched him from the side of the lab—a chemist, physicist, and a doctor—and wires were plastered all over Willem’s bare torso, connecting him to loud, clunky monitoring machines around him.

Willem stared intently at the barrel of tinder and kindling, rubbing the sides of his head with both fingers. After several minutes, nothing happened.

“I suppose you’ll continue testing him?” asked the gray-eyed girl, whose name was Alise.

“No,” Ward heard himself say. “He’s a fake. He must have tricked our investigators when they found him. Under controlled conditions, he does nothing.”

“What shall we do with him, sir?” Alise asked.

“Get rid of him. I don’t want him eating one more meal at the Reich’s expense. And I don’t want him talking to anyone.”