later.
Three hours after the helicopter landed Thorne got a phone call. It came in on a secure line as he was working at his desk. Or trying to work. He’d taken the information given him by Farrow and put it out for immediate action. He knew he was taking a risk. Deploying valuable assets in a war zone on the thinnest of threads was frowned upon. The payoff however, would be huge. Millions of dollars were spent in turning up the smallest of details that could shed light on developing situations around the world and within the United States itself. If the gamble paid off, Thorne would be in position to ask for more and his influence extended into the highest levels.
The phone buzzed and he picked it up.
“Hello.”
The connection was clear though it originated from halfway around the world.
“Bingo. We got him. Right where you said he’d be.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said, hung up the phone and immediately dialed Archer.
Cassie had been assigned to James Ruff, a much more cautious man than Farrow and his approach to her testing had been methodical. Given her identification of a submarine berth as containing a whale, Ruff operated under the assumption that her description had been a lucky guess or at best an indication of some low level power. As the weeks passed however, it became apparent that Cassie Reynold ran much deeper than that. Her ability seemed mixed at first but had been growing rapidly. In the time that followed her initial testing Ruff had presented her with a series of both photographs and verbal descriptions of subjects, asking her to identify locations and provide descriptions based on nothing more than map coordinates. She was running at 90% accuracy and Ruff believed that the misses were more the fault of the supplied information and inexperience than any failure on the part of Cassie Reynold.
Ruff was being pushed now. His experiments had been running long enough. Thorne laid things out in no uncertain terms. While the research was interesting, the purpose of the program was to find subjects whose insights could be put to practical use. Either Cassie Reynold could produce or she was to be pushed gently aside, her parents told she wasn’t a good fit for the fictitious scholarship, and a search for a new subject would be found. What Ruff didn’t know was that Thorne had been seeking to identify viewers in major urban areas around the country with no success. Lightning had struck with Ronnie Gilmore and possibly with Cassie Reynolds. Thorne wanted to know for sure.
What Ruff didn’t know was exactly how far Cassie had come. When she had called the object in the bunker a whale she had known exactly what it was, a submarine. But she was beset with a feeling, a dim thought in the back of her mind that telling too much would be a mistake. Ruff and this whole experience were not all that they seemed. She had held things close to the vest in the ensuing sessions by leaking small things that seemed to her innocuous, remaining silent on the larger pictures that formed in her mind’s eye. In this she was much more devious than Ronnie Gilmore, a boy that spoke his thoughts like an open book. Cassie would bide her time. Her talent, if it could be called that, would be held back. At times she had reached out, feeling for James Ruff, and she didn’t like what she saw. Alone, she had tapped into something about him as he moved in circles of men who threw off a dangerous air. She knew more about him than he thought.
As the session for the day began she was more nervous than usual, sensing some stress within Ruff that he was trying to hide. He was usually cheery, or tried to be, but today she could feel the tension coming off him, though he tried his best to hide it. She could see a shake to his hands when he reached into his briefcase and pulled out the usual folder of papers and photographs. Inside her, alarm bells began to buzz in the back of her mind, small whispers that told her to
Three hours after the helicopter landed Thorne got a phone call. It came in on a secure line as he was working at his desk. Or trying to work. He’d taken the information given him by Farrow and put it out for immediate action. He knew he was taking a risk. Deploying valuable assets in a war zone on the thinnest of threads was frowned upon. The payoff however, would be huge. Millions of dollars were spent in turning up the smallest of details that could shed light on developing situations around the world and within the United States itself. If the gamble paid off, Thorne would be in position to ask for more and his influence extended into the highest levels.
The phone buzzed and he picked it up.
“Hello.”
The connection was clear though it originated from halfway around the world.
“Bingo. We got him. Right where you said he’d be.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said, hung up the phone and immediately dialed Archer.
Cassie had been assigned to James Ruff, a much more cautious man than Farrow and his approach to her testing had been methodical. Given her identification of a submarine berth as containing a whale, Ruff operated under the assumption that her description had been a lucky guess or at best an indication of some low level power. As the weeks passed however, it became apparent that Cassie Reynold ran much deeper than that. Her ability seemed mixed at first but had been growing rapidly. In the time that followed her initial testing Ruff had presented her with a series of both photographs and verbal descriptions of subjects, asking her to identify locations and provide descriptions based on nothing more than map coordinates. She was running at 90% accuracy and Ruff believed that the misses were more the fault of the supplied information and inexperience than any failure on the part of Cassie Reynold.
Ruff was being pushed now. His experiments had been running long enough. Thorne laid things out in no uncertain terms. While the research was interesting, the purpose of the program was to find subjects whose insights could be put to practical use. Either Cassie Reynold could produce or she was to be pushed gently aside, her parents told she wasn’t a good fit for the fictitious scholarship, and a search for a new subject would be found. What Ruff didn’t know was that Thorne had been seeking to identify viewers in major urban areas around the country with no success. Lightning had struck with Ronnie Gilmore and possibly with Cassie Reynolds. Thorne wanted to know for sure.
What Ruff didn’t know was exactly how far Cassie had come. When she had called the object in the bunker a whale she had known exactly what it was, a submarine. But she was beset with a feeling, a dim thought in the back of her mind that telling too much would be a mistake. Ruff and this whole experience were not all that they seemed. She had held things close to the vest in the ensuing sessions by leaking small things that seemed to her innocuous, remaining silent on the larger pictures that formed in her mind’s eye. In this she was much more devious than Ronnie Gilmore, a boy that spoke his thoughts like an open book. Cassie would bide her time. Her talent, if it could be called that, would be held back. At times she had reached out, feeling for James Ruff, and she didn’t like what she saw. Alone, she had tapped into something about him as he moved in circles of men who threw off a dangerous air. She knew more about him than he thought.
As the session for the day began she was more nervous than usual, sensing some stress within Ruff that he was trying to hide. He was usually cheery, or tried to be, but today she could feel the tension coming off him, though he tried his best to hide it. She could see a shake to his hands when he reached into his briefcase and pulled out the usual folder of papers and photographs. Inside her, alarm bells began to buzz in the back of her mind, small whispers that told her to
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