Winds of Change by Christine Pope

Author:Christine Pope [Pope, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Valentine Press

13

The under-secretary of the Science and Technology Directorate within Homeland Security was Wallace Bryant, a man who had worked his way up into the position from being a field agent and someone who was widely regarded as a fair, no-nonsense manager. Randall Lenz had always enjoyed a good working relationship with Bryant, mostly because his superior knew enough to stay out of the way and allow Lenz to do what was required for maximum results. At the same time, Bryant had always appeared to respect Lenz’s zeal for the work and the professionalism he demanded of all his subordinates.

At that exact moment, however, Bryant was staring at Lenz with roughly the same mixture of astonishment and derision he might have directed at someone who’d just announced that they’d seen a flying saucer hovering over the White House.

“Are you trying to tell me, Agent Lenz,” he rasped — thirty years of smoking two packs a day had done their work on Wallace Bryant’s vocal chords — “that your newest subject, the one you claimed was more valuable than all the others, has vanished into thin air?”

That was exactly what had happened, but Randall Lenz fervently wished the man could have come up with a slightly less sensational phrase to describe the abduction of Adara Grant. “That seems to be the case, sir,” he replied in his driest, most neutral tone. “The people who took her did not appear to have circumvented our security measures, either coming or going.”

Bryant leaned against the back of his seat. He was in his early sixties, thinning hair iron gray, eyes dark and shrewd. Nicotine stains showed yellow on his fingertips. “How did they get in?”

A very good question. Lenz had surmised that the operatives who’d carried out the rescue attempt had to be gifted, just like Adara and the rest of the test subjects still residing in the research facility. If those strangers truly had the ability to transport themselves through solid walls, then their talent was insanely powerful — and, by extension, exceedingly desirable.

But although Under-Secretary Bryant was of course privy to all the details of Project Daedalus, asking him to believe that people existed who could teleport was probably straining credulity a bit. It was one thing to accept the idea that there were individuals who could control the weather or move objects with their minds or alter their own appearance. Believing that somewhere in the world there were those who could treat solid matter as if it didn’t exist was something else entirely.

There was also the frustrating fact that, even though the security cameras in Adara’s suite should have caught the entire episode, every detail of that scene had been conveniently erased from the facility’s servers. All Lenz had to go on were his memories of the incident, and he knew better than anyone else that trying to explain exactly what had happened made him sound like a madman…especially since there was no corroborating evidence to back up his story.

“We’re still working on that, sir,” he said.

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