Spectre of Intention Read online

  “Human trust is fallible, and I don’t want my team caught second-guessing each other, waiting to become the next elevator to succumb to a terrorist attack from within. I want hope to be the focus here, not fear. So, before this ship takes on a single passenger, I will expect everyone affiliated with this project to be thoroughly screened by this intention detection technology of yours with its statistically impossible two percent error rate. Myself and yourselves included. There will be no one exempt. There will be no Captain Reynolds here.”

  “Yes, sir,” I nodded, and Jessie echoed me.

  Then Jessie and I turned and slipped out the door.

  We walked in silence through the length of the rat’s maze.

  We passed through the simple security between operations and hospitality.

  We made it twenty feet down the plush carpeted hall to the elevator.

  I burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Oh, my god, he had me there at the end. He really had me. God, I think I’m going to faint.”

  Jessie shook his head but took my arm just in case.

  “No faith. Come on, Osgood. Time to go do a little celebrating.”

  Celebrating. Kaitlin wanted to throw confetti at the stars. But deep in the corner of her darkness, Ashley whispered about the inevitable sunrise, the dawn that would bring this long masquerade to an end.

  And I chose to ignore her.

  “Hey, my favorite pair of suits!”

  Gerard swung us into the ship’s tiny sports pub with a gigantic pint of beer in his hand. And immediately began to chug down what appeared to be a good strong Guinness for long enough that I started holding my breath, wondering how much longer he could possibly keep going. He slammed down the empty glass next to Paula’s workpad. She jumped, and Gerard tossed back his head in laughter.

  “To our first billion!”

  Jessie lifted the brimming glass Gerard handed him. “To our first billion.” He took a short drag from beneath the foam.

  Gerard slapped a hand to his own chest in melodramatic disappointment.

  “Come on, man, if I’m gonna keep your pace, you’re gonna have to buy me a replacement. Step this way to the buffet, my friend.”

  I laughed, still too giddy to settle in for a long-overdue meal. Gerard, lean and pretty-faced, dragged his bulkier partner over to a table loaded with bar food and shouted for another Guiness. I leaned against the dark buttery wood of the table where Paula tapped furiously away at her screen in the dim light and watched the owners of Countermeasures International fall backwards in time through the portal of a beer glass.

  I couldn’t really follow their friendship. Jessie was serious and steady, brilliant and ruthless, and a hero to the core of his gold heart. Gerard was the guy who ends up dead by the middle of the military buddy movie—the reckless “kid” full of joie de vivre but missing the real reasons for being here. If at that critical moment five years ago, I had reached out to Gerard instead of Jessie, I would be pregnant and back on the street by now. Fortunately, I was better at reading people than your average refugee.

  Jessie should have bored Gerard; Gerard should have tested the strength of Jessie’s last nerve. Instead, they seemed to balance each other. They divided tasks naturally between their strengths and weaknesses. I opened doors; they wordlessly took control of buildings. They had served in the Army together; they took what they had learned there, kept right on fighting. And now I was a part of it.

  “Would you stop that?”

  I laughed down at Paula. “What?”

  “If Gerard sees you looking over there with all that hero-worship in your eyes, he’s going to walk over here and try to find a way to get laid and I’m going to have to sit through it.”

  Whoops, time to put Ashley back away.

  “Which is precisely why I don’t let him within ten feet of me. He can go buy himself a blow-up doll if he’s that horny.” Not a very Kaitlin thing to say, or maybe it was. Anyway, time to change the subject. I pushed at Paula’s pad. “What are you working on? Why aren’t you over there getting drunk?”

  Paula ruffled her sleek mahogany hair, then tried to rub the life back into her petite, pale face.

  “I was flipping through the micro-expressions database and came up with an idea I want to try.”

  “Let me see.” I reached for the workpad and suddenly Jessie was right in front of us. He pushed the pad back to Paula.

  “Not for you.”

  Ignoring the sting of that parental wrist slap took the focus of every cell in my body, but Kaitlin didn’t take things like that personally. She didn’t wince with hurt. She just smiled and shook her hair back. Jessie stared me down, making sure his point had been taken. With a reinforcing tap on the table, he turned away and returned to Gerard and his dreams of what to do with his share of the billion. I glanced back at Paula, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  With a sigh, I pushed off the table and wandered toward the bar and the man doomed to wait on our tiny celebration. Above his head, flashes of a hockey game shared space with baseball, basketball, and soccer.

  “Champagne for the lady?”

  With the readiness of a well-trained host, the bartender held the glass out for me. I smiled and thanked him, turned back toward the room, only then realizing that left me standing with a glass of champagne in my hand. I didn’t need to look to feel the yank of concern from Jessie. I gazed down at the golden liquid effervescing inches from my lips. One little sip; how bad could it be? Kaitlin would drink champagne to celebrate a moment like this.

  I raised the glass to my lips.

  Just one little sip.

  Wine splashed over my tongue, tart and tingly, freeing. Freeing, granting Ashley full control of my brain and body. She wanted it all. She wanted it NOW.

  No.

  I breathed through it, willed Kaitlin back in control. Kaitlin set that glass back down. Kaitlin walked away from that bar. Kaitlin met the reproach in Jessie’s eyes with indifference.

  “I think I’m more exhausted than I thought. I’m going to head up for a hot bath and some room service. I’ll see you boys and girls in the morning.”

  Kaitlin spared Paula a nod, then walked away.

  I got myself to the elevator. I reached for the ninth floor button but met with resistance. I wasn’t ready yet to be caged up in my room. By god, I’d just signed a billion-dollar contract, a contract I’d spearheaded! My finger hovered over the button for the entertainment deck, then the deck advertising a park; passed the pools and the spa; settled on a set of decks that held “observation decks.” I chose one at random and settled back for the ride.

  The alcohol-lust still churned in my gut, but my mind was so full, it was easy to find something else to distract me.

  Cam.

  He was so different from what I’d expected. I’d looked forward to meeting him. Our working relationship had been filled with the light, short banter that made the day go faster—simple fun. So, I’d expected, apparently foolishly, more of the same once I came onboard. But Cam in person, god, those eyes. And that mind, there was nothing simple about that mind.

  Even if he knew nothing…

  I caught myself tapping out my nerves on the railing.

  Even if he knew nothing, I was in trouble in more ways than one.

  The elevator door opened, and I laughed to myself.

  I stepped out into another hallway. This one was old-fashioned with real wood wainscoting on the walls, a richly patterned velvet-style wallpaper on the upper half of the walls. The fixtures were ornate brass, the floors, wood with an embedded carpet runner down the center. I followed the signs to the observation deck.

  Brocade wing-back chairs studded the rear of the room. I passed them by, running my fingers along the ridges of the cool, satiny fabric. I followed a rail down to the floor-to-ceiling window that should have overlooked the elevator launch pad. But hours had bled into one another and it was dark now. The deck lights which, in just a couple months would illuminate
the ribbon of nanotubes and its elevator climber, waited dormant for the ship’s less utilitarian occupancy.

  So, I was left looking out at blackness, most of the stars flooded out by the boat’s safety lights. The sliver of moon served as the primary reminder of the heavens this vessel promised. I looked down. At the base of the window, in heavy gold script lay the title of the room: The Dream.

  I glanced around the walls of the observation deck and realized that I had missed the artwork, images from a dozen ancient cultures framed in gold and richly stained woods. Curious, I strode to the first.

  Done in the stylistic strokes of old Chinese art, the image depicted a thinly bearded man in the heavy layers of his finery sitting atop a floating chair, one hand raised to the moon, a flock of cranes sailing by on a lazy breeze. I read the placard next to the picture.

  “According to legend, Wan Hu, a minor official of the Ming dynasty, circa mid-1500s, attempted to become the first pioneer of space travel. Seating himself upon a chair mounted with forty-seven rockets, he gave the command and his forty-seven servants lit one fuse each. There followed a great billow of smoke and a terrible rumble. When the air had cleared, both chair and pioneer were gone.

  A crater on the far side of the moon now bears his name.”

  I laughed—a little too loudly for such an empty space. So that’s who did it. It wasn’t the wildly desperate or the wildly bored. It was the abject lunatics.

  I wandered down the row, saw images from an ancient Persian epic, another throne pointed toward the heavens, this time propelled by great clawed eagles. The next portrait, a black and white of a five-thousand-year-old seal from Babylonia, the raised edges nearly erased by time, but there it was again, the mind of man reaching for the moon and stars, this time forgoing the throne, being borne aloft by a magnificent bird.

  I stopped when I had come full circle, looked up again at the shine of that perfect crescent hanging in the sky. I laid my hand on the window, over that silvery light. The Dream. It should have been impossible, but our ancestors kept trying, kept fighting and dying over a chance to realize that dream, to become a part of the magic of the heavens. Sometimes my own simpler dream felt that impossible. Sometimes I felt like an abject lunatic for trying. But maybe, just maybe my fighting was done, too. Maybe I could stop looking over my shoulder and start looking forward.

  Even as I thought that, a seeping warmth bloomed at the back of my head, my heart, my stomach.

  Him.

  Trying to take over.

  I shook my head, shook out my limbs. The sensation fled. So pathetic. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the only part of my past here to haunt me…was me.

  And only if I let it.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sweep of a flashlight in the dimly lit hall. How small an action to change the comfort of solitude into the chill of isolation. I reached into my bag and palmed a small spritzer of perfume, then turned my purposeful stride up the ramp. I could feel the hot anger coming toward me, knew it would hit me full on once the bearer of all that good will rounded the corner.

  The guard and I saw each other at the same time. He lowered his flashlight and for a second, I thought I saw something I hadn’t seen in a half a decade: the energy of his intention become corporeal. Ghosting ahead of his own body, a raging image of the man raised his transparent fist and took a swing at me.

  I couldn’t stop myself from dodging. His intention scrambled as he stared at me like I was crazy. The ghost image vanished. Probably never even there.

  Abject lunatic was right.

  I kept my face blank, kept walking right past him, listened for his footsteps behind me. Didn’t hear them.

  Caucasian male; six-foot one; two hundred pounds; short wavy black hair; large brown eyes; pronounced cheek bones; heavy on the stubble potential; large hands with cornered thumbs; size 14 shoe, slight turn out on right foot.

  When it came time to vet the staff, that guy was going on a growing list of people who hated me. He’d be on the first boat back to shore.

  Tough shit.

  I hit the elevator. The perfume didn’t slide back into my bag until I saw the doors close over the vacant, antique hallway.

  I breathed out the last of my adrenaline against the evacuation instructions on the back of my cabin door. I reached over my left shoulder and secured the door bolt. Sometimes I wondered if knowing what I knew was entirely fair. Maybe the guard was just pissed that some dumb blonde had set off the alarm and interrupted his poker game. That didn’t make him a sociopath. Of course, wanting to beat her face in over it kind of did.

  If what I’d seen had been a real incarnation of his intent in the first place.

  With a sigh, I tossed my bag in the middle of the bed’s bronze coverlet, checked the wall pad for any messages. Cam had scheduled our first meeting for ten o’clock the next morning. I chuckled. How thoughtful of him to plan some time for hangover recovery.

  I kicked off my heels. My hamstrings screamed even as my soles sighed down into the soothing softness of the white carpet. I flung my jacket over my bag and stretched out the rest of my cramped body.

  I wandered over to the mirrored closet facing my bed. Time to let Ashley out. I lowered my guard, lowered my body to the floor. Here was the street rat’s longest con: Kaitlin Osgood, Senior VP, Sales and Project Management for Countermeasures International. Seeing my own face in the mirror no longer gave me a jolt. Jessie and I had taken away the street rat’s kinky brown hair, replaced it with a stylish gold-blonde, shoulder-length swing. We’d dyed the brown eyes a serious shade of blue-gray. Hours at the gym had peeled away the roundness of fast food; the simple passage of years had transitioned a soft child’s face into the sculpted lines of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted but could still laugh about it.

  Kaitlin Osgood.

  Ashley reached out and touched the lines of Kaitlin’s face, traced her hair with more than a bit of wonder. Who might I have become if I’d never met Jessie? Ashley tried to place an image of herself over the blonde executive in the mirror.

  She wanted the gentle image of my mother, the nurse.

  She could con anyone, but me.

  I corrected her idyllic portrait:

  Hard, sunken lines framing a hard mouth and yet harder eyes. Anger, suspicion, and the restlessness of addiction. Rough hair, rough skin with the perpetual pink stain of alcohol. A worn wardrobe that could never keep up with the weight gain.

  She could con anyone, but me.

  The wall pad behind me beeped. Ashley slid without protest back into her closet.

  I rose from the floor, feeling long and light on my feet after spending that little moment without the mask. I touched the screen and Cam’s face appeared. That was unusual. He was a voice-only kind of guy. I turned on the video from my end with a smile.

  Surprise flashed over his face. I reached up to toy with my necklace and realized why. The lacy cream-colored camisole from my suit probably looked a whole lot like lingerie from the camera’s perspective.

  “Ah, am I calling too late?” he asked.

  I laughed. “No, I just got to my room. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I just got out of my last meeting and I thought I’d see if you wanted to go celebrate.”

  This was a really dumb idea. I was so exhausted that I was seeing things and the man who probably knew too much wanted me to go play mental chess with him.

  But god, those eyes.

  “I’d love to. Give me about twenty minutes to wash the day off. Where do I meet you?”

  “At the Parkside Café. See you in twenty.”

  He signed off with a victorious grin.

  As I moved in the direction of the shower, I acknowledged that this wasn’t going to be dinner between business associates. Ethical or not, I was being courted. And now I had to decide if I was ready to give Kaitlin a boyfriend.

  I recognized, as I stepped out of the mirrored elevator, that my wardrobe choice indicated I’d already
made up my mind. The flowing white summer dress with its chunks of silver sparkle along the neckline might have been a bit overdone on some women, but I’d long since learned Kaitlin could pull it off and still look classy. As for the actual state of my mind, I had forgotten in my distraction to check the ship’s map and now walked confidently down the pale blue halls trimmed in birch bark, waiting patiently for any directional signage to appear so that I could adjust my course accordingly.

  And if something didn’t appear very soon, I was going to be very late.

  Then suddenly the right side of the hall gave way to a wall of smoky glass. Over the open doors in the center hung the shingle “Parkside Café.” I stepped into the dimly lit waiting area. A very bored, very young maitre d’ looked up from his podium.

  “Miss Osgood?”

  I smiled and nodded.

  The spectre of his intention stepped out from behind the podium, reached out to feel the skin of my naked arms. I stared as those ghostly hands moved over my flesh.

  “Miss Osgood, this way please.”

  I jerked my head up. I should go. This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t be seeing his intention. Especially not for something so trivial. I should get back to my room. I should call Jessie. Something…something was wrong with me.

  The young man reached my side, reabsorbed his ghostly self, and took its place. In a formal gesture, he raised his elbow and I slipped my hand through. His spectral hand came to rest on my forearm, gently stroking as he told me the specials for the evening. I didn’t hear a word, didn’t feel a thing but the horrible pressure in my head.

  The maitre d’ led me through a narrow room with seating raised in tiers up the wall to overlook a lovely leafy park full of flowers and fairy lights. We stepped out the restaurant doors and into the steamy night air and the pressure in my head evaporated. My escort’s intention faded slowly from view.