She chose the challenge. “No, you can’t seduce me,” she declared.
Jed slid his card into the security slot. His eyes never left hers as he tapped on the keypad. “Give me time,” he said softly.
She wanted to say something sarcastic to counter such display of supreme male ego, she really did. But it was hard when her own body was betraying her. Her gaze lowered and admired the supreme male ass in the snug blue jeans and she gave a mental sigh as she followed him inside.
The first thing she registered when they entered was that the room was oval shaped. There were large screens and electronic maps on the walls surrounding a large oddly shaped table, which was half-circular on one side, with extended arms at zero degrees and one hundred and eighty degrees that protruded outwards about six feet. There was a chair in the empty space in the middle; whoever was sitting there would be surrounded by more keyboards, monitors, and electronic gadgets than she’d ever seen in one room, outside a store.
“What room is this?”
“Debriefing,” Jed said as he coded in something on a pad in the wall. “You’ll be given access to this room once you run missions regularly.”
“I thought debriefing was, like, sitting in front of a bunch of balding old men answering their questions,” Helen drawled, looking around, intrigued by all the gadgets. Some of the screens on the walls were in different languages. One appeared to be showing weather updates around the world.
“That’s standard debriefing, which is still done, but COS commandos and operatives have many different tasks and operations, with many different assets involved who need to be present during the debriefing. Some of them are in different countries. Some of them are underground and don’t want to be tracked. In this room, all the relevant participants can function as a group.”
It made sense, except for one thing. “I’m assuming a satellite is hooking all this up,” Helen observed. “So, wouldn’t the signals be easily tracked by outsiders?”
“Scrambled,” Jed explained.
“Ah.”
“Signal diffusion technology. Electronic encryption. Quantum...”
“All right, all right. I get it. Security’s taken care of.” Helen wasn’t giving up, though. She cocked her head, adding slyly, “What about remote viewing? They might send someone like me to spy in here.”
His lips quirked. Taking her by the hand, he led her to one side of the oval room where, inside a glass-protected portion of the wall, similar to a fish tank, out of the way of busy hands, some kind of weird instrument was glowing with electric-like sparks inside a dome.
Very conscious of her hand in his, Helen studied it for a few seconds. “What the heck is that?”
“It’s an improved version of the Tesla coil. It’s used to repel mind spies like remote viewers.”
Helen turned and stared at the man beside her. “You’re kidding me, right? I thought the government didn’t believe in the stuff. Is it like the energy alarm ring T gave me to wear?”
“No, but they’re probably similar technology.” Jed studied her for a moment. “Covert bases aren’t as inflexible. You’ll discover that there are secrets within secrets inside our government branches that are extremely well guarded.”
Helen waved at the room behind her. “Like what goes on in here?” Obviously, paranoid people ran this place.
“What goes on in here can sometimes be an amalgam of different groups of people working covert missions within missions.”
Hell moved closer to the protected panel. Could that thing really stop remote viewing? During training, she’d been told of the existence of certain devices but had never seen them.
“Double agents,” she guessed.
He nodded. “COMCEN has operatives who are different personas in different groups. In this room, he or she can perform their communications effectively and give SITREPs of their assignments without confusing the various departments. It’s very streamlined and effective. And Eight Ball takes care of what information goes where.”
Then Eight Ball, the crazy computer, was even more powerful than she’d thought. She arched her brows in mockery. “You trust a computer that masquerades as a surfer dude with all that information? Does he use that same persona when he’s giving the situation reports to the higher-ups?”Thatshe wanted to see, some big brass’s face when Eight Ball addressed him with “Dude, here’s the SITREPs for the day.”
Jed’s lips quirked in amusement. “I think he programmed himself to add ‘sir’ after his ‘dude’ just to be respectful.”
Helen chuckled. She talked to Eight Ball a lot but hadn’t really seen him in his full capacity. She looked over her shoulder again. “He must be quite the supercomputer if he’s the one with all the data that runs this place.”
Wow. She was standing in the heart of COMCEN. And Jed had said she would have personal access to it one of these days. The fact that he’d brought her in here couldn’t just be coincidental.
“Eight Ball is actually only a program within a Mother Eight Ball. There are different versions of Eight Ball running this place. A supercomputer for a supersoldier-spy,” Jed said softly.
She turned back to him. Once again, he’d managed to read her thoughts even though they weren’t in virtual reality. “Why am I here? To watch you get debriefed?”
His hold tightened slightly. “I need your trust in me,” he said simply. “Making you aware of what’s going on will build that foundation. Letting you see the many intertwining projects will give you a quicker understanding than reading situation reports and files.”
