Chapter 7

Jacob was home already by the time I pulled up in front of the cannery. Normally I’d make a smart remark about him clocking out on time for once, but frankly, I wasn’t feeling it. Darla heard the repeater? The details she’d given were a hell of a lot more precise than the nebulous, “I sense a presence” horseshit you’d get from a table-rapper out to plunder your wallet. Not only gender and location, but the foreign language bit that even I didn’t know about until I matched the repeater to a photo of a missing Russian spy. I picked up on audio repeaters once in a blue moon, but Darla had hit two out of three without any guidance on my part.

Jacob was sitting at the dining room table staring off into space. Either he was thinking, or an alarming crack had appeared in our masonry. I checked the wall. Looked fine to me…then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d stared at something overly long because he was too proud to wear glasses. I even ended up grabbing him a pair of cheaters, which I left on the coffee table in hopes he’d break down and use them. But I supposed those were just for reading, not distance. I hung up my coat and told him, “I have absolutely no idea how to rate a potential medium.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” he said blandly. As it registered that he’d given me a patently un-Jacob-like response, he touched my forearm to signal that if we had anything important to say, we’d best say it where random electronic listening devices wouldn’t overhear us. I put my coat back on again, and we headed to the big supermarket. 

I’m not sure exactly how much privacy there is in public places. After all, it would be easy enough to bribe or coerce a faceless corporate entity into letting you plant all the bugs you want. But we figured that crowded spots would at least provide some camouflage.

Jacob grabbed a cart and strode to the coffee aisle with great purpose, stepped up to the bulk bins, filled a bag, dumped it into the grinder and hit the button. It was obnoxiously loud…in fact, it was perfect. But before I could start ruminating about mediumship, he brushed his lips against my ear and said, “What do you know about Andy Parsons?”

Other than my immediate and visceral dislike of good old Officer “Andy”?

“Not much,” I admitted. “Why?”

“Someone’s been sending bizarre anti-FPMP manifestos to the press.”

“That can’t be good.” I watched coffee tumbling into the bag. “Possessed?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“And you’re thinking it’s Andy.”

“I’m not sure. We’ve got a guy in the news agency who intercepted it before it got out. He recovered a printed document, someone trying to cover their digital trail by using paper. What they didn’t know was that FPMP printouts are traceable. The printers at headquarters stamp the documents with a watermark that looks like a fleck of toner if you don’t know about it.”

The stream of freshly ground coffee ebbed, and the loud grinding noise slowed, then stopped. I filled another sack with beans, then dumped them into the hopper. As I did, Jacob fit himself against my back and spoke into the tender spot behind my ear. “I traced it to the printer. Parsons shares it with three other agents—and it could be any or all of them. But Parsons went out to lunch today and didn’t come back.”

His words buzzed against my skin and made me tingle in all the right places. I bumped him off me with my shoulder blade and said, “Careful, Mister, or you might cultivate a weird kink we’ll both regret.”

He eased back, marginally. “I was hoping you’d have some insight since you worked with him at the Fifth.”

“Only that he was nowhere near as slick as he thought.” I pulled down another stream of coffee beans so it was ready to go when the current batch was ground. “Let’s say it was him, and not a stowaway ghost. This information is so newsworthy that he was willing to trade his career for it?”

Jacob sighed against the back of my neck. I slipped a hand inside my overcoat to rearrange myself. The grinder stopped, and I poured another sack down the chute. When the noise-cover resumed, Jacob said, “A psychic conspiracy that goes back decades.”

“So, when he asked me about Stargate…I take it he wasn’t talking spaceships.”

“That’s the program officially on the record—it was all part of the arms race of the seventies. The Soviets supposedly had a remote viewer, the US decided they needed to get in on that action. They didn’t realize that all the training in the world couldn’t help someone without the intrinsic clairvoyant ability. The program was a bust—maybe it was just too far ahead of its time. The Army declassified all the particulars, but the things Parsons was hinting at were a lot darker. Not the Army, but the FPMP.”

“I thought F-Pimp wasn’t even a thing until after the Ganzfeld experiments.”

“He alleged the FPMP has been working in the background for nearly half a century, since the Cold War, using genetic manipulation to make super-spies.” 

Funny, I could still remember a time when that would’ve sounded like the plot of a comic book, or maybe the raving of a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, I’d be surprised if it didn’t have some basis in truth. Either way, the FPMP gag-order policy was clear, and whoever was telling tales might as well kiss their Lexus goodbye.

Of course, that concern didn’t stop Jacob and me from working off our frustrations together. As soon as we got home, we dropped eight pounds of freshly ground coffee on the kitchen counter and stripped out of our black suits, grappling and kissing and nailing each other with serious eye contact. Jacob is a knockout when he smiles, but his smoldering good looks are even hotter when he’s all intensity and hard-edged focus. I never really wanted to be a telepath, but right then, I wished that the two of us could talk, mind to mind in our own safe cocoon, and no one else privy to the things we needed to share. 

Somehow, we made it upstairs and fell into our bed, me on my back and him straddling one leg to flatten me into the mattress. He rubbed his hard-on to life in the crook of my thigh. I fumbled a lube out of the nightstand and gave him a few slippery strokes, and before I knew it, that old familiar hardness was nudging toward my back door. My knees fell open as my whole body went limp, readying itself to be used. 

I never was keen to be the guy that just lays there and lets someone else do all the work, but sometimes it seemed like my utter surrender pushed Jacob’s buttons as much as any clever new gyration. He buried himself in me, over and over, merciless and deep. I slipped a hand between us and pumped my dick in time with his thrusts. As one, we labored toward our common goal. And after countless thrusts, we scaled that precarious height, then plunged to our release. Wordlessly. Together. 

Maybe sex was mainly a poor substitute for telepathy. Hell, maybe that was the Darwinian reason NPs made up the majority of the population. Connections are easy to take for granted, but knowing that someone within the FPMP had been working against us was a stark reminder of just how much I cherished the trust I shared with Jacob.

I settled against him and reveled in the heavy-limbed sensation of creeping slumber. So elusive lately without the Reds, without Valium, and without the Auracel that would blunt my psychic reflexes. But now, sleep was rolling toward me like a gentle mist, beckoning me into its sweet embrace.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Jacob murmured.

And…there it went. “Hm?”

“If it is Andy Parsons, he might not be working alone. Telepaths who grab detailed thoughts right out of your mind are rare—but they do exist. And a few of them work at the FPMP. That’s why I’m the logical person to keep an eye on internal issues. I only let them know what I want them to know.”

I rolled onto my back and groaned. “So, here’s where I regret working with you….”

“You keep to your investigation and I’ll keep to mine. Two totally separate projects.”

“And even so, now I’m putting your whole investigation at risk.”

“It’s fine. It’ll be okay. Just…try not to think about it.”

Uh huh. I happen to know someone at the FPMP is a turncoat, but I’ll just put that idea right out of my mind. Sure. Easy. No problem.

I focused on the ceiling tiles and began to count. Beside me, Jacob let out a gentle snore.