can feel my nerves rise and so I scan the room as a distraction. The walls are white and by them stand three stainless steel seats and two cream Formica tables. There are no pictures or soft materials, just brown plastic blinds and two officers guarding the doors with handguns hanging by their sides. I don’t like it and so start to jig my leg.
‘Maria, look at me. Can you look at me?’
‘No.’ Jig, jig. ‘I want to go home.’
His smile slips and, without warning, his arm whips out and slaps my leg still. ‘Stop stimming and look at me.’
A sting like one hundred needle points pricks my skin. My leg drops still. I want to scream at him, jolted by the feel of his touch, but am too scared because I know he could shout and the noise would bother me too much, and so instead I attempt to do as he says so he won’t touch me again.
He rolls his fingers into his palm and withdraws his hand to his lap. ‘I’m sorry for that,’ he says. ‘We are on a tight deadline today.’
I strain my eyelids, force my sight to stare straight at him, but it is hard, hurts, almost in an uncomfortable way, as if opening my eyes to his, to anyone’s, would allow them to see into me, see into my thoughts. In the end, I only manage to make contact for two seconds then have to look away, exhausted.
He inhales. ‘For the next few hours, I want you to practise making eye contact for half a conversation. This will help you slip more seamlessly into a regular situation if you ever go operational. Make you appear more … normal. Yes?’ He smiles and I think I see tiny eye creases crinkle out on the corners of his face, but I am unsure. ‘Yes, Maria?’
‘Yes,’ I respond on autopilot.
‘Good. Look at me.’ I do. ‘One second longer, that’s it. Two, three, four … Good. You can lower your eyes now.’
I drop my gaze, shattered, as he takes notes in green ink on a yellow page. Behind him, a woman walks over, petite, a tattoo of a cross on her brown neck, hair so closely cropped to her scalp, it appears to shine. The woman stops and whispers in Black Eyes’ ear. I cannot hear them so I bend forward a little, yet, when I look down at my thin, gowned body, the probes sticking out, it is merely crumpled, having barely moved at all. Beside me the heart rate monitor beeps faster.
My body shifts on the bed. Black Eyes is nodding now to the woman who has appeared in the room and at first, the words they whisper fade into the squashed air, but after two then three seconds, their sentences filter through as, slowly, my ears switch fully on.
‘The programme is showing her skills are improving, Dr Carr,’ the woman whispers. ‘Her handler at the church is communicating very positive results.’
‘Such as?’
‘He gave her a complex code to crack and she did it within thirteen seconds.’
‘Good. Good. What else?’
She consults her notes. ‘The subject’s IQ is exceptionally high, photographic memory sharp—she is obsessed with classical composers, tracks all their family details, their names, all their pieces—’
‘Has she learnt to play the piano yet?’
‘Yes. Self-taught, Trinity College London, Grade Eight standard within three weeks. Further information: the way in which she can sense acute sounds and scents is exceptional—I know you were concerned about that.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘And her dexterous skills, her technical assimilation—it’s getting faster. She can take apart and reassemble a radio clock, for example, within three minutes now, last time it was five. Her handler at the school recorded that.’
There is a nod from Black Eyes as he turns and provides me with a narrow stare. ‘We have been operating for twenty years now and this is our breakthrough. She’s the only one the conditioning appears to be working on.’
‘Yes.’
He looks to her. ‘MI5 will want to hear about this.’
The woman hands him a slip of white paper. ‘Done. Here are the results we sent over to our contact there.’
Black Eyes scans the data, his fingers pinching the page, each a spindled vine of pale flesh. ‘All these people we have conditioned and tested, and none of them are quite like this test child, this Maria Martinez. What is her confirmed subject number?’
‘375.’
‘Subject 375. Yes.’ He taps the paper. ‘We have some scenarios I would like to use her for, see what she can do. MI5 are pressing us to assist them with unusual security threats—cyber elements, computers etcetera. Let’s see how she can help us.’
His head dips and, without warning, his skeletal fingers creep forward so that they skim my calf. I instantly flinch, but he doesn’t appear to notice, instead seems in some kind of trance. ‘It’s okay,’ he says to me. ‘It’s okay.’ Then he turns to the woman. ‘She is strong, but not yet old enough to fight, but soon …’ He lifts his hand, knuckles and flesh hovering in the air, and the thought occurs to me that he may hit me. ‘While she is here, we will ask her what she knows.’
The woman frowns. ‘But won’t that stay in her memory, the covert details are just that—covert. What if she recites them when she is back in her normal environment?’
He shakes his head. ‘We will give her Versed as we always have, administered before she is dispatched home to Spain. It has worked well so far.’ He looks to me. ‘It will wipe her immediate mind so no secrets are divulged—she will simply believe she has visited the specialist clinic with her mother because of her Asperger’s.’ He hands the woman the paper. ‘The Versed drug means she will be unable to recall fully what she has or has not done, but enough remains in the subconscious for her to be useful until she reaches an age where she can be fully operational. It is important that you learn this.’ He folds his arms. ‘The subject may recall things, facts, but they will be hazy—like dreams. But we need that. We need this data, this training we give her, to remain stored in her brain somewhere so we can use it when the time is right.’
‘Maria?’ He is talking straight to me now. A rush of heat prickles my entire body and I don’t know what to do. My eyes search for a way out but there are no exits, here, anywhere. ‘Maria,’ he says, voice unusually soft, low, ‘where are we?’
But nerves rack me, and instead of speaking, I press my back into the bed, the cold cotton of the gown skimming my knees, goosebumps popping out.
‘I want to go home.’
‘You will. But first—that’s it, look at me, good—answer me: where are we?’
I look between the woman and Black Eyes. When I open my mouth, my voice trembles. ‘I am in a Project facility.’
‘And who are the Project?’
‘It is a covert group linked to MI5.’
‘And what do we do?’
Despite myself, despite my resistance, the words trip from my mouth, as if they are preset, robotic. ‘The Project is a covert programme formed in response to a global
