See No Evil (The PSI Trilogy Book 2)

  SEE NO EVIL

  The PSI Trilogy #2

  by

  A.K. Alexander

  &

  J.R. Rain

  THE PSI TRILOGY

  Hear No Evil

  See No Evil

  Speak No Evil

  Flight 12: A PSI Novella

  See No Evil

  Published by J.R. Rain Press

  Copyright © 2014 by A.K. Alexander and J.R. Rain

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedications

  A.K. Alexander dedicates this to my dear friend Jon who keeps my chin up when things look a little dismal, and to my husband John who has infinite patience when I spiral into crazy writer mode. I have good food and beer for both of you—always!

  J.R. Rain dedicates this book to the very awesome, Andrew Stuart.

  See No Evil

  Chapter One

  Orlenda Kobach inhaled deeply from her Virginia Slim and eyed the specimen in front of her. Then, she placed the lit cigarette beneath the man’s eye and watched to see if he would squirm. He didn’t. He continued staring at her, unflinchingly. His name was John, and he was gagged and bound to the chair he’d been forced into.

  “Now, would you like to tell me where they’ve taken the girl?” She pulled the gag out of his mouth.

  And he immediately spit at her.

  “You are a stupid man.” In more ways than one. The idiot had just walked right in here and tried to take over. Stupid, stupid man. She placed the gag back in his mouth and turned to one of the men in the corner. “Geryon, get me something to break his fingers with. Oh, and set him up for some water sports.” By water sports, of course, she meant waterboarding. “Do whatever it takes to get him to talk. They’ve already taken Echidna from us. Do you know how much goddamn money is at stake with Hope Mitchell? Do you know how much I could lose here? And someone find me that prick, Simms. He wants the kid, too. He may know where they’ve taken her. Maybe the two of us can strike a deal.”

  Truth was, she would do pretty much anything to get this kid back. Anything.

  She walked out of the warehouse and stepped into the car that awaited her. “Call the pilot. Have the plane fueled. We’re going to the airport,” she said, knowing that by the time they arrived there, the man would talk. Geryon, after all, was damn good at his craft.

  She sat back and ran her fingers through her thick hair. She had thought John was dead. Instead, he had only disappeared. She wondered why...until the answer came to her.

  He’d betrayed his team. If so, he could be of use. And not just for information.

  Then again, he’d come charging into her temporary headquarters in Morocco searching for the girl, Hope Mitchell. Which meant he was up to something...and possibly working for someone else.

  Well, he hadn’t been willing to talk and this aggravated Orlenda. So, it didn’t really matter what team he’d been playing on. He was either an asset or a detriment, and one thing Orlenda knew about John was that he’d once been a loose cannon. Loose enough to betray the people he worked for, and the woman he had supposedly loved. To her, that meant she was leaning toward the idea that John would’ve been a detriment, and she’d had enough of those.

  Then again, if he had betrayed his team…

  She had just lit another cigarette when her mobile rang. She figured it was Geryon, but it wasn’t. She winced when she heard the voice on the other end. Ivan Propokensko. “I’ve heard. I am not happy,” he said. “I want the child.”

  “Don’t worry, Ivan. I’m taking care of everything. You’ll have her. I promise.”

  “Yes. I know I will have her. I know where she is going.”

  “Where?”

  He laughed. “You think you are the only one in this world who has eyes and ears all around? The only one with any kind of intelligence operation? Come now. We are all going to Israel.” He clicked off.

  Orlenda inhaled on the freshly lit cigarette, filling her lungs. Then she exhaled and dialed Geryon.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Kill him. He’s of no use. The child is heading to Israel and so are we.”

  * * *

  John Herrel lay there in a pool of blood—his own.

  They thought he was dead. He was good at playing dead. He’d been taught well, and if he could hang on for a few more minutes, they’d leave and he could do what was necessary to survive. Necessary to protect. He’d once almost died. He’d been an experiment of sorts, but that experiment by Grant Simms hadn’t gone as planned. John had come back a very different man. One that no one was aware of—one who could easily hide in the shadows and keep watch without being detected, where he could truly help protect the people he loved. He needed everyone to think he was dead—and continue to think he was dead.

  He heard the man that Orlenda had called Geryon order the others out and, right after, he heard doors slamming shut. John took a deep breath. He was in pain—a lot of pain, and how he was actually alive was a credit to his particular gifts. The gifts that the experiment-gone-awry had created.

  John held the gift to heal others in his hands through touch. But this gift had amplified tenfold over the past couple of years since his “death.” He hadn’t exactly been as psychic as the others inside of PSI. Sure, he could do some predicting, but his real talents were in healing people—and himself—physically. However, he was sure the team now thought of him as a fraud. Thanks to Grant Simms for setting him up to...what was it? Tear him down, then bring him back, then build him up...blah, blah, blah. That hadn’t gone so well for Grant. He wondered if Simms was still trying to find out if he was alive. John hadn’t wasted too much time learning what Simms did or didn’t know about him. But considering the situation, and what John expected was to come in the future, maybe it was time for him to find out.

  John closed his eyes again and saw her face in his mind’s eye.

  Kylie Cain.

  He saw her as if she were standing right there in front of him. And it was her, without her knowing it, who had once again willed him fully back to life.

  John Herrel stood up and untied the ropes that had bound him. He stared down at his injured hands, and through that stare, he was healed. He did the same for his knees that had been shot out.

  “Good as new,” he said aloud, and opened and closed his injury-free hands.

  Time to get to work.

  Chapter Two

  “Miss Cain, would you like a pillow and a blanket?” asked the sole flight attendant on the private plane we’d chartered.

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  She nodded and stepped away, leaving me to my thoughts.

  I needed sleep, but I had no time to rest. I needed to think. I needed to puzzle this out. I looked across the aisle from me and saw Hope, my eleven-year-old sister, asleep—a sister I had only learned of a few days earlier—a sister my team and I had rescued from one of the most diabolical humans I’d ever encountered.

  Hope and the other two people with us—Noah Kensington and Ayden Connors—were all very unique individuals. We each had distinct psychic powers. Noah, Ayden, and I were part of a special team put into place by a secret sect of the US government headed by the CIA. My team and I were known as the PSI—Psychic Sensory Intelligence Unit.

  As an audial, I could hear conversations from thousands of miles away, and I spoke several languages fluently, which made me an asset against terrorism, espionage, assassinations, matters of high security, and more. I had been able to in
form the top brass when bad things were possibly going to go down, and because of my abilities, I’d been able to prevent some catastrophic events.

  Noah Kensington, with his fair-haired good looks, had the ability to “read” the past. This meant that he could access events, situations, and even conversations by simply tuning into the event or individual. This helped in giving everyone true accuracy, especially when there were doubts. It was also useful when someone truly couldn’t recall an occurrence in detail—Noah was able to fill in those gaps. Handy stuff.

  Then there was Ayden Connors. Ayden was dark and brooding with sarcastic wit, and was devilishly handsome—in a roguish kind of way. Ayden read the present and was able to tune somewhat into the future, but only the immediate future. Ayden’s contribution to the team was a big deal. We all contributed our assets, but most of the time, the advantage that Ayden tended to have over Noah and me was accuracy. He was always spot on.

  Admittedly, I had myself a little situation where both men were concerned—they both had a thing for me. In the past two weeks, I’d shared a kiss with each of them. I was still trying to work it all out in my head. Truth was, I wasn’t really sure where my feelings lay—except all over the map.

  No time for all that nonsense, I thought. We had work to do.

  After all, we were heading to Israel at the insistence of my sister, who, like me, was also an audial, and from what I’d been learning, she was also quite a bit more. Apparently, Hope could transverse time. Yes, time. She could travel to what I’d discovered were parallel universes, multiverses, and other dimensions. Basically, my sister had the capability to time travel—and this made her very desirable by some not-very-good people, including the one we’d just saved her from who’d had her imprisoned in Morocco.

  Orlenda Kobach.

  A former KGB agent, Orlenda Kobach was old-school Russian, and if my instincts were correct, she’d love to have the old Soviet Union back, too. She was also the woman who had murdered my father—who had founded PSI. In fact, he had been in the process of rescuing me, because, as she had recently done to my sister, Orlenda had abducted me as a child to exploit my own gifts...gifts she had learned of through her work as a double agent.

  Anyway, what did Orlenda Kobach want with Hope? I guessed that since the woman had always wanted to be top dog on the totem pole in her goal for world domination—her “covert” agency was called, after all, World Order Now or WON—Orlenda Kobach was eager to exploit my sister’s ability to time travel.

  Why? My guess: to change the course of history. And to change it in her favor.

  Just after taking off out of Morocco—and just after she had informed us that we must travel to Israel—Hope also revealed something deeply unsettling, something I was still wrapping my brain around.

  Apparently, this race to Israel was about some papers—papers that detailed a person who was of ultimate evil, and a person who was of ultimate good. Since Orlenda liked the bad guys of the world, I was hedging my bets that if she were to discover those papers and gather this apocalyptic-sounding information, she would likely find a way to destroy the good guy and manipulate the bad guy to further her gain. That is, if Hope’s information was correct, and I had no reason to doubt that it was. Not yet, anyway.

  Now, I could see that Ayden’s mind was abuzz as he stared out the window into the inky sky that had taken over the late-night hours of our flight. Noah was in the back of the plane, nursing a bullet wound. Yeah, things had gotten crazy back there. I also figured he was nursing his ego, as the three of us were on shaky ground. We were having some trust issues, too, regarding Noah, and as much as I hated to admit it, they weren’t totally unfounded.

  So, I got up and sat down beside Ayden. In a low voice, I asked, “What’s going on up there?” I tapped his temple.

  “Just thinking, Kylie.”

  “Well don’t hurt yourself.” I nudged him in the ribs with my elbow.

  He shook his head and grinned. “Might be too late. You got any aspirin?”

  “There’s some in the bathroom, hang on.”

  I fetched him three or four tablets, along with a cup of water. Once he downed them, I said, “So what’s rattling around in that brain of yours?”

  “Well, the kid—your sister—talked about papers dating back to the 1940s. She also told us that these papers contain information about a really good guy and a really bad guy, right?”

  “Right. What can be better than good versus evil?”

  “So what was discovered in the 40s and 50s in Israel that caused controversy for the past half-century?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “The Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  “Bingo.”

  Noah suddenly appeared and sat down next to me. “Bingo what?”

  Ayden was sure that Noah had compromised our team. It had turned out that the woman he was married to, who had also worked for the PSI, had also been secretly working for Orlenda. It had turned out that she’d set up Ayden and me after Noah had left us on a sailboat back in Morocco where we had been gathering intel on Hope’s location. The guy feeding us the intel had been planted by Orlenda. He had presented himself as a scientist who was working on time travel multiverse stuff. The fake scientist had exited the sailboat after feeding us false information. Noah had left the boat because he supposedly received another tip and went to check it out. The boat was next blown to smithereens while Ayden and I had barely escaped with our lives. In fact, my leg took a real beating, and after a couple of whiskeys and a few stitches, that was exactly how I’d wound up in a heated kiss in Ayden’s arms.

  When Noah had finally turned up, it was at the exact moment I had located Hope in the Palais Hotel and was in the process of extricating her from it. Noah had shown up with an automatic rifle and covered my back. Ayden and I had made off with the kid and headed to the airport where, lo and behold, Noah joined up with us just as he was being gunned down by some baddies in a black SUV. Ayden didn’t want me to let Noah on the plane, thinking he’d double-crossed us. But my gut said that he hadn’t. I let him on board and we had taken off.

  And now here we are, I thought.

  Noah, of course, had a plausible story that I believed. Turned out Jacqueline, his wife, had double-crossed all of us and had attempted to kill him, too. The tip he had followed up on had been a setup by her, and she’d fired at him. He’d returned the fire and now she was dead. His own wife.

  I let that sink in: Noah had just killed his own wife. A woman he had loved. Or thought he had loved.

  Anyway, as fantastical as it sounded, that was Noah’s story, and, like I said, I believed him. For now. Still, I had a few questions. I also had questions about our boss, Grant Simms, who had been my father’s best friend, and who had helped raise me after my dad’s murder. But something shady was going on and I intended to question Noah about what he might know.

  “So what are you two talking about?” Noah repeated, bringing me out of my thoughts. Neither of us jumped in and started talking yet. Noah, no slouch, sensed our hesitation. “Look guys, I know you’re having some trust issues with me. You’ve made no bones about it.” He nodded his head toward Ayden. “But I’m a part of this team and I wouldn’t compromise us. You have to believe me.”

  He turned his deep blue-eyed gaze on me. My stomach sank. He definitely had an effect on me. I said, “I believe that you’re on the up-and-up, but—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Ayden cut in. “You just killed your wife and you’re hanging out with us like it’s cocktail hour.”

  Noah stared at him. “My so-called wife used me...used us. She was a plant placed into my life to infiltrate this team for Orlenda, and I’d say she did a good job of that.”

  “With your help,” Ayden replied.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, pal. She was good. I believed she loved me.”

  I was totally buying this. I mean, sure, I did kiss him back in Mexico about two weeks earlier when we’d brought down the biggest cartel leader in the worl
d. That was when I had thought Noah was happily married—and I had regrettably conceded that I was a homewrecker.

  “What are you asking me, Ayden?” Noah asked. “That I don’t seem shaken that I killed Jacqueline? Of course I am! I’m even more shaken that I fell for her lies and allowed her into our world, but I never get a thrill out of a kill. Trust me, I’m devastated. Fucked up, even. But like all of us, I hide my emotions well. We have to.” He pointed at Hope, and lowered his voice. “We have a mission and we need to not only protect Hope, we need to find out what the hell Orlenda wants with her and what Grant Simms wants with her, too. With all of us. We need to get to whatever these papers are that the kid is talking about, because something tells me that if we don’t, we could cease to live in the world that currently exists. And there may be some bad stuff in this world, but if Orlenda gets her way, I’m thinking it’ll be a helluva lot worse. Now, do you want to start talking and clue me in?”

  Chapter Three

  I glanced at my watch and saw that we were about two hours outside of Israel. I looked back up at Noah and then at Ayden. “He’s right. We have to rely on each other. We are a team, and without using our skills together, we won’t accomplish anything.”

  Which was true. We formed a sort of trifecta. Combined, we were a hell of a force to be reckoned with.

  Ayden nodded. “Fine. But we are going to talk about Simms. I think we need to wake the kid up and ask her what more she knows about him.”

  “Let her sleep,” I said. “She’s been through hell; she can tell us when she’s awake—and when she’s ready.”

  He backed off. “Your call. So what do we know?”

  “We know that Simms held her and other kids captive in a compound or school where gifted psychic children were being raised for whatever program he has in mind. I’ll explore all of that with her. Later. Something tells me she may be more open with me. I think right now we should talk about the possibility of these papers being a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”