He turned back to the window.
“What, exactly, do you mean by context?” he asked.
“I know that your dream is connected to whatever happened on that last job with your no-name-agency client, but that’s all I’ve got. I need more if you want me to guide you through a trance.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what happened. But I don’t see how it will help you interpret my dream.”
“Take your time.”
He fell silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts and memories. After a while, he started talking. He knew that he would not stop until he had told her everything.
“You know that Sam and I do—did—some investigative work for an off-the-books government agency,” he said. “What you don’t know is how we got the client.”
“I assume you don’t advertise Coppersmith Consulting services online.”
“No. The director of the agency, Joe Spalding, recruited me and two other guys, Burns and Elland, in our senior year in college. Spalding was a quietly powerful figure in the intelligence community. He had been green-lighted to set up an experimental covert ops department staffed with agents he believed had some paranormal talent. It was supposed to be an updated version of the old CIA remote viewing project.”
“How in the world did he identify potential agents like you?” Gwen asked.
“Spalding’s real secret asset was that he was a talent himself,” Judson said. “A strong one. He could recognize other people with similar psychic profiles if he got close enough to pick up the energy of their auras. He set up shop on a handful of college campuses, offering to pay students to take what he called an experimental psychology test that was designed to determine if a person had any psychic talent. I signed up out of curiosity to see if his test really worked.”
“You knew you had some talent, so you were testing his test,” Gwen said.
“Yes. The test, as it turned out, was a fraud. It was the old tell-me-what-card-I’m-holding-up-now experiment.”
“Useless, according to Evelyn.”
“Right. But Spalding wasn’t depending on the results of his test. He was trying to find other people with what he called hot auras. A lot of nontalents showed up to take the test, of course, but he also got a few people who, like me, were drawn to the experiment because we wanted to know more about the psychic side of our natures.”
“Spalding recognized you when he saw you,” Gwen said.
“Yes. He found Burns and Elland at another campus. He offered all three of us a thrilling career filled with action and adventure as well as the opportunity to use our psychic talents in the service of our country.”
“I gather you couldn’t resist the offer,” Gwen said.
“Hell, no.” He turned around to face her. “I was twenty-one and looking for all the things Spalding promised. Mom tried to talk me out of joining the agency. But Dad was all for it. He said it would be good experience since I seemed fated for a career in the security field. And it was good experience. For a while.”
Gwen smiled. “You were living every young man’s dream. You were a real psychic secret agent. Very cool.”
“Good times, yeah. Spalding understood that I preferred to work alone, and he let me run with my assignments. He didn’t ask questions. All he cared about was results. I always got results. But after a couple of years, I realized that I wasn’t cut out to work for someone else. I liked the investigation process, though.”
“Because it suited your talents,” Gwen said. “It was satisfying work.”
“Yes. But I knew that I didn’t want to work for Spalding or anyone else forever. I wanted to be my own boss. In the meantime, Sam had finished getting his fancy degrees in geology and engineering. We all knew that he was destined to head up the Coppersmith R-and-D lab, but like Emma and me, he didn’t—couldn’t—work directly for Dad.”
“You Coppersmiths care a lot about each other, but you’re all too strong willed to take orders from each other,” Gwen said.
“Like Mom says, we’re all chips off the old rock and Dad is a very hard chunk of stone. As it happened, Sam was thinking about setting up his own consulting firm, but there’s not a lot of demand for paranormal crystal consultants outside the Coppersmith R-and-D lab. Spalding, however, saw a use for Sam’s talents in the field. It was Spalding who suggested that Sam and I set up a private investigation business and work for him on a contract basis.”
“Coppersmith Consulting.”
“Trust me, the word consulting covers a lot of gray territory. Spalding liked the idea of a contract arrangement because it was so easy to hide off-the-record investigations that way. Sam and I went into business. Spalding was our main client. Things went along swell for quite a while. But about a year ago, things started to change.”
“What happened?” Gwen asked.
“The changes were subtle at first. As contract consultants, we realized we were out of the need-to-know loop on a lot of stuff. But we had our intuition. We started to get uneasy about some of the jobs. Started turning down work from Spalding unless we could get enough background out of him.”
Gwen smiled. “You and Sam wanted to know what you were getting involved in when you agreed to take a job. You wanted context.”
“Sounds familiar?”
“Yep. So, to recap, I’m getting the impression that over time your relationship with Spalding and his little agency became somewhat strained.”
“Right.” He started to prowl the room. “But we all managed to make it work for a while. The bottom line for Spalding was that he needed us. We were the strongest talents he could put on a case and he knew it. If he wanted results, he used us, and if he used us, we demanded context.”
“What about the other agents?”
“Burns and Elland turned out to be the canaries in the coal mine. I noticed the changes in them first.”
“What kind of changes?”
“I had worked with both of them long enough to have a sense of their paranormal strengths as well as their limitations. Their abilities were similar to your friend Sawyer’s—preternatural night vision and hearing, lightning-fast reflexes. They could disappear into the shadows.”
“What happened?” Gwen asked.
“I went into the office one day to get a briefing from Spalding on a new investigation. Spalding was on the phone when I arrived. Burns was there. He offered to pour a cup of coffee for me. When I took the mug from his hand, I sensed something in his energy that just seemed somehow wrong.”