Amman, Jordan

Shali pulled back her long black hair, revealing her smooth, golden-brown Indian complexion. She glanced over at the out-of-place, middle-aged American man strolling beside her. "Do you think we'll get the right Iqbal today?"

Clay responded, "I don't know. We've done Iqbal Al-Subari and Iqbal Al-Suwari, but neither were the right target. They had the wrong name, wrong incarnation, wrong soul. It sure would be nice to get more precise information on our subjects, but no such luck this time."

"We obviously didn't get an accurate family name for our Iqbal from the regression of the woman in Jakarta. She had that lisp, which threw off my transcription of the name. You've told me a hundred times that we are bound by the body through which they see the world. So this time we were limited by her impaired pronunciation of a name."

Clay and Shali continued walking down the busy main street in Amman toward their rustic hotel in the old section of town. The early morning air was crisp and pungent with the sharp smell of cooking spices and fried breads. Having just finished breakfast at a side-street cafe, they were returning to set up the hotel suite for the morning's past-life regression session.

Clay said, "If today's Iqbal isn't the right one, we've got three more Iqbal Al-Subari-Suwari-Suhari's in their mid-twenties to go through. But today, I feel positive."

"The problem with today's Iqbal is that he is only giving us one session. We've got three days of regression work to cram into one day, so we will have a problem if he is the right guy."

"We'll just have to move fast," Clay said, quickly adding, "You've got to keep us on track."

Shali replied, "Or we pay him more to get another day of regressions."

"Hey, I'll triple his fee if he is the one we're looking for. Quadruple."

"If we find those secret treasures you believe exist, then money shouldn't be a problem."

Clay hesitated for a moment as they walked into the hotel lobby. He looked at Shali and said, "But you know it's not about money. I already made my millions doing this regression stuff. I could make many millions more. I'm just after those secrets. I want them for what they are, or might be — not for some monetary value. But at this point we don't even know what they are exactly, and we certainly don't know what they are worth. If the secrets really are some kind of advanced knowledge, we need to bring them out to better this world we live in. It could sure use some help."

Shali nodded her head in acknowledgment as they walked up the stairs to the second floor hall that led to their suite. With Clay behind her, she unlocked the door to the suite. Suddenly there was a crashing sound in the room. As she pushed open the door, they saw a man dressed in local Arab garb dashing across the dimly lit room.

Realizing they were being robbed, Clay pushed Shali aside and darted towards the dark figure. He tackled the thief mid-waist, several feet from the open balcony door where the man had been attempting to make his escape. The two tumbled and rolled across the floor, slugging and beating each other like grade-school bullies.

Shali flicked on the lights and screamed down the hallway for help, using several Middle Eastern languages. Clay was on top of the perpetrator, swinging as hard as he could at his opponent's face. His years of training in the army helped him gain the edge, but that training was not able to stop the knee that sharply jabbed into his crotch. He let out a loud yelp and leaped almost straight into the air before buckling and falling on top of the man.

Shali grabbed a metal floor lamp and slashed it across the thief's shoulder as he pushed out from under Clay. The bloodied thief let out his own yelp and scrambled on his knees towards the open balcony with Shali swinging the lamp in close pursuit. He turned back to Shali and yelled out in a Middle-Eastern tongue.

Clay moaned and tried to get back on his feet, as the thief and Shali remained at a stand-off. She stood firm with a wildly swinging floor lamp while the perpetrator stood on the edge of the balcony lecturing her as if the entire episode was her fault.

The thief suddenly turned and vaulted over the balcony onto the hood of a parked car below. As the car's alarm blared with ear-piercing beeps, Shali dropped the lamp and pulled Clay back to his feet. Both ran to the edge of the balcony and watched with adrenaline-pumped tremors as the thief ran off down the street, still looking back to yell his chastisements.

In less than a minute, the hotel security guards and manager ran into their suite, expressing concern and promising action. Clay and Shali surveyed their equipment and materials but found nothing missing. Clay discussed the matter with the hotel manager, and they agreed not to involve the local authorities at this time. That would only complicate their stay. However, the manager agreed to post two twenty-four-hour security guards — one in the street below and one in the hallway outside their room — for the remainder of their stay. While they were speaking, two maids arrived to clean up the broken lamp, tables and glasses.

Shali and Clay freshened up in their own rooms and then met back at the suite. After pouring a cup of sweet, spiced tea for each of them, Clay said, "Our Iqbal shows up in thirty minutes. Considering what just happened, should we be doing this regression today?"

"If you're okay, then I think we'll be alright," Shali responded. "We're only going to get one shot at him, and he has already taken the day off of work. We can't risk losing him, so let's just do it."

Clay sat for a moment sipping his tea and finally said, "Fortunately, we must have walked in on this thief shortly after he got into the room. He didn't have a chance to take anything."

She gave Clay a look of contemplation. "I don't think he was here to steal anything."

"What do you mean? He was going to rob us."

"I don't think so. I think he just wanted to know what we were up to." Looking puzzled, Clay said, "How do you know? What was he was yelling at you?"

Shali took a deep breath. "It was confusing. He was yelling in Hebrew, but he had a heavy Palestinian — or maybe an ethnic Jordanian — accent. I couldn't tell for sure."

"But did you catch what he was saying?"

She seemed solemn. "He said something like, 'You don't know what you are doing' or 'You don't know who you are dealing with. You are asking for trouble.' Or something like that."

"So if this guy wasn't a thief, why would he care what we are doing? Or did someone else send him here?"

Looking through the corner of her eyes, Shali replied in a facetious tone, "I couldn't get the guy on the couch for a hypnosis session, Chief, so I have no idea what was going on in his head."

"Fair enough."

Her face mutated to a teasing smirk. She nodded her head at Clay's crotch, which had been battered during the scuffle. "How're you doing — you know — down there?"

Clay snorted. "It'll be alright after a little physical therapy. Maybe you can help out."

Shali giggled lightly and replied, "It ain't gonna happen, Charlie — not by me. You know what happened last time. I'll call room service for a bag of ice. That ought to cool you down."

The two laughed at the joint jabs, remembering how history had played out between them.

A large, full-reclining chaise lounge chair sat in the center of their regression suite. On one side was a chair and small table, and on the opposite side was a table with a computer equipment set-up akin to a small TV studio. Shali turned on the equipment on the table, while Clay turned on another computer in the adjoining room.

He called out from the far room, "He's supposed to be here at eight-thirty, so we don't have much time."

"We'll be fine if we don't hit any snags. You ready to test the audio?"

"Give me a minute."

On the table next to the computer in the main room was a large, shielded microphone box with a baseball-sized hole in the front. The contraptions were designed to protect against high levels of electromagnetic radiation that could be emitted during a regression. The heavy microphone box was lined with sheets of lead and copper grounding mesh. Recessed inside the opening was the high-quality directional microphone. As long as they kept the hole pointed at their subject, the whole session would be recorded on the computer in next room.

Shali checked the thirty-foot cables that ran from one room to the other. When she got to his room, she said, "It's such a pain to haul these heavy-assed cables every place we go around the world."

"Heavy-assed cables?" Clay laughed.

"Sorry. Blame my stepdad — you know, talk like a sailor."

Clay thought back to her descriptions of her stepfather, the Portuguese ship captain. He still pictured Shali as being culturally constrained, despite knowing that her Indian mother from New Delhi rebelled after the premature death of Shali's very conservative Hindu father.

"So, do we really need all this stuff? We haven't had any problems in the last two years."

"I'm not sure if all the precautions are necessary, but they are part of the protocol and help protect against high levels of electromagnetic radiation. The specs for the PLR protocols are very specific. Anyway, I've never had a failed recording in over five years of regressions, so those scientists must have known something."

"So when are we going to get some interesting lives? So many past lives seem so boring."

"Now, come on. Once in a while we get some interesting characters. I've verified a lot of actual previous lives, but I never got any really famous people." He continued his tinkering with the equipment. "So, what's this particular Iqbal's background again?"

"He's a twenty-three year old Palestinian; a junior accountant at a construction company and a recent finance graduate from Al-Ahliyya Amman University. There's nothing significant or different about him; he's just an ordinary young buck with aspirations for a fruitful and productive life. Did you see him trying to hit on me when we interviewed him last week?"

Clay snickered. "Yes. And you're what, ten — or is it fifteen years his senior?"

"Hey, can't a girl have a little privacy or maybe even an ego boost in her personal life?"

"We're paying him more Jordanian dinars for an eight-hour session than he makes in two weeks at his bean-counting job. He needs to focus on what we hired him to do, not hit on a fine-looking Indian babe trying to regress him."

Shali gave him a smile of gratitude for the jealousy-laced compliment. "No, today our Iqbal needs to relax," he said in a melodic tone, "and go for a hypnotic ride back into his soul's history. Maybe he'll get to see that hot cave lady from twenty thousand years ago. He could knock her in the head with a club and drag her back to his cave."

"Maybe he was the cave lady," Shali fired back with a grin. "He won't remember a damn thing when it's over, anyway. Have you ever used those protocols where subjects can actually remember their past lives?"

Ever since Shali had worked with him, he had used PLR Protocol 75, which kept the subjects from remembering anything about the secrets, should they find them. This was a precaution, because if the subjects remembered they might join the race to find the hidden treasures.

"A few times, but any head shrink can do that with hypnosis," he replied. "But I'm not really interested in all that anyway. I'm looking for specific things. If they want to remember their boring past lives, they should be paying me — not me paying them."

"But they could never track down the soul pods or soul mates on their own."

"Maybe. Being in the same soul pod, they seem to know where other mates are at any point in time and space. The challenge is to coax out details before the souls or their guides get suspicious about what we're up to; otherwise, they clam up. The guides are protective of those souls in their trust and don't often reveal where other souls may be incarnated. If a shrink can do that or if the person gets good at regressing themselves, it's possible to identify their soul pod."

Shali said, "I've never had any bad regressions since we've been working together. Have you ever seen any bad ones in the years before that? You know, blowouts during or after a session?"

"Nah, not really." Clay looked back at her and said, "The secret government studies say that attempts to access or confront previous lives could have emotional or psychological effects, but it is usually beneficial. It's basically the same as what shrinks do when they try to fix people's problems with hypnosis. But PLR Protocol 75 shields them from any knowledge of their previous lives anyway."