The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  She’d spent the first twenty years of her life trying very, very hard to convince herself it was all imagination, coincidence. But two experiences had ripped through that protective cloak of denial. Henry Youngblood called them “spontaneous remote viewing experiences,” but Tobie hadn’t known what they were at the time. The first was so traumatic that she’d dropped out of college. The second, in Iraq, nearly got her killed and helped earn her a psycho discharge.

  She realized the Colonel was watching her closely. “Did you like the military, Tobie?”

  “No,” she said baldly, and saw a gleam of amusement light up his eyes.

  “And why was that?”

  “I’m a lousy shot, I can’t run for shit, and I have trouble with authority. Or at least, that’s what the shrink in Wiesbaden told me. I don’t like to take orders.”

  Colonel McClintock shifted his papers but said nothing. Tobie figured the report from the shrink in Wiesbaden was probably somewhere in those papers. The Wiesbaden report, and a lot of others. When you get a psychiatric discharge from the military, the process generates a slew of reports.

  “Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” they’d called it. But October knew even that label had provoked dissension.

  According to one psychiatrist at Bethesda, October Guinness was certifiably nuts and probably had been even before they’d made the mistake of letting her into the U.S. Navy.

  “Do you enjoy your work with Dr. Youngblood?” asked the Colonel, surprising her by the shift in direction.

  She relaxed a little. The Colonel was one of the few people with whom Tobie could discuss Youngblood’s project. The other military psychologists she’d dealt with had all looked at her file and labeled her crazy. But McClintock had tapped his templed fingers against his lips and asked her questions about her daydreams as a child. He talked to her about what she’d seen in Iraq and how she’d seen it. Then he’d handed her a thick declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document called Training Manual for Remote Viewing and phoned his friend Dr. Youngblood at Tulane.

  “I enjoy it in some ways,” said Tobie. As a child, she’d eventually come to accept the idea that she was a bit weird. But between them, McClintock and Youngblood were working to convince her that she was neither weird nor crazy. She simply had a talent she could learn how to use—and control.

  “In what ways don’t you enjoy it?”

  “I find it…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “…disturbing.”

  “And why is that, Tobie?”

  Their gazes met and held. He was no longer smiling, and neither was she. “You know why.”

  3

  Tulane University, New Orleans: 4 June 6:20 P.M. Central time

  Once upon a time, Dr. Henry Youngblood had been considered a respected academic. Courted as a speaker at conferences, he’d been an easy favorite for grant money and was published regularly in all the right journals. Then he was sucked into a research program on remote viewing secretly funded by the United States government, and all that changed.

  It had taken Henry a while to realize what his new interest was doing to his career. Scholarly journals started rejecting his articles. Colleagues snickered when the once esteemed Dr. Youngblood walked into a room. It was a career-wrecker, this kind of research. Not because of the involvement of the government—which was unknown—but because of the nature of the research itself. Yet Henry couldn’t let it go. Even when he had to dig into his own pocket to continue financing his experiments. Even when the demands of operating without support kept him working in his office night after night, as he was now.

  Casting a quick glance at the clock, he swiveled his chair toward his desk and flipped on his computer. The monitor stayed blank except for a bright yellow message that blinked out at him. WARNING! WARNING! Unauthorized access to files detected.

  Henry huffed a short laugh. The warning system was the university’s, not his. As far as he was concerned, the new hacker-protection program was just one more thing that could go wrong—and frequently did. He was a research psychologist, for Christ’s sake, not a nuclear physicist. Why would anyone want to hack into his files?

  Still smiling faintly, he typed in the password to clear the warning message and hit Enter. The message kept blinking.

  His amusement sliding into annoyance, Henry glanced again at the clock. He was supposed to be meeting Elizabeth for dinner down in the Quarter at eight. Elizabeth Vu was thirty-nine years old, attractive, bright, and single; Henry was forty-eight, divorced for six long, lonely years, and carrying around a gut that spoke of an expanding love affair with New Orleans food. He was so preoccupied with his research that he rarely remembered he was supposed to have something called a life. He needed to get this data entered into the files before he quit for the night, but women like Elizabeth didn’t come into Henry’s orbit very often. The last thing he had time for was computer problems.

  Rapidly pecking at the keyboard with two pointed fingers, Henry punched in the password again. Then he paused and lifted his head when he heard the street door below open and close.

  Tulane’s psych department had relegated Henry to an office in the Psychology Research Annex, which was what they called the old two-story nineteenth-century white frame house on Freret Street that handled the department’s overflow. The house had never been renovated to suit its new function, so what were once a dining room, parlors, and bedrooms had simply been pressed into service as offices and lab space. The place had been in bad shape even before Katrina; now it was a virtual death trap to anyone with mold allergies.

  Being sent to the Annex was considered a state of exile: punishment for his determined pursuit of a project most academics considered absurd if not downright unscientific. But the Annex suited Henry just fine. He wasn’t particularly troubled by mold. His office had once been a large corner bedroom at the back of the house, so it had the kind of nice architectural touches—like double hung windows and high ceilings and hardwood floors—that he loved about old New Orleans houses. True, the air conditioner was broken and the ceiling still showed an ugly brown water stain left from when Katrina took off most of the shingles on the roof. But he’d managed to scrounge up enough funds to have one of the unused rooms down the hall soundproofed for his research and training sessions. And because the Annex was on the edge of campus, people tended to leave him alone. Most of those with offices there were graduate students. The place was usually deserted by now.

  Cocking his head, Henry listened to the footsteps coming up the uncarpeted stairs. Two men, or maybe three, he thought as the old wooden floorboards creaked. He glanced out the open side window to the driveway below. It was empty except for his ten-year-old Miata.

  Henry sucked in a quick breath of hot air scented with jasmine and sun-baked asphalt. He’d been working in the field of parapsychology for almost twenty years, and never once in all that time had he himself experienced so much as a whisper of premonition, a hint of anything he might have termed extrasensory perception. Until now.

  His heart hammering painfully in his chest, Henry turned toward the door. He’d pushed halfway up from his desk chair when a man’s figure filled the open doorway.

  The man paused, his pale blue eyes narrowing as the light from the overhead fluorescent fixture fell on the even, familiar features of his face. The two men behind him also hesitated. One was big and dark; the other more leanly muscled, with a pair of silver-rimmed glasses that lent an air of scholarly distinction to an otherwise military bearing.

  “Lance.” Awash in a giddy wave of relief that left him feeling vaguely silly, Henry sank back into his chair. “This is a surprise.”

  “Hey, Henry,” said Lance Palmer, and smiled.

  4

  “Let me introduce you to my associates,” said Palmer, one arm swinging around to indicate the men behind him. “Michael Hadley and Sal Lopez.”

  Henry returned the men’s nods. He’d seen enough Navy SEALs and Army Rangers while working on government co
ntracts out at Stanford to recognize the type immediately, with their tight jaws and fixed expressions and alert postures. The organization Lance Palmer worked for was full of such men. It never occurred to Henry to question why these two men were here, now.

  “My boss was impressed with the results of your little demonstration,” said Palmer, while Henry hurried to clear stacks of papers and books from the office’s scattered, mismatched chairs. “Very impressed indeed.”

  Henry turned with a pile of books in his arms, his pulse thrumming with anticipation and hope. “It was accurate, was it?”

  “Uncannily so. So accurate, in fact, I had a hard time convincing my boss you hadn’t found some way to fake the results.” Both men laughed. It was a suspicion Henry had dealt with time and again when he’d been working on the Grill Flame Project for the Army.

  “So are they interested?” asked Henry, trying hard to sound casual but not succeeding.

  “The suits are drawing up the contracts even as we speak.”

  Henry shoved the books he’d been holding onto the top of the nearest filing cabinet, then just stood there, grinning like an idiot. Wait until Elizabeth and Tobie heard this!

  “Where’d you find this remote viewer, anyway?” Palmer asked.

  Henry felt his grin grow wider. “She’s incredible, isn’t she? A colleague of mine recommended her. She’s the best viewer I’ve ever studied.”

  Palmer nodded. “Who is she, exactly?”

  Henry gave a nervous laugh. From somewhere, un-bidden, came a shadow of his earlier unease. “The identities of viewers are always kept secret. You know that, Lance.”

  Palmer leaned forward in his seat. He was no longer smiling. “But surely you can tell us now? After all, we’re going to be funding this project.”

  Across the room, Sal Lopez sat with his hands loose at his sides, while Michael Hadley had taken up a position near the door. Neither man looked directly at Henry.

  Henry had no illusions about the nature of the organization Lance Palmer now worked for. From the open window came the sound of the hot breeze shifting the leaves of a nearby oak and the blaring of a ship’s horn from out on the Mississippi. Henry was suddenly, intensely aware of the stillness of the evening around them, of his own relative weakness compared to the strength and training of the three men ranged about his office. And he felt it again, that whisper of warning that spoke from across the eons. This time he listened.

  He gave a shaky laugh. “I guess you’re right.” He turned toward the door. “Some of the things she’s done are amazing. Let me get her file so I can show you. I’ll be right back.”

  Henry hurried down the darkened hallway, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the old empty house. A slick layer of cold sweat lined his face, trickled down between his shoulder blades. He threw a wistful glance at the training room, with its reinforced walls and heavy, dead-bolted door. But the room was kept locked and he’d left the keys lying next to his computer. He thought about making a break down the stairs, then realized they’d hear and be after him in a minute.

  His breath coming hot and fast in his throat, Henry ducked into one of the empty offices. He eased the door closed behind him, his cell phone already flipped open in his shaky hand.

  His fingers were clumsy. He wasted precious seconds searching through the menu for Tobie’s number. More time waiting for the call to go through. He kept his terrified gaze fixed on the panels of the closed door. His ears strained to catch the least hint of movement from the hall.

  The phone began to ring.

  “Come on, Tobie,” he whispered as the it rang for the second, then the third time. “Answer.”

  It was possible he was wrong, of course. Maybe he was overreacting to the point of foolishness. He could deal with the embarrassment if it came to that. But if he were right—

  A computer-generated voice said, “You have reached the mailbox of…October Guinness. At the tone, please record your message—”

  “Damn,” he swore, hitting the appropriate key and waiting for the requisite beep. “Come on.” It finally sounded, high-pitched and long…

  Just as a board creaked out in the hall.

  5

  Tobie was leaving Colonel McClintock’s study when she felt her cell phone begin to vibrate in her messenger bag.

  “Still going to therapy for your leg?” asked the Colonel, walking with her to his front door.

  “I’m down to twice a week now,” she said, ignoring the phone’s gentle summons. The bullet she’d taken in her left thigh in the deserts of western Iraq had snapped the femur. That was bad, but the worst part was the way the subsequent weeks of immobility had aggravated an already bad knee. If she hadn’t caught a psychiatric discharge, she would probably have been given a medical discharge. Although maybe not. The United States military was getting pretty desperate these days. “I’ve noticed lately it only tends to hurt when I run.”

  “Which you don’t like to do anyway.”

  Tobie huffed a soft laugh. “Which I don’t like to do anyway.” She reached for the front door handle. “Tell Mrs. McClintock hello for me.”

  At the base of the porch’s wide wooden steps, Tobie paused. Her cell phone had quit vibrating. She fished it out of her bag and frowned at the sight of the message icon. Pressing Talk, she shifted the bag’s strap on her shoulder and headed for her car.

  Lance Palmer knew something was wrong.

  The sudden stealth of Henry Youngblood’s movements betrayed him. The Army had spent a lot of time and money teaching officers like Lance about people’s behavior, about things like neurolinguistic programming and body language and voice patterns. But Lance didn’t need anything more than common sense and a keen awareness to tell him that a man with nothing to hide walks with a firm, steady gait. He turns on lights. Makes noise.

  Dr. Henry Youngblood moved furtively. Nervously. Like a man doing something on the sly. A man who is afraid.

  Lance slipped his Glock 18 from its shoulder holster and motioned for Lopez and Hadley to follow him.

  Hugging one wall to minimize the betraying creaks from the old floorboards, they crept toward the front of the house. The hall was lined with half a dozen closed doors. Lance resurrected the memory of Henry’s careful footsteps, the distant click of a closing door, and focused on the two front rooms overlooking Freret Street.

  Pausing at the end of the hall, Lance could hear the faint whisper of a man’s voice coming from behind the door on their left. He settled into a balanced stance, the Glock extended in an easy, double-handed grip. His gaze met Lopez’s and he nodded. Lopez pulled his own pistol and with one powerful kick sent the door crashing open.

  Henry Youngblood stood in the middle of the room, his middle-aged body frozen in terror, his face a slack oval in the early evening light. His hand jerked and the dying sunlight streaming in through the front window glinted on metal.

  “He’s got a gun!” shouted Lopez, squeezing his Glock’s trigger twice. The silenced percussion sounded like pops in the small room.

  It wasn’t until two dark holes opened up between Henry’s eyes that Lance realized what the professor held. Lance walked over to nudge the dead man’s hand with the toe of one shoe. “It was just a cell phone,” he said, giving Lopez a hard look.

  Henry Youngblood was supposed to die, of course. But not yet and not like this. Not with two bullets in his head. And not before he’d told them everything they needed to know. It was to prevent exactly this kind of mistake that Lance had come down here and taken charge of the operation himself.

  “Shit,” said Lopez.

  Easing his Glock back into its holster, Lance bent to lift the phone from Youngblood’s lifeless grip.

  If the professor had been talking to someone, he must have ended the connection when he heard them in the hall. Lance glanced at his watch, then flicked through the menu to the list of outgoing numbers. Youngblood had called someone named Tobie.

  The name meant nothing to Lance. He hit redial, his
gaze traveling around the darkened room. It was empty except for a dusty desk and an old wooden chair. The office was obviously unused. Whatever Henry had come in here for, it wasn’t to get a file.

  The connection went through, going immediately to voice mail. “You have reached the mailbox of…October Guinness—”

  An unusual name, Lance thought as he pressed End. He remembered seeing it on the university’s pay list. He turned toward Michael Hadley and smiled.

  “Got her.”

  6

  Gentilly, New Orleans: 4 June 6:35 P.M. Central time

  Tourak Rahmadad snagged a bag of potato chips, popped open a beer, and wandered into the front room of the half-renovated cottage he and three fellow students rented in an area of New Orleans known as Gentilly. Unlike most of the other Middle Eastern students who formed Jamaat Noor Allah, the Light of God, Tourak actually liked America—which surprised him, because he had expected to hate it.

  He’d been in the States for three years now, studying journalism and filmmaking at the University of New Orleans. After 9/11, when white Americans started treating people with dark skin and foreign-sounding names the way they used to treat American blacks, Tourak had begged his parents to let him study in Paris, or maybe London. But his mother insisted that he go to the States. She had a cousin, Kamal, who lived in New Orleans and promised to watch out for him. Actually, the desire to escape the watchful eye of cousin Kamal was one of the reasons Tourak wanted to go to Paris. But his mother was the one paying the tens of thousands of dollars it cost to send him overseas to study. And so he had come to America.