The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  “It’s not exactly a secret anymore. In 1995 the Company hired a private think tank to evaluate the entire history of remote viewing. Some of the guys I know who were in the program say the deck was stacked against them—the civilian scientists doing the review didn’t have top secret clearance, and the Government refused to declassify some of their most spectacular successes. They say the CIA wanted a negative review and only released the data that would give them that conclusion.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. But have you ever known the Company to commission a review that didn’t bring in the result they wanted? The review board found that remote viewing failed to produce the kind of specific information required for intelligence work, and all remote viewing projects were shut down.”

  Jax eyed the piles of paperbacks and hardcovers. There was even a dog-eared Defense Intelligence Agency manual. “So where do I start? It’s not that long a flight.”

  “This is probably the best of them.” Matt lifted a slim volume from one of the stacks. “It’s written by a career Army sergeant named McMoneagle. Some of his remote viewing episodes are incredible. He talks about remote viewing Soviet subs hidden inside huge warehouses, and locating a lost airplane loaded with nuclear weapons that went down over Africa.”

  “You don’t actually believe in this, do you?”

  Jax watched, bemused, as Matt’s gaze slid away to focus on something across the room. “Read up on it. I think you might be surprised.”

  “Right.” Jax slid off the edge of the table. There was a flight leaving in forty-five minutes to take him to New Orleans. “So if these programs were all shut down back in ’ninety-five, then what’s this Tulane professor been up to?”

  “As I understand it, he’s had a small program going at the university down there for the past year, training remote viewers and trying to identify criteria that can be used to select the most promising candidates. That was one of the main problems all the old programs faced: they were never able to find a way to predict who would be reliably successful.”

  “Who’s been funding him?”

  “He’d cobbled together some grant money here and there, but I gather he was struggling to keep the program going. He put in a proposal to us a few months ago.”

  “And?”

  “We turned him down…at least, as far as I know.”

  “Ah. But how much do you know?”

  Matt met Jax’s gaze, the big man’s eyes dark and troubled. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  Jax frowned down at the stacks of books with titles like Mind Race and Using Your Psychic Abilities and sighed. “This is going to sink what’s left of my career if it ever gets out. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Chandler personally requested you be the one assigned to it.”

  Jax laughed. Gordon Chandler had been ambassador to Colombia at the time of his little episode last winter. And then, three months ago, the asshole had been appointed the new head of the CIA when former head Clark Westlake was elevated to the position of intelligence czar. Chandler had been doing his best ever since to get Jax fired from the Company. A different kind of man would have quit; Jax Alexander was biding his time, waiting for the chance to get even.

  But Chandler was no fool. He knew Jax. He knew, too, that the future of his own career depended on getting Jax before Jax got him.

  “Then I’m fucked,” said Jax.

  Matt balanced the file back on top of the stacks of books and shoved them toward Jax. “I think that’s the general idea.”

  17

  New Orleans: 4 June 8:35 P.M. Central time

  “Hey, lady! This is a private bus.”

  Her face hot and wet with mingling sweat and rain, Tobie turned toward the bus driver and found rows of exquisitely dressed wedding guests staring at her. “Sorry.” She flashed what she hoped was an apologetic grin. “Could you just let me out at the corner of Calhoun?”

  “Some people,” muttered the driver, and swung onto Magazine.

  The instant the bus swooped in close to the curb, Tobie leaped out. It was raining hard now, great, wind-gusted sheets of water that fell in waves from a lightning-torn sky. She hurried down Calhoun, her shoulders hunched and head bent against the downpour, her hair hanging in a wet curtain beside her face. A car splashed past and she spun around, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, ready to run. The car disappeared around the corner.

  By the time her Bug appeared as a yellow blur through the falling rain, she was drenched. Her skirt clung to her thighs, her cotton jacket hanging heavy and wet. Jerking open the door, she tossed her bag onto the far seat and slid in.

  Rain drummed on the metal roof, cascaded in sheets down the windshield. She was shaking so badly she had a hard time fitting the key into the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and the voice of Lee Ann Womack blared out incongruously from the radio. Tobie punched the power button, turning it off. She wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, her breath soughing hot in her throat. Then she threw the car into first and hit the gas.

  Turning onto Tchoupitoulas, she tore upriver toward Audubon Park. She had no thought in mind beyond putting as much distance as possible between herself and the men chasing her. But at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Henry Clay, the light turned red and she had to stop. She watched the overhead traffic signal shudder in the wind, watched her windshield wiper blades beat back and forth, and tried to figure out what the hell she should do.

  She didn’t dare go to the police, she realized; not when the men chasing her carried FBI badges. So where could she go? She tried to think of someone—anyone she could turn to. She’d made friends since moving here to New Orleans, good friends. But what would a couple of eccentric artists and a French Quarter musician know about dealing with the kind of men who flashed FBI badges and fired guns equipped with suppressors?

  And then she thought about Colonel McClintock.

  She’d never been clear on exactly what the Colonel had done during his many years in the Army. But she knew he’d spent two tours in Vietnam, and she’d seen pictures in his study, curious old photographs that hinted at colorful adventures involving far more than the kind of calm therapy sessions he’d had with her. Plus, he knew about Henry’s project. If anyone could help her make sense of what was going on, it was the Colonel.

  Reaching over to the seat beside her, she fumbled around in her messenger bag for her cell phone. Her hand closed around it just as the traffic light changed, painting the rain-slicked black streets with a vivid wash of green.

  The guy behind her in a white pickup decorated with two American flags leaned on his horn. Tobie dropped her phone on top of her bag and took off.

  Lance Palmer closed his cell phone and held it in a tightened fist, his gaze fixed on the rain-flecked window and distant white lights that flickered past in the darkness. They were on the I-10 heading west out of the city toward the suburbs and Metairie Country Club, the destination of the wedding reception shuttle bus. He’d had a car with four men at the club waiting when the shuttle arrived. Except that according to the shuttle driver, October Guinness had hopped off the bus back on Magazine Street.

  “Take the next exit and turn around,” said Lance.

  Lopez glanced over at him. “We lost her?”

  “We lost her.” Lance swiveled sideways in his seat and flipped the phone open again. “Let me see what else we’ve got on this girl,” he said to Hadley as he punched his own home number on the phone’s auto dial.

  Hadley was a mess; his swollen left eye was turning blue and purple, and blood still oozed from a cut on the back of his head. There was obviously more to this girl than any of them had figured.

  “Hey, Jess,” said Lance, his head tipped at an awkward angle to cradle the phone between his ear and shoulder as he reached to take the laptop from Hadley. “Looks like I’m not going to make it home tonight after all.”

  Lance paused, his gaze scanning the directory of files while he list
ened to Jess’s soft expressions of disappointment. “What?” he said a minute later, his attention jerked back to the phone. “Sure I’ll tell them good-night. Put them on.”

  His ten-year-old, Jason, was watching TV and could barely spare him a quick “’Night, Dad.” But the little one, six-year-old Missy, recited a long and tangled tale about her cat, Barney.

  “That’s nice, honey,” he said finally. “I love you, too. Now let me talk to Mommy again for a minute, would you?”

  “I should be home tomorrow morning,” he told Jessica when she came back on. “’Night, darling.”

  He dropped the phone into his pocket and started flipping through the files on October Guinness. “Get onto headquarters,” he told Hadley. “Tell them I want to know everything there is to know about this woman. I want her license number and the kind of car she’s driving. I want to know who her friends are and where they live. I want the activity on her bank and credit cards monitored. And I want someone assigned to do absolutely nothing except wait for her to turn on her cell phone.”

  Hadley shook his head. “She’s not going to be stupid enough to use it.”

  “Are you kidding? So someone taught her how to kick. Big deal. She’s a lousy college dropout who couldn’t even make it in the Navy, for Christ’s sake. What does she know?” Lance glanced out the window again. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, more like a fine mist that swirled around the car. “She’ll use it.”

  18

  Halfway down the block, Tobie pulled in close to the curb and parked. A drop of cold water from her wet hair rolled down her cheek, and she swiped at it absently with the back of one hand as she reached for her phone. She had the phone open and was about to punch in Colonel McClintock’s number when she froze.

  She had a friend, Gunner Eriksson, who kept a little shop on Magazine Street where he worked restoring antiques. Gunner had three passions in his life: woodworking, his wife Pia, and political activism. A true conspiracy nut, he’d tell anyone who’d listen that the government was covering up everything from who really shot JFK to the truth behind 9/11. He was always going on about the Patriot Act and something he called TIP. She remembered one rant he’d gone off on, about how the government had set up a program to record and monitor the cell phone calls of everyone in the United States.

  Tobie closed her phone and set it aside, then stared at it as if it were a false friend. She didn’t believe a fraction of the nonsense Gunner was always rambling on about. But what if that part of it were true? And if it were true, how many people had access to that computer system? The FBI, surely. And what about the private companies that ran the system? Everything in the government was privatized these days, wasn’t it?

  She realized she was shaking, and pressed both hands to her face, squeezing her eyes shut. Her breath came in quick short pants that felt hot against her palms. Then another thought occurred to her. Her eyes flew open and she reached out quickly to turn off the phone and yank out its battery, terrified it might act like a homing beacon that could lead Dr. Youngblood’s killers to her. That was possible, too, wasn’t it, using global positioning coordinates?

  Oh, God. What else didn’t she know? She felt hopelessly lost and afraid, alone and totally out of her element. Yet she couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. Not one.

  She became aware of a scraping sound and realized the rubber blades of her windshield wipers were dragging across dry glass. It had stopped raining. Sitting forward, she switched off the wipers, put the car in gear and eased out into traffic.

  She might be ignorant and inexperienced, she told herself, but she was smart and she could learn. All she needed was a teacher.

  “I can do that myself, you know,” said Tobie, then sucked her breath through her teeth in a hiss when Colonel McClintock touched an alcohol-saturated pad to a jagged cut on her calf. The pungent scent of the alcohol pinched at her nose and she sneezed.

  “You just sit there and drink your tea and concentrate on warming up,” said the Colonel. “You’re shaking so hard your teeth are chattering.”

  “It’s June in New Orleans. My teeth are chattering because I’m scared.”

  They were sitting in the Colonel’s book-lined study, Tobie on the somewhat threadbare sofa, the Colonel on the old trunk he used as a coffee table, a first aid kit open on the floor at his feet. Outside, the rain had started up again, but softer now, a gentle scattering of drops that pattered on the windowpanes and the broad leaves of the elephants ears and banana trees in the garden outside.

  He spread antiseptic ointment on a bandage and pressed it into place. “I hope your tetanus shot is up to date.”

  “It is.” Tobie held the bandage in place with her fingertips while the Colonel tore off a strip of adhesive. “What am I going to do?”

  He kept his head bowed, his lips together, his attention seemingly on the task of bandaging her leg. Tobie felt a welling of impatience but curbed it. After all these months of mutual analysis, she had come to know his ways. He was a brilliant man, but patient and unhurried in his thinking. He never said or did anything without thoroughly considering all possible options and their consequences.

  After a moment he said, “These men who came to your house…you realize that you can’t be sure they’re FBI, simply because they had badges?”

  “Yes. Except that they didn’t just flash some badge at me. They had ID cards. I know what they look like. Those suckers were real.”

  He pressed the last strip of adhesive into place and leaned over to gather his first aid kit together. “There are other organizations in the government that have been known to carry FBI badges. The FBI doesn’t like it and it’s not supposed to be done anymore, but I suspect it still happens.”

  “Other organizations like—what?” Tobie kept her eyes on his lined face as he stood and walked across the room to tuck his first aid kit into a drawer of his desk. “Oh God. Don’t tell me the CIA.” He was starting to remind her of her friend Gunner. “The CIA isn’t allowed to operate inside the U.S., remember?”

  “I’m afraid you’re a few years out of date, Tobie. The government has used their so-called War on Terror to start doing a lot of things Americans would never have tolerated if we weren’t so scared.”

  “I don’t think they make it a habit of going around rubbing out innocent, law-abiding citizens.”

  “The government does kill people. They do it all the time in the interest of national security—or what they tell themselves is national security.”

  From overhead came a thump and a woman’s gentle voice; the sounds of the Colonel’s maid, LaToya, settling Mary McClintock into bed for the night. Soon, Colonel McClintock would go up to read to his wife as she drifted off to sleep.

  Tobie kept her gaze on the Colonel’s face, lit now with a soft light cast by the green glass shade of the banker’s lamp on the corner of the desk. “Why would the CIA be interested in Henry Youngblood?”

  “We don’t know for certain you’re dealing with the CIA. It’s just one possibility out of several. Except…you said they were asking about Henry’s remote viewing program? That they were particularly interested in some session you did for Henry that he was using as a demonstration for a funding proposal?”

  “What are you suggesting? That Dr. Youngblood was applying to the CIA for funding?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he walked over to where LaToya had set the tea tray. “How much do you know about the history of remote viewing?”

  “I know the Army had a unit back in the seventies and eighties that developed a lot of the techniques Dr. Youngblood was teaching me. He talked a fair amount about the work he did with them when he was out at Stanford. He used to joke about the CIA a lot, but he never said anything about them being involved in RV.”

  “I suspect that over the years a good half of the funding for the program came from the CIA through one conduit or another.”

  Tobie felt a strange, almost numbing sense of unreality creep over her. “Oh, Jesus.�
��

  “What exactly was the target in this demonstration you did? Do you remember?”

  She ran her splayed fingers through her hair, still damp from the rain and hanging in untidy clumps around her face. “A building. An office. Nothing unusual.”

  “You need to try to remember everything you can about it.”

  “I’ve tried. I can’t. It was weeks ago. And it didn’t seem important at the time. Do you have any idea how many sessions Youngblood and I did over the last four or five months?”

  He lifted the quilted cover off the teapot and carried it over to where she sat clutching her empty teacup in both hands. “It will come. It’s not easy to think clearly when you’re scared.”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “I know you are. You’re a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for sometimes.” He poured the steaming tea into her cup. “The most important thing right now is for you to keep yourself safe.”

  He put the teapot on the table at her elbow and came to perch again on the edge of the trunk before her. “Here’s what you need to do…”

  19

  Deep within the shadows of a spreading oak tree, Tobie rolled her VW to a stop and cut the engine. The rain had tapered off again but the sky was still black with clouds, the pavement sheened with wet.

  Ignoring the PERMITS ONLY sign, she’d turned into the narrow road winding around Loyola University’s athletic center, to the one-way street that ran behind the parking garage. It was late now and the rain had driven most of the students indoors. But the garage was still filled with cars.