The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  She turned left and right and then right again, suddenly emerging onto a broad, tree-lined avenue she didn’t even recognize. It wasn’t until she heard a clang and looked up to see a red streetcar rolling down the center of the street that she realized she was on Canal. Inadvertently, she was leading her shadow dangerously close to City Park.

  Throwing a glance in her rearview mirror, she hit the gas, edging up until she was just past the streetcar. She swung a quick left, bumped over the tracks onto Cortez, and heard the shriek of metal brakes as the Suburban tried to follow her.

  The streetcar slammed into him broadside, pushing him some twenty feet up the neutral ground before they came to a shuddering, screeching halt.

  “Ha! Take that, you bastard,” she cried, her pulse thrumming with elation. Then another black Suburban darted from around the wreckage and she went, “Holy shit.”

  She hit the gas, her rear tires jackknifing as she tore up the street. The guy in the second Suburban was on her ass in an instant. She tried to pull away but this dude wasn’t in the mood to play nice and follow along behind her at a cozy distance. He was obviously pissed. He edged right up behind her, close enough to tap her rear bumper once, twice.

  By now she was on Moss, winding along Bayou St. John. She managed to put about five or six feet between her VW and the guy behind her, but the road here was treacherous. There was one spot opposite Cabrini High School where both the bayou and the road beside it took a sharp curve to the right. Someone had put up a row of crosses, one for each of the speeding motorists who had drowned here in the last ten years. Seeing the crosses, Tobie hit the brakes and spun her wheel. Behind her, the Suburban accelerated.

  She heard the squeal of tires and glanced back to see the Suburban soar off the road. For one glorious moment the sonofabitch was airborne. He hit the water with a teeth-jarring splash.

  She floored her accelerator and didn’t look back.

  33

  “How did they find me?” Tobie asked Gunner.

  They were walking through the long grass of City Park, deep in the area beyond the stables where the trees were thick and the leafy canopy overhead whispered relentlessly with the early afternoon breeze. Gunner squinted up at the sunlight filtering down through the moss-draped live oaks. “You say you noticed them after you left Byblos?”

  “Yes.” She crossed her arms at her chest and hugged herself. There was a fine trembling going on inside her that wouldn’t seem to stop. Even her voice was shaky. “Why?”

  “Do you eat there much?”

  “Yes. But how could they know that?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard if they ran your credit card records.”

  “How could they get that kind of information?”

  “Depending on who they are, they either hacked into your credit card company’s records or they simply ordered the company to turn them over.”

  Tobie was silent for a moment. “Can the Government do that?”

  “Are you kidding? With the Patriot Act, they can do anything they want. As long as they say it’s for national security reasons, no one is going to complain or try to stop them. In fact, it’s a federal offense even to tell anyone the Government requested the information.”

  Tobie watched the oak leaves flutter in the breeze, watched a white ibis take off from the calm green water of the bayou. She’d known that, of course, but it hadn’t particularly worried her. She was a good, law-abiding American citizen; how could she ever imagine someone might use those Draconian powers against her?

  “Of course, it doesn’t even have to be the Government doing this,” Gunner was saying. “All that information collection has been contracted out to private companies.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “I think Keefe is one of them. There are supposed to be safeguards, but, well, you know how that goes.”

  “Oh, God. How do you fight someone who has the power to lay their hands on every little detail of your life?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  “You can’t. Not openly. And not by yourself. Maybe if you find out what’s behind all of this, you can go to someone in Congress.”

  “Oh, right. Someone like that congressman you were telling me about? The one who ended up dead in a plane crash?”

  Gunner held out a thick manila envelope. “I looked up the Keefe Corporation on the Internet. You wouldn’t believe the shit they’re into. And God knows what they’re up to that isn’t public information. Especially these days.”

  Tobie took the envelope and shoved it in her messenger bag. “Thanks, Gunner. I never should have contacted you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.”

  “I just wish there was more I could do to help. There didn’t seem to be anything on an Archangel Project. If I find something, I’ll call you.” He hesitated, then said, “Have you thought about getting out of New Orleans?”

  “You’re the second person who’s suggested that to me. The trouble is…where am I supposed to go?”

  Gunner stared off across the treetops, toward the shattered neighborhoods that stretched between the park and the grassy levees of the lake. Afternoon thunderheads were starting to build, although here in the park the sun still blazed down bright and hot. “I don’t know. But you need to stay away from anything and anyone familiar.” Bringing his gaze back to hers, he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “I’m worried about you, October.”

  She gave him a wry smile. “I’m worried about myself.”

  Hadley was on his laptop at the Sheraton, trying to run down some nonexistent guy named Jason Aldrich, when the call came in from Lance Palmer.

  “Our girl has a new license plate,” said Palmer, giving him the number.

  “You lost her?”

  “That’s right.” Palmer’s voice was tight. “Along with two of the Suburbans.”

  Hadley glanced over at Fitzgerald, who just shrugged.

  “Where are you?” Hadley asked.

  “Emergency room. Lopez had a slight run-in with a streetcar. They think he’s going to be all right, but they want to keep him under observation for a few hours.”

  “You all right?”

  “Me? Yeah. I just need to change into some dry clothes.”

  “Dry clothes?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “And the girl?”

  “She’ll surface again,” said Palmer. “And when she does, we take her out. Forget about trying to make it look like a suicide or an accident. I just want this girl dead. Understood?”

  “Got it.”

  34

  Tobie considered herself a typical all-American chicken-shit. She was not hero material. She’d survived the terror of being in Iraq largely by playing mind games with herself. In Iraq, when she thought about where she was and what could happen to her there, she froze up. So she learned not to think about it.

  Colonel McClintock had all kinds of terms for it, like “sublimation” and “suppression,” words she vaguely remembered from Psych 101. He said sublimation of fear was the reason at least half of all vets suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. People can only repress so much for so long, he said; then it starts bubbling up.

  She didn’t think she deserved her psycho discharge from the Navy, but she figured she probably did have PTSS. Most sane vets did. Hell, half the people in New Orleans were suffering from PTSS, although their demons had been unleashed by Katrina rather than Iraq.

  She figured maybe, in some way, what she’d been through in Iraq had prepared her for what she was going through now. People had been trying to kill her there, and people were trying to kill her now. There were differences, of course. In Iraq, none of it had been personal. She’d been a target not because she was October Guinness, but because she was a member of an occupying military. Now the people trying to kill her were after her and her alone. She wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. At least it removed that element of randomness.

  But there was another difference, one that she knew did
make her present situation worse. In Iraq she’d had over a hundred thousand guys on her side. She always knew there was someone watching her back—lots of guys watching her back. Here, she was on her own. Every time she contacted one of her friends, she put them in danger.

  After leaving Gunner, she went to sit in the Fair Grinds Coffee Shop, just off Esplanade Avenue. Like almost everything else in that part of New Orleans, the coffee shop had flooded after the storm. But it had been one of the first places to reopen, and continued to serve as a rallying point for a neighborhood determined to rebuild itself.

  Fishing the envelope from her bag, she drew out a thick sheaf of Internet printouts. She found herself staring at an article concerning a study advocating the military destruction of Iran, published by a Washington think tank called the Freedom Institute for Democracy. At first she thought Gunner had included the site by accident; then she noticed Keefe Corporation listed as one of the study’s sponsors.

  She glanced through it in a hurry. It was pretty alarming stuff, reminding her of the policy document produced by the Project for the New American Century—PNAC—back in September of 2000. In a Mein Kampfesque call for world domination, PNAC had advocated rallying the people of the United States to attack Iraq in the wake of a Pearl Harbor–like disaster. Gunner was always using it as evidence to support one of his crazier conspiracy theories, that the U.S. government was covering up something about 9/11. She shifted the article to the bottom of the pile.

  The rest of the printouts dealt mainly with Keefe Corporation’s various projects. There were articles about Keefe’s involvement in building American bases and military installations everywhere from Iraq to Uzbekistan to Pakistan; about their contract to supply the U.S. military; about legal suits against various chemical factories built by Keefe. There were several articles on the proposed pipeline through Afghanistan, oil exploration in Arctic wildlife refuges, and, buried amidst reports on the buildup of mercury around Keefe’s offshore drilling platforms, a brief mention of the corporation’s funding of a study on the use of psychics in the exploration for mineral deposits.

  Tobie pulled out the page and stared at it.

  Here, it seemed, was the source of Keefe’s interest in remote viewing. Had Henry Youngblood put in a funding proposal to Keefe Corporation? A proposal that included a trial remote viewing session? A session in which she had seen something no one was supposed to see?

  She dug her prepaid phone out of her purse. About the only person she knew at the university who’d been associated with Youngblood’s research was a statistician from the math department, Dr. Elizabeth Vu.

  Tobie was about to punch in the woman’s number when she hesitated, remembering Gunner’s warning. What if the bad guys were monitoring Vu’s phone? She knew she was probably being paranoid, but she turned off the phone again, and then, for good measure, pulled out the battery. Pushing back her chair, she went to use the coffee shop’s pay phone.

  Dr. Vu answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Vu? This is October Guinness. I was wondering if I could come by your office this afternoon?”

  “Oh, hi, October. I’m about to leave my office for the day. I need to do some work on my boat this afternoon—I’m taking my brother and his family out this weekend. Why don’t you come to the marina? I’d like to talk to you myself. The boat’s at the Orleans Marina, slip 23, Pier 4. Say in about an hour?”

  “I’ll be right there,” said Tobie, and hung up.

  Jax was on his laptop, flipping through Matt’s information on October Guinness, when the call came through from Dr. Elizabeth Vu.

  “I just heard from October. She’s coming to see me.”

  Jax looked at his watch. “Now?”

  “In an hour. At the Orleans Marina.” There was a pause. “I hope I’m not making a mistake telling you this.”

  “You’re not.”

  He hung up the phone, then sat staring at the photograph on his computer screen, a photograph of an unexpectedly fresh-faced young woman with brown eyes and shoulder length, honey-colored hair. She didn’t look crazy. But he had read her medical reports.

  He slipped his Beretta into the waistband of his slacks and reached for the city map.

  Detective William P. Ahearn fingered the bullet-scarred wood of October Guinness’s kitchen door frame. This investigation just kept going from bad to worse.

  He glanced over at the lowlife with long scraggly hair and ragged jeans who stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. Ambrose King, he said he was; played the sax at some tourist trap down in the Quarter. The guy might have called the cops, but he wasn’t exactly being cooperative.

  “You say she contacted you? Where is she?”

  The lowlife stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked blank. “She didn’t say. She just said she had to leave town for a few days.”

  “In the middle of a murder investigation?”

  Ambrose King rolled his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “She didn’t say nothing about that.”

  Ahearn met his partner’s gaze. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to hide a half smile.

  He walked back toward the living room, his gaze sweeping the ransacked house. “I see DVDs, but no DVD player or computer. What else do you think is missing?”

  King ambled behind him. “Tobie has a laptop, but I think she took it in to get fixed last week. Her DVD player died a month or so ago. I don’t think she’s replaced it.”

  Ahearn turned to give the guy a hard look.

  King stared back at him. “What? What you thinking? That I lifted her stuff? Man, you’d have to be nuts to want any of Tobie’s electrical shit. It’s like she generates this electromagnetic field or something. If she walks up next to you when you’re on your computer, it freezes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Ahearn pushed out his breath through pursed lips and swung back to the kitchen. “Let’s get that bullet to ballistics,” he said to Trish. “See what they can tell us about it. And I think maybe we ought to find this Guinness woman. She has some serious explaining to do.”

  35

  The Orleans Marina lay in that part of the city known as the West End, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain just north of the Old Hammond Highway. Hurricane Katrina had devastated this part of the city. Many of the houses here were still derelict; others had already been bulldozed, leaving empty lots of rutted mud. But some houses had FEMA trailers in their yards, with olive-skinned crews hanging Sheetrock or hammering on roofs.

  Leaving her car parked on Lake Marina Drive, Tobie passed through the gate in the high seawall that effectively hid the marina from the street. The sheltering boathouses and the small park beyond them had saved the Orleans Marina—and its boats—from the worst of Katrina’s storm surge. In contrast, the sailboats and yachts docked at the Municipal Marina on the lake’s edge had been smashed into a tangle of nearly unrecognizable wood, fiberglass, and metal.

  Walking through the gate, she found herself in a broad basin a quarter of a mile wide and filled with pier after pier of dazzling white sailboats and cabin cruisers that lolled lazily in the protected surge of the tide. Sunlight glittered on the open expanses of water between the piers. Thunderheads still hung dark and heavy over the north of the lake, but here the sun beat down golden and hot.

  At mid-afternoon on a weekday, the place was virtually deserted. She found the fourth pier and hurried down the rough steps to the graying wooden dock, her gaze scanning the numbers on the slips. A woman called her name.

  “October?”

  Tobie turned toward a large fiberglass cabin cruiser. Dressed in a white T-shirt, denim capris, and boat shoes, Dr. Vu was at the stern coiling up a line. “October,” she said, drying her hands on the seat of her pants as she moved toward the bow. “Please, come aboard. How are you?”

  Tobie scrambled over the cruiser’s side. She knew the question wasn’t meant to be funny, so she was careful not to laugh. She’d always had a bad tendency to lau
gh at what most people considered inappropriate times. It had frequently landed her in trouble during her school days—and later in the Navy. She had no doubt it contributed to her psycho discharge.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “But I think the people who killed Dr. Youngblood are now trying to kill me.”

  Dr. Vu’s mouth went slack. “But…why?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”

  “Me?”

  “Do you know if Dr. Youngblood was applying to Keefe for funding?”

  “The Keefe Corporation? I suppose it’s possible, but he kept that sort of thing confidential even from me.”

  “He didn’t say anything to you at all about where he was applying?”

  Dr. Vu turned away to dump out an ice chest. She was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. Then she said, “I remember, about a month or two ago, he told me he’d run into someone he knew. Someone he’d met while working on a remote viewing project he did for the government.”

  A flock of sea gulls wheeled overhead, their harsh cries drifting on the breeze. Dr. Vu squinted up at them, a sad, soft smile lighting her face. “Henry was excited about it. Whoever this person was, he was familiar with RV and knew it worked. Henry was hoping the guy would convince his boss to consider a funding proposal.”

  “Was this guy still with the government?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Although I could be wrong.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “I think it was something like Lance, but I’m not sure.”

  The sound of a car door slamming cut through the rhythms of the wind whispering through the rigging and the gentle lapping of the waves. Tobie stared off across the bobbing boats to the long narrow parking lot near the seawall. Two men in khaki slacks were approaching the pier, their polo shirts flapping loose in the breeze. Tobie watched them clamber down the steps. They were unfamiliar to her.