The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  He walked in a few minutes before seven o’clock. He hesitated just inside the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light and giving her a chance to study him unobserved. He had an air about him that spoke of prep schools and the Ivy League and weekends in the Hamptons. But there was something else there, too; an unexpected edge of irreverence and danger that didn’t quite fit with the rest.

  His gaze settled on her and he came to slip into the seat opposite hers. “I saw the news,” he said. “I assume that was your car?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why weren’t you in it when it blew?”

  “I don’t know.” She picked up one of the menus and handed it to him. “I recommend the shrimp étouffe.”

  He met her gaze and held it. “Sounds good.”

  A waiter came up to take their order. She waited until he’d gone, then said, “Henry once told me that if someone says he works for the federal government, it usually means he’s with the CIA.”

  Amusement crinkled the skin beside his eyes. “You’re the second person who’s said that to me today. This guy must have told that to everyone he knew.”

  “Who was the first?”

  “Dr. Vu.” The faint smile was gone.

  She leaned forward. “He said it’s always a giveaway because people like to talk about themselves. If a guy’s an accountant with the Department of Agriculture, he’ll say, “‘I’m an accountant with the Department of Agriculture.’ But no one goes around saying, ‘I’m a spy for the CIA.’”

  “Most people who work for the CIA aren’t spies or even field operatives. They’re analysts. Paper pushers. They get to spend a few days down at the Farm playing James Bond, but they’re really just very boring people who spend all day sitting at a desk doing very boring jobs.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re not at a desk, are you?”

  He reached for his glass of water and took a slow sip.

  She said, “Did you kill Henry Youngblood?”

  He set the glass down again. “Me, personally? No. But I can’t speak for the entire Agency.”

  His candor caught her off guard. But then, maybe that’s what it was supposed to do. He reminded her of the sunstruck shimmers on the surface of an uncharted stretch of water, all flash and sparkle hiding the deadly depths beneath.

  She said, “Why would the CIA want to kill Henry Youngblood?”

  “If this is a CIA operation, then it’s a black op that’s so secret even the Director doesn’t know about it, and I find that hard to believe. I think you’re tangling with somebody else here.”

  She paused while the waiter served their salads, then said, “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I recognized the guy I shot. Last time I saw him, he was in Special Forces, but he could be working for anyone by now. One thing I do know: men like him are expensive.”

  “Why should I believe anything you’re saying?”

  He looked up at her, his gaze uncomfortably direct. “Don’t believe me. Don’t believe anyone. Just keep going it alone the way you’ve been doing. But you need to recognize that eventually they’re going to get lucky or you’re going to make a mistake. And then you’re going to be dead.”

  She looked away. He was right and she knew it. There was something to be said for that old Middle Eastern adage, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” The men on Elizabeth Vu’s cabin cruiser had tried to kill him, too. She drew in a deep breath and said, “You’re familiar with remote viewing?”

  “Yes.”

  That surprised her. She picked up her fork, looked at her salad, and put the fork down again. “Dr. Youngblood and I did a remote viewing session as part of a funding proposal Henry had in with someone. I don’t know who. The target was a building, a modern office building. On one of the desks was a maroon folder with the Keefe Corporation logo. The men who came to my house last night were asking questions about that viewing.”

  He glanced up from eating his salad with an appetite she envied. “You’re familiar with the Keefe logo?”

  “Are you kidding? I spent ten months in Iraq. I would recognize that logo in my sleep.”

  “So what was in the folder?”

  “Some kind of report. Maps. Diagrams. Photographs.”

  “Of what?”

  “Only one photo sticks in my mind, of an old World War II plane. I think it was a kind of transport called a Skytrooper.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. The only other thing I remember is the title of the report: the Archangel Project. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  She blew out a long breath in disappointment.

  “So where was this office building?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The target was given to me by its geographical coordinates.” She studied his fine-boned face, with its patrician nose and hooded eyes. She knew that Look. The Look that said someone thought remote viewing belonged in the same class as séances and horoscopes.

  “You don’t believe in remote viewing, do you?” She sat back with a sharp laugh. “God. How can you possibly help me if you think I’m making this up?”

  “I didn’t say I thought you were making it up.”

  “You don’t have to.” She leaned forward again, her hands coming up together. “Whoever is doing this—whoever killed Henry, and Dr. Vu, and came to my house last night claiming to be the FBI—they knew about the viewing session Henry and I had done. They knew about the office building, and the folder, and the photograph of the Skytrooper. You might find it hard to believe in remote viewing, but that doesn’t alter the fact that whatever I ‘saw’ was important enough that five people are now dead and another one is in the hospital.”

  She saw a flicker of confusion cross his face. “Who’s in the hospital?”

  “Colonel F. Scott McClintock. He’s a therapist at the VA. They got him this afternoon.”

  He hesitated while the waiter set their dinner plates in front of them. “So do you remember the coordinates?”

  “No. They were just numbers. I never paid any attention to them.”

  He reached for a roll of bread and carefully tore off a chunk. “Would you be willing to be hypnotized?”

  She stared at him. “What? You don’t believe in remote viewing but you believe in hypnotism?”

  He met her gaze and held it. “Hypnotism might have started out as a carnival act, but it was grounded in scientific fact a long time ago. Everything you’ve ever seen, heard, or done is stored in your subconscious; you just can’t access it all. It’s as if it’s behind closed doors. Hypnotism opens those doors.”

  Tobie remembered Henry Youngblood telling her once that the CIA—in fact, all the intelligence branches—used hypnotism to debrief their agents. They’d discovered that particularly when he’d been given a previous hypnotic suggestion, a man under hypnosis could remember startlingly accurate details of things he hadn’t even been aware of at the time he’d seen them. Of course Jax Alexander believed in hypnosis, she realized; he’d probably used it.

  She pushed the food around on her plate. “Remote viewing opens mental doors, too. Different doors, maybe, but the concept is basically the same. It’s just another way of accessing layers of the mind we’re not normally aware of.” When he continued to stare at her impassively, she pushed her plate away in disgust. “The CIA has poured millions into remote viewing, which means they obviously have people who believe in it. So why did they send you?”

  He laughed. “Because the new head of the Agency decided this assignment had my name written all over it.”

  She thought she was beginning to understand. “I gather he’s not one of your fans. What did you do to him?”

  “Punched him in the face in the middle of an embassy dinner party.”

  “You’re kidding. Why?”

  “It’s a long story.” He signaled the waiter for their check. “Now, where can we find a hypnotist?”

  Tobie stayed where she was. “Why would you want to help me?”r />
  He rested his hands on the table. “I was sent down here to find out what happened to Henry Youngblood, and it looks to me like whoever killed the professor is now trying to kill you.”

  “So what am I? Bait?”

  There was a long pause during which he simply looked at her.

  Tobie let out a quick laugh that broke at the end. “Okay. So I’m bait.”

  “You’re bait whether I’m here or not. But with me around, you’ve at least got a chance to survive.”

  It stung her pride, but she knew it was true. If he hadn’t shown up that afternoon, she’d be dead by now.

  She saw the glint of amusement in his eyes and knew he was following her every thought. But all he said was, “Now do we find that hypnotist?”

  46

  Lance Palmer stood in the center of their suite at the Sheraton, his hands on his hips, his gaze fixed on the television. The news media had been in a frenzy at first, convinced the West End car bombing was the work of al-Qa’ida or something. But that kind of crazy speculation seemed to have died down now.

  The death of Reggie Williams weighed heavily on Lance’s shoulders. He hated to lose men, and he’d recruited the kid himself. Williams was good at what he did. Lance still couldn’t understand exactly what had gone wrong, why it was Williams and some cop who’d ended up in those body bags rather than October Guinness.

  “Shit,” said Hadley, looking up from his computer. “The police have put out an APB on Guinness.”

  Lance huffed a bitter, mirthless laugh. “It just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it? I’ve got two of my men dead. One car in a bayou and another crushed by a streetcar. And now I’ve got a dead cop. The boys in blue will be going nuts looking for Guinness. And they know this town and we don’t.”

  “So why don’t we just let the cops bring her in?” said Sal Lopez. The hospital had finally agreed to release him, although he wasn’t going to be much use to them with one arm in a sling and a minor concussion. “They bring her in, and we take her away from them.”

  Lance wanted to laugh again. “They think she’s mixed up in a cop killing, Lopez. They’re not going to let her go that easily. We might eventually be able to make her disappear into the system, but it would take time. And time is the one thing we don’t have.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll kill her.”

  “Lucky? Why the hell would we suddenly start getting lucky?”

  Hadley had left his computer now and was on the phone. Lance knew something was up by the look on his face.

  “What is it?”

  Hadley closed his phone, his lips stretching into a rare smile. “That was our friend in field support at Langley.”

  The guys in field support were what was known in the industry as backstop. They were the ones who provided the documentation for people in the field—the fake IDs, the credit cards with false names that actually worked. If an agent had a phone number on his business card and someone called that number, it was the guys in field support who answered the phone.

  “So what’s he got for us?”

  “Jason Aldrich. It’s an alias used by a guy named Jax Alexander. He’s CIA.”

  Lance punched off the TV. “CIA? What the fuck? What’s he doing down here?” He went to stand beside the window and stare out over the darkened city. But after a minute he swung back around, and he was smiling. “This might not be a bad thing. October Guinness keeps slipping through our fingers because she’s unpredictable. She’s a psycho case. But now she’s with this guy Alexander, and he’s a pro. That means we ought to be able to figure out what he’s doing. We might not be able to find her, but maybe, just maybe, we can find him.”

  47

  Every respectable hypnotist in New Orleans had long since locked his or her office and gone home. Which left only the unrespectable ones.

  Using the phone book attached by a metal cord to the pay phone in the Crab Shack’s lobby, Tobie found a woman named Sister Simone who worked out of a second floor walkup in the French Quarter. Her ad read: FORTUNES TOLD. PALMS READ. PAST LIFE REGRESSIONS. WALK-INS WELCOME.

  “You can’t be serious,” said Jax, peering over her shoulder at the entry.

  She glanced back at him. “If she does past life regressions, she must be a hypnotist.”

  “The woman’s a charlatan.”

  “That doesn’t mean she can’t hypnotize people.”

  Jax was sipping a gin and tonic in a bar on Bourbon Street when Matt called him.

  “Hey, Jax. I’ve got something for you.”

  Jax turned his back on the noisy, crowded room. “What is it?”

  “Jax? I can hardly hear you. Where are you?”

  Jax cupped his hand over the phone. “Where am I? I’m sitting at the window of a bar down in the French Quarter. From here I can look across the street at a ramshackle eighteenth-century building with a big pink neon eye in the window and a sign that says, ‘Sister Simone’s House of the All-Seeing Soul.’”

  Matt laughed. “You’re making that up.”

  “I wish I was. October Guinness is in there right now getting hypnotized so she can remember the coordinates that were used in some remote viewing session. My career is in the toilet, Matt.”

  Matt’s voice sharpened. “You found her again?”

  “She called me. Someone blew up her car and put her shrink in the hospital. I guess she ran out of options.”

  “McClintock? What happened to the Colonel?”

  Jax set down his drink. “Matt, how do you know Colonel McClintock?”

  “I’ve known him for years. What happened to him?”

  “Someone beat him up this afternoon.”

  There was a pause, then Matt said, “What have you managed to get out of the girl?”

  “Did you ever hear of something called the Archangel Project?”

  “You’re the second person who’s asked me that today.”

  “Oh? So who’s the first?”

  Instead of answering, Matt said, “I can tell you the same thing I told him: never heard of it. What else have you got?”

  Jax gave him a quick rundown.

  When he was finished, Matt said, “Keefe? Did you say Keefe?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was another long silence, then Matt said, “This isn’t good, Jax.”

  “No shit.”

  “What’d you say these coordinates are for?”

  “The office where Guinness says she saw this Archangel file.”

  “So you’re beginning to believe in this stuff?”

  “Did I say that? All I know is that someone obviously believes in it. They’re killing people all over town.”

  Matt grunted. “I looked into Ross. He was discharged three months ago.”

  “So what’s he been doing since then?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth. Rumor has it he went to the Middle East.”

  The door across the street opened and October Guinness stepped out onto the narrow, crowded sidewalk. She was wearing a simple T-shirt and flippy cotton skirt, and her hair looked as if she’d recently been for a swim and let it dry in a breeze. As he watched, she brought up one hand to tuck a stray wisp behind her ear. The light from the wrought-iron street lamp slanted across her face as she turned her head, looking for him.

  Jax pushed back his chair and stood. “The Middle East?”

  “That’s right. Listen, Jax: somebody tried to access your files.”

  “What?”

  “They came at it through your identity documents. This wasn’t by way of official channels. This was someone working the old boy network. Which means someone down there has contacts in the Company.”

  Jax stepped out of the bar into the street. The night smelled of the river and dank stone archways and spilled beer. “What are you saying to me, Matt?”

  “I’m telling you to watch your back, buddy.”

  48

  Just to the west of New Orlean
s and its suburbs of Metairie and Kenner lay a tract of uninhabited bayous and swamps known as the Bonnet Carré spillway. A bowl-shaped expanse that stretched from the Mississippi to the lake, the spillway served as a safety valve when the river reached flood stage. Locals knew it as a great place to fish and hunt and trap crabs. The area’s less savory inhabitants knew it as the perfect spot to dump bodies.

  Paul Fitzgerald turned his pickup off onto a narrow rutted track that wound down through ancient cedars and water oaks to a half-forgotten dirt boat launch. The pickup had been bought secondhand from a dealer out on Airline Highway who knew better than to ask questions. In a few days it would be found, torched, on the side of the road in some abandoned neighborhood in New Orleans East. No one would think anything about it.

  Backing the pickup down to the water’s edge, Fitzgerald opened his door to a thick, hot night scented with the fecund smell of wet earth and green growing things. He stood for a moment, his well-trained senses alive to all the subtle nuances of the marsh. He was alone.

  He closed the door with a quiet snap, then went to launch the small aluminum skiff from the back of the pickup truck. The rattle of metal against metal sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness as he piled the chains in the bottom of the boat. He hesitated, listening to the slap of murky water against the bank, the hum of a car engine somewhere in the distance. It faded quickly into the night.

  Wiping his sleeve across his damp forehead, he went back to the pickup for the Iranian’s body and dumped that in the skiff, too. The man had served his purpose. All the carefully arranged pieces of incriminating evidence were in place. Now the time had come for him to disappear. After tomorrow night, the authorities would assume he had fled the country. They wouldn’t think to look for him here, in the back swamps of Louisiana.

  Dipping his paddle with the effortless grace of a born outdoorsman, Fitzgerald eased out into the middle of the channel. At the other end of the skiff, Barid Hafezi’s sightless eyes stared open and wide at the starry night sky above.