The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

  “The President made a strategic decision to limit the number of people with access to the intelligence.”

  Beckham swung to face him again. “Why?”

  “Why?” Chandler huffed a soft laugh. “If this information gets out, it’ll rewrite the history books—and not in a way that would reflect well on the United States.”

  “My God, man. You think that’s more important than preventing some terrorist outfit from detonating an atom bomb on our soil?”

  A muscle tightened along Chandler’s jaw. “We have over fourteen hundred crews fanning out all over the country, sir. If those sons of bitches have brought that device into the States, we’ll find it.”

  Beckham studied the other man’s smooth, handsome face. “Your confidence is inspiring. But I can’t help thinking that, thanks to you, I sent two brave young people into danger without even knowing what I was asking them to face.”

  Chandler pushed to his feet. “We plan to bring them home tonight, sir.”

  Beckham shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’ve done pretty darn good, so far. I say, let ’em run with it.”

  “Sir—”

  “You heard me. I want Guinness and Alexander to keep following this thing wherever they think it’s leading them. At least for now.”

  Chandler’s jaw tightened. But he simply inclined his head and turned toward the door. “Yes, sir.”

  47

  Bremen, Germany: Wednesday 28 October

  11:05 P.M. local time

  “This isn’t going to work,” said October. Wrapped in one of the guesthouse’s big, fluffy white bathrobes, she sat on the edge of the bed, her wet hair hanging straight about her shoulders.

  “Why not?” said Jax.

  “There’s a protocol”

  “I know. I talked to the Colonel. I’ve selected the target myself. It’s written down, here.” He laid a folded square of paper on the table before him. “When we’re ready, I’ll give the Colonel a call. He doesn’t know what the target is, so he can do the tasking from New Orleans, over my speakerphone.”

  “This isn’t something you can do over a speakerphone.”

  “Why not?”

  She ran the splayed fingers of one hand through her wet hair, raking it off her forehead. “I don’t know. It just isn’t.”

  “I don’t see why it should make a difference.”

  She stared at him with wide, luminous brown eyes. “I thought you didn’t believe in remote viewing.”

  “I don’t. But, for some reason I can’t begin to understand, it works.” He hesitated. “Sometimes.”

  “See. You don’t believe in it.”

  He pushed away from the table. “You saw that U-boat in Kaliningrad. I don’t know how or why, but I can’t deny the fact that it was there, right where you said it was.” He went to put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the tension thrumming through her like fine little tremors. “You need to do this, October,” he said more gently. “We have just over two days left until Halloween. Right now, we don’t know who these guys are, or where they’re going to hit. About all we do know is that if we don’t stop them, a lot of innocent people are going to die. Horribly.”

  She gazed up at him. “What if it doesn’t work? Then what will we do?”

  He shifted his hands to her neck, kneading the tight muscles. The truth was, they’d reached a dead end, and time was running out. But all he said was, “We’ll figure out something. But we need this viewing, October. Will you do it?”

  He felt her draw in a deep breath that shuddered her small frame. “Let me get dressed.”

  While he dimmed the lights, she pulled on a turtleneck and a pair of sweatpants, then went to sit cross-legged in a darkened corner of the room, her hands resting on her knees, her eyes closed. Part of her success as a remote viewer came, he knew, from this—this rare ability to sink so easily and deeply into the required state. Her vegetarian diet, and the years she had spent practicing yoga and meditating, all helped. But the last few days had been chaotic and frightening; how would that affect her ability to reach her “Zone”?

  He watched her lips part, her chest rising and falling with her even breathing. There was a peace about her, a calm grounding, that he both admired and—he was ashamed to realize—vaguely envied.

  She opened her eyes and gave him a soft smile.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He reached for his phone.

  “The target is written on the folded piece of paper Jax laid on the table,” said the Colonel, his voice sounding vaguely hollow as it came through the speakerphone. “It’s a location. I want you to tell me what you see.”

  October sat silently. She had shifted to a comfortable chair, a pad of paper and a pen on her lap. From the table near the window, Jax watched as a slight frown twitched her forehead. Her lips parted, but she said nothing.

  After a moment, the Colonel said, “Just take your time, October.”

  She closed her eyes. Jax had only seen her do a viewing once before, but he could sense the tension in her. Something was wrong.

  The Colonel said, “Tobie?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not working. I’m not getting anything.”

  The Colonel’s voice was soothing. “That’s okay, Tobie. Just try to relax. Describe what you see.”

  She took another breath. “I see…darkness.”

  The Colonel waited patiently, but after a few minutes of continued silence, he said, “Describe some sensory elements, Tobie.”

  Her pen was moving across the paper now, in slow looping circles. “I sense…a void. It’s like the dull moan of a blowing wind. It’s…I’ve never experienced this before. It’s…”

  She thrust up suddenly from the chair, both hands coming up to pull her still damp hair away from her face. “It’s not working.”

  The Colonel’s voice was low, calm. “It’s all right, Tobie.”

  She spun to face Jax. He stood beside the window, watching her. She said, “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Without this viewing—without the information we need from it—we don’t have anything.”

  “We can try again, later,” said McClintock.

  Jax picked up the phone and took it off Speaker. “I’ll get back to you, Colonel. Thanks.” He looked at October.

  She said, “The target. What was the target?”

  He shook his head. “If we’re going to try it later, that kind of frontloading—”

  “No. What was the target?” She snatched up the piece of paper that still lay on the table. He’d folded it into thirds, and then again in half. Spreading it open, she stared down at what he had written.

  The current location of the atomic device taken from U-114.

  “Maybe I worded it wrong,” said Jax.

  She shook her head. “No. It should have worked. I should have seen something, even if it wasn’t enough to tell us exactly where the bomb is.”

  His hands closed over hers, crushing the sheet of paper she still held. “It’s okay.”

  She jerked away from him. “I don’t understand what went wrong. I’ve never had a complete miss like this. It was as if I reached out with my mind and touched…nothing.”

  “How often are you wrong?”

  “It depends on how you define ‘wrong.’” She thought about it for a moment. “I get details wrong. I miss things that are there—sometimes important things, like the Yalena at the shipyard. And sometimes I’ll see things that aren’t there—or I’ll interpret some of what I see wrong. Then other times, my attention will waver from the intended target to something nearby that’s more interesting.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well…one time I described a church, when the target was a bicycle shed across the street. And then sometimes I’m off in time.”

  He frowned. “In time?”

  She nodded. “Once, McClintock ran me against a target I described as a swimming pool, when i
t was supposed to be a warehouse. At first we thought it was a complete miss. Then we discovered that the site used to be a public swimming pool, before it was abandoned during the Civil Rights movement in the sixties.”

  Jax studied her smooth-skinned face. “Are you telling me you can remote view different time periods?”

  She gave him a wry smile. “Why is that so much harder to believe than remote viewing across distance?”

  “Because—” He broke off. The truth was, he didn’t know why it was harder to believe. Hell, both should be impossible.

  “One of the reasons quantum physicists have always been at the forefront of research into remote viewing is because they know that our ideas about time and space are just mental conveniences that don’t actually describe the fundamentals of reality at all. The problem is, it’s a concept the rest of the scientific community has a hard time grasping—mainly, I suspect, because it threatens so many things we all believe in.”

  He went to stand at the window, his gaze on the dark river sliding silently past below. His own knowledge of quantum physics—of things like string theory, or M-theory-was at best vague. Not something he’d ever felt a compelling need to understand. Now, it had suddenly become vitally important.

  After a moment, he said, “So why do you think it didn’t work tonight? Because the setup was wrong?”

  She shook her head. “No. That shouldn’t really have made a difference. The constructs McClintock and I use—always having an independent tasker, always keeping the viewer ignorant of the target—are important in training, and to provide clean quantifiable results for statistical purposes—or for intelligence work. But the truth is, experienced remote viewers are capable of tasking themselves.”

  “How do you know you’re not just accessing your own imaginations?”

  “We don’t. That’s part of the problem. It’s why I wanted tonight’s setup to be as structured as possible—to reduce the chance I would simply tap into my own imagination.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder. “But you didn’t access your imagination. All you got was…nothing.”

  She pursed her lips and blew out a long sigh. “It could be because I’m tired. Because I’m tense. Because I know so much is riding on this.” Reaching down, she snatched up the crumpled paper from the floor. “And it’s not like I was really ignorant of the target. I had a pretty good idea what you were setting me against—either the atomic device, or the men who have it.”

  “So you can still try it again, later?”

  “I can try.”

  The rattle of his phone vibrating against the table drew his attention. He picked it up without even glancing at the caller ID. “Jax Alexander.”

  A heavily accented voice said, “You wanted something?”

  Jax met October’s questioning gaze. “Hey, Andrei,” he said lightly. “Just the man I wanted to talk to. Did your guys ever do a radiation check on that U-boat?”

  “What do you think? We’re stupid? We know about U-234. Of course we did a radiation check.”

  “And?”

  “And, nothing. It came up clean. Why do you ask, Jax?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Right, Jax. It doesn’t have anything to do with the interesting rumor I heard this evening?”

  “Rumor? What rumor?”

  “That U-114 was carrying some kind of atomic device.”

  Sonofabitch. Wolfgang Palmer obviously had a big mouth. Aloud, Jax said, “The Nazis never developed an atom bomb, Andrei.”

  Andrei gave a soft laugh. “Just because the West has been ignorant of the contents of our archives for the last sixty years, Jax, doesn’t mean we were.”

  Jax looked out the window, at the cold stars glittering from out of the black northern sky.

  Andrei said, “I checked into your suggestion about the boy, Stefan Baklanov.”

  “And?”

  “And his body was not among the thirteen dead found on the Yalena.”

  “So he is still alive.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps he was somehow involved in the killings.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Andrei grunted. “One more thing. It seems the captain of the Yalena was in contact with a mutual friend of ours.”

  “We have mutual friends?”

  “Call him a business acquaintance. Azzam Badr al’Din.” He gave the name its proper pronunciation, Bed-ra-deen.

  “Shit.” Jax was aware of October’s frowning gaze upon him. He said, “We’d heard Baklanov was into gunrunning.”

  “This was more than gunrunning. We’re not talking about a bunch of Kalashnikovs here, Jax. Whatever was on that ship was big. Baklanov was asking a million euros for it.”

  Jax leaned back against the edge of the table. “Why are you telling me this, Andrei?”

  “Because this is your problem, Jax, not mine. Besides…” Jax could hear the malicious smile in the Russian’s voice. “What are friends for?”

  48

  Washington, D.C.: Wednesday 28 October

  6:05 P.M. local time

  As far as Gerald T. Boyd was concerned, remote viewing belonged in the same category as sun signs and chakras and all the other New Age nonsense embraced by the credulous fools of the world. He knew about the Army’s decades-long flirtation with the phenomenon, and had always found it a source of profound professional embarrassment. So it was with a sense of anger mingled with disgust that he settled at the desk of his room at the Willard that evening and spread the report on Ensign Guinness’s “viewing” session across the leather blotter.

  It’s some kind of a fraud, he thought. No one could “see” images with only their minds. Someone had obviously leaked the location of the Yalena and its illicit cargo. The problem was, who? Baklanov? Rodriguez?

  Impossible.

  As he flipped through the pages, anger bled slowly into disquiet and, ultimately, into doubt. Pushing up from the desk, he paced the room, his mind testing and rejecting one hypothetical explanation after the other. He poured himself a glass of Jack Daniel’s and drank it down in one long pull. Then he splashed another two inches into the bottom of his glass and went to flip open his laptop.

  The convictions of a lifetime are not easily overturned. But as he worked his way through the publicly available literature and then on to the material that was still classified, he found himself eventually confronted with more evidence than he could deny. In the end, he was inclined to agree with the general who’d once said that if you didn’t believe in remote viewing, you hadn’t done your homework.

  Whether October Guinness’s ability was a gift from God or the devil, it was not Boyd’s place to judge. He knew only one thing: the woman was dangerous, and she needed to be located and eliminated.

  Quickly.

  Bremen, Germany: Thursday 29 October

  12:10 A.M. local time

  They went for a walk along the Weser River, where a wide paved path ran between the embankment and a looming stone wall that protected the red brick buildings above from floods.

  “So who is Azzam Badr al’ Din?” October asked, huddling deep in her jacket. A cold wind was blowing in off the North Sea, fluttering her hair around her face and bringing a rosy glow to her cheeks.

  “A Druze gunrunner,” said Jax.

  She glanced over at him. “A what?”

  “A Druze. It’s a kind of offshoot of Islam, with a heavy influence from Gnosticism and neo-Platonism thrown in. Most of the Druze live in Lebanon and Syria, although there are about a hundred thousand of them within the borders of pre-1967 Israel, with maybe another twenty thousand in the Occupied Territories and Jordan. Sometimes they side with other Muslims, but they’ve been known to form alliances with the Maronite Christians and the Israelis, too.”

  “So who does Badr al’Din sell his guns to?”

  “Basically, anyone who can afford them. As far as Azzam is concerned, if you’ve got a Swiss bank account, then you’re in business. He doesn’t care w
here your money comes from, just as long as it converts.”

  “And how exactly do you and Andrei know this guy?”

  “I’m not sure about Andrei. But I first ran into Azzam in the Horn of Africa. He was selling guns to my people, and to Andrei’s people, and cheating both of us.”

  She walked along in silence for a moment, her hands thrust into her pockets. “You think he’s the one who hit the Yalena and set the U-boat to explode?”

  Jax shook his head. “Azzam Badr al’Din is a liar and a cheat, but I’ve never known him to have blood directly on his hands. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure he’s caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, indirectly. But what we saw on the Yalena…That isn’t his style.”

  “So what is his part in all this?”

  “I don’t know.” Jax reached for his phone. “But I intend to find out.”

  She watched him. “You know Badr al’Din’s phone number, too?”

  Jax paused at the edge of the stone embankment leading down to the river. “No. I’m calling Matt. It’s not going to be easy, setting up a meeting with this guy.”

  She tilted back her head, her breath showing white in the cold as she stared up at the pointed spires of the cathedral, thrusting tall above the roofs of the ancient buildings lining the quay. “Let me guess; we’re going to Lebanon.”

  He grinned. “If I remember correctly, you wanted to go to Lebanon when we left Russia.”

  She sighed. “At least I get to sleep in a bed tonight.”

  Jax glanced at his watch. “If you hurry.”

  Matt called back about an hour later.

  “I got a fix on your Azzam Badr al’Din,” said Matt. “He’s in the Chouf region of Lebanon. You’re booked on the six A.M. Lufthansa flight from Bremen to Beirut.”

  Jax glanced over at Tobie, who had fallen asleep, still dressed, on top of the covers. “How do I contact him?”

  “We’re working on that. We should have something by the time you land in Beirut.”

  “How many people know we’re going to Lebanon?”