The Archangel Project Page 6

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Not with any of his colleagues? Or maybe a girlfriend?”

  “No. I don’t think he had one. Girlfriend, I mean.”

  “How about a boyfriend?” asked the third man, smirking. He was the tallest of the three, his arms thick with muscle, his eyes small and dark in a full-cheeked face.

  Palmer didn’t even turn to look at him. He just said, “Lopez,” in a low, warning tone, and the big man closed his mouth.

  Tobie glanced from one man to the next, and it was as if a canyon yawned in the pit of her stomach and ice water trickled slowly down her spine. For it had only just occurred to her to wonder how the FBI could have been brought into an investigation of Dr. Youngblood’s death so quickly.

  When she left Freret Street, the fire had still been smoldering. According to the policewoman, it would be hours before the firemen would be able to retrieve Youngblood’s body. It would take more time still for anyone to decide his death was both suspicious and of a nature to require bringing in the FBI. She remembered Henry’s quick, breathless message. They came here, to my office…These people are dangerous…

  “We understand Dr. Youngblood called you tonight,” said Palmer. “Right before he was shot.”

  Tobie opened her mouth to ask how he could possibly know so quickly that Henry had been shot. Then her instinct for self-preservation kicked in and she said instead, “That’s right. He called about six-thirty and left a message.” She stood up, her legs shaking so badly she wondered if she could walk. “Would you like to hear it? I think I left my phone in the kitchen. I’ll get it.”

  Her hopes that the men would simply let her leave the room were dashed when Palmer nodded to the scholarly-looking agent with the wire-framed glasses. “Go with her.”

  The agent at her side, she led the way through the darkened dining room to the kitchen. Her messenger bag lay where she had left it, on the counter beside the half-emptied grocery sack. “It’s in my bag,” she said, maneuvering to put some distance between herself and the man behind her as she reached for the bag’s strap.

  Tobie might not be able to run or shoot well enough to please the Navy, but she’d been only sixteen years old when she earned a black belt in tae kwon do. She’d blown out her knee working on her second degree while in college, but up until that fateful night in the deserts of Iraq, she had continued to train privately. Her love of martial arts was one of the things she had preferred the Navy not know about her.

  Now, drawing a deep breath, she collected herself. Then she let out her breath in an explosive burst of energy and spun around, her left foot coming up in a high roundhouse kick that caught the man behind her on the side of the head.

  Grunting, he dropped to his hands and knees. She kicked him again, her heel slamming into his forehead. He fell back, whacking his shoulders and head against the cabinet with a bang. As he slid to the floor, she heard Palmer shout, “Hadley?”

  Someone at some time had added a utility porch onto the side of Tobie’s kitchen, a small space just a few feet square, barely big enough for a washer and dryer and a door that opened into the side yard. Throwing her bag over one shoulder, she leaped for the door. With a howl, Beauregard threaded himself through her legs as she fumbled with the dead bolt. “Hush, baby,” she whispered, scooping him up under one arm.

  The cat kicked and mewed. The lock was old and stiff, Tobie’s fingers slippery with sweat. Panic rose thick and choking in her throat. Then the bolt shot back. She yanked the side door open, the night air cool against her hot face.

  The wooden floorboards in the dining room creaked. Someone shouted, “Hey!” She heard the suppressed crack of a pistol shot as the window in the upper part of the door beside her exploded.

  Tobie dove through the door. She heard a second shot, smelled the familiar stench of cordite as a bullet chewed through the wooden door frame beside her. Beauregard let out a howl and leaped from her arms.

  Tobie jumped off the small concrete stoop and ran.

  14

  Tobie tore through the darkened, wind-tossed side garden.

  She heard the big man behind her shout, “She’s outside, headed for the street. Stop her!”

  The front door banged open. Heavy feet thumped across the wooden gallery. “What the fuck?” Palmer’s angry voice cut through the night. “Where is she?”

  Her heart pounding, Tobie veered toward the corrugated iron fence separating her yard from the florist on the corner. The fence was a good eight feet high and thickly overgrown with jasmine and honeysuckle, but there was a gap where two lengths of the fencing didn’t quite meet. She squeezed through the narrow opening just as Palmer shouted, “There she is!”

  Tripping over garden hoses and flowerpots, Tobie dodged between the nursery’s long rows of raised garden beds to yank open the heavy wooden gate at the far end. She stumbled out onto the broad, lamplit expanse of Nashville Avenue and knew she’d made a mistake. The instant those men rounded the corner, she’d be an easy target.

  “Jesus.” She swerved sideways, down the narrow, darkly shadowed opening between two houses. A dank, tomblike smell of wet earth and cold brick enveloped her. She could see a low chain-link fence stretching across the rear garden in front of her. She leaped it without breaking stride and felt her knee almost give way beneath her.

  Limping badly across someone’s darkened backyard, she darted up their driveway to the broken brick sidewalk and saw the shadow of a man silhouetted against the streetlight on the corner. “There!” he cried, and ran toward her.

  Her messenger bag thumping against her hip, Tobie sprinted across the street. Dodging the jutting fender of a parked Mercedes, she hit the muddy strip of half gravel, half grass on the far side of the pavement and her feet slid, her arms windmilling as she tried to keep her balance.

  Breathing hard now, her lungs straining to draw in air, she ran along a row of rusting tin sheds backed by a cinder-block wall that rose up to engulf her in shadow. She could hear a dog barking from somewhere close at hand. A lamp in the house beside her flicked on to throw a square of light across her face and shoulders as she ran past. She shied away, but it was too late. She heard the men shout again.

  A flash of lightning veined the dark clouds overhead. She ran on, her bad knee exploding in fire with each step. A cool wind lifted the damp hair from her forehead and flattened the thin cotton of her skirt against her thighs. She smelled rain and heard the rumble of thunder mingling with the sweet chiming of church bells ringing out over the tops of trees bending restlessly with the wind. The wedding was ending.

  Throwing a quick glance over her shoulder, she dashed toward the narrow, car-lined street and the low-slung, modern brick sprawl of St. Francis of Assisi Elementary School beyond it. She could hear the sound of car engines gunning to life, see the stab of headlights piercing the darkness. There were people here, but not many. All were in a rush to get to their cars before the storm broke. She wasn’t safe yet.

  She was conscious of people turning their heads to stare at her. Crossing the parking lot, she slowed to a trot, her lungs straining, her chest jerking with each breath. She dodged down the walkway that ran along the high walls of the old brick church and felt the wind gust up stronger. A fine mist hit her face, blessedly cool against her hot sweaty skin.

  She could see more people, spilling down the church steps, milling about on the wide swath of paving that stretched to the curb. Throwing another glance over her shoulder, she saw Lance Palmer, his hand held significantly beneath the front of his suit jacket. She broke into a run again.

  Heedless of the startled expressions and indignant exclamations she provoked, Tobie pushed her way through the laughing, talking crowd that filled the open space before the church. A row of shuttle buses stood lined up at the curb, ready to ferry the wedding guests to some distant reception site.

  The first bus was almost filled. She leaped onto the steps just as the doors snapped closed and the bus lurched away from the curb
.

  She swung around, one hand flinging out to grasp the nearby chrome bar as the bus swayed and picked up speed. Through the glass doors she could see Lance Palmer start forward through the crowd. Then he disappeared into the night.

  15

  Old Town Alexandria: 4 June 9:10 P.M. Eastern time

  Jax Alexander lived in a narrow brick town house overlooking the Potomac. He had inherited the house from Sophie’s father, the late Senator James Herman Winston. It was Senator Winston who had paid to send him to a string of expensive East Coast boarding schools—he kept getting kicked out—and, ultimately, to Yale. The Winstons were a venerable old Connecticut family who could trace their ponderous wealth and prestige back three centuries. It always grieved the senator that Jax took after his father, who was neither venerable nor ponderously wealthy.

  The mist was drifting in off the water as Jax let himself into the town house’s paneled entry hall. Through the French doors in the living room, the river showed as a sheet of moon-struck silver that rippled lazily with the flow of the current. He could see the red message light blinking on the answering machine in the kitchen. Hitting the Play button, he headed up the stairs to pull an overnight bag from the closet.

  “Hey, Jax.” Sibel Montana’s low, husky voice drifted up the stairs after him. “I got your call about the tickets to Turandot. I’ll be free tomorrow after four-thirty.”

  Jax squeezed his eyes shut and swore under his breath. Sibel Montana was a brilliant, funny, long-legged lawyer with Williams and Connolly. It had been nearly four years since he’d met a woman who connected with him the way she did. But in the past three months he’d already had to cancel two dinner dates, a weekend in the Hamptons, and a trip to Barbados with her. Opening his suit pack on the bed, he punched in Sibel’s number on his phone and went to yank open the top drawer of the antique mahogany dresser that stood in an alcove overlooking the river.

  Sibel’s voice was a warm contralto. “Hi, Jax.”

  “I got your message,” he said, tossing boxers and socks into his bag. “I’ve got the opera tickets and reservations at the Old Ebbitt Grill. There’s just one potential problem. I need to go out of town. But I should be back by tomorrow night.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. “That’s what you said the last time, Jax. You didn’t come back for two weeks.”

  Jax retrieved his toilet kit from the bathroom. “I know. I’m sorry, Sibel.”

  Sibel was a smart lady, and she had lived in Washington, D.C., for six years. It had taken her only two dates before she added Jax’s evasiveness together with a few other clues and figured out exactly what he did for a living. Now, she let out her breath in a long sigh. “You know, Jax…I don’t think this is going to work.”

  He heard the break in her voice and stopped packing. “Don’t do this, Sibel.”

  “I’m sorry, Jax. For a while I thought maybe I’d get used to it. But the closer we get, the more it bothers me. We all have jobs that require us to keep business out of our private lives, but with you, it’s so much worse. What kind of relationship can I have with someone who is constantly being sent out of town on a moment’s notice and who can’t even tell me where he’s going or what he’ll be doing?”

  “Sibel—”

  “I like you, Jax. I like you a lot. I think we could have had something special together. If you ever decide to change jobs, give me a call.”

  “Sibel, please listen—”

  “’Bye, Jax.” The connection ended.

  “Son of a bitch.” He snapped his cell phone closed and tossed it on the bed beside his half-packed suitcase and the holster for his Beretta.

  16

  Langley, Virginia: 4 June 9:25 P.M. Eastern time

  Division Thirteen had its offices deep in the bowels of the CIA’s sprawling headquarters at Langley. You couldn’t sink much lower at the Company, either literally or figuratively. The head of the division, Matt von Moltke, had been relegated to a cubbyhole near the maintenance department, his cramped office barely big enough for a beat-up gray metal desk, a couple of filing cabinets, and a Formica-topped conference table that looked like a sturdier version of something salvaged from a 1950s-era diner.

  Jax arrived at the office to find Matt sitting at his desk, his forehead furrowing as he studied a series of spreadsheets while wolfing down a triple-decker club sandwich.

  “You haven’t been home yet, have you?” said Jax.

  A 250-pound giant of a man with wild, silver-laced black hair and a thick beard, Matt shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, drained the can of generic diet cola that was never far from his reach, and swallowed. “Hell. It’s early yet.”

  He pushed back his chair and stood up, lurching awkwardly when his weight came down on the leg that had been mangled by a run-in with a Bouncing Betty on a rain-slicked jungle path in the Mekong Delta. He’d had a wife, once—or so Jax had heard. He still had a daughter, Gabrielle, who lived near her mother somewhere in the Midwest. But since the breakup of Matt’s marriage, the Company had become his life. He’d been sidelined here, to the division, way back in the eighties as punishment for kicking up a fuss over the U.S. funding of death squads in El Salvador. For some reason Jax had never quite figured out, the division had suited Matt von Moltke just fine. Twenty-odd years later, he was still here.

  Matt limped over to an ominous-looking pile of books and files stacked at one end of the Formica and chrome table. “You need to find out what you can about the death of this man,” he said, flipping open one of the files to extract a large black and white photo.

  Jax stared down at a picture of a balding, overweight man with gentle eyes and a pleasant smile. “Who was he?”

  “A guy by the name of Dr. Henry Youngblood. Professor of psychology at Tulane University. His name came up in a police report tonight. He’s on our watch list.”

  “What’s the Company’s interest in him?”

  “He worked on a project for us back in the late eighties and early nineties. We need to make sure nothing that’s happening in New Orleans now involves us. And that nothing’s going to come out that might embarrass us.”

  Jax looked up. “Why ‘embarrass’? What was this guy doing?”

  “Remote viewing.”

  Jax kept his gaze on Matt’s plump, hairy face. “What the hell is that?”

  Matt cleared his throat. “It’s a term developed about thirty years ago by a couple of physicists out at Stanford Research Institute in California. Basically it’s just an academically sanitized label for the ability to observe distant places and events through alternate channels of perception.”

  “You’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you?”

  The skin beside Matt’s dark brown eyes creased into a smile. “Ooohhh, yeah. Clairvoyance, telekinesis, pre-cognition…you name it, the U.S. government has studied it at one time or another.”

  “Please tell me this is a joke.”

  Matt reached for another one of the fat files and held it out. “Nope. It started at the end of World War II, when we captured some reports on the Nazis’ parapsychology experiments that interested our guys—not as much as the Germans’ work on the A-bomb and jet engines, of course, but it was intriguing. Things really picked up in the seventies, when George H. W. Bush was Director of the CIA. Most of the programs back then were run through the Stanford Research Institute, but not all of them.”

  Jax perched on one end of the table and started thumbing through the file.

  “You remember the Iranian hostage crisis?” said Matt.

  “I’ve read about it.”

  Matt sighed. “You’re such an infant. Anyway, they had the Army’s remote viewers from Fort Meade working twenty-four hours a day during the rescue mission.”

  Jax looked up. “You mean the Army had a hand in this, too?”

  “The Army, the Navy, NASA, the NSA—you name it. Everybody had projects going on this at one time or another.”

  �
�NASA?” Jax laughed. “What for?”

  “They had the idea maybe astronauts could be trained to use telepathy. It’s the same reason the Navy was interested. They wanted to find a way to stay in touch with their submarines when traditional communications technology failed…and maybe follow the movement of the Soviets’ boats at the same time.”

  “And the National Security Agency?”

  “They were worried about Soviet remote viewers being able to access our top secret files. Maybe even use telekinesis to mess with our computers.”

  “You mean to tell me the Soviets were fooling around with this, too?”

  “That’s right. At one point there was a real psi arms race going on.”

  “You mean, as in psychological warfare?”

  “No, I mean psi as in ‘psychic.’”

  Jax groaned.

  “We had film clips of Soviet sessions that showed their group moving objects, even killing. We had no way to verify any of it, but it was worrisome, to say the least. Once Reagan was elected, we got into the psi business big time. The White House started consulting astrologers and fortune-tellers, and things really went off the deep end. There was talk about shit like a Photonic Barrier Modulator to induce death telepathically, and a Hyperspatial Nuclear Howitzer, which was supposed to use thought waves to send a nuclear explosion from the deserts of Nevada to the corridors of the Kremlin.”

  “Jesus.” Jax snapped the file closed. “And this is still going on?”

  “All psi-related projects were supposedly terminated in 1995.”

  Jax raised one eyebrow. “Supposedly?”

  Matt shrugged. “It’s hard to tell with these things. You know that. It was a Special Access Program from the very beginning.”

  “Of course,” said Jax. Anything sensitive, nasty, or just plain stupid was usually made into a Special Access Program, or SAP, as they were known in the business. SAPs were black operations, kept hidden from both the public and Congressional oversight by a procedure that allowed access only by those personnel specifically cleared by the program’s manager. The Iran-Contra deal had been an SAP; so had the development of the Stealth aircraft. Setting aside the file folder, Jax leaned over to study the title of the book at the top of the nearest stack: Mind Wars: The True Story of Secret Government Research into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons. He wanted to laugh, except this wasn’t a joke. “Well, I can certainly see why they’d want to keep this a secret.”