The Archangel Project (3 page)

Tobie was leaving Colonel McClintock's study when she felt
her cell phone begin to vibrate in her messenger bag.

“Still going to therapy for your leg?” asked the Colonel, walking with her to his front door.

“I'm down to twice a week now,” she said, ignoring the phone's gentle summons. The bullet she'd taken in her left thigh in the deserts of western Iraq had snapped the femur. That was bad, but the worst part was the way the subsequent weeks of immobility had aggravated an already bad knee. If she hadn't caught a psychiatric discharge, she would probably have been given a medical discharge. Although maybe not. The United States military was getting pretty desperate these days. “I've noticed lately it only tends to hurt when I run.”

“Which you don't like to do anyway.”

Tobie huffed a soft laugh. “Which I don't like to do anyway.” She reached for the front door handle. “Tell Mrs. McClintock hello for me.”

At the base of the porch's wide wooden steps, Tobie
paused. Her cell phone had quit vibrating. She fished it out of her bag and frowned at the sight of the message icon. Pressing Talk, she shifted the bag's strap on her shoulder and headed for her car.

 

Lance Palmer knew something was wrong.

The sudden stealth of Henry Youngblood's movements betrayed him. The Army had spent a lot of time and money teaching officers like Lance about people's behavior, about things like neurolinguistic programming and body language and voice patterns. But Lance didn't need anything more than common sense and a keen awareness to tell him that a man with nothing to hide walks with a firm, steady gait. He turns on lights. Makes noise.

Dr. Henry Youngblood moved furtively. Nervously. Like a man doing something on the sly. A man who is afraid.

Lance slipped his Glock 18 from its shoulder holster and motioned for Lopez and Hadley to follow him.

Hugging one wall to minimize the betraying creaks from the old floorboards, they crept toward the front of the house. The hall was lined with half a dozen closed doors. Lance resurrected the memory of Henry's careful footsteps, the distant click of a closing door, and focused on the two front rooms overlooking Freret Street.

Pausing at the end of the hall, Lance could hear the faint whisper of a man's voice coming from behind the door on their left. He settled into a balanced stance, the Glock extended in an easy, double-handed grip. His gaze met Lopez's and he nodded. Lopez pulled his own
pistol and with one powerful kick sent the door crashing open.

Henry Youngblood stood in the middle of the room, his middle-aged body frozen in terror, his face a slack oval in the early evening light. His hand jerked and the dying sunlight streaming in through the front window glinted on metal.

“He's got a gun!” shouted Lopez, squeezing his Glock's trigger twice. The silenced percussion sounded like pops in the small room.

It wasn't until two dark holes opened up between Henry's eyes that Lance realized what the professor held. Lance walked over to nudge the dead man's hand with the toe of one shoe. “It was just a cell phone,” he said, giving Lopez a hard look.

Henry Youngblood was supposed to die, of course. But not yet and not like this. Not with two bullets in his head. And not before he'd told them everything they needed to know. It was to prevent exactly this kind of mistake that Lance had come down here and taken charge of the operation himself.

“Shit,” said Lopez.

Easing his Glock back into its holster, Lance bent to lift the phone from Youngblood's lifeless grip.

If the professor had been talking to someone, he must have ended the connection when he heard them in the hall. Lance glanced at his watch, then flicked through the menu to the list of outgoing numbers. Youngblood had called someone named Tobie.

The name meant nothing to Lance. He hit redial, his gaze traveling around the darkened room. It was empty except for a dusty desk and an old wooden chair.
The office was obviously unused. Whatever Henry had come in here for, it wasn't to get a file.

The connection went through, going immediately to voice mail. “You have reached the mailbox of…
October Guinness
—”

An unusual name, Lance thought as he pressed End. He remembered seeing it on the university's pay list. He turned toward Michael Hadley and smiled.

“Got her.”

Gentilly, New Orleans: 4 June 6:35
P.M
. Central time

Tourak Rahmadad snagged a bag of potato chips, popped
open a beer, and wandered into the front room of the half-renovated cottage he and three fellow students rented in an area of New Orleans known as Gentilly. Unlike most of the other Middle Eastern students who formed Jamaat Noor Allah, the Light of God, Tourak actually liked America—which surprised him, because he had expected to hate it.

He'd been in the States for three years now, studying journalism and filmmaking at the University of New Orleans. After 9/11, when white Americans started treating people with dark skin and foreign-sounding names the way they used to treat American blacks, Tourak had begged his parents to let him study in Paris, or maybe London. But his mother insisted that he go to the States. She had a cousin, Kamal, who lived in New Orleans and promised to watch out for him. Actually,
the desire to escape the watchful eye of cousin Kamal was one of the reasons Tourak wanted to go to Paris. But his mother was the one paying the tens of thousands of dollars it cost to send him overseas to study. And so he had come to America.

Life here had been difficult at first. So much was strange, different. But most of the people Tourak met in New Orleans were surprisingly friendly, and he had fallen in love with the city's moss-draped oaks and wide, slow moving river, with its platters of spicy crawfish and cold pitchers of beer. He liked Mardi Gras and shopping malls, cable TV and Baskin Robbins ice cream. But he still really, really hated the American government.

Flopping into a scruffy beanbag chair, Tourak pointed the remote control at the TV and flipped through the channels. He was restless tonight, unable to settle. In just forty-eight hours he would face the most important test of his life. Once, he had prayed to God to be given such an opportunity. Now he was nervous, afraid. His fear shamed him. What if he froze at the last moment? What if he couldn't do it? He would let everyone down.

He flipped through two more channels, then paused at what passed for an American “news” network. The network alternately amused and infuriated him. So much of what they broadcast was a tissue of lies and exaggerations, all carefully crafted to deceive and manipulate. In other countries, people were more cynical, more suspicious of those with the power and means to deceive. But Americans weren't like that. They were so credulous, so gullible. Even after Watergate and the Gulf of Tonkin,
the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra, the American people still believed everything their government and news outlets told them. Tourak found that both incomprehensible and frightening.

He was about to switch the channel when a woman on the screen caught his eye. She appeared to be in her early thirties, dark and attractive in a way that reminded him of his sister Naji, who was a surgeon in Tehran.

The young woman was leaning forward in her seat, her face drawn and serious as she said, “We have to stop them, even if we have to kill them all to do it. If we don't, they'll destroy civilization and take over this country. I don't want my children to grow up in a world run by illiterate mullahs who rant about evil and preach holy war against infidels.”

Practically choking on his beer, Tourak leaped from his chair and pointed the remote at the woman's face, zapping her out of existence. “You stupid, bigoted donkey!” he screamed at her. “We
started
civilization, remember? You're the ones who've been bombing the cradle of civilization back into the Stone Age. It's your politicians who rant about axis of evil and evildoers and preach crusades against anyone who isn't a Judeo-Christian. We don't want to take over your stupid country. We just want you to get out of our part of the world and stay out!”

One of Tourak's roommates, a physics student from Syria, called from upstairs in Arabic, “
Ya, habibi. Aish bi'dak
?”

“Nothing,” Tourak shouted, then slammed out the door to go stand on the front stoop and look out over the ghostly dark neighborhoods of the ruined city.

He had come from Tehran to the States to study journalism because he'd believed in the power of the truth to overcome ignorance and prejudice. But over the course of the last three years it slowly dawned on him that he had been as naive as he accused the Americans of being. Because most people weren't swayed by words, particularly if those words were an uncomfortable truth.

Lately, Tourak had begun to believe the only truth Americans understood was the kind delivered by the barrel of a gun, or the explosive exit of a man driven to suicide by the grim realization that while he might be powerless in life, his death could change the world.

Most people who knew October Guinness looked upon her
decision to move to post–Katrina New Orleans as proof-positive that the girl was certifiably crackers.

She had no previous connection to the city. Her father might have grown up in Louisiana, but he died when Tobie was only five years old and she'd never known his family. Her mother's people were from South Carolina and her stepdad from Oregon. His career as a petroleum engineer meant they'd lived in some far-flung places when Tobie was growing up, but Louisiana wasn't one of them.

She remembered calling her parents the night before her scheduled discharge from Bethesda. Her stepdad had retired to Colorado, and her mother had prattled on breathlessly about fixing up Tobie's old room and the looming deadline to register for next semester's classes at the University of Colorado—which was where Tobie had gone to school before dropping out just two months shy of graduation.

But she hadn't wanted to go home. Not as a twenty-four-year-old college dropout with a psycho discharge from the Navy. If she was going to start over, she wanted to do it someplace new. It seemed appropriate to rebuild her life in a city that was also struggling to rebuild itself.

“I'm not coming back to Colorado,” she'd told her mother. “I've been accepted into Tulane. In New Orleans,” she added into the stunned silence.

“Are you nuts?”
her stepdad, Hank Bennett, had thundered on the other extension.

She'd leaned her forehead against the cold-frosted window of her hospital room and laughed. “That's what they're saying, isn't it?”

Hank didn't get the joke. He never did. “Do you have any idea what a mess things still are in New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

“You'd qualify for in-state tuition here, you know. How much is Tulane?”

“A lot.”

“I'm not paying for it.”

“I'm not asking you to.”

It was one of the reasons Tobie had agreed to start working for Henry Youngblood. He couldn't pay her much, but it helped supplement her GI Bill and the small disability payment she got from the Navy. Plus he'd arranged to give her three credits a semester. It was a deal she found impossible to refuse…even though it did require her to confront an aspect of herself she'd spent a lifetime avoiding. If Iraq had taught her one thing, it was that she couldn't continue to hide from the truth. Whether she was gifted or cursed, she had an unusual
ability she needed to learn to understand and to control. Dr. Youngblood was teaching her to do both.

Now, sliding into the driver's seat of her 1979 yellow VW Beetle, Tobie rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof. Most people thought Tobie drove the old Bug because she liked vintage cars, but the truth was, she had bad luck with modern electrical products. She'd learned to buy the extended warranty on everything from computers and cell phones to DVD players and TVs because few lasted even a year. And she'd learned to buy cars too old to have a computerized anything.

According to Dr. Youngblood, good remote viewers frequently had an odd effect on electronics. At one time, he said, the CIA and NSA had actually tried to find some way to use the phenomenon to crash the Soviets' computers and weapons systems. But since the disturbances only affected electronics within a person's immediate vicinity, the government could never figure out how to use it against their enemy du jour. They'd just learned to keep remote viewers away from their own sensitive systems.

The inside of the car was still unbearably hot, so she left the door ajar to catch the evening breeze while she sat and listened to the message Dr. Youngblood had left on her voice mail. His voice sounded hushed, strained. “October? Henry Youngblood here. Listen…I'm afraid I might have made a terrible mistake. They came here, to my office. They don't know who you are, but these people are dangerous, Tobie. If they—”

The connection ended abruptly. Puzzled, she saved the message and was listening to it again when another call from Youngblood came through. But when she
tried calling him back, she went straight to his voice mail.

Checking the time, Tobie shoved her phone into her bag and pulled away from the curb. If she knew Youngblood, he was probably still in his office. It would be easier to just swing by campus on her way home than to keep playing phone tag with him all evening.

She thought about his message as she drove toward the university. She didn't have a clue what the professor might have been talking about. In Youngblood's world, dangerous people killed tenure applications or cut off funding for projects. Was that it? Was someone threatening to close down Henry's program—and her job?

She could see a mass of heavy thunderheads building on the horizon, casting an eerie silver light over the scattered piles of building rubble and occasional squatty FEMA trailers that still dotted the streets. This part of town had stewed in Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters for less than a week. Not as long as other areas, but long enough to undermine a lot of aging foundations and wreck havoc with century-old floor joists and timber framing. The neighborhood was starting to come back, but she'd heard people saying it would probably be ten to fifteen years before the last of the FEMA trailers were gone.

By the time she turned onto Freret, thunder was rumbling in the distance and an early darkness had settled over the campus. She spotted Youngblood's little red Miata in the Annex's side yard. She thought about pulling in behind him, except she didn't have a parking sticker for this zone and the fines for violations were stiff. Turning onto Newcomb Boulevard, she had to
drive halfway down the block before she found a place to pull her VW in close to the curb.

The evening was quiet, the stately old homes lining the street somber behind their drawn curtains. She walked back toward Freret, her footsteps echoing in the stillness. A nearby stand of bamboo rustled faintly in the suddenly cool breeze, and a dog began to bark. Tobie ran one hand up her bare arm and wished she'd thought to throw on a jacket over her T-shirt.

She was just stepping off the curb to cross Freret when the Annex exploded.

A concussive blast of heat slammed into her, knocking her off her feet. She hit the ground hard, her ears ringing, her arms coming up to wrap around her head as jagged, flaming timbers rained down around her and a roaring caldron of flames leaped high into the stormy sky.

 

From the black Suburban parked around the corner, Lance Palmer watched the dancing flames light up the cloudy evening. The smell of smoke and burning timbers lay heavy in the sultry air.

A quick search of Youngblood's files had turned up nothing they needed to worry about. They'd brought the files away with them anyway, along with the professor's hard drive, just to be sure. It was to cover up the missing files and dismantled computer that they'd decided to torch the building.

An investigation might in time discover that the fire had been caused not by some leaky gas line but by a sophisticated incendiary device of the kind favored by the U.S. military. An autopsy would definitely turn up
a couple of well-placed bullet holes in whatever the fire left of Henry Youngblood's head. But by then it would all be over. As soon as they took care of the girl, Lance thought, his embarrassing little problem would be solved. Even in the best of times, the NOPD hadn't exactly been known for their brains, and these were hardly the best of times. They'd never be able to connect the dots.

From somewhere in the distance came the screaming whine of an emergency vehicle's siren. Lance flipped open his phone. “Get me the address of a woman named October Guinness…That's right, October,” he said again, when the voice at the other end of the line queried the name.

Lance leaned back in his seat and waited. With just a single phone call he could find out virtually anything he needed to know about anyone, from the most embarrassing details of their medical history to the brand of toilet paper they used. Within a minute he had the address.

“Number 5815 Patton Street?” he repeated. He nodded to Lopez. “Good. I want as much additional information on this woman as you can put together ASAP.”

Lance slipped the phone into his pocket and smiled as the Suburban pulled away from the curb. Things hadn't exactly gone according to plan with Youngblood, but at least they had the girl's name. All they needed to do now was make sure she hadn't told anyone about what she'd seen, and then silence her. Permanently.