The Archangel Project (7 page)

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.”

“It's not exactly a secret anymore. In 1995 the Company hired a private think tank to evaluate the entire history of remote viewing. Some of the guys I know who were in the program say the deck was stacked against them—the civilian scientists doing the review didn't have top secret clearance, and the Government refused to declassify some of their most spectacular successes. They say the CIA wanted a negative review and only released the data that would give them that conclusion.”

“Is that true?”

“Hell, I don't know. But have you ever known the Company to commission a review that didn't bring in the result they wanted? The review board found that remote viewing failed to produce the kind of specific information required for intelligence work, and all remote viewing projects were shut down.”

Jax eyed the piles of paperbacks and hardcovers. There was even a dog-eared Defense Intelligence Agency manual. “So where do I start? It's not that long a flight.”

“This is probably the best of them.” Matt lifted a slim volume from one of the stacks. “It's written by a career Army sergeant named McMoneagle. Some of his remote viewing episodes are incredible. He talks about remote viewing Soviet subs hidden inside huge warehouses, and locating a lost airplane loaded with nuclear weapons that went down over Africa.”

“You don't actually believe in this, do you?”

Jax watched, bemused, as Matt's gaze slid away to focus on something across the room. “Read up on it. I think you might be surprised.”

“Right.” Jax slid off the edge of the table. There was a flight leaving in forty-five minutes to take him to New Orleans. “So if these programs were all shut down back in 'ninety-five, then what's this Tulane professor been up to?”

“As I understand it, he's had a small program going at the university down there for the past year, training remote viewers and trying to identify criteria that can be used to select the most promising candidates. That was one of the main problems all the old programs faced: they were never able to find a way to predict who would be reliably successful.”

“Who's been funding him?”

“He'd cobbled together some grant money here and there, but I gather he was struggling to keep the program going. He put in a proposal to us a few months ago.”

“And?”

“We turned him down…at least, as far as I know.”

“Ah. But how much do you know?”

Matt met Jax's gaze, the big man's eyes dark and troubled. “That's the problem, isn't it?”

Jax frowned down at the stacks of books with titles like
Mind Race
and
Using Your Psychic Abilities
and sighed. “This is going to sink what's left of my career if it ever gets out. You know that, don't you?”

“Chandler personally requested you be the one assigned to it.”

Jax laughed. Gordon Chandler had been ambassador to Colombia at the time of his little episode last winter. And then, three months ago, the asshole had been appointed the new head of the CIA when former head
Clark Westlake was elevated to the position of intelligence czar. Chandler had been doing his best ever since to get Jax fired from the Company. A different kind of man would have quit; Jax Alexander was biding his time, waiting for the chance to get even.

But Chandler was no fool. He knew Jax. He knew, too, that the future of his own career depended on getting Jax before Jax got him.

“Then I'm fucked,” said Jax.

Matt balanced the file back on top of the stacks of books and shoved them toward Jax. “I think that's the general idea.”

New Orleans: 4 June 8:35
P.M
. Central time

“Hey, lady! This is a private bus.”

Her face hot and wet with mingling sweat and rain, Tobie turned toward the bus driver and found rows of exquisitely dressed wedding guests staring at her. “Sorry.” She flashed what she hoped was an apologetic grin. “Could you just let me out at the corner of Calhoun?”

“Some people,” muttered the driver, and swung onto Magazine.

The instant the bus swooped in close to the curb, Tobie leaped out. It was raining hard now, great, wind-gusted sheets of water that fell in waves from a lightning-torn sky. She hurried down Calhoun, her shoulders hunched and head bent against the downpour, her hair hanging in a wet curtain beside her face. A car splashed past and she spun around, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, ready to run. The car disappeared around the corner.

By the time her Bug appeared as a yellow blur through the falling rain, she was drenched. Her skirt clung to her thighs, her cotton jacket hanging heavy and wet. Jerking open the door, she tossed her bag onto the far seat and slid in.

Rain drummed on the metal roof, cascaded in sheets down the windshield. She was shaking so badly she had a hard time fitting the key into the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and the voice of Lee Ann Womack blared out incongruously from the radio. Tobie punched the power button, turning it off. She wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, her breath soughing hot in her throat. Then she threw the car into first and hit the gas.

Turning onto Tchoupitoulas, she tore upriver toward Audubon Park. She had no thought in mind beyond putting as much distance as possible between herself and the men chasing her. But at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Henry Clay, the light turned red and she had to stop. She watched the overhead traffic signal shudder in the wind, watched her windshield wiper blades beat back and forth, and tried to figure out what the hell she should do.

She didn't dare go to the police, she realized; not when the men chasing her carried FBI badges. So where could she go? She tried to think of someone—anyone she could turn to. She'd made friends since moving here to New Orleans, good friends. But what would a couple of eccentric artists and a French Quarter musician know about dealing with the kind of men who flashed FBI badges and fired guns equipped with suppressors?

And then she thought about Colonel McClintock.

She'd never been clear on exactly what the Colonel had done during his many years in the Army. But she knew he'd spent two tours in Vietnam, and she'd seen pictures in his study, curious old photographs that hinted at colorful adventures involving far more than the kind of calm therapy sessions he'd had with her. Plus, he knew about Henry's project. If anyone could help her make sense of what was going on, it was the Colonel.

Reaching over to the seat beside her, she fumbled around in her messenger bag for her cell phone. Her hand closed around it just as the traffic light changed, painting the rain-slicked black streets with a vivid wash of green.

The guy behind her in a white pickup decorated with two American flags leaned on his horn. Tobie dropped her phone on top of her bag and took off.

 

Lance Palmer closed his cell phone and held it in a tightened fist, his gaze fixed on the rain-flecked window and distant white lights that flickered past in the darkness. They were on the I-10 heading west out of the city toward the suburbs and Metairie Country Club, the destination of the wedding reception shuttle bus. He'd had a car with four men at the club waiting when the shuttle arrived. Except that according to the shuttle driver, October Guinness had hopped off the bus back on Magazine Street.

“Take the next exit and turn around,” said Lance.

Lopez glanced over at him. “We lost her?”

“We lost her.” Lance swiveled sideways in his seat and
flipped the phone open again. “Let me see what else we've got on this girl,” he said to Hadley as he punched his own home number on the phone's auto dial.

Hadley was a mess; his swollen left eye was turning blue and purple, and blood still oozed from a cut on the back of his head. There was obviously more to this girl than any of them had figured.

“Hey, Jess,” said Lance, his head tipped at an awkward angle to cradle the phone between his ear and shoulder as he reached to take the laptop from Hadley. “Looks like I'm not going to make it home tonight after all.”

Lance paused, his gaze scanning the directory of files while he listened to Jess's soft expressions of disappointment. “What?” he said a minute later, his attention jerked back to the phone. “Sure I'll tell them good-night. Put them on.”

His ten-year-old, Jason, was watching TV and could barely spare him a quick “'Night, Dad.” But the little one, six-year-old Missy, recited a long and tangled tale about her cat, Barney.

“That's nice, honey,” he said finally. “I love you, too. Now let me talk to Mommy again for a minute, would you?”

“I should be home tomorrow morning,” he told Jessica when she came back on. “'Night, darling.”

He dropped the phone into his pocket and started flipping through the files on October Guinness. “Get onto headquarters,” he told Hadley. “Tell them I want to know everything there is to know about this woman. I want her license number and the kind of car she's driving. I want to know who her friends are and
where they live. I want the activity on her bank and credit cards monitored. And I want someone assigned to do absolutely nothing except wait for her to turn on her cell phone.”

Hadley shook his head. “She's not going to be stupid enough to use it.”

“Are you kidding? So someone taught her how to kick. Big deal. She's a lousy college dropout who couldn't even make it in the Navy, for Christ's sake. What does she know?” Lance glanced out the window again. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, more like a fine mist that swirled around the car. “She'll use it.”