The Archangel Project (8 page)

Halfway down the block, Tobie pulled in close to the curb
and parked. A drop of cold water from her wet hair rolled down her cheek, and she swiped at it absently with the back of one hand as she reached for her phone. She had the phone open and was about to punch in Colonel McClintock's number when she froze.

She had a friend, Gunner Eriksson, who kept a little shop on Magazine Street where he worked restoring antiques. Gunner had three passions in his life: woodworking, his wife Pia, and political activism. A true conspiracy nut, he'd tell anyone who'd listen that the government was covering up everything from who really shot JFK to the truth behind 9/11. He was always going on about the Patriot Act and something he called TIP. She remembered one rant he'd gone off on, about how the government had set up a program to record and monitor the cell phone calls of everyone in the United States.

Tobie closed her phone and set it aside, then stared at
it as if it were a false friend. She didn't believe a fraction of the nonsense Gunner was always rambling on about. But what if that part of it were true? And if it were true, how many people had access to that computer system? The FBI, surely. And what about the private companies that ran the system? Everything in the government was privatized these days, wasn't it?

She realized she was shaking, and pressed both hands to her face, squeezing her eyes shut. Her breath came in quick short pants that felt hot against her palms. Then another thought occurred to her. Her eyes flew open and she reached out quickly to turn off the phone and yank out its battery, terrified it might act like a homing beacon that could lead Dr. Youngblood's killers to her. That was possible, too, wasn't it, using global positioning coordinates?

Oh, God
. What else didn't she know? She felt hopelessly lost and afraid, alone and totally out of her element. Yet she couldn't afford to make any mistakes. Not one.

She became aware of a scraping sound and realized the rubber blades of her windshield wipers were dragging across dry glass. It had stopped raining. Sitting forward, she switched off the wipers, put the car in gear and eased out into traffic.

She might be ignorant and inexperienced, she told herself, but she was smart and she could learn. All she needed was a teacher.

 

“I can do that myself, you know,” said Tobie, then sucked her breath through her teeth in a hiss when Colonel McClintock touched an alcohol-saturated pad
to a jagged cut on her calf. The pungent scent of the alcohol pinched at her nose and she sneezed.

“You just sit there and drink your tea and concentrate on warming up,” said the Colonel. “You're shaking so hard your teeth are chattering.”

“It's June in New Orleans. My teeth are chattering because I'm scared.”

They were sitting in the Colonel's book-lined study, Tobie on the somewhat threadbare sofa, the Colonel on the old trunk he used as a coffee table, a first aid kit open on the floor at his feet. Outside, the rain had started up again, but softer now, a gentle scattering of drops that pattered on the windowpanes and the broad leaves of the elephants ears and banana trees in the garden outside.

He spread antiseptic ointment on a bandage and pressed it into place. “I hope your tetanus shot is up to date.”

“It is.” Tobie held the bandage in place with her fingertips while the Colonel tore off a strip of adhesive. “What am I going to do?”

He kept his head bowed, his lips together, his attention seemingly on the task of bandaging her leg. Tobie felt a welling of impatience but curbed it. After all these months of mutual analysis, she had come to know his ways. He was a brilliant man, but patient and unhurried in his thinking. He never said or did anything without thoroughly considering all possible options and their consequences.

After a moment he said, “These men who came to your house…you realize that you can't be sure they're FBI, simply because they had badges?”

“Yes. Except that they didn't just flash some badge
at me. They had ID cards. I know what they look like. Those suckers were real.”

He pressed the last strip of adhesive into place and leaned over to gather his first aid kit together. “There are other organizations in the government that have been known to carry FBI badges. The FBI doesn't like it and it's not supposed to be done anymore, but I suspect it still happens.”

“Other organizations like—what?” Tobie kept her eyes on his lined face as he stood and walked across the room to tuck his first aid kit into a drawer of his desk. “Oh God. Don't tell me the CIA.” He was starting to remind her of her friend Gunner. “The CIA isn't allowed to operate inside the U.S., remember?”

“I'm afraid you're a few years out of date, Tobie. The government has used their so-called War on Terror to start doing a lot of things Americans would never have tolerated if we weren't so scared.”

“I don't think they make it a habit of going around rubbing out innocent, law-abiding citizens.”

“The government does kill people. They do it all the time in the interest of national security—or what they tell themselves is national security.”

From overhead came a thump and a woman's gentle voice; the sounds of the Colonel's maid, LaToya, settling Mary McClintock into bed for the night. Soon, Colonel McClintock would go up to read to his wife as she drifted off to sleep.

Tobie kept her gaze on the Colonel's face, lit now with a soft light cast by the green glass shade of the banker's lamp on the corner of the desk. “Why would the CIA be interested in Henry Youngblood?”

“We don't know for certain you're dealing with the CIA. It's just one possibility out of several. Except…you said they were asking about Henry's remote viewing program? That they were particularly interested in some session you did for Henry that he was using as a demonstration for a funding proposal?”

“What are you suggesting? That Dr. Youngblood was applying to the CIA for funding?”

He didn't answer her. Instead, he walked over to where LaToya had set the tea tray. “How much do you know about the history of remote viewing?”

“I know the Army had a unit back in the seventies and eighties that developed a lot of the techniques Dr. Youngblood was teaching me. He talked a fair amount about the work he did with them when he was out at Stanford. He used to joke about the CIA a lot, but he never said anything about them being involved in RV.”

“I suspect that over the years a good half of the funding for the program came from the CIA through one conduit or another.”

Tobie felt a strange, almost numbing sense of unreality creep over her. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What exactly was the target in this demonstration you did? Do you remember?”

She ran her splayed fingers through her hair, still damp from the rain and hanging in untidy clumps around her face. “A building. An office. Nothing unusual.”

“You need to try to remember everything you can about it.”

“I've tried. I can't. It was weeks ago. And it didn't seem important at the time. Do you have any idea how
many sessions Youngblood and I did over the last four or five months?”

He lifted the quilted cover off the teapot and carried it over to where she sat clutching her empty teacup in both hands. “It will come. It's not easy to think clearly when you're scared.”

“I'm okay,” she said.

“I know you are. You're a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for sometimes.” He poured the steaming tea into her cup. “The most important thing right now is for you to keep yourself safe.”

He put the teapot on the table at her elbow and came to perch again on the edge of the trunk before her. “Here's what you need to do…”

Deep within the shadows of a spreading oak tree, Tobie
rolled her VW to a stop and cut the engine. The rain had tapered off again but the sky was still black with clouds, the pavement sheened with wet.

Ignoring the
PERMITS ONLY
sign, she'd turned into the narrow road winding around Loyola University's athletic center, to the one-way street that ran behind the parking garage. It was late now and the rain had driven most of the students indoors. But the garage was still filled with cars.

Following the Colonel's instructions, she'd carefully gone over her own VW before leaving his house. “They might have put a tracking device on it,” he'd warned her, telling her exactly where to look and how. But she hadn't found anything. And so now, for the first time in her adult life, she was about to steal something.

“You do realize,” McClintock had told her, “that they could have put out an APB on your car?”

Tobie had stared at him. “What are you saying? That I could have the police chasing me, too?”

He shrugged. “Until we know who you're dealing with, it's better to be safe and assume the worst. Even if these people haven't brought the police in on this, it's not that hard to get someone's license plate number. And that car of yours is like a yellow beacon.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Steal another car?”

He'd laughed. “Now that would get the police after you. You don't need a new car, Tobie; all you need is a new license plate.”

Tobie took a deep breath and opened her car door. In the stillness of the night the clicking latch sounded dangerously loud. Now that the worst of the storm had passed, the temperature was rising again. The smell of wet earth and leaves hung heavy in the air, mingling with the sweet scent of a mimosa blooming unseen somewhere in the darkness.

With a quick glance up and down the street, she went to crouch at the back of her car and slip the Colonel's screwdriver from her pocket. “How often do you look at your license plate?” he'd told her. “You'd be surprised how many people don't even know what their own license plate number is.”

She hadn't said anything, but she was one of those people. Whenever anyone asked for her license number, she always had to go look at it.

The two screws holding the metal plate came off easily. She dropped them into her pocket and stood up, the license plate tucked out of sight beneath the inside of her still damp jacket, her heart pounding uncomfortably at the thought of what she was about to do.

There were people, she knew, who did memorize their license plate number. Her own stepfather, Hank Bennett, could rattle off the license plates of every car he'd ever owned. What if she made a mistake and picked a car belonging to someone like him?

The first floor of the parking garage was separated from the street by no more than a low wall, easily stepped over. She walked up the ramp, her footsteps echoing eerily in the low-ceilinged, deserted space. What she needed, she decided, was a car that obviously belonged to a girl, the kind of girl unlikely to obsess about things like license plate numbers.

It didn't take her long to find what she was looking for: a silver Honda Civic with a pair of miniature pink ballet slippers hanging from the rearview mirror, an
ALPHA LAMBDA DELTA
decal in the back window and a
MOUNT CARMEL VOLLEYBALL
sticker on the bumper.

With another quick glance around, Tobie hunkered down at the Honda's rear bumper. She kept expecting to feel the clamp of a heavy hand on her shoulder or hear a shout from across the garage. Setting aside the Honda's plate, she fit her own license in its place…

And felt one of the screws slip from her fingers to roll away into the darkness.

Easing her weight down on her good knee, she skimmed her hands in ever-widening, panicked circles across the pavement. Just when she thought she wasn't going to find it, she felt the screw roll beneath her palm.

She sat back on her heel, her lower lip held tight between her teeth, and carefully twisted the screws into place. Sweat dampened her forehead, plastered her T-
shirt to her body. Hiding the Honda's license plate beneath her jacket, she stood up and walked away.

Her legs were shaking, but she was breathing easier now. Moving quickly, she fit the purloined plate onto the rear of her car, then slipped behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine roared to life and she felt a zing of elation run through her so powerful it left her fingers tingling.

I did it. Ha!

Smiling, almost giddy with relief, she slipped the car into reverse, backed onto the street, and took off toward Tulane's Student Union, where she knew she'd be able to find a twenty-four-hour ATM. She was going to need cash.

The Colonel had wanted her to spend what was left of the night at his house, but she'd refused. She knew from an incident last Easter, when one of Mary McClintock's nieces came to visit, that it confused Mary, having people in the house overnight.

Tobie had seen snapshots of Mary McClintock in the Colonel's study, photographs of her as a beautiful woman with thick hair the color of sunsets and a wide smile. After years of casually forgetting things, she'd now slipped so far into the fogs of Alzheimer's that she no longer recognized her husband, although she still loved to listen to his voice reading to her.

But it wasn't only a desire to avoid confusing Mrs. McClintock that had stopped Tobie. She also realized, belatedly, that she'd already put the Colonel and his wife in serious danger simply by coming to him.

He'd tried to argue with her, of course. When he realized he wasn't going to change her mind, he warned
her not to use her credit card to pay for a hotel. But he hadn't told her not to use an ATM, and she hadn't thought to ask.

She knew she was running a risk, using one. But did it really matter, she reasoned, if some computer in Maryland or Virginia flagged her withdrawal? She'd be gone before anyone could possibly show up to check it out.

 

Lance was going through a stack of printouts when Michael Hadley stuck his head around the door frame. “Our girl just hit an ATM at Tulane, near the Union. Withdrew two hundred dollars.”

Lance looked up. They'd taken a suite at the Sheraton for the night, although he had started to worry that their quarry might already have headed out of town. “Good. That means she's still here in New Orleans.”

He pushed to his feet. They had men at the airport and at the bus and train stations, but there was always the possibility she'd simply driven out of town. He'd alerted their people in Colorado to tap her parents' phone and keep an eye on their house. He glanced at his watch. “What do you suppose she's been up to for the past couple of hours?”

Hadley shrugged. “If she used a Tulane ATM, it means she's staying close to the familiar.”

“We need a list of all the hotels in that area.” Lance stretched. “With any luck, we might get out of here before morning after all.”