The Archangel Project (9 page)

Broadmoor, New Orleans: 4 June 11:00
P.M
. Central time

Barid Hafezi stood in the doorway to his daughter's darkened
room and watched her sleep.

Yasmina was eight years old, a small, wiry tomboy with laughing brown eyes and a mischievous grin. Her ten-year-old brother Faraj was the serious one. He was probably reading a book with a flashlight under the covers in his room down the hall. But Yasmina was like her mother, a carefree spirit who drew like an angel and could charm the squirrels out of the trees.

Barid sucked in a deep breath, but it did nothing to ease the tight pain in his chest. Twenty-five years. It had been twenty-five years since he'd fled the turmoil of Iran for the United States. He'd built a new life for himself here, a safe life for his wife and children. It hadn't been easy, but he'd managed to get a Ph.D. in journalism from NYU while his wife, Nadia, earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from Columbia. Now he was
a professor at the University of New Orleans, while Nadia had just earned tenure at Loyola. They owned a graceful old cottage in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had made them refugees again for a while, but now they were back home and soon, Inshallah, the repairs on the house would finally be finished. Only, he was very much afraid he wouldn't be here to see that happen.

It had been four months now since the man he called “the Scorpion” had first come to him. Barid had never learned the man's real name. The man wore cowboy boots and a Stetson, and had a tattoo high on his bulging bicep—a tattoo of a scorpion superimposed on two crossed arrows with the words
DE OPPRESSO LIBER
beneath. Barid had looked it up on the Internet. It was a United States Special Forces tattoo.

At first the Scorpion had smiled and talked pleasantly, although even then the man made Barid nervous. He had known men like the Scorpion before, in Tehran. In Tehran, such men had been agents of the
SAVAK
, the Shah's old secret police. The SAVAK might not have worn Stetsons and cowboy boots, but at heart such men were all the same. Perhaps such men had believed in something, once. But soon they believed only in their own power.

Like the agents of the SAVAK, the Scorpion was well versed in the use of fear and intimidation to control men. He showed Barid pictures of his children: candid shots of Yasmina at school; of Faraj walking down the street; of brother and sister at play with their white bunny, Cupcake, in the backyard. The message was implicit:
Your children are not safe from me. I can get at them anytime, anywhere.

Then Cupcake disappeared and the Scorpion had shown Barid more photos—ghastly, sick images that haunted his dreams. This time the message was explicit:
Follow instructions or what was done to your children's bunny rabbit will be done to your children.

At first the Scorpion's orders were simple. Barid was to form a small group of Islamic students who would meet once a week to study the Koran. Jamaat Noor Allah, they were called: the Light of God. Some of the students were politically moderate, others more angry. Did that matter? Barid had no way to know.

Then he was told to assign certain journalism students to certain projects. Again he reluctantly complied. Surely no harm could come from that? But the requests soon became more ominous. He was given the funds to buy a derelict house in the Lower Ninth Ward. Then he was told to rent another house, this one in the Irish Channel in the unflooded part of the city near the river. Because of the way the Scorpion phrased his instructions, Barid knew there were more men than the Scorpion involved. “This is the house we want you to buy,” the Scorpion would say. Or, “Here are the Korans for the group's meetings. We want you to make certain each student has one.”

Barid never asked why he was being made to do all these things. At first he hoped that if he did as he was told and kept his nose out of it, the men might spare him. But eventually he'd had to admit that he was only fooling himself. He might not know what these men were doing, or why. But he knew too much to be allowed to live.

At one point he'd given some thought to going to the American authorities, but the memory of that Special
Forces tattoo always stopped him. He had no way of knowing whom the Scorpion worked for, and so he knew there was no one he could trust. Ever since 9/11, too many Americans treated Muslim citizens the way the Nazis had started treating Jews in 1930s Germany. If the Americans locked him up as a suspected “enemy combatant,” his family would be left completely vulnerable. And so for the sake of his children, he continued to cooperate. And he kept his mouth shut.

“Barid?”

He felt his wife's hand touch his shoulder, slide down his arm in a gentle caress. “You're doing it again. Watching them. Why?”

He turned to enfold her in his arms and draw her close so she couldn't see his face. He longed to tell her the truth, to say,
I watch them because there are evil men out there who have threatened to kill my children if I don't do what they say. And even though I have done all that they have asked, I know it won't be enough. I know that one day they will kill me, if for no other reason than to keep me silent. And so I watch my children because I know that someday, soon, I will never see them again.

Except of course he couldn't say any of that to Nadia, because when he was gone, his children would need their mother, and he couldn't do anything that might put her life in danger, too. So all he said was, “I watch them because it brings me peace.”

And even though he knew she didn't believe him, she said no more.

The Coliseum Street Guest House lay on a narrow, cobble-lined
block of Coliseum, across from Trinity Church and just half a block down from the official boundary of the Garden District. A narrow, two-story galleried building with thick brick pillars and transomed French doors, it had once served as the
garçonnière
and kitchen of a Creole plantation. The plantation house and its sprawling acres had long since disappeared, leaving the
garçonnière
looking like a bit of French Quarter architecture that had somehow strayed into a neighborhood of Yankee-built Greek Revival and Queen Anne–style mansions.

The current owners had grandiose plans for someday turning the ancient building into an upscale bed and breakfast. But at the moment the place was still seedy enough that they had no problem taking in a guest who chose to pay cash, carried no luggage, and had a streak of dirt across her nose.

Tobie was given a room on the second floor overlook
ing the deep backyard where a giant sycamore rubbed against the double hung window with every gust of wind. Dropping her messenger bag on the wicker chair that stood beside a chipped, white-painted iron bed frame with a sagging mattress, she caught sight of her reflection in an age-spotted mirror hanging above the empty fireplace and said out loud, “Oh, Jesus.”

Her eyes were wide and dilated, her face white, her hair hanging in damp, stringy clumps. The wet vines and shrubs she'd run through had left green stains across the front of her white T-shirt and skirt, and her calves and sandaled feet were flecked with drying mud. She looked like a wino just coming off a three-day binge.

The room had a compact bath carved from one corner near the fireplace. Stripping off her clothes, she turned on the shower and stood beneath it, letting the hot water cascade over her head and shoulders. The backs of her legs were still trembling, and it was a minute or two before she could set to work washing her hair with the bar of soap she found wrapped up beside the sink.

It was such a wonderfully mundane task, washing her hair, a touchstone of normalcy in a life careening suddenly, wildly, off track. For one moment she closed her mind to everything that had happened in the last hours, to the whirlwind of confusion and suffocating fears, and simply concentrated on the sensation of wet hair gliding through fingers and the familiar comfort of hot steam filling her lungs.

The room had an air-conditioning unit built high up in the wall, but she couldn't get it to work and finally just gave up and opened a window. The last thing she
wanted to do was call attention to herself by complaining about it. She washed her T-shirt, skirt, and under-clothes as best she could in the sink and spread them out near the open window. She wasn't sure the clothes would even dry in the moist, hot night air, but hotels like this one didn't furnish their guests with hair dryers.

Wearing nothing but a towel, she sank down on the edge of the bed and attacked the wet, snarled mess that was her hair. The sultry breeze pushing through the screen of the open window brought with it the pungent aroma of wet earth and sweet jasmine underlain by the subtle, pervasive hint of decay that was ever-present in New Orleans.

Once, when Tobie was seven or eight years old, her family had passed through New Orleans on their way to visit her mother's people in South Carolina. Like most of the Bennett-Guinness family's vacations, it had been a tumultuous two weeks of her stepfather barking orders and her mother softly pleading as Tobie and her brother and sister squabbled in the backseat. But the three days they'd stopped in New Orleans had been pure magic. She remembered hours spent in the dusty wonder of the Cabildo; hours more exploring the tangled batture that stretched between the levee and the Mississippi, with Hank yelling, “If you get bit by a snake, I'm going to make you pay the hospital bill.” Tobie smiled at the memory. Then her smile slipped. The urge to call Colorado, to hear her mother's soft drawl and her stepfather's flat, calm tones, was so overwhelming it brought the sting of tears to her eyes. But she knew better than to give in to the urge to call anyone close to her.

For hours, her focus had been on survival, the need
to escape, to find a safe refuge for the night. Now came time for reflection, and with it, anger. A man she'd both liked and respected had been brutally murdered. She'd been shot at and chased through a driving rainstorm by three men who claimed to work for her own government, whether they actually did or not. Because of them, she was alone in a cheap hotel room, without a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. She was worried about her cat. She had classes in the morning she didn't dare go to. She couldn't use her cell phone or her credit cards. She couldn't even talk to her own mother and stepfather.

Raising her head, Tobie pushed her hair out of her face, her hands clenching together behind her neck as her anger hardened slowly into determination.

That viewing session had obviously been a success
. What had she seen
?

She and Henry had done dozens of sessions—perhaps as many as a hundred or more, many of them with buildings as targets. How was she supposed to remember the details of one seemingly insignificant session?

She shoved away from the edge of the bed to stand beside the open window and draw the warm air deep into her lungs.
Calm down,
she told herself.
Think.

Henry had designed a special soundproofed room in the Annex, with heavy curtains at the windows, thick carpet on the floor, and a comfortable reclining chair. In the beginning, when he first introduced her to the phenomenon he called remote viewing, he used to have her listen to a series of tapes—soothing tones that were fed to her through earphones and were designed to help her sink down into what he called “the zone.” But it hadn't
taken her long to learn to reach the zone herself, once she understood what was required. She simply needed to put herself in a state of pure relaxation. When she was ready, Henry would start the remote viewing session.

At first they used live targets. Henry would have another student or associate drive to an unknown location at a preappointed time. He'd say to Tobie, “Elizabeth is at the target,” and she would close her eyes and focus on that person. Gently at first, like a feather brushing across the mind, the images and impressions of the target's location would come to her.

The first time Tobie tried it, she didn't expect it to work. She'd drawn pictures of a stone-walled, castlelike structure and the sun gleaming off huge sheets of looming glass. She was a good enough artist that her sketches were easily recognizable. When she finished, Henry called in the student and Tobie learned the target location: the tiny, castlelike Confederate Museum, now virtually engulfed by the modern Ogden Art Museum.

As she gained experience, the targets had grown more sophisticated. Sometimes the target was a photograph, double-wrapped in an opaque envelope that Henry laid on the table before him. Often the target was described simply by its geographical coordinates. And still the images would come to her, like a memory of something glimpsed in a dream.

She couldn't be sure but she thought the demonstration session had used geographical coordinates.

Closing her eyes, she let the humid breeze from the open window bathe her cheeks and lift the drying hair from her forehead as she fought to remember that one session.

It had begun like all the others. As always, the first impressions of the target had come in quick, fragmented flashes.
A tall building outlined against a blue, cloudless sky. Sunlight glinting on a glass and steel facade. A small patch of grass. The splash of a fountain. A pile of sand with orange cones.
She tried to recapture those images now, but they were too generic, too over-laid with memories of hundreds of such buildings seen over the years. It could have been any modern office building or hotel in any city.

At the time, Henry hadn't seemed particularly interested in the building itself. “That's good, Tobie,” he'd said. “Now go into the building.”

And so her focus had narrowed, honing in quickly on one particular office.
A large office richly furnished with an Oriental carpet and oxblood leather sofas. An American flag in a brass stand strategically placed behind a broad mahogany desk
. She remembered a file on the desk, a burgundy-colored file labeled
THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT
. For some reason she couldn't explain, the file had drawn her, so that she'd described it in great detail, lingering even when Henry tried to get her to move on.

He had told her that happened sometimes with remote viewing: the viewer would become obsessed with an object that was more interesting or seemed somehow more powerful, often to the point of veering away from the actual intended target to something more remarkable or fascinating nearby. However much Henry tried to get her to shift her focus, she hadn't been able to tear her attention away from that file.

The file had been closed, but that didn't make any
difference. She'd still been able to describe what it contained. In some of the early experiments Henry told her about, remote viewers were able to accurately describe small objects inside closed metal film cans.

She remembered seeing documents: pages of text along with maps and diagrams and photos. She'd sketched some of the images, including an old World War II plane.

One of the men who'd come to her house had said something about a plane, a vintage C47 Skytrooper.

But however hard she tried, she couldn't remember anything else in the file. Only the gold emblem embossed on the front of the folder stood out clear in her mind: a K enclosed in a circle, like a cattle brand from the old West.

Tobie opened her eyes, her lungs emptying on a slow, shaky exhalation. It was an emblem she'd seen constantly during her year in Iraq: the Circle K of Keefe Corporation. Keefe was all over the place in Iraq, supplying the military with everything from oil to food. One of their subsidiaries, Jones & Bearde, was building the huge permanent bases the United States was putting in there. Another subsidiary, Meyer Oil, had managed to secure a virtual monopoly over the Iraqi oil fields. Their contracts with the Defense Department were said to be worth tens of billions of dollars. She thought there'd been some kind of stink about it at the time the contracts were renewed. She couldn't remember exactly what it was about.

But Gunner Eriksson would know.