The Archangel Project (2 page)

New Orleans, Louisiana: 4 June, 5:40
P.M
. Central time

“At the end of our last session, we explored the possibility
that you might be setting extraordinarily high standards for yourself. Have you been thinking about that?”

October Guinness glanced at the psychiatrist seated on a gently worn leather chair beside the study's empty fireplace and laughed. “My sister's an electrical engineer making over a hundred thou a year, my brother has his own accounting firm, and I'm a college dropout. You're the only person I know who thinks I set unusually high standards for myself.”

Colonel F. Scott McClintock had thick silver hair and kindly gray eyes set deep in a tanned face scored with lines left by years of smiling and squinting into the sun. But at the moment, he was not smiling. Templing his fingers, he tapped them against his lips before saying, “You compare yourself to your brother and sister?”

“Why wouldn't I? Everyone else does.”

As soon as Tobie said it, she regretted it. It was exactly the kind of offhand remark McClintock picked up on. She watched him jot down a quick note, probably part of the growing itinerary for another session labeled “Family Issues” or something like that. After five months of coming here every other week, she was beginning to understand how the Colonel worked.

He was semiretired now, after nearly forty years as a clinical psychiatrist. Most of those years had been spent in the Army. He still worked with patients from the local VA hospital as a volunteer. Since Hurricane Katrina smashed the VA's facility on Perdido Street, he'd taken to seeing his few remaining patients here, in the study of his big old Victorian just off St. Charles.

“We haven't talked yet about the reason you dropped out of college,” he said in that soft voice of his. “Maybe now would be a good time to touch on it.”

Tobie shifted in her chair. “I don't want to talk about that.”

There was a pause. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, a subtle sign that he was disappointed. While Colonel McClintock analyzed October Guinness, Tobie in turn analyzed the Colonel and his methods. She figured it was only fair.

“All right,” he said. “Do you want to talk about why you joined the Navy?”

“That's easy. My stepdad told me that if I dropped out of college, he wouldn't pay for me to go back. I joined the military so I'd be able to get the GI Bill, and I chose the Navy because I didn't think they'd send me to Iraq.”

It was the truth—as far as it went. But it also avoided
several key issues, including the fact that her real father, Patrick Guinness, had been in the Navy when he died. But Tobie didn't see any reason to give the Colonel more fodder for his Family Issues session than he already had.

“You didn't want to go to Iraq?” said the Colonel.

“Are you kidding? The only people who actually want to go to Iraq are either seriously delusional or very, very scary individuals.”

“It didn't occur to you that your skills as a linguist might be found useful?”

Tobie laughed. As an expat's brat growing up around the world, she'd been fluent in Arabic by the age of eight. “Yeah. But I thought they'd assign me to the Pentagon, or to some nice safe ship parked out in the Persian Gulf. I didn't expect them to send me to Baghdad.”

Sometimes she wondered what her life would be like if she'd been born and raised in one place rather than being yanked around the world by her parents. Any kid who grows up in Qatar and Frankfurt, Paris and Jakarta, is inevitably going to be strange—even when all their sensory input is firmly planted in the here and now.

But Tobie had spent her childhood bringing home report cards with teachers' notes that read, “October spends far too much of her time in class daydreaming…” Every year, her mother would sigh and get the same worried, baffled expression on her face. Meredith Guinness-Bennett's two oldest children were studious, hardworking,
normal
. But Tobie, by far the youngest, was always a problem, drawing strange pictures when she should have been studying, and running with the
local kids rather than hanging out with the other expats' children. They were habits that left her with a passable drawing ability and a knack for picking up languages. But while her sister had been student body president and her brother captain of the football team, Tobie never quite fit in anywhere, even though she'd learned early to hide the things she saw, the things she knew.

She'd spent the first twenty years of her life trying very, very hard to convince herself it was all imagination, coincidence. But two experiences had ripped through that protective cloak of denial. Henry Youngblood called them “spontaneous remote viewing experiences,” but Tobie hadn't known what they were at the time. The first was so traumatic that she'd dropped out of college. The second, in Iraq, nearly got her killed and helped earn her a psycho discharge.

She realized the Colonel was watching her closely. “Did you like the military, Tobie?”

“No,” she said baldly, and saw a gleam of amusement light up his eyes.

“And why was that?”

“I'm a lousy shot, I can't run for shit, and I have trouble with authority. Or at least, that's what the shrink in Wiesbaden told me. I don't like to take orders.”

Colonel McClintock shifted his papers but said nothing. Tobie figured the report from the shrink in Wiesbaden was probably somewhere in those papers. The Wiesbaden report, and a lot of others. When you get a psychiatric discharge from the military, the process generates a slew of reports.

“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” they'd called it. But October knew even that label had provoked dissension.

According to one psychiatrist at Bethesda, October Guinness was certifiably nuts and probably had been even before they'd made the mistake of letting her into the U.S. Navy.

“Do you enjoy your work with Dr. Youngblood?” asked the Colonel, surprising her by the shift in direction.

She relaxed a little. The Colonel was one of the few people with whom Tobie could discuss Youngblood's project. The other military psychologists she'd dealt with had all looked at her file and labeled her crazy. But McClintock had tapped his templed fingers against his lips and asked her questions about her daydreams as a child. He talked to her about what she'd seen in Iraq and how she'd seen it. Then he'd handed her a thick declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document called
Training Manual for Remote Viewing
and phoned his friend Dr. Youngblood at Tulane.

“I enjoy it in some ways,” said Tobie. As a child, she'd eventually come to accept the idea that she was a bit weird. But between them, McClintock and Youngblood were working to convince her that she was neither weird nor crazy. She simply had a talent she could learn how to use—and control.

“In what ways don't you enjoy it?”

“I find it…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “…disturbing.”

“And why is that, Tobie?”

Their gazes met and held. He was no longer smiling, and neither was she. “You know why.”

Tulane University, New Orleans: 4 June 6:20
P.M
. Central time

Once upon a time, Dr. Henry Youngblood had been considered
a respected academic. Courted as a speaker at conferences, he'd been an easy favorite for grant money and was published regularly in all the right journals. Then he was sucked into a research program on remote viewing secretly funded by the United States government, and all that changed.

It had taken Henry a while to realize what his new interest was doing to his career. Scholarly journals started rejecting his articles. Colleagues snickered when the once esteemed Dr. Youngblood walked into a room. It was a career-wrecker, this kind of research. Not because of the involvement of the government—which was unknown—but because of the nature of the research itself. Yet Henry couldn't let it go. Even when he had to dig into his own pocket to continue
financing his experiments. Even when the demands of operating without support kept him working in his office night after night, as he was now.

Casting a quick glance at the clock, he swiveled his chair toward his desk and flipped on his computer. The monitor stayed blank except for a bright yellow message that blinked out at him.
WARNING! WARNING
!
Unauthorized access to files detected
.

Henry huffed a short laugh. The warning system was the university's, not his. As far as he was concerned, the new hacker-protection program was just one more thing that could go wrong—and frequently did. He was a research psychologist, for Christ's sake, not a nuclear physicist. Why would anyone want to hack into his files?

Still smiling faintly, he typed in the password to clear the warning message and hit
E
nter
.
The message kept blinking.

His amusement sliding into annoyance, Henry glanced again at the clock. He was supposed to be meeting Elizabeth for dinner down in the Quarter at eight. Elizabeth Vu was thirty-nine years old, attractive, bright, and single; Henry was forty-eight, divorced for six long, lonely years, and carrying around a gut that spoke of an expanding love affair with New Orleans food. He was so preoccupied with his research that he rarely remembered he was supposed to have something called a life. He needed to get this data entered into the files before he quit for the night, but women like Elizabeth didn't come into Henry's orbit very often. The last thing he had time for was computer problems.

Rapidly pecking at the keyboard with two pointed
fingers, Henry punched in the password again. Then he paused and lifted his head when he heard the street door below open and close.

Tulane's psych department had relegated Henry to an office in the Psychology Research Annex, which was what they called the old two-story nineteenth-century white frame house on Freret Street that handled the department's overflow. The house had never been renovated to suit its new function, so what were once a dining room, parlors, and bedrooms had simply been pressed into service as offices and lab space. The place had been in bad shape even before Katrina; now it was a virtual death trap to anyone with mold allergies.

Being sent to the Annex was considered a state of exile: punishment for his determined pursuit of a project most academics considered absurd if not downright unscientific. But the Annex suited Henry just fine. He wasn't particularly troubled by mold. His office had once been a large corner bedroom at the back of the house, so it had the kind of nice architectural touches—like double hung windows and high ceilings and hardwood floors—that he loved about old New Orleans houses. True, the air conditioner was broken and the ceiling still showed an ugly brown water stain left from when Katrina took off most of the shingles on the roof. But he'd managed to scrounge up enough funds to have one of the unused rooms down the hall soundproofed for his research and training sessions. And because the Annex was on the edge of campus, people tended to leave him alone. Most of those with offices there were graduate students. The place was usually deserted by now.

Cocking his head, Henry listened to the footsteps coming up the uncarpeted stairs. Two men, or maybe three, he thought as the old wooden floorboards creaked. He glanced out the open side window to the driveway below. It was empty except for his ten-year-old Miata.

Henry sucked in a quick breath of hot air scented with jasmine and sun-baked asphalt. He'd been working in the field of parapsychology for almost twenty years, and never once in all that time had he himself experienced so much as a whisper of premonition, a hint of anything he might have termed extrasensory perception. Until now.

His heart hammering painfully in his chest, Henry turned toward the door. He'd pushed halfway up from his desk chair when a man's figure filled the open doorway.

The man paused, his pale blue eyes narrowing as the light from the overhead fluorescent fixture fell on the even, familiar features of his face. The two men behind him also hesitated. One was big and dark; the other more leanly muscled, with a pair of silver-rimmed glasses that lent an air of scholarly distinction to an otherwise military bearing.

“Lance.” Awash in a giddy wave of relief that left him feeling vaguely silly, Henry sank back into his chair. “This is a surprise.”

“Hey, Henry,” said Lance Palmer, and smiled.

“Let me introduce you to my associates,” said Palmer, one
arm swinging around to indicate the men behind him. “Michael Hadley and Sal Lopez.”

Henry returned the men's nods. He'd seen enough Navy SEALs and Army Rangers while working on government contracts out at Stanford to recognize the type immediately, with their tight jaws and fixed expressions and alert postures. The organization Lance Palmer worked for was full of such men. It never occurred to Henry to question why these two men were here, now.

“My boss was impressed with the results of your little demonstration,” said Palmer, while Henry hurried to clear stacks of papers and books from the office's scattered, mismatched chairs. “Very impressed indeed.”

Henry turned with a pile of books in his arms, his pulse thrumming with anticipation and hope. “It was accurate, was it?”

“Uncannily so. So accurate, in fact, I had a hard time
convincing my boss you hadn't found some way to fake the results.” Both men laughed. It was a suspicion Henry had dealt with time and again when he'd been working on the Grill Flame Project for the Army.

“So are they interested?” asked Henry, trying hard to sound casual but not succeeding.

“The suits are drawing up the contracts even as we speak.”

Henry shoved the books he'd been holding onto the top of the nearest filing cabinet, then just stood there, grinning like an idiot. Wait until Elizabeth and Tobie heard this!

“Where'd you find this remote viewer, anyway?” Palmer asked.

Henry felt his grin grow wider. “She's incredible, isn't she? A colleague of mine recommended her. She's the best viewer I've ever studied.”

Palmer nodded. “Who is she, exactly?”

Henry gave a nervous laugh. From somewhere, un-bidden, came a shadow of his earlier unease. “The identities of viewers are always kept secret. You know that, Lance.”

Palmer leaned forward in his seat. He was no longer smiling. “But surely you can tell us now? After all, we're going to be funding this project.”

Across the room, Sal Lopez sat with his hands loose at his sides, while Michael Hadley had taken up a position near the door. Neither man looked directly at Henry.

Henry had no illusions about the nature of the organization Lance Palmer now worked for. From the open window came the sound of the hot breeze shifting
the leaves of a nearby oak and the blaring of a ship's horn from out on the Mississippi. Henry was suddenly, intensely aware of the stillness of the evening around them, of his own relative weakness compared to the strength and training of the three men ranged about his office. And he felt it again, that whisper of warning that spoke from across the eons. This time he listened.

He gave a shaky laugh. “I guess you're right.” He turned toward the door. “Some of the things she's done are amazing. Let me get her file so I can show you. I'll be right back.”

Henry hurried down the darkened hallway, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the old empty house. A slick layer of cold sweat lined his face, trickled down between his shoulder blades. He threw a wistful glance at the training room, with its reinforced walls and heavy, dead-bolted door. But the room was kept locked and he'd left the keys lying next to his computer. He thought about making a break down the stairs, then realized they'd hear and be after him in a minute.

His breath coming hot and fast in his throat, Henry ducked into one of the empty offices. He eased the door closed behind him, his cell phone already flipped open in his shaky hand.

His fingers were clumsy. He wasted precious seconds searching through the menu for Tobie's number. More time waiting for the call to go through. He kept his terrified gaze fixed on the panels of the closed door. His ears strained to catch the least hint of movement from the hall.

The phone began to ring.

“Come on, Tobie,” he whispered as the it rang for the second, then the third time. “Answer.”

It was possible he was wrong, of course. Maybe he was overreacting to the point of foolishness. He could deal with the embarrassment if it came to that. But if he were right—

A computer-generated voice said, “You have reached the mailbox of…
October Guinness
. At the tone, please record your message—”

“Damn,” he swore, hitting the appropriate key and waiting for the requisite beep. “Come on.” It finally sounded, high-pitched and long…

Just as a board creaked out in the hall.