The Archangel Project (19 page)

Just to the west of New Orleans and its suburbs of Metairie
and Kenner lay a tract of uninhabited bayous and swamps known as the Bonnet Carré spillway. A bowl-shaped expanse that stretched from the Mississippi to the lake, the spillway served as a safety valve when the river reached flood stage. Locals knew it as a great place to fish and hunt and trap crabs. The area's less savory inhabitants knew it as the perfect spot to dump bodies.

Paul Fitzgerald turned his pickup off onto a narrow rutted track that wound down through ancient cedars and water oaks to a half-forgotten dirt boat launch. The pickup had been bought secondhand from a dealer out on Airline Highway who knew better than to ask questions. In a few days it would be found, torched, on the side of the road in some abandoned neighborhood in New Orleans East. No one would think anything about it.

Backing the pickup down to the water's edge, Fitzgerald opened his door to a thick, hot night scented with
the fecund smell of wet earth and green growing things. He stood for a moment, his well-trained senses alive to all the subtle nuances of the marsh. He was alone.

He closed the door with a quiet snap, then went to launch the small aluminum skiff from the back of the pickup truck. The rattle of metal against metal sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness as he piled the chains in the bottom of the boat. He hesitated, listening to the slap of murky water against the bank, the hum of a car engine somewhere in the distance. It faded quickly into the night.

Wiping his sleeve across his damp forehead, he went back to the pickup for the Iranian's body and dumped that in the skiff, too. The man had served his purpose. All the carefully arranged pieces of incriminating evidence were in place. Now the time had come for him to disappear. After tomorrow night, the authorities would assume he had fled the country. They wouldn't think to look for him here, in the back swamps of Louisiana.

Dipping his paddle with the effortless grace of a born outdoorsman, Fitzgerald eased out into the middle of the channel. At the other end of the skiff, Barid Hafezi's sightless eyes stared open and wide at the starry night sky above.

Belmont, Virginia: 5 June 10:20
P.M
. Eastern time

Adelaide Meyer flashed her pass to the guards at the gates of Clark Westlake's sprawling country estate on the outskirts of Belmont and floored her Boxster up the
long, winding drive. Like the Randolphs, the Westlakes were old New England money. They'd grown rich—like the Randolphs—on the slave trade of the eighteenth century. They'd grown richer on the ruined lives of hundreds of thousands of exploited immigrant workers in the nineteenth century, then richer again thanks to some nasty deals with European factories using slave labor during World War II. There was plenty of mud there, if anyone cared to dig for it. But what was the point? No one would ever be able to get it to stick.

“Adelaide,” said Westlake, meeting her at the door. “I'm glad you're here.” He led the way to his library and barely waited until the door closed behind them before he exploded. “What the fuck are your boys doing down there? Car bombs, for Christ's sake? You told me these guys are good.”

“They're good.”

“Are they? We've been planning this thing for months, Adelaide. There's too much at stake here to have the whole thing come unraveled at the last minute.”

Adelaide tossed her Prada purse on the leather sofa and went to pour herself a drink from the wet bar. “It would all have been taken care of by now if you hadn't sent one of your field operatives down there to get in the way.”

Clark shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“Some turkey named Jax Alexander. He killed one of my men and now he's protecting the girl.” Adelaide knocked back the shot of neat vodka and poured another. She'd learned to drink on the oil rigs, working with roughnecks and roustabouts. She could drink almost everyone in Washington under the table, and had.

Westlake came to pour himself a brandy. “How do you know he's one of my men?”

“Because the people I have on this have contacts. And those contacts are telling them this Jax Alexander is a real loose cannon. You've got to get him out of there.”

“What are you suggesting? That I just head on over to Langley and order Chandler to pull this guy out? You don't think that's going to set off alarm bells someplace?”

“I don't care how you do it, Clark. Just get that guy out of New Orleans. I've spent a fortune setting this thing up. If it starts unraveling, all those threads are going to lead right back to me. Not you. Not your boss. Me. I did that so that you and your boss could keep your hands clean. But I should think the least you can do is avoid sabotaging me.”

“Give me a break, Adelaide. You're not doing this out of the goodness of your heart. You're doing it because it's a good investment. The contracts that are going to come out of this will make Iraq look like a boondoggle in a banana republic.”

Adelaide threw down another shot. “No one's going to get any contracts if this thing blows up in our faces.”

Clark took a sip of his own brandy and coughed. “I'll take care of the idiot from Langley. Just tell your guys to get this thing back on track and keep it there. We've got less than twenty-four hours.”

“So did it work?” Jax asked, pushing through the drunken
crowd of tourists and college students on Bourbon Street.

October turned toward him, a smile spilling across her tanned face as she waved a piece of paper through the air in triumph. “I got them.”

“I can't believe it.” It was true that hypnotism could unlock the secrets of memory, but it required specialized training to draw exact details from a subject's subconscious. When the CIA used the technique, its agents were always hypnotized before they went out into the field and given suggestions that primed them to remember everything they saw.

“Believe it,” she said. “Sister Simone used to be a hypnotherapist in Jersey City. She says she got tired of only dealing with people who wanted to quit smoking or lose weight, so she gave up her practice and moved down here two weeks before Katrina hit.”

“Great timing. I guess she forgot to read her own tea leaves.”

October let out her breath in a little
huh
. “She was good. She not only helped me remember the coordinates, but I came up with something else, too. An address: 1214 Charbonnet Street.”

“Where's that?”

“Charbonnet Street? It's here, in New Orleans. The Lower Ninth Ward.”

“So are the coordinates in New Orleans, too?”

“You tell me.” She handed him the paper with the coordinates. “You're CIA, right? Don't you guys all come with an On Star system or something?”

Jax blew out a long sigh. “Hang on,” he said, and punched Matt's number on his speed dial. “Hey,” he said when Matt picked up. “Me again.”

 

Ten minutes later they were sitting in Jax Alexander's rented Monte Carlo, parked near the old Jax Brewery, when the call from the guy named “Matt” came through.

Tobie watched Jax talk on the phone. He kept going, “Mm-hmm.” At one point he threw a sharp glance at her that made her go, “What?” But he just shook his head.

“The coordinates are in Dallas,” he told her, closing his phone. “So what's this address here in New Orleans got to do with anything?”

“I don't know. I don't even remember seeing it in the file.”

A group of drunken college kids staggered past, arms
around each other, voices raised in wild laughter. He watched them for a moment, then said: “Why don't you just do another one of your remote viewings and ‘see' it all again?”

She'd wondered how long it would be before he asked her that. “I did try. But remote viewing doesn't work that way. It's not like a card trick you can repeat over and over. If the controls aren't in place, it's too easy to simply tap into your imagination. There's no way to know what is real and what isn't.”

He turned his head to look at her, and she found herself wondering what he saw. If he saw her as crazy, too. “How do you ever know what's real and what's your imagination?” he asked.

“You don't. Which is why no remote viewer is ever one hundred percent accurate.”

“How accurate are you?”

“Henry said I averaged around eighty percent.”

“In other words, there's a one out of five chance that this Charbonnet address is just a figment of your imagination?”

“Yes.”

“I guess there's only one way to find out.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Let's go take a look at it.”

She stared at him. “Now? You want to go to the Lower Ninth Ward
now
? At nine-thirty at night? Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what it's like down there?”

“My friend at Langley tells me there's an APB out on you. That means you don't just need to worry about the bad guys, whoever they may be. You also need to
worry about the NOPD. They think you're involved in the death of one of their own. We need to find out what's going on here, and fast.” He threw the car into gear. “So how do I get to this Ninth Ward?”

 

Lying just downriver from the Quarter, the Lower Ninth Ward had once been a vibrant community of mainly African-American, working-class homeowners. Now, since Katrina, it was a virtual ghost town. There were no trees. No cars that hadn't soaked in filthy brown water for weeks. No people. Some of the homes here had already been bulldozed; a very few of them were being renovated. Most were just empty husks, their yards overgrown, their windows boarded up or left as gaping holes with ragged dirty curtains that blew in the breeze like something out of a B-grade post-Apocalyptic film.

“The street signs are all gone,” said Jax, driving slowly up St. Claude. He had his window down, the air rushing in warm and moist and faintly fetid. Not only were the street signs gone, but so were most of the streetlights and stoplights. No one in their right mind came down here after nightfall.

“I think Charbonnet Street is up there,” Tobie told him. “Second on your left.”

They turned down a broken street of dark, empty houses and weed-choked lots.

“That's it,” she said. “The two-story frame house on the left.” She put her finger against her window's glass as he drove right past the house. “Why didn't you stop?”

“Are you familiar with the Navaho culture?”

“No. Why?”

“The Navaho consider it rude to just pull up outside someone's house and go knock on their door. So when a Navaho goes to visit his acquaintance's hogan, he'll sit outside and wait for a while, to give the people inside a chance to get used to the idea of his being there. Basically to decide if they want to talk to him, or shoot him.”

She turned sideways in her seat to stare at him. “I don't get it. What do the Navaho have to do with the Ninth Ward?”

“I don't want to get shot.”

He crept around the corner, his gaze scanning the rows of empty houses.

“Why are you stopping here?” she asked when he suddenly braked.

He threw the car into reverse, backing into an empty driveway where a detached garage stood open to the night, its door long gone. He kept backing until the darkness of the garage swallowed them. “I don't think we want to leave the car anyplace visible. Not in a neighborhood as devastated as this one.” He handed her one of the flashlights they'd picked up from a convenience store at the edge of the Quarter. “Here. Take this.”

The click of the car door opening sounded unnaturally loud. Like most people in New Orleans, Tobie had periodically driven through the ruined neighborhoods of the city, looking for signs of progress that were pitifully slow in coming. “Misery tours” the locals called them. But she'd always stayed in her car. She'd never
gotten out and walked the streets, never realized how silent a city without people could be. There was no hum of electricity, no swish of passing cars, no dogs barking in the hot sticky night. Only an endless, oppressive silence.

He touched her arm, startling her. “You all right?”

She nodded.

They cut through backyards, climbing over the weathered branches of fallen oaks and downed fences, skirting piles of rotting mattresses and water-warped furniture and smashed crockery that gleamed white in the night.

She hadn't thought to count the houses on the block, but he obviously had. Crawling through what was left of an old wooden fence, they reached the broken back steps of the two-story frame house she'd seen from Charbonnet. The door gaped half open before them.

“It looks deserted,” he said. “You sure you have the right house?”

“It's what I wrote down.”

Reaching one hand behind his back, he pulled out his Beretta before pushing the door open wider. It creaked on rusty hinges, then stilled.

Tobie stared into the moon-washed interior. The first floor of the house had been gutted to the ceiling: plaster, doors, door frames—all were gone, exposing the timber studs so that they could see right through what had once been walls. Even the floorboards and carpet had been ripped up, exposing an uneven pine subfloor.

“Doesn't look like you could hide much in here,” he said, going to stand in the middle of what looked as if it had once been a kitchen.

One hand clutching the strap of her messenger bag against her side, Tobie walked over to peer through the doorway into an eerie, wall-less hall. “At least it shouldn't take us long to look around.”

Neither one of them saw the motion sensor hidden at the top of the door frame. The sensor was set up to do two things: activate the various microphones scattered around the house, and put in an automatic call to one of the men who'd set up the system.