The Archangel Project (4 page)

Fire engines and police cars clogged the street, their flashing
blue and red lights reflecting off the water that pooled at Tobie's feet. She stood with her arms wrapped across her chest, her gaze fixed on the roaring inferno before her. Oh, God, Henry, she thought. Please tell me you weren't in there.

There were times when Tobie believed she probably deserved her psycho discharge. She still broke into a cold sweat when she heard the thump of a helicopter overhead, still awoke too often, screaming, in the middle of the night. And when Tulane's Psych Annex exploded in front of her, knocking her off her feet, for one hideous, heart-pounding moment, she'd actually thought she was back in Iraq.

When they sent Tobie to Iraq, they told her the linguist she was assigned to replace had been blown to pieces when his Humvee rolled over an IED. She always tried hard not to think about that when she went out into the field as an interpreter. She also tried not to
think about the fact that the officers she was assigned to accompany were prime targets—which made her a prime target, too.

But it didn't take her long to realize that in Iraq, she was never safe. At any moment a mortar round could come smashing into their compound. Snipers might lurk behind any rock or ruined wall. Ambush potentially awaited every convoy that ventured out of the Green Zone. Every person she passed in the souk might be a suicide bomber.

Yet alternating with those intense moments of terror stretched vast hours of tedious boredom. Most of her days were spent at a scruffy desk in an airless room where she translated endless reports and transcriptions of intercepted telephone or radio conversations.

Then, in early September, her unit buzzed with the anticipation of a major coup. Telephone intercepts suggested a large gathering in the western desert, and some of the names bantered around in the intercepts seemed to be on their watch list. Satellite photos showed images of tents and white pickup trucks. The intel people went nuts. They were convinced they'd stumbled on a huge terrorist gathering. Tobie wasn't so sure. But she was just a linguist, an interpreter, not an intelligence analyst.

It was one afternoon when Tobie was looking at some low-level Predator reconnaissance photos Lieutenant Costello had stuck up on the wall, that the images first came to her, like a daydream or a memory she held in her mind. Flashes of sights and sounds and smells that had nothing to do with the airless office where she spent her days
.

A laughing young woman braiding her hair. Gnarled hands kneading bread. A child spinning around, the gold coins on her ankle jangling as she danced before a Bedouin tent, its brown-striped camel hair sides stretched taut beneath the desert sky.

At first Tobie tried to ignore what she had “seen.” She pushed it to the back of her mind, told herself it was just her overactive imagination. A daydream. But she knew it wasn't. Once before, during her senior year in college, she had ignored the images her mind somehow plucked from the ether. As a result, her best friend had died. The guilt she still carried from her inaction that day had driven her to drop out of college and, ultimately, hide in the Navy. She didn't understand why or how these images came to her, but they were powerful enough that she finally went to see Lieutenant Costello.

“This encampment,” she said, standing nervously before his desk, “the one in the western desert you think is a terrorist gathering? It's not. It's just two tribes who've come together for a wedding. Those tents are full of women and children.”

The Lieutenant looked up from the papers spread across his desk. He was a Marine, with a rawboned face and a pronounced disdain for Naval personnel—especially female Naval personnel. “You got that out of some intercept, Guinness?”

Tobie felt her cheeks heat. “No. I saw it.”

His brows drew together in a frown. “Did we get some new photos?”

“No.”

“Then where did you see this, Guinness?”

“I just…” She hesitated. “Sometimes I just know these things.”

He stared at her for a long moment, his lips pressed together, not saying anything. Then he gave her a smile that wasn't really a smile at all. “You just ‘know' these things, do you? We've been watching this buildup for weeks, Guinness. This is what we do, and we're good at it. There's been no indication of any wedding. It's a gathering of insurgents, and it's huge. You think it's something else, you'd better come to me with some solid evidence. This is an intel unit. We don't operate on feelings.”

“But you're wrong. There are all these children—”

“That's the way these guys operate.” Lieutenant Costello stood up and assembled the papers on his desk. “They hide in with women and kids, and then cry when they get them blown to smithereens.”

“But—”

“There's no ‘buts' about this, Guinness. A combined air strike and ground assault has already been called in for 0400 tomorrow morning.” He hesitated, then added gruffly, “We've all been under a lot of strain here lately. Why don't you take the rest of the day off?”

He was being easy on her. She knew that. But she couldn't let it go. “If you let this happen, our forces will kill dozens and dozens of innocent women and children. They're—”

His jaw tightened. “Listen, Petty Officer—you're way out of line. I don't want to hear any more about this. Now just go to your quarters.”

Tobie went to her quarters—for half an hour. Then she grabbed her helmet and flak jacket and headed for
the helipad, where she talked her way onto a Blackhawk ferrying medical supplies out to forward headquarters. She wasn't sure what she could do to stop the assault once she got there, but she knew she had to do
something
. She couldn't just pace up and down in her quarters while innocent people were massacred.

The Blackhawk crew put her in touch with a couple of Marine medics who let her perch on the outside of their Humvee as they headed out across the stony desert in the cold calm of predawn. The attack was scheduled for 0400, but as the Marines approached their unit, they could hear sporadic gunfire in the distance.

“Sounds like they've already started boogying,” said the driver. “Our guys must have spooked someone.”

A familiar thunder vibrated the air around them. Tobie leaned down to stick her head through the Humvee's open window. “Hear that chopper?”

The Humvee crested a rise and the driver screamed, “Jesus Christ!”

A white Toyota sped up the hill toward them, dust billowing behind it into the night. Hot on its tail, a Kiowa helicopter materialized out of the dark sky, its whirling blades beating the crisp desert air, the insectlike spread of its landing gear and loaded pylons looming over them. Through the Toyota's grime-coated windows, Tobie caught a glimpse of a woman's covered head and half a dozen small, wide-eyed faces. Then the helicopter belched a missile and the Toyota exploded. Caught in the fireball, the Marine medics' Humvee flipped.

Tobie was thrown clear. She landed on her back, the impact driving the air from her chest. For what seemed an eternity all she could do was lay in a gasping agony,
surrounded by the broken, burned bodies of the Iraqi family who'd tried to run in the Toyota. The Marine medics were dead, too.

But the guys in the Kiowa Warrior weren't through yet.

Pivoting at the top of the hill, the helicopter swooped back toward the wreckage, its machine guns spitting fire. Frantically scrambling for protection behind the upturned Humvee, Tobie felt a round tear through her thigh and heard the bone snap. She was lucky it was just a glancing blow; a direct hit would probably have taken off her leg.

Then all hell broke loose as the full-scale attack on the encampment below began. Pinned down by her broken leg, Tobie could only watch, helpless, as the tents below burst into flames. Screaming women erupted into the night, to be mowed down by withering machine-gun fire. Rockets shrieked, their explosions punctuating the endless rattle from the helicopters that filled the sky. The last thing she remembered was the sight of a crying child silhouetted, alone, against the fire's light.

The next thing Tobie knew, she was on a stretcher. She was babbling to anyone who'd listen about the wedding and what she'd “seen,” until a nurse with a worried frown stuck a needle in her arm.

They flew her to Kuwait first, then to Germany. Whenever anyone asked her what in the hell she was doing out in the desert, she told them. A sad-eyed Air Force surgeon in Wiesbaden kindly suggested she might want to reconsider what she was saying, but Tobie refused to shut up. In the end, they gave her a psycho discharge.

She'd been lucky. Lieutenant Costello had tried to have her court-martialed.

 

“Excuse me, miss. You need to get back.”

The crackling roar of the fire still loud in her ears, Tobie turned to find a short, squat policewoman studying her through narrowed eyes.

“I'm October Guinness. I'm the one who called 911.”

The policewoman sniffed. She had peroxide hair and a broad, plain face prematurely hardened by overexposure to the ugly side of life. “Live around here, do you?”

“No. I was coming to see Dr. Youngblood.”

“He's the guy you reported was in the building when it blew?”

“That's right. Dr. Henry Youngblood. He's a professor of psychology.”

The policewoman fished a notebook out of her pocket. “And your name and address?” She wrote down the information, then said, “You his student?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

Tobie watched the policewoman's head come up and swore silently to herself. The tone of that last response had been all wrong and Tobie knew it. She didn't deal well with people in uniform—one of the many reasons she should never have gone into the military. “I work for him,” she said, giving a half smile.

The smile was not returned. “Were you supposed to work for him tonight?”

“No.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“He tried to call me about half an hour ago. I got the impression he was working late.”

The policewoman lowered her notebook and looked pained. “So you don't actually know for sure that he was in the building?”

“That's his red Miata there, in the driveway.” What was left of his Miata. Tobie stared at the blackened ruin of Youngblood's car and wondered how the policewoman would react to what she was planning to say next. “He left a strange message on my voice mail. Something about having made a mistake, and dangerous people. I thought he meant someone was threatening the funding for his research project, but now I wonder…”

The policewoman blinked. “Those were his exact words? ‘Dangerous people'?”

“Yes.”

The policewoman wrote it down. “You say this guy is a professor of psychology? Is he working on anything in particular?”

Tobie hesitated.
The giggle factor
, Youngblood called it. Tobie had learned to be careful about what she said about remote viewing and how she said it. “He was, um…He was looking into different forms of cognitive mental functioning. But I don't see how the project could have had anything to do with this.”

The policewoman flipped her notebook closed. “Right. We've got your name and address. If we need anything more, we'll be in touch. In the meantime, I suggest you get out of the way and let these men do their work.”

Tobie felt a pain pull across her chest. She drew in a
deep breath of smoke-tinged air to try to ease it. “But they're not even trying to rescue him. His office is in the back, on the left—”

“It'll be hours before anyone can get in to check and see if he really was here when the place blew. For all we know, this Dr. Youngblood of yours could be sitting in a coffee shop someplace sipping a latte.”

“But—”

The policewoman took an aggressive step forward, one hand hovering suggestively near her hip. “Look, miss. I don't want to have to tell you again. Now get back.”

Tobie clenched her jaw against an unwise response and swung away.

She walked across the street to Newcomb Boulevard, but she didn't go back to her car. Worried about Dr. Youngblood, frustrated by her inability to do anything, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the big brick bungalow on the corner until the lady who'd been hovering on the house's broad porch called her over.

Elegantly dressed in linen shorts and a silk blouse, the woman was excited and wanted someone to talk to. Tobie sat on the porch steps and let the woman rattle on about the rash of fires since Katrina and the continuing shortage of police. The flames from the fire felt hot against Tobie's face, but the damp chill from the bricks seeped up through the cotton of her skirt as she watched the Psych Annex burn.

Lance Palmer considered himself one of the good guys. As
a kid he'd been Luke Skywalker, battling the forces of evil with a plastic light saber. He'd charged into imaginary jungles as a war-painted Rambo, rescuing anyone who needed it and killing as many gooks as he could. Later he'd been a star running back on his high school's football team in Lawton, Oklahoma, and joined the ROTC at Oklahoma State. He'd signed up with the Army right after graduation.

Lance loved the Army. He'd made it into the Rangers, then Special Forces. He'd spent thirteen years doing the kind of things he'd dreamed of doing as a kid, fighting America's enemies from Nicaragua to Afghanistan and advising U.S. allies on how to handle dissidents and other lowlifes.

But as much as he loved the Army and the action, Lance had eventually grown discontented with the money. The Army provided its officers with a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, but he wanted more. He
wanted a Beamer and a stock portfolio, while his wife Jess hungered for a beach house in Florida and skiing vacations with the kids in Aspen. Luxuries beyond the reach of an Army major.

But luckily for him, modern American warfare was changing. More and more, the United States was coming to rely on what they called private security firms—no one ever used the word “mercenaries,” which was of course what they were. Some of the outfits the United States and Britain were sending to Iraq were full of crazy cowboys who'd as soon shoot a rag-head as look at him. But Global Tactical Solutions was a professional organization. Yeah, they signed up some South Africans, but they drew the line at hiring the Pinochet-trained Chileans that some of the other firms were sending into Iraq.

After just one year at GTS, Lance had been appointed head of their Special Operations. He was a troubleshooter, the guy who handled their sticky stuff. Basically, he was doing exactly the same kinds of things he'd done as a major in the Army, only now he was getting paid a whole lot better.

“Hey, look at this,” said Hadley. He was in the backseat, flipping through the stream of information coming in over their laptop as the Suburban headed toward the river. “Our girl was in the Navy. She's even an Iraq War vet.” He let out a low whistle. “We're talking psycho discharge.”

Lance twisted around in the seat. “Let me see that.”

He'd handpicked the two men working most closely with him on this assignment. They made a complimentary pair: a former Navy SEAL, Michael Hadley was
an expert on everything from computers and electronics to explosives, while Sal Lopez, an ex–Green Beret, was always handy to have around to do any necessary heavy lifting.

As Lance took the laptop from Hadley, Lopez turned down a narrow street crowded on both sides with lines of parked cars. He slapped the steering wheel with the flattened palm of his hand in frustration. “What the hell is going on around here?”

Looking up, Lance nodded toward the empty shell driveway of a darkened two-story on the corner of Patton and Nashville. “Just pull in there.”

Lopez rolled the Suburban to a stop and killed the engine.

They were parked across the street from October Guinness's house. Lance had spent enough time in New Orleans to recognize the style. Shotgun doubles, they called them. A kind of duplex built without halls, each side of the house had one room opening right behind the other so that if you fired a shotgun in the front door, the blast could pass out the backdoor without hitting anything. Or so Lance had heard.

“Doesn't look like she's home yet,” said Lopez. Both sides of the double lay dark and silent, the ornately turned wooden balustrades and colonnettes of the front gallery in deep shadow. “What's she do now that she's out of the Navy?”

Lance scrolled through the information. “She's a student. Tulane. Twenty-four. Single.” They had photos from her passport, her driver's license, her old military ID. Not a bad looking woman, if you liked the type. Dark blond hair. Brown eyes. A square chin. He flipped
through her Navy records and grunted. “Almost failed her PT twice. Can't run. Can't shoot. She was only in for two years.”

“And the psycho discharge?” said Lopez.

“Post-traumatic stress syndrome. Iraq. Looks like something weird happened out in the desert when she was wounded.” Lance glanced through her medical report, catching key phrases: “reported seeing visions…suffers from hallucinations…poor grasp of reality.” He wanted to laugh. From the sound of things, the girl had reacted badly to a spontaneous viewing experience. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, decided she was crazy and kicked her out.

“This is good,” said Lance. “We'll set the death up to look like a suicide.”

Lopez smiled. “She sounds easy.”

Lance grunted. He had no qualms about what he was about to do, just as he had no regrets about what he had already done tonight. The girl had seen enough to be dangerous if she—or someone else—put it all together and started asking questions. Collateral damage, that's what the military called civilian deaths. There was always collateral damage in a war. Regrettable, but necessary.

And they were at war. The President was always telling them that. Lance was simply doing what needed to be done to protect his country. He was fighting for freedom and democracy and to make the world a better place. Henry Youngblood and October Guinness had become threats not just to the security of this country but to the future of the world. They had to be eliminated. Quickly.

With the air conditioner off, the interior of the Suburban was already heating up. Lance slid down the window, his trained gaze studying the neighborhood.

The shotgun double had a small side yard, dark now beneath the heavy shadows of the spreading oaks that lined the street. Beyond that stood an old corner grocery store that someone had turned into a combination nursery and florist shop. Two other houses faced the small, narrow street on this block, both shotgun doubles with camel-back second floors. Only the house on the corner showed any lights.

“Who lives in the other half of our girl's double?” he asked.

“A guy by the name of King,” said Hadley, back on the computer. “Ambrose King. A musician. Works at some club down in the Quarter.”

“Which means he won't be home anytime soon.” Lance opened the door. “Hadley, you stay here. Lopez, come with me. Let's take a look around before our girl gets home.”

Silencing her was going to be a cakewalk, Lance thought as they crossed the darkening street. They just needed to make sure all knowledge of the results of her little session with Youngblood would die with her.