The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  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.”

  49

  “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 hou
ses 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.

  50

  His name was Michael Crowley, and when the call came through, he was at his computer in the back room of a rented shotgun in that part of New Orleans known as the Irish Channel. All he had to do was glance at the number on the phone and he knew they had trouble.

  He listened for a moment, then put in a call to Lance Palmer. “The Charbonnet Street house has been compromised. A man and a woman. They sound white.”

  “Fuck,” said Lance. “It’s Alexander and the girl. How the hell did they find the house?”

  Crowley could hear Palmer shouting to Hadley in the background, “Where’s Fitzgerald?” Hadley’s reply was muffled by the slamming of doors, the slap of running feet.

  Lance said, “He’s closer to the Ninth than we are, if he’s in Marigny. We’ll meet him at the house. Let’s go.”

  Crowley said, “You want me to head over there, too?”

  “Negative. Keep monitoring the microphone feed. You can relay it to us when we get to the house. I don’t care what it takes. I want those two dead.”

  The moonlight shining through the empty windows was bright enough that they didn’t need the flashlights until they reached the stairwell, where the walls were only gutted to about halfway up. Jax Alexander slipped his Beretta back into the waistband of his khakis and flicked on his flashlight, holding the fingers of one hand splayed over the glass so the light came out diffused and tinted oddly red by his flesh. Tobie, following him up the stairs, did the same.

  Nothing in the house seemed familiar to her, not even when they reached the second floor and found the walls there still intact. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. The first two bedrooms were empty. But in the third bedroom, the largest, they found a stained mattress thrown on the floor in the corner. There was a folding table, too, set up near the curtained window.

  Jax walked over to finger the heavy drape. “It’s a blackout curtain. Someone obviously wanted to make sure no one knew they were in here.”

  Tobie let her gaze rove over the litter of items on the table: a pair of wire cutters and a couple of screwdrivers, a coil of wire, and a few snips of stripped wire. A canvas bag lay on the floor, next to the empty blister pack from a card of nine-volt batteries and the discarded packaging from a couple of cheap, throwaway cell phones.

  “What’s this?” she asked, hunkering down to look at a scattering of silver splatters on the floor.

  “Someone’s been soldering in here.”

  Straightening, she was reaching for a book she’d spotted on the edge of the table when he said, “We need to back out of here fast.”

  She swung around to look at him. “Why? What is it?”

  “This place is a bomb factory. Did you touch anything?”

  Tobie felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. “The book,” she said, realizing she was still holding it.

  “Bring it.”

  “I don’t understand.” She shoved the book into her bag as they headed back toward the stairs. “How does this fit in with any—”

  He pressed a finger to her lips, silencing her as the distant creak of a board cut through the stillness of the night.

  Her gaze flew to meet his. There was someone downstairs.

  Rather than click off his flashlight, he carefully set it down on its face, reducing the light to a small, softly glowing ring. She did the same. Then, slipping the Beretta from its waistband holster again, he thrust out his left hand, his fingers splayed wide in a silent message. Stay here.

  She expected him to creep down the stairs. Instead, she watched, bemused, as he laid down on his stomach at the top of the stairs and began to inch down the steps head first, his elbows splayed wide so he could hold his Beretta at the ready.

  There hadn’t been another hint of movement from the first floor. She was beginning to wonder if they’d simply been spooked by the sound of the ruined house settling when she heard another creak, this time from the stairwell directly below.

  51

  Jax slithered head first down the steps. He could feel the rough floorboards snagging his shirt, scraping his bare arms.

  He had no way of knowing exactly who was downstairs. The last thing he wanted to do was get in a shootout with some Katrina-crazed homeowner, or maybe a cop. But then he saw the tall man at the base of the stairs, the shadow of his gun extended by the length of a suppressor, and Jax knew he wasn’t dealing with either a cop
or a homeowner.

  The light filtering in through the uncurtained ground floor windows glinted on something shiny in the man’s ear. Jax saw the gleam of a tiny blue LED and realized it was a Bluetooth earpiece. The guy was listening to a cell phone.

  Then one of the steps groaned beneath Jax’s weight.

  The man jerked, his gun coming up to fire. But the sight of Jax upside down on the stairs must have confused him because he hesitated for a split second. Jax squeezed off two rounds, one right after the other, his ears ringing with the percussion in the confined space. The unsuppressed explosions bracketed the other gun’s silenced pop.

  The man in the hall jerked once, twice, then dropped to his knees. Jax was about to fire again when the man pitched forward onto his face. It was only when Jax felt the sting in one of his legs that he realized the sonofabitch had hit him.

  Jax slithered the rest of the way down the stairs. Given the way he was hanging upside down, he figured it was easier than trying to get up. October Guinness came charging down the stairs behind him, a big Glock held in that professional grip she’d displayed on the cabin cruiser. She was so small and slim that he kept forgetting she was a vet who’d seen action in Iraq.

  “Is he dead?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  Jax held a finger to his lips in warning. Slipping the Bluetooth from the dead man’s ear, he listened to the frantic voice at the other end of the connection.

  “Christ! What the hell happened? Fitzgerald? Fitzgerald, talk to me. Lance says he’s a few minutes away. I heard shots but now the microphones aren’t picking up anything. Fitzgerald?”

  Moving quickly, Jax went through the dead man’s pockets, removing wallet, gun, keys. He found the guy’s cell phone, turned it off, and took that, too. That’s when he noticed the tattoo high on one of the guy’s arms: a scorpion superimposed over two crossed arrows.