The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  But Dallas was booming, flush with oil money and the benevolent hand of a federal government run by politicians always eager to please that big block of Texas voters. As the small jet dropped lower, the lights separated into wide boulevards, shopping malls, row after row of tidy houses.

  She swung her head to look at Jax. “Do you know what part of the city those coordinates were in?”

  “Irving,” he said, coming to buckle into the seat opposite her. “But I want to check out Fitzgerald’s house first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re right about these coordinates, I have a feeling our appearance at this building of yours is going to stir up the natives.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in remote viewing?”

  He grinned. “I don’t.”

  He rented a Chevy Trailblazer from a sleepy clerk who threw in a map of the city. “Here,” he said, handing Tobie the keys.

  “What? Not another phone call?”

  “No. There’s something I want to try.”

  He navigated her onto the freeway headed south, then took out Paul Fitzgerald’s phone and started flipping through the menus.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Home.” He hit the speed dial and listened as the call went through. On the fourth ring an answering machine picked up with a man’s voice that said curtly, “Leave a name and number after the tone.”

  “Nobody home,” said Jax, hitting End.

  “Maybe his wife’s in bed and just didn’t answer the phone.”

  “With hubby out of town? I don’t think so. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”

  It occurred to Tobie she hadn’t even thought to notice. “A lot of men don’t wear wedding rings,” she said. “Why would he have his home number programmed into his phone if there’s no one at home to answer it when he’s gone?”

  “The answering machine’s probably set up so that he can remotely access his messages.”

  “Oh,” she said, and shut up.

  “You want the next exit,” he warned her.

  She turned off into a subdivision of hulking stucco houses with tiny yards of neatly trimmed box hedges and flickering gaslights. The dawn was still just a pale hint of lightness on the distant flat horizon. “Mr. Fitzgerald seems to have been doing quite well for himself,” said Jax.

  “What do we do when we get to the house? Break in?”

  “We don’t need to break in. I have his keys, remember?”

  Paul Fitzgerald’s house stood at the end of a gently curving cul-de-sac. She pulled in close to the curb and got out. The night air felt surprisingly cool compared to New Orleans, without the suffocating, wet-blanket humidity of the Crescent City. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, but it sounded like the yappy complaint of something like a bichon frise or Chihuahua. People who lived in houses like these rarely kept big dogs that crapped on neatly manicured lawns and tracked mud onto white carpets and shed all over designer furniture.

  They walked up the short path to the front door. On the porch, Jax paused to flip open Fitzgerald’s cell and hit the speed dial for Home again. From the far side of the heavy leaded glass door came the peal of a phone, followed by the answering machine.

  He tucked the phone away and drew out a black zippered case from which he selected a pair of gloves and a small black device about the size of a box of matches. He held it up to the door.

  “What’s that thing for?” she asked.

  “It tells me if the door has an alarm system—” The box’s green light suddenly started blinking red as he neared the corner of the door casing. “Which it does.”

  As Tobie watched, he took out another small box. This time he stuck the gadget up against the wall and left it there.

  “And that?” she asked.

  “The sensor on the door is wireless. This jams the frequency so we can open the door without setting off the alarm.”

  He tried a couple of the keys on Fitzgerald’s ring in the door. The third one opened the lock.

  He pushed the door in about a foot, then stopped. Holding the alarm detector in his hand, he moved it slowly up and down just inside the door, his gaze trained on the device’s tiny LED. The green light stayed on.

  Jax grunted. “Cheap sonofabitch doesn’t have a motion detector. The only alarm is on the door.”

  Tobie cast a quick, nervous glance around. “Can we go in now?”

  The house had travertine floors and thick moldings and an entry hall that soared two full stories high. When Tobie asked, “What are we looking for?” her voice echoed.

  “Anything that catches our eye. You take the upstairs. I’ll start downstairs. And here—” He handed her another pair of gloves.

  She left him pulling out drawers in the living room, but most of them were empty. The house reminded her of a hotel—professionally decorated but impersonal, like a stage set. Or the home of a man who was rarely there.

  There were four bedrooms upstairs, each with its own en suite. On the bedside table of the master bedroom she found a silver framed photograph of two boys. They looked about eight or ten years old, and were grinning into the camera. The boys’ mother was nowhere to be seen.

  Unsettled, she set the photograph back on the table and went quickly through the drawers, then the closet. Nothing.

  She went back downstairs to find Jax Alexander dismantling the computer in the den.

  “It’s password protected,” he said, yanking out the hard drive. “We’ll have to take it with us.”

  “Where haven’t you checked?”

  “The kitchen.”

  The kitchen was all black granite and stainless steel industrial appliances that didn’t look as if they’d ever been used. She found a scattering of opened mail on the counter, including a bank statement with an eye-opening balance of $250,000. She stuck it in her bag.

  She was just turning back toward the den when her gaze fell on a book that lay at one end of the breakfast room’s oval oak table. It was a Koran, the intricate blue and yellow mosaic pattern of its cover terribly familiar. She picked it up and headed back toward the den.

  “Look what I found in the kitchen,” she said. “A Koran. It’s the same edition as the one from the Charbonnet Street house.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, look at this.” Jax pulled out a cardboard box from beneath the desk and flipped back the lid. Tobie found herself staring at stack after stack of Korans, with empty spaces where perhaps as many as a dozen copies had already been taken out.

  54

  “Why all the Korans?” asked Tobie as Jax pulled back onto the freeway and headed north. “What’s going on?”

  He glanced over at her. “Do you remember seeing any Korans in that vision of yours?”

  “It wasn’t a vision; it was a remote viewing session. But no, I don’t remember any Korans.”

  He drove the Trailblazer as if it were a sports car, weaving nimbly in and out of traffic. “I’m beginning to think that house in the Ninth Ward was a setup.”

  “A setup?” She swung her head to look at him.

  “That’s right. Everything we saw—the snips of wire, the splattered solder—all of it was put there to lead the observer to one inescapable conclusion: Islamic terrorists. Right down to the Koran.”

  “Why would someone set up a house to look like a bunch of Islamic terrorists had manufactured a bomb there?”

  “Presumably so it can be found after a bomb goes off.

  A bomb that may or may not have been built by a bunch of Islamic terrorists.”

  “You think that’s what this is all about? A terrorist attack? But…what could the Keefe Corporation have to do with something like that?”

  He turned off the freeway onto Irving Boulevard. “Maybe we’ll understand that a little better when we get to these coordinates of yours.”

  Tobie abruptly sat forward, her gaze on the soaring tower of glass and steel that rose before them. “That’s it. That’s the building I saw.” She s
tared at the wide granite steps, the fountain, the small garden edged by a low wall. The street in front of the building was half obstructed by rubble from a building being demolished halfway down the block.

  Jax pulled in next to the curb at the corner and killed the engine. In the pale light of early dawn, the city streets were eerily deserted. He thrust open the car door, and after a moment’s hesitation, Tobie followed. She realized she was shivering, from cold, from exhaustion, from fear.

  “Will the building be open this early?” she asked as they climbed the broad stone steps.

  “The main door will be.”

  They found the building directory mounted high on the wall opposite a bank of elevators. Tobie ran through the names, but nothing leaped out at her. “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Get the access card out of Fitzgerald’s wallet.”

  She dug the dead man’s wallet out of her messenger bag while he hit the elevator button. One set of doors near the end snapped open immediately.

  “We stop at every floor,” he told her, pressing the button for the second floor, “and see what we find.”

  At each of the first three floors they came to, the elevator doors slid open to reveal halls lined with office doors. But on the next floor they found themselves staring at a darkened lobby sealed off behind heavy glass doors. Beyond the lobby lay another set of glass doors leading to a corridor of offices. A black sign with bold brass letters above the reception area read: GLOBAL TACTICAL SOLUTIONS.

  “See that little box beside the first set of doors?” said Jax. “That’s an access card reader.”

  Tobie jerked her gaze away from the sign to a flat white panel with a steady round red light. “Why don’t I see any security cameras?”

  “They’re there. They’re just hidden. They could be in the air vents, or the smoke detectors, or just about anywhere.” The elevator doors started to slide shut, and he hit the button to hold them open. “I need you to stay in the elevator and keep it here. If you’re right about this place, we’re going to need to bail out of here in a hurry.”

  She put her hand on his arm, stopping him when he would have moved through the doors. “Should you even go out there? If there are cameras—”

  He gave a soft laugh. “They’ve already seen us. An outfit like this will have cameras mounted on the outside of the building. Probably even in the elevators.”

  “And this is supposed to reassure me?” she said, pressing her thumb on the button to keep the doors open.

  She watched him cross the reception area and hold Fitzgerald’s access card about an inch away from the remote reader. The steady light blinked from red to green. There was a loud click and the doors unlocked.

  “Shit,” he said, and ducked back in the elevator.

  In quick succession he hit the buttons for the fourth, third, second, and first floors.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “The surveillance cameras trained on that card reader feed somewhere—probably to a room in the basement where a very bored guard spends his life staring at a bank of monitors. When Fitzgerald’s card popped that lock, the system would have flashed Fitzgerald’s ID photo up on one of those screens for comparison. So whoever was looking at me through that security camera is, as we speak, on the phone with security saying, ‘We’ve got an intruder.’”

  The elevator doors popped open on the empty fourth floor corridor. He grabbed her hand and pulled her off. “Let’s go.”

  They could see the fire stairs at the other end of the hall. They raced toward them, yanked open the heavy door. Breathing in stale, concrete-scented air, they pelted down the steps. By the time they reached the third floor, Tobie’s knee was on fire, but she kept going, round and round, her hand slick on the banister, their clattering footfalls echoing up and down the enclosed stair shaft.

  As they reached the ground floor, he held a finger to his lips, then carefully pushed the heavy fire door open about six inches.

  From here, she could see the bank of elevators. Two uniformed guards with bulky black holsters on their belts stood in the corridor. Their gazes scanned up and down the line of doors. As Tobie watched, the elevator they’d sent down hit the ground floor and its doors flew open on the empty cage.

  Jax slapped the fire door open wide. “Now.”

  The fire stairs emptied into the lobby just to the left of the entrance. They were halfway out the front doors before a shout went up behind them.

  Skirting the fountain, they dashed across the narrow shrubbery and leaped the retaining wall. Sprinting across the sidewalk, Jax yanked the rental car’s key out of his pocket and hit the remote, popping the locks on the doors. Tobie jerked open the passenger door and practically fell into the Trailblazer. She barely got the door slammed before Jax hit the gas.

  They tore up the street, dodging orange construction cones and piles of sand. “Jesus. That was close,” she said, just seconds before a white Crown Victoria with darkly tinted windows exploded up out of the parking garage and bore down on them.

  55

  A second Crown Victoria tore up the ramp from the underground parking garage. “Shit,” said Jax, throwing a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “There’s two of them.”

  He sped up the street, the first cruiser hard on his ass, the second darting out into the lane beside them and moving up fast. At the first intersection, he spun a quick right, flooring the accelerator as he straightened the wheel, the rear end fishtailing. Beside him, October flung out a quick hand to steady herself.

  “Those are police interceptors,” he said, the Trailblazer’s engine racing as he tore up the street. “We’re never going to outrun them.”

  She craned around to look back. “They’re police?”

  “No. No lights and sirens. But these guys have the same cars police drive. Which means they’re fast.” He hung another quick right, forcing the second car to fall back behind the first.

  “So what do we do?” she asked. “We can’t keep going around the block.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  They were almost at the next intersection. Jax geared down rapidly from fourth to third, then down to second, the engine revving way up as he kept his foot off the brake.

  The cruiser behind him roared up on his back end. Jax geared down to first. Tobie watched his face harden.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Brace yourself.” Halfway around the next corner, he slammed on the brakes and threw the Trailblazer into reverse.

  “What the—”

  He floored the accelerator, sending the Trailblazer screaming backward. The heavy SUV slammed into the cruiser’s right front at an angle, crumpling the fender back into the wheel and setting off its air bags.

  Jax threw the car into first and floored it again, disengaging a nanosecond before the second cruiser plowed into the back of the first.

  “You all right?” he asked, throwing her a quick glance as he raced up the street.

  “Yeah.” She craned around to look behind them. “Oh, shit. Here comes the second guy.”

  Jax’s eyes darted toward the rearview mirror. The pileup had immobilized the first cruiser, but not the second. Tires squealing, air bags still deflating, it whipped around the crippled first car and tore after them.

  The light at the next corner was changing. Jax floored the accelerator, streaking through the intersection under a yellow light. The light turned red. The Crown Victoria barreled on through. An early morning commuter slammed on his brakes and went into a sideways skid, his horn blaring as the cruiser shot past.

  Jax narrowed his eyes against the rising sun spilling golden light through the canyons of tall buildings. He could see a green space up ahead on his right, a small park of grass and low shrubs some two blocks before the street he was on merged with another street at a Y intersection.

  He eased the SUV into the gutter, the right tires rubbing against the curb as he cut in close. There was a crosswalk with a handicap curb cut,
just past a four-story building of glass and steel, where the park began. “Hang on,” he yelled.

  October grabbed for the armrest. He jerked the wheel to the right, just enough to send his right front tire into the curb cut, then straightened out with his right wheels on the sidewalk, his left wheels in the gutter. The Trailblazer tilted wildly as he ran that way for some thirty feet. He wiped out two parking meters, the impact jarring the wheel under his grip. A cross-walk sign tumbled off the front hood to skitter across the street.

  She flinched. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to cut across the park. But if I turn straight into the curb it’ll flip the car.”

  “Uh…fire hydrant,” she gasped, one hand braced against the Trailblazer’s roof, the other still gripping the door’s armrest.

  “I see it.” By now he’d eased his left tires against the curb. The friction pulled the heavy car up so that they literally climbed the curb. He felt the left tires grab the sidewalk’s concrete and immediately spun the wheel to the right. The SUV skidded sideways, missing the fireplug with inches to spare.

  “Holy shit.”

  He tore across the green strip, the Trailblazer’s big tires ripping through soft earth and grass and smashing rosebushes. Careening through a line of low shrubs onto the far sidewalk, the Trailblazer rocked and bounced as it clattered down off the curb and onto the far street. He hit the gas, tires squealing as he spun the wheel to the right and tore back up the street.

  “What are they doing?” he asked. “Can you see?”

  She craned to look behind them. “They’re going up to the intersection. There’s no way they can follow you across the park in that car.”

  He made a quick left, then a right, then another left, weaving through the city streets, moderating his speed as the morning traffic increased and they left their pursuers far behind.