The Archangel Project

by C. S. Graham

  “Holy shit,” said Jax.

  Tobie yanked the Glock out of her ruined bag and gripped the stock in both hands, ready to squeeze off another round if she needed to. She didn’t. The men were dead.

  Jax wiped the back of one hand across his sweat-dampened forehead. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, although she wasn’t. She swallowed, breathing hard through her nostrils, her grip on the automatic so tight she realized her hands were starting to ache.

  “How’d you think you were going to get that gun through the museum’s security check?”

  “I forgot I had it,” she said, her voice cracking.

  He put his strong hand over hers, loosening her grip. “Here. Give it to me.”

  She let him take the gun.

  He wiped it down, which she would never have had the presence of mind to do. Then he tossed it into one of the construction Dumpsters and put a gentle hand on her arm. “Our fifteen minutes just narrowed down to five.”

  67

  A crowd of latecomers still clogged the entrance to the museum. Tobie clenched her hand over the scorched hole in the front of her bag and hoped no one noticed the blood splatters on her arm and the skirt of her dress.

  “Keep your head down,” said Jax, leaning in close to her. “And whatever you do, don’t turn around. Ever meet an NOPD homicide cop named Ahearn? Small, sandy hair, invisible eyelashes?”

  The taste of copper pennies was back in Tobie’s mouth. She was careful not to look around. “No. Why?”

  “Because he’s standing over there beside one of the uniforms at the barricades. I think he’s made us.”

  “What do we do?”

  One of the men guarding the doors said, “Excuse me, miss. You need to put your bag on the X-ray machine and move through the metal detector.”

  “Sorry,” said Tobie. As she stepped toward the metal detector, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder and saw him: a plainclothes detective with sandy hair pushing purposefully through the crowd. “Shit,” she whispered.

  Jax grabbed her arm, pulling her up the stairs into the museum’s huge main entrance hall.

  It was a cavernous space that soared some four stories high. The main front wall was glass, but the rest of the structure was concrete and steel. Gray walls, gray ceiling, gray floors. The only color came from a row of allies’ flags ranged along a shallow second story balcony at the rear and the three green Army vehicles parked in front of the windowed wall: a Sherman tank, a half-track, and what she now realized was an old amphibious jeep. She could see its anchor, still incongruously fastened near the rear.

  Jax touched her arm. “There’s your Skytrooper.”

  Tobie’s head fell back. She found herself staring up at a huge C47. The last time she’d been here, not too long after she first moved to New Orleans, two small, single-engine planes were suspended by heavy cables from the ceiling of the museum’s lofty main hall: a British Spitfire fighter and an old naval torpedo bomber called the Avenger.

  The Spitfire was still there, in the far corner. But the Avenger had been replaced by a much larger C47. It hovered high over the center of the warehouse-like space, a lumbering transport with a white underbelly and rows of dark windows nearly lost in the dull sheen of its fuselage.

  “Oh, God,” she said, her gaze fixing on the encircled star that was the emblem of the old Army Air Corps. “That’s it. They must have hidden the—”

  “Don’t say it,” he warned her.

  She lowered her voice. “They must have hidden the package in the plane when the museum made the switch.”

  “The problem is, how are they going to detonate it?”

  Tobie scanned the laughing, chattering throng, their voices melding together into a dull roar. Clusters of men in suits and women in silken dresses balanced wine-glasses while selecting hors d’oeuvres from the trays of passing waiters. A wizened little man in a wheelchair sat looking out at nothing in particular, a proud grin on his face, the Medal of Honor on its blue ribbon around his neck nestling next to rows of other medals pinned to the chest of his faded uniform. Beyond him, Tobie could see the mayor’s bald chocolate head thrown back as he laughed at something.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Two minutes after seven. Beckham is already here. See him? By the podium.”

  Tobie followed his nod. A podium had been set up between the museum’s two hulking Higgins boats.

  “Every minute we stay here,” said Jax, leaning in close to her, “brings us that much closer to dying.”

  She looked up at him. His voice was calm, but she could see the sweat glistening on his upper lip, see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “What would happen if we yelled fire? Wouldn’t that at least clear the place out?”

  “No. We’d be tackled in an instant and hustled out of here.”

  “Then you leave,” she said, frantically scanning the crowded hall. “There’s no point in you staying.”

  “Right. I’ll just clear out and let you and all these other people get blown to pieces.”

  She saw his eyes suddenly narrow. “What? What is it?”

  She followed his gaze to where a young man with dark hair and a hawklike nose stood off to one side. He was lugging a huge video camera and had a press pass around his neck. What was it Jax had told her about the guy who owned the Charbonnet house? He was a UNO professor, wasn’t he? A journalism professor.

  “That’s one of the guys in the visa photos Matt e-mailed me,” said Jax. “He’s Iranian.”

  As they watched, the Iranian raised the Canon camcorder. It was big and black, designed to take digital videos on tape. He panned slowly over the crowd, then swung to point it directly at the vintage airplane looming over them.

  “Grab him!” yelled Jax, surging forward. “There’s a bomb!”

  “No, wait!” Tobie knew Jax had taken one look at that long black lens and remembered the cylinders she’d sketched during the remote viewing session. But it was all wrong. “That’s not it!” she shouted. But Jax had already lunged.

  Women screamed, their colorful skirts swirling as they scrambled out of the way. Jax knocked into a young waitress with a platter of shrimp that flew into the air, the waitress crashing back into a guy with a tray of drinks.

  The young Iranian turned to stare, his green eyes wide with confusion, not understanding until the last minute that the guy in the khakis and the polo shirt was coming at him.

  Jax slammed into him, bowling the kid over, the camcorder flying out of his hands to land with a shattering smack on the hard concrete floor.

  Suddenly, something like a dozen guns erupted from beneath suit jackets and out of little purses, the snick of their hammers being drawn back loud in the hushed silence. “Get down, you son of a bitch,” yelled a Secret Service agent with a big .357 Sig he stuck in Jax’s ear. “Do it! Do it! On your face! Arms out to the side! Make a move and I blow your brains out!”

  Jax lay facedown on the concrete, his arms spread-eagled, a Secret Service agent’s foot in the small of his back and a dozen guns pointed at his head. “The camera,” he said. “It’s the triggering mechanism for a bomb.”

  One of the agents—a hulking guy with a blond crew cut—leaned over to pick up the Canon. “Doesn’t look like a bomb to me.”

  “No, you don’t understand…” Jax began.

  But Tobie was looking beyond him, at the spotlights mounted on the wall behind him. Big, black cylinders.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  She swung around. The lights were everywhere, mounted high on the walls and on the exposed steel girders. Heart pounding wildly, she let her head fall back.

  The hall had been built with a semicircular observation platform that jutted out into the air from the third floor balcony. It stood just about level with the Skytrooper hanging suspended from the center of the hall’s ceiling. Two flights of concrete and steel stairs climbed toward it, wrapping around the elevator shaft.

  Tobie stare
d at the platform’s familiar gray metal railings. Whoever took the photograph of the Skytrooper in the Archangel Project file had been standing on that platform.

  She looked beyond the platform, to the rear wall where a row of three black spotlights hung suspended from a pole, the last one positioned so it pointed straight through the side window of the C47’s cockpit.

  She raced toward the steps, taking them two at a time, just as the sandy-haired detective burst through the knot of security at the front entrance and shouted, “That woman in the pink sundress—stop her!”

  68

  Tobie sprinted up the stairs, her breath sawing in and out with terror and a surging rush of adrenaline. She hit the first floor balcony, nearly stumbling as her knee buckled for a moment, then held.

  She was dodging the elevator shaft, headed for the second flight of stairs, when she spotted a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall near a restroom and some drinking fountains. A half-formed idea in her head, she swerved to yank open the small door and wrench out the canister. She was expecting it to set off an alarm. It didn’t.

  She turned back toward the second flight of stairs just as a man burst out the exit door ahead of her, a slim Latino with a pencil mustache. He came at her with his teeth barred. Clutching the fire extinguisher with both hands, she swung it at him. The end of the canister whacked against the side of his head. He stumbled back and landed on his rump. She dashed past him, up the second flight of stairs.

  Careening around the elevator shaft, she darted out onto the viewing platform, then stopped, her chest jerking wildly with her breathing. She’d thought she would be able to spray fire retardant foam onto the face of the light canister, but she saw now that it was mounted too high. She’d never hit it.

  She was aware of the sound of running feet, pounding up the stairs, slapping across the gallery. She spun around, her body pressing up against the railing as she frantically scrabbled with the extinguisher’s safety pin. Pointing the hose, she squeezed the handle, a sulfurous powder shooting out the nozzle in an arc that filled the air with an acrid smell as it slapped against the cockpit window.

  Rough hands grabbed her from behind, snatched her back from the railing, yanked the fire extinguisher from her hands. “Get down! Now!” someone screamed in her ear. They shoved her to her knees, the concrete scraping her bare skin.

  And then, in the sudden, breathless silence, she heard it: an audible click. A small red beam of light appeared on the yellow powder obscuring the window of the C47’s cockpit.

  “What the hell is that?” said the big black agent with his Sig shoved against the base of her skull.

  “It’s an infrared signal,” she said, sucking in a breath that shook her entire frame. “There’s a bomb in the Skytrooper.”

  69

  McLean, Virginia: 6 June, 8:30 P.M. Eastern time

  Adelaide Meyer sloshed a measure of Russian vodka into a glass and downed it in one long pull, her gaze on the fifty-inch plasma TV at the end of the room. The reports coming out of New Orleans were confused, the screen filled with flashing blue and red lights splashed across the World War II Museum’s towering glass and concrete facade.

  She didn’t exactly understand what had happened or why. All she knew was that the Vice President was still alive and Lance Palmer, who should have been reporting to her right now, was dead.

  She poured herself another drink. She wasn’t the kind of woman to panic. She sucked in a deep breath, inhaling alcohol fumes and what smelled suspiciously like her own body odor. She was sweating. She knocked back the second drink and zapped off the TV.

  Whatever the potential damage from this debacle, it could be contained. She was certain of that. With enough money and power, anything could be contained.

  She’d told Westlake that all the threads led back to her, but that wasn’t exactly true. There was still one slender thread that ran to Clark Westlake and from there to the President himself. Oh, not that Randolph had ever come out and exactly said what he wanted done. That’s not the way these things were handled in the Oval Office. He’d simply looked over at Westlake one frosty morning when they were doing their daily three mile run around the White House gardens and said, “The liberal press and the bleeding hearts on the Hill are becoming a serious threat to our agenda, Clark. Nine/eleven shut them up for a while, but they’re back at it again, and too many of the good people of this country are starting to listen to them. They don’t understand that America has a destiny. A destiny and a responsibility. Nine/eleven let this country go into Iraq and take care of Saddam, but without something similar, I’m afraid our plans for Iran are going to be derailed. I trust I make myself clear?”

  And Westlake had blinked and said, “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Adelaide turned toward her library, to the safe she’d had built into the wall behind her desk. “Call Lopez,” she told her maid, Maria. “I want the Learjet ready in an hour. I’ll be flying to Dallas tonight.”

  “Yes, Meez Meyer.”

  Adelaide punched in the combination and yanked open the safe door, her fist closing around the small memo recorder she kept there. It wasn’t enough to convict or impeach, but it could embarrass. And politicians didn’t like to be embarrassed.

  She shoved some papers into a soft-sided briefcase, but she didn’t need to pack. She had another house in Dallas. It was where she’d been born. She was going home.

  New Orleans: 7 June 2:00 A.M. Central time

  Lieutenant William P. Ahearn stared at the young woman who sat at the end of the interrogation table, her crossed arms hugging her chest. He and Trish had been grilling her for six hours now, and she was still telling them the same story. It was the biggest crock of bullshit he had ever heard anyone spin. They’d had time to look into her background in the last few hours, and what they found was not good. The girl was a real psycho case.

  “All right, Miss Guinness,” he said, pulling out the chair opposite her and sitting down. “Let’s try it again, shall we? Only, leave out the part about the crystal balls and Ouija boards, would you?”

  She fixed him with a hard brown stare he found unexpectedly intelligent and lucid. “You people own a computer? Get on Wikipedia and look up remote viewing.”

  Ahearn met Trish’s gaze.

  She pushed up from her chair and stretched. “I’ll go do it. I need a break anyway.”

  “And while you’re out there,” he called after her, “check and see how Bullock is doing with the smartass. Last I heard, he was still claiming to be a CIA agent.”

  “He is a CIA agent,” said Guinness calmly.

  Ahearn glanced over at her. “Right. At the moment, we’re still trying to figure out what the asshole’s real name is.”

  70

  Every morning of his life, T. J. Beckham rose at 5:00 A.M. He spent twenty minutes doing the series of push-ups and sit-ups they’d taught him in the Army when he was still a green kid from the hills of Kentucky. He shaved and showered, and then he liked to sit down to breakfast, usually orange juice, oatmeal, and blueberries, although on special occasions he allowed himself to splurge.

  This was a special occasion. Besides, he was expecting company.

  “They’re here, sir,” said one of his aides.

  Beckham set aside his morning briefing papers and pushed to his feet. “Show them in, then leave us. All of you.”

  The young woman looked tired and apprehensive. Jax Alexander just looked tired.

  “I understand I owe you my life,” said Beckham. “Simply saying thank-you sounds so inadequate, but, well…thank you. I’m sorry if you spent an uncomfortable night in the local lockup. It took us longer than it should have to figure out what was going on.”

  “At least they drew the line at pulling out our fingernails,” said Alexander.

  “There was a time I might have laughed at that statement, Mr. Alexander. Not these days.” He held out his hand toward a nearby cloth-covered table spread with domed silver serving plates and glistening pitcher
s of juice and milk. “Please join me. I don’t know if they told you or not, but you were right. There were several pounds of plastic explosives in the cockpit of the C47, very carefully sealed and sanitized, and probably placed there months ago, which is why the security sweep didn’t pick it up. I’m told the chemical signature they look for would have dissipated by now. However, I’m afraid some of the other information you gave us proved to be less accurate. There were no bodies in the street around the corner from the museum.”

  Miss Guinness looked up from scooting in her chair but said nothing.

  “Please help yourself,” said Beckham, handing her a plate of toast. He turned to Mr. Alexander. “You might be interested to know that the young gentleman with the camera you tackled—a Mr. Tourak Rahmadad—claims to have been ignorant of any bomb. It seems he’s a journalism student and was there simply taking video footage for a documentary. It was his first such assignment, and I gather he was rather nervous. He admits to having been a member of something called Jamaat Noor Allah, but he claims their sole purpose was to study the Koran. Interestingly enough, his fingerprints were found on a Koran in Miss Guinness’s bag.”

  “Interesting,” said Mr. Alexander, giving nothing away.

  “There was some talk of sending him down to Gitmo,” Beckham continued smoothly, “but I’ve intervened. He’ll be deported. It’ll wreak havoc with his education, but at least he’s alive. According to Matt von Moltke—you know Mr. von Moltke, I understand—his sole role in all this was probably to provide a dead Iranian at the scene of the explosion.”

  “What about the Iranian professor?” asked Alexander, helping himself to eggs. “Is he still missing?”

  “Dr. Barid Hafezi? I’m afraid so. We suspect he may also have fallen victim to a scheme to discredit his nation of origin.”

  “And his wife?”

  “Is being treated at one of the local hospitals. Unfortunately, she has no memory of how she came by her injuries.”