The bank sloped steeply; the stones and dirt were loose, and he stumbled over something and lost his balance. Sanchez pitched forward, lost his grip on his water bottle, and landed hard on his hands and knees a foot behind Jessie, startling her. Her head turned and she didn’t see what Sanchez did, a water moccasin whipping toward her through the water. Sanchez scrambled to his feet, threw his arms around her, and pulled her out of the way seconds before the snake struck the spot where she’d been standing. He grabbed hold of her collar and they ran back up the hill.
At the top, Sanchez dropped to his knees and doubled over, panting as hard as she was. She nudged him with her nose, then licked his face and hands until he slung an arm around her neck and pressed his forehead to hers. “You scared the shit outta me, girl.”
She whined and pawed the ground.
“The run is over for the day, Jess.” He pushed to his feet and walked over to the edge of the canal, Jessie trotting along behind him. He could see his bottle down there near the water, the aluminum glinting in the light. The snake wasn’t in sight. “Stay, Jessie. Please. There’s still water in that bottle and we’ve got a two-mile walk back to the car. Stay.”
She sat down and didn’t move as Sanchez started down the bank again, anxiously scanning the ground and the canal for the snake. He wondered if it was the cause of his earlier unease. The bite of a water moccasin could be fatal if not treated immediately. Losing Jessie, a stray he’d found two days after his mother’s death, would definitely hurl him into an emotional tailspin, but he suspected it didn’t qualify as a radical turn in life. He decided the snake was a warning. But about what?
He snatched up the water bottle and hurried back up the bank, where Jessie waited, tail wagging. They shared the remainder of the water and headed back toward the car. During the walk, Sanchez obsessed about the possible significance of the close call with the snake. He obsessed about every enigma he encountered, his brain chewing away at it until he found an answer. His mother used to comment on it, Nicole kidded him about it. But he couldn’t help it. Some mysteries begged for answers.
The most obvious meaning was danger to someone he loved. Right now, his love life was a joke. The woman he’d been involved with during his first year of grad school at the University of Florida, the woman he’d thought he was going to marry, had walked out on him the same day his mother had died, February 13 of last year. He’d dated a few women since then, mostly women he met through his boss. But the moment they learned he was a remote viewer, they were only interested in getting readings from him. Sanchez invariably explained that he didn’t give personal psychic readings, that his ability didn’t work like that. But it didn’t matter. These women hounded him until he simply stopped calling.
Family? Just his sister, brother-in-law, and his father. Maybe the snake portended danger to one of them? Or to Jessie? None of that felt right.
If he interpreted the incident like a dream, then in Jungian psychology, his major and grad school study, a snake represented both fertility and power, healing, spiritual activities, and what was hidden in the unconscious. Given the nature of remote viewing, which dealt with everything that was hidden, he supposed the snake incident could point to danger through his work. But in the sixteen months Sanchez had worked for ISIS, he’d never encountered physical danger, only psychic risk.
A few months after he’d been hired, Bob Delaney, his boss and monitor, gave him a target that turned out to be on the international space station. Sanchez remembered peering out a window and seeing the sunlit Earth swirling below him, its oceans and land masses crisply visible. Vertigo gripped him and he bolted from the viewing, puking. Maybe the snake portended something like that.
And maybe not. He didn’t have a feel for this one way or another.
He and Jessie finally reached his lime-green VW convertible, the only car parked on the shoulder of a two-lane dirt road just outside town. He had bought it the day he landed the job at ISIS, and named her Gwen after Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he had fallen in love after seeing Sliding Doors. The movie remained one of his all-time favorites, a portrayal of the probabilities his work entailed, a place his old man referred to as voodoo land, as though it were one of the Disney worlds.
Sanchez drove Gwen fast across town, Jessie riding in the passenger seat, her head hanging out the window. He pulled up in front of an old concrete barracks where he had spent eight to ten hours a day for the last sixteen months. ISIS headquarters, three connected concrete barracks that looked like neglected postscripts of another age, had survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992 when it had slammed into Homestead with winds in excess of 175 miles per hour. What a perfect metaphor for ISIS, he thought, the ugly Stargate stepsister that initially scrambled for funding, validation, oxygen.
Stargate’s remnants had endured in a vastly different form and landed enough funding to pay eleven remote viewers and half a dozen monitors. Tighter protocols had been implemented and yet the information gleaned by individual viewers didn’t always have to be verified by other viewers. At ISIS, the process was less of a team effort than it had been at Stargate or its earlier incarnation, Grill Flame. Monitors still assisted the individual viewers during sessions, provided feedback when necessary, recorded and videotaped the sessions, and trained neophyte viewers. Five of the viewers, including Sanchez, were well versed in extended remote viewing—ERV—which entailed venturing deeply into a target site and staying there for long periods of time. As a result of these changes, ISIS had a higher success rate than Stargate ever did—nearly 90 percent.
Sanchez nosed his VW into a parking space, grabbed his pack, and whistled for Jessie. She trotted alongside him, her reddish-gold fur shining in the last of the light, and they headed toward the building. Shower, clean clothes, a bite to eat, then on to the target that Delaney would have for him. Jessie would be there with him during the viewing. She usually was; Delaney allowed it. He considered the dog a stabilizing influence. Maybe she was.
The only thing Sanchez had ever picked up on her was that she had belonged to a large family that could barely feed themselves, much less a young dog. So one sunny day, they had dropped her off in downtown Homestead, to make her own way. When he’d found her outside ISIS headquarters, she was emaciated, covered with fleas, and he’d adopted her on the spot.
Sanchez slid his ID through the slot, and the door beeped as it opened. Jessie trotted over to the large bowl that bore her name, next to the water cooler, and lapped in her usual pristine way, not a drop of water splashed to the floor, no fuss, no mess.
The old barracks ceilings always prompted him to duck. Sanchez didn’t really need to do it; he stood six feet and the ceiling was seven. But Bob Delaney, a former pro basketball player who lumbered in from another room, had barely two inches between his skull and the ceiling and had developed a permanent hunch in his shoulders.
“Hey, Sanchez, you’re twenty minutes late.”
“Had a run-in with a snake.”
Delaney fixed his massive black hands to his hips. “A snake. Well, if you’d jog on the running track at the park, you wouldn’t run into snakes. Ten minutes, downstairs.”
“Fifteen, I need to shower and grab a snack.”
Delaney slipped his hand in the pocket of his jeans, brought out a dog treat, and tossed it to Jessie. She caught it in midair and he grinned like a proud father, as though he had taught her how to do that. Sanchez suspected Delaney had picked up info about her that he hadn’t shared. He could be like that at times, a hoarder who evaluated the treasure before he placed a value on it. He’d been a part of the remote viewing program for twenty years and undoubtedly knew tricks Sanchez had never imagined.
An injury on the basketball courts at age twenty-eight—Sanchez’s age now—had apparently blown open some psychic center in Delaney. Besieged by visions that poured through him 24/7, Delaney ended up on a shrink’s couch. Luckily for him, the shrink was a consultant to Stargate, and Delaney was eventually recruited.
“Fifteen, then,” he said, and brought out another treat for Jessie and wagged it in the air. “So who’s it going to be? Treatless man or me, Jess?”
Without any hesitation, she trotted after Delaney. But in the doorway, she paused, glanced back at Sanchez, and barked as if to reassure him it wasn’t about affection. It was about these utterly incredible treats.
* * *
Sanchez joined Delaney and Jessie in pod three. It consisted of two windowless rooms—control room and viewing room—and the walls were painted in soft lavender and pale blues, colors deemed to be conducive to a meditative state. Sanchez settled into the comfortable chair against the north wall of the viewing room, clipped his mike to the collar of his shirt, and Delaney disappeared into the adjoining control room. They went through the usual tests with the mike and speakers, mounted on the walls to either side of his chair, and everything worked fine. Jessie sat to his right, attentive, ears twitching. On the table in front of him were a sketchpad and pencil.
“Okay, Sanchez, cool down and then let’s get started.”
Every remote viewer had his or her own techniques for sinking into the zone. Alternate-nostril breathing worked for Sanchez. He had learned it as a kid in yoga classes he had gone to with his mother when she was in a rehab phase. It brought the hemispheres of the brain into synch, right brain images flowing into left brain analysis, and vice versa. He spent several minutes counting himself deeper, deeper, into the place where there was no time, no space, just a seamless whole. He flashed a thumbs-up to Delaney.
“All right, Sanchez, our target is thirteen-thirteen.”
The numbers immediately threw him. Delaney knew about his aversion to the number thirteen. Not only had the thirteenth day marked his mother’s death and his lover walking out of his life, Nicole’s birthday was on April 13, Emilio’s fell on May 13, and his own birthday fell on November 13. He couldn’t view thirteens. His superstition was simply too great.
“I can’t do this target, not with all those thirteens, Delaney.”
“Sure you can. Just focus.”
“Assign something different to it.”
“C’mon, Sanchez. You know I can’t do that. We’d have to do an entirely different target.”
The numbers didn’t mean anything to anyone but Delaney, who assigned numbers to specific targets. His intention, focus, and ability to clearly visualize the targets in his own head as he assigned the numbers were paramount to the unit’s success rate. Random numbers were Sanchez’s favorite way to remote view. Numbers possessed a purity, a psychic resonance, that called to him, pulled him in. Even though he disliked the idea of double thirteen, of thirteen anything, even though he hesitated, fighting with himself, his curiosity and resolve won. It was time to shove past his stupid superstitions.
“Okay, okay. I’ll try. Give me a few more minutes.”
He moved himself into the zone again through breathing exercises, then said, “There.”
And he was there, near or on an island, that’s what it felt like. He appeared to be on a pier raised above the street level that afforded him a view of a vast expanse of water, with sailboats, speedboats, kayaks, fishing boats. There seemed to be twin columns of smoke wafting up through the haze in the distance, but he couldn’t tell what generated them. Off to his left were colorful wooden buildings raised on wooden or concrete pilings above the water. He shifted his perceptions toward the street, so he could see the people, cars, shops. He tried to see the names of stores that he could Google later, but it was like trying to read a book in a dream. The signs blurred, the letters melted together like wax.
People, he thought, and felt himself attracted to the energy of a redheaded woman who walked quickly, with purpose and determination, along the sidewalk. He came up behind her. With his eyes still shut, he picked up the pencil and started sketching: her clothing, the loose flow of her shiny hair, the shape of her body. He sketched the cars parked on either side of the road, the shops, restaurants, pier. He kept hoping to glimpse a street sign, license plate, something that would help him pinpoint the location.
Delaney now fired questions at him. What was the temperature? What did the shadows tell him about the time of day? What did he smell, taste? And on it went like that, not a constant barrage of questions, but intermittent questions, to keep him on track, to remind him of the goal. Explore the target in as much detail as possible and report back.
He followed the redhead again, her flaming hair pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip, the ends bouncing against the collar of her sweater. She moved with the grace of a dancer, carried a large bag over her shoulder, red and brown, like her outfit, sweater, jeans, interesting brown shoes. Alpargatas, a Latino thing.
He jotted the word on his sketchpad because he didn’t quite know how to draw them, sandals but not sandals in the traditional sense. Woven at the toes, open at the back, they could be worn with or without socks. His mother used to wear them, one of the few details of Cuban culture that she liked. The redhead wore socks. She looked like a latter-day hippie.
The sidewalk emptied into a large marina parking lot with trucks, boats. He heard the cries of gulls. He looked out over the water again and realized that what he’d thought was haze might actually be fog. He no longer saw the twin columns of smoke. He shifted his perception again so that he was in front of the woman now. Her wild red hair framed a lovely, pale face with a defiant mouth, parrot-green eyes, and freckles that crossed the bridge of her nose. Certain that she was integral to this target, Sanchez moved in closer to her. He immediately sensed something inside her, a raw, primal power, an evil so terrible that he nearly bolted out of the viewing.
Was she evil? Or did the evil control her, like a cult, a terrorist? He immediately wondered if she was a terrorist.
Then the evil seemed to become aware of him and whipped toward him, just as the water moccasin had whipped toward Jessie, and attacked with a fierce brutality. It invaded him, choked him. It wanted his body. He fled the viewing gasping for air, Jessie in his face, barking, licking his cheeks. Delaney rushed into the room. “Christ, Sanchez. What’s going on? You okay?” Delaney grasped Sanchez’s shoulders, shook him.
Sanchez threw his arms up, breaking Delaney’s grasp on his shoulders. “Don’t do that.”
Delaney’s arms fell to his sides. “Okay, man, whatever. Calm down, okay? Just calm down, breathe. Deep breaths.” He patted the air, and talked to Sanchez as though he were a wild, intractable animal.
As his breathing evened out, Delaney passed him a bottle of water. “What happened?”
“What happened is that you shouldn’t have assigned me a target with double thirteens,” he snapped.
“It fit the target, Sanchez.”
“I don’t give a shit what it fits. Just don’t use it again. It threw me. I could’ve gone in deeper with a different number.”
“Maybe. But maybe you got exactly what we needed.” He paged through the sketches Sanchez had made. “Who’s the woman?”
He didn’t know. He suspected she wasn’t the evil he had sensed, but that she might be its ward, its slave, its indentured servant. He didn’t have any idea what that meant. When he said as much, Delaney looked interested.
“How old is she?” he asked.
“Barely old enough to vote.” But pretty. And intriguing. “I think she’s part of a terrorist cell that steals bodies.”
“Bodies?” Delaney lifted his eyebrows. “You mean, that steals identities.”
“No, I mean bodies. This cell steals bodies.”
“What the hell does that mean, Sanchez?”
“I don’t know. It was choking me.”
“It. What do you mean by it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea what it means. It felt like…” Like what? He struggled to find the right words, a comparison, an analogy, and the full horror of it struck him, the way this thing, this evil, had slipped into his consciousness, tasting it, tasting him, as if the taste alone would lead it to wh
at it coveted most—his body. When he said all this aloud, it sounded nuts.
“We’ll come back to that. What about location?”
“It feels like a tourist place, maybe an island. So what’s the target? I should at least be entitled to know what kind of target deserves a double thirteen.”
“The FBI asked us for help,” Delaney said.
“What? Why? They don’t put any stock whatsoever in remote viewing.”
“True. But they know we get results and that’s what they want. Thirteen bodies have been discovered in two landfills—one north of Gainesville and another outside of Ocala.”
Sanchez instantly felt superstitious again. More thirteens.
“Two of the bodies had been in the water for quite some time before they were taken to the landfill. They were too badly decomposed for the autopsies to turn up much of anything other than genders and approximate ages. But the autopsies on the other eleven bodies indicated that they’d died of the same thing, massive bleed-outs, possibly caused by an unknown virus. Two county coroners did the initial autopsies, the FBI confirmed their findings. Not all the victims have been identified yet, but so far, they come from various states and range in age from early twenties to late sixties. The bureau boys suspect it’s a biological weapon and need to know where this terrorist cell is located.”
“The best I can tell you now is that the cell is located on or near a tourist island.”
“In Florida.”
“That makes sense, given where these bodies were found, but I didn’t pick up anything specific about a state.”
“Okay, let’s assume it’s Florida.” Delaney went through the sketches again and picked up the one that showed the twin columns of smoke. “What’s this?”
“It was something I could see from the pier. But the air was hazy or foggy, so it might be an optical illusion.”
Delaney put a question mark at the top of the page, set it aside, then went over to one of the wall cabinets and brought out a rolled-up map. He smoothed it open on Sanchez’s desk, a huge map of Florida. So damn many islands, Sanchez thought. They ran up and down both coasts, dozens of tourist destinations. And at the foot of the peninsula lay the Florida Keys, with more than 1,700 islands.
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