He woke up early, to be sure to get in his morning run in the park, and then came back energized—ready to take on the world. He thought about what Jamie Hastings had said. “Just tune in your antennae to reach the vibrational frequency of the target,” and that was precisely what he did. And it worked. Things went far better than he had even expected: he said what he had to say, providing projections for the next three years, and told the big boys what they wanted to hear. He secured their approval—provided USOIL could keep the conglomerate’s “pocket politicians” appeased enough that they would continue bending the rules in the right direction, which meant their direction.
By three that afternoon, he was already back in Houston. Mat decided he had to meet Jamie Hastings—a matter of first order. A man of infinite means and inimitable style, he managed to pull a few strings with a political ally, the governor of California, to get the man she had worked for, the current chief of police in the Los Angeles Police Department, to open the door with Jamie. He told the governor that he wanted to be sure his was a request, not an order, to keep everything, in his words, “friendly like.”
Once Mat got the green light from the governor, he immediately telephoned the police chief, Martin Kaszlow, and tried to engage him in conversation about her. He was dying to know more about her investigative work for the force, and what it was like having worked with her, from an insider’s point of view. He piled on the questions, but Martin was generally tight-mouthed and cautiously uncooperative, especially when it came to Jamie. Too many people had tried to get to her through him, and he was extremely protective.
Then again, the governor demanded that he cooperate.…
“So when was it, exactly, that she was in your employ?” Mat asked, probing.
Martin hesitated, choosing his words carefully, determined to reveal as little as possible. “Ms. Hastings was never employed by the Police Department. She was a consultant.”
“Right. And when was that?”
“That was from somewhere around the middle of 2003 through 2008—give or take a few months.”
“Is it true that she helped solve fifty-three cases in that time?”
“She did more than help—she actually led us to the criminals.”
“Wowee. Fifty-three times?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. That’s correct.”
“That is damned amazing. Do you happen to know where she’s been working the last five years?”
Martin was increasingly uncomfortable and he didn’t take kindly to being cross-examined, which was how he felt the whole time he was on the line with Mat. He was used to being on the other side of an interrogation, in control. “I know she’s been overseas a lot,” he said, “but, to be honest, I don’t keep track of her.”
“Look, Chief, I am really not trying to put any pressure on you, here. I just really need to meet this woman,” Mat said, trying not to alienate him. “Now, I’m thinking it would be very helpful if you would be kind enough to introduce us, at least make a little phone call, so she knows who I am when that phone rings—now how about that?”
He told Mat that, the last he’d heard, she had gone on an extended winter retreat in New Zealand, where she was vacationing and hiding out from the long list of people and organizations who were lined up, hoping to consult with her. At last count, Kaszlow said, she had a two-year waiting list. What he didn’t tell Mat was that prior to that, Jamie had been working in Pakistan, locating oil wells—but then again, he figured that was information Mat already had, and that it was his reason for seeking Jamie out in the first place. Still, just in case, Martin figured it was best left unsaid.
Mat pressed him. “So I’m wondering … why did she leave you and where can I find her?”
According to Martin Kaszlow, Jamie had signed off because she didn’t want to be found. She knew she was being called to serve in other capacities, and that using her vision for corporate and criminal investigations simply didn’t fit the bigger picture. Everybody wanted her, but she basically had a case of burnout, and she just could not do the work any longer. “I had to respect her wishes, and let her go,” Martin said, pointedly.
That she would refuse notoriety and god knows how many more business opportunities, where all she had to do was to turn on her lightbulb now and then, intrigued Mat even more. That kind of personal integrity didn’t fit into any formula he had ever encountered in his business or personal life—it just wasn’t American!
“I heard her tell Katie Lee that she was dowsing out there—where was it again?”
Martin knew Mat was trying to trap him, but still … he didn’t have much of a choice but to answer his questions. It was political. “She was in Pakistan last.”
“Dowsing for water out there, in the desert?”
“No, Mr. Anderson—she was dowsing for oil.” He figured Mat already knew, and that holding back information would only get back to the governor. He didn’t need the pressure.
Mat, great actor that he was, hid his shock at Martin’s disclosure, but, inside, his heart was pounding with the excitement that his hunch was right on the money. The woman dowsed for oil! “Right, right, plenty of oil over there, that’s for sure.”
Eager to avoid any further questions, Martin mustered up all the diplomacy he could manage, to get Mat off the line. He did his best to convince him that Jamie was recovering, and that she had made it more than clear she didn’t want to be disturbed—under any circumstances.
He was uncomfortable getting into the Lahore situation with Mat—that was Jamie’s own business to discuss, if she felt like it. He emphasized that, as far as he was concerned, with what he’d seen her go through with the LAPD work alone, she had more than earned “time for Jamie”—however and wherever she wanted to spend that time, without interruption.
Having learned that Jamie had actually dowsed for oil in Pakistan, Mat couldn’t wait to get his team to run a full profile on her—but he still had to have that introduction from Martin. He pushed him to make the call, looking for that wedge that only Martin Kaszlow could provide—just a “friendly-like” way into the life of Jamie Hastings.
Under pressure from the governor’s office, Martin had little choice but to accommodate the man. They hung up, agreeing that Martin would get back to Mat after he’d made contact.
In the meantime, Mat cleared his desk completely to focus on her and the mysterious world she moved in—the paranormal realm. Who was this woman, really, and how did she see these visions so clearly that she was capable of overriding every tool available to the police, leading them to solve case after case of unsolvable crimes? How did she dowse for oil in the middle of the desert in Pakistan—and for whom? How outrageous was that—or rather, how perfect?
Jamie Hastings’s experience surpassed by far anything that could have been dismissed as “coincidence.” The L.A. police record certainly attested to that, with fifty-three cases solved in a framework of five years, thanks to her intervention. All things considered, from what Mat had gleaned so far, Jamie Hastings had managed to qualify and position psychic investigation as a tested and credible resource, to explore and bring into the foreground.
He knew the government had people training in “remote viewing,” but she could see and talk to dead people and all kinds of spirits; she could locate underground water and, holy mackerel, she could find oil, too. He was waiting to hear about her success with the Pakistanis, but he was convinced she’d managed to produce for them, too.
Considering the world Mat had always walked in, these were feats that made her a phenomenon he wanted to learn more about and, quite naturally, to exploit as best possible. He just couldn’t believe she was out there in the world, walking around, free—even if she was hiding out for a while, on the other side of the planet. With what she knew and what she could do, she was fortunate that most of the world would dismiss and discredit her. He laughed at the irony of how, rather than putting her at a disadvantage, other people’s negative perceptions of her w
ere most likely the perfect shield to keep her out of harm’s way.
Now that was some kind of divine protection.
He ordered some of his most reliable staff members to do a complete workup on her and to have it on his desk before the end of the day. These were people he could count on for discretion; they were people who were dedicated to him and him alone—his “intelligence” gatherers. He wanted specific information about where she had been the last five years, and everything they could dig up on her time in Lahore.
What they gathered about her work reconfirmed that she was an exceptional psychic, with an unbelievable track record, as he already knew. She was the real deal: they found indisputable proof. She had pinpointed three sites in the middle of the desert, in less than a year, which became three successful oil wells for the Pakistanis. Jamie Hastings’s keen vision was like an arrow and she had a remarkable record of hitting the bull’s-eye. In her world, the unknowable was the known, and the scientific, analytic world of reason was the unknown: shady and inconclusive.
No one else he had ever heard of had been better able to validate the credibility of superconsciousness, which she used to pluck answers out of the void, leaving the empirical process of science scratching its head, in the dust.
This was a person Mat wanted on his team, without question, at any cost. There was just one small detail to contend with. Martin had driven home the fact that she had had enough of police work and enough of corporate, and had gone into hiding, to escape the whole business of using her psychic acuity to serve other people’s needs. For all intents and purposes, Jamie Hastings was no longer available for any of it. She was out of service—and not planning to return.
Mat’s favorite expression was “everybody has his price,” and he was determined to find Jamie’s. He learned that she had been paid a fortune in Pakistan and that she was also up to her neck in extraordinary high yield stock options as part of the deal—so money was not going to be the bait that would lure her. She had no husband he could pull strings for; no children to put through college; no debt he could pay off. She had no legal problems that he could make go away. No matter how deep they dug, the team came up with absolutely nothing on Jamie Hastings.
She was a perfectly clean slate—a total enigma.
4
Reeling in the Buddha Baby
After her long vigil that terrible night, with the passing of the whales and dolphins, Jamie was ready to return to San Francisco. She knew it was time to come out of hiding and get to work, doing whatever she could to help assure that scenes like the one she had just lived through never happen again. She trusted that she would get guidance to help her turn her gifts over to the imperiled whale communities—those interdependent pods of amazing, loving beings, who were clearly calling out for help. And she was absolutely clear that there needed to be a massive shift in human awareness, if the whales were to survive the ecological blight that was rapidly overtaking the oceans, or whatever else it was that was causing them to die, in mass graves, around the world.
When Martin Kaszlow’s call came, she was almost in the right frame of mind to listen, since she was over her retreat from society, packing up her suitcases, and heading home. Jamie was pleased to hear from him on the one hand, but wary on the other, knowing he never called without a motive. He always sought her out when another grisly murder had occurred—usually a serial killer was on the loose—when no one else, and no police forensics investigation, could provide even a clue where to look, before the killer struck again. How much terror had she had to witness and work through? How much darkness and suffering? She was absolutely unwilling to return to it.
His face flashed into her mind before the phone even rang.
“I don’t need bad news right now, Marty,” she said, folding her jacket into the suitcase, the phone wedged up between her shoulder and her ear. She always knew when Martin was going to call, sometimes even before he knew, himself. For Jamie, “caller identification” pre-dated cell phones by decades. She called it an “elementary psychic exercise,” which she had mastered since childhood.
Martin searched for the right way to start the conversation. He was always asking her for a favor or for help, and, as always, he was awkward about how to approach her. “We miss you out here in crazy world,” he said, attempting sentimentality, but failing, as usual.
“I don’t want to know,” she replied, tersely.
Martin felt embarrassed at having been forced to invade her privacy, and that awkwardness came through in his voice. “It’s been a long time, James—what have you been up to, down there in the Down Under?”
Knowing how uncomfortable it made him to deal with anything remotely resembling what he called her “emotional issues,” she did her best to conceal them, but she knew that neither one of them was interested in, nor good at, small talk. Their relationship was about real life, fast and furious, all the time. Ironic it was, too, that, in a district of toughened street cops and violent crime, feminine sentiment was simply too frightening for the Big Chief to cope with.
“I just said goodbye to about a hundred and fifty whales and dolphins, who, for whatever reason, decided to beach themselves on the coast here,” she said. Jamie tried to keep her voice from breaking, but she couldn’t hold back. “I watched them die—it was a mass suicide.” The tears welled up in her eyes and her profound sadness poured through, her voice cracking as she tried to hold it all within … for Martin’s sake.
“That’s bad news,” he replied, solemnly. Martin was not a man of words. He was coarse, rough police material. No room for sentimentalism over a bunch of whales, with what he saw unfolding every day on the streets of America.
Jamie sighed. “Yes … yes, it is bad news, Marty—extremely bad news.”
As always, Martin sidestepped Jamie’s feelings and got right to the point of his call. “Yeah, look James, I have someone who needs your help—a guy by the name of Mat Anderson, out in Houston.” Martin started shuffling some papers on his desk, preferring to be doing anything else than having to ask Jamie for this favor. “He’s the CEO of USOIL—a friend of the governor,” Martin said, clearing his throat, “and he wants to talk to you.”
“Not interested.”
“I’m in a kind of spot here, Jamie … it’s pressure from the top.”
“Still not interested,” Jamie snapped.
Martin expected a cool reception—it was no surprise that Jamie would be annoyed. She had let him know, in no uncertain terms, not to look for her while she was regrouping in New Zealand: not for serial killings or other unsolved murders, nor any other horrors he would want to call her in on. Certainly not this. He knew she would be incensed that he was willing to break his commitment to her—governor or no governor.
“I thought I was really clear about this, Marty.”
“You always tell me everything happens for a reason, right?” he replied. “The governor says this big-shot oil guy is looking for ‘environmentally friendly’ ways to find drill sites out there in the Pacific Northwest. That’s all he told me. Who knows? Apparently he thinks you can help. Maybe it’s important, James. If it is for real. I mean, if this guy is legit, maybe helping him out will be good for the whales too, right?” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his feet out on the desk.
“Jesus, Martin. Drilling in those waters? That’s one of our last relatively intact ecosystems, for god sakes.” She poured a cup of coffee from the room service tray. “And there is no ‘environmentally friendly’ way to suck oil out of the earth—who are we kidding here?”
“Hey—don’t shoot the messenger. Talk to this guy—he’s a really big player.”
Jamie thought about it a moment and figured it couldn’t hurt to at least listen to what USOIL was really up to, and how exactly this Anderson character wanted to use her to do it.
“Can I give him your number?”
“Sure,” she said, and hung up. She figured that if Oil Man had pull with the governor of California, he most
likely already had the number anyway, and that he was going to call, regardless.
Martin called Mat back as soon as he hung up with Jamie, recounting the conversation and passing on her number. He advised Mat to move quickly, since Jamie was packing to return home. “Go easy on Jamie Hastings, Anderson,” Martin said, authoritatively. “She’s a real lady and a precious commodity for us all.”
Mat bristled at the chief’s tone of voice. Not too many people got away with talking to him like that. “Yeah, sure thing, Marty boy,” he said, condescendingly, controlling the impulse to cut Martin down to size. “And thanks, my friend, I will definitely put in a good word for you with the gov, next time we’re out playing a few rounds,” Mat said, throwing his weight out in Martin’s face, and then he hung up, abruptly. He smiled at himself in the mirror, straightening his tie. “Way to go, Mattie boy! Ecology, man! You found the hook and you have cast the bait. Let’s reel in Jamie Hastings.”
Jamie was in the middle of battling with the airline to get a flight back to San Francisco when his call came in. Juggling between the hotel phone and her mobile, she was not feeling her most receptive when he rang, at a point of sheer exasperation with the airline. She couldn’t seem to make him understand that she was on another line, trying to get a flight home, and that she wasn’t free to talk. She tried hanging up as politely as possible, but he insisted.
“Look, how about you let me solve that little problem for you, in exchange for you coming out here to Houston for a friendly business dinner?”
Jamie couldn’t believe the audacity of the man. She held the phone away from her ear and just stared at it, incredulous.
Mat’s secretary, Louise, walked in on the conversation, carrying a stack of payroll checks that needed to be signed. A former Miss Texas, she was the classic trophy secretary: she wore too much makeup, her pearl pink fingernails matched her clingy cashmere dress, and not one strand of her lacquered blonde hair was out of place.
The Emissary Page 4