On the evening of June 26, 2004, a dirty bomb detonated outside the Capitol Building, spreading two kilos of radioactive cesium-137 dust across Washington DC.
The president and his wife were rushed from their residence to the third sub-basement level of the White House and driven by electric cart to a classified evacuation transport hub under Union Station. There, they boarded an underground maglev train and within thirty minutes had arrived beneath Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Their final destination was the Continuity of Government facility code-named Raven Rock. Less than sixty minutes after the initial explosion the president prepared to address the nation from the television studio in the Army’s Emergency Operations Center.
That was the 2004 scenario for TRAIL RIDER, a yearly exercise run by the Secret Service and multiple other government agencies to test disaster preparedness. Since the president was in Ireland that day, his role and his wife’s were taken by two Secret Service Agents. They were among the twenty-six victims who had died in the EOC studio that night. Investigating those deaths had been Daniel Caparelli’s first encounter with CROSSWIND.
At the time, he had been Master Sergeant Caparelli, a Special Agent in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. He had investigated murders before, but nothing like the scene that awaited him in that studio: twenty-six bodies battered so badly that none had an unbroken bone. Yet the skin of each victim was intact and there was no blood anywhere.
The lone survivor, found unconscious beneath other bodies, described a cloud that had moved through the studio like a miniature storm, sweeping up individuals, spinning them, throwing them against each other and against the walls, floor, and ceiling.
The story was, of course, unbelievable. It was also exactly what had happened.
After the first day of the investigation, the small team of Army CID investigators and Secret Service agents had been joined by CROSSWIND personnel. Two months later, when the investigation was closed, and after Caparelli had survived an attack by the phenomenon that had killed the others, he was released from the CID to join the other organization. More than a decade later, he was running it.
But even after all that time, Caparelli remembered very clearly his initial surprise and confusion upon learning the secret of CROSSWIND’s operational capabilities. However, he had not experienced what Detective Caidin had upon learning the same: disbelief.
Caparelli had grown up in a family in which tales of second sight and the paranormal were accepted as fact. Why wouldn’t they be? His grandmother had predictive dreams more often than chance could explain. His aunt was banned from playing cards in casinos across the country, though she’d never been caught cheating—because she had no need. And his sister’s only child, in his charge since her mother’s untimely death, had always had an uncanny ability to find lost objects.
For that reason, and others, including the thought that he could more easily protect her and care for her, Caparelli had personally recruited his niece into CROSSWIND. Laura Hart.
He might as well have been driving the car Laura died in himself.
No matter what else he and CROSSWIND found out about the circumstances of Laura’s death, there was no escaping the terrible knowledge that his niece’s death was his fault, and that whatever echo remained of her was inextricably bound to a stranger.
All because late one Sunday night, he had seen her name come up on his caller ID, and thinking that there would always be time enough tomorrow, he hadn’t taken her call.
No matter what else, there was no coming back from that.
* * *
Forty-two of the 183 personnel assigned to CROSSWIND knew exactly what its purpose was. Three of them, with Caparelli, met in the facility’s image analysis lab to review surveillance video from Molly’s Café. For the video, the cameras had been positioned in an unmarked surveillance van parked across the street. The café was brightly lit, so the incident had been recorded at optical wavelengths suitable for imaging manifestations.
Simultaneously, in an assessment lab on the same floor, two other technicians and a psychologist ran Matt Caidin through what was, to CROSSWIND, a standard battery of tests to identify any latent sensitivity the detective might have in regard to remote viewing perception. In lay terms, they were testing him for psychic powers.
* * *
Previous studies by many researchers had established that a measurable electromagnetic field was generated by the electrochemical activity within the brain. CROSSWIND researchers had taken that work further and determined that the brain’s EM field was not just a side effect of the brain’s biochemistry, but an actual component of the universally experienced but so-far impossible-to-define phenomenon of self-awareness.
In research terms, that phenomenon was classified as “the hard problem of consciousness”: Was there a nonphysical component to human consciousness?
Clearly, humans exhibited self-awareness, and considered from a strictly physical perspective, that self-awareness must arise from the particular arrangement of the molecules making up the brain and the way they interacted. The evolutionary chain that led to such complexity could be traced back to primordial forms of life and the way in which the simplest cells respond to their environment in the most basic way, blindly avoiding bad conditions and seeking good ones—all behaviors governed by electrical signals generated within and between cells.
The more different types of sensory input a life-form was capable of receiving, and the complex behaviors the life-form could undertake in response to those inputs, had led eventually to a consciousness of self. Responses to certain complex conditions were no longer blind, but involved a semblance of analysis and choice. Where simple life-forms would always avoid bad conditions, humans might willingly endure those conditions, knowing, for example, that the exertion of planting crops under a blazing sun would result in food, not immediately, but months in the future. Consciousness, having arisen from basic biological processes, thus became something more than just blind reaction, while still believed to be anchored in the complex chemical interactions of the brain.
Intriguingly, though, if those interactions were interrupted by means of an anesthetic, or by a jarring physical blow, or by delivering a small electric current to a thin, irregularly shaped section of the brain called the claustrum, consciousness vanished, even though other sections of the brain continued to function. That implied consciousness didn’t arise from the brain’s overall activity, but from a specific subset of activities. However, when consciousness vanished, so too did the distinctive EM field associated with it.
Detailed measurements of that field in conjunction with monitoring brain activity had led CROSSWIND researchers to conclude that the field carried a neural imprint of the originating brain’s structure, a finding that answered another great mystery about the nature of consciousness: so-called “brain-dead” patients with no measurable brain activity who nonetheless could recall in detail events that took place around them in their hospital room or operating theater prior to their resuscitation.
For CROSSWIND researchers, then, the hard problem of consciousness was one on the brink of being answered. Human consciousness did have a nonphysical component: the EM field imprinted with the brain’s neural structure.
* * *
Observing the video playback of the event with Caparelli were Sam Arlo as well as the project’s senior interface technician, Dr. Norma Chu. The third was one of the project’s eight remaining perceivers, Leo Kushner, a tall, rawboned man who affected an untrimmed beard that gave him the look of a wild academic. Kushner had been with the project for more than a decade, frustrated by his awareness that his ability to perceive was only a fraction of that of the others.
Like Caparelli, none of the three others in the lab had had direct experience with a postmortem manifestation of a perceiver’s consciousness—what the public would call a ghost. In the more than forty years the US military and intelligence communities had been utilizing remote viewing at an operational level, the official records described only a handful of similar incidents. None with a good outcome.
The café manifestation appeared to be another example.
* * *
In addition to being capable of perceiving sensory inputs while existing only as a disembodied field, other capabilities of the brain were also imprinted. One mirrored the section of the cerebellum responsible for what the experts called proprioception, the sense informing the brain of the body’s physical shape and position of its limbs.
For CROSSWIND’s perceivers, like Laura, who could separate their consciousness from their body, the brain’s proprioceptive feedback somehow created a macroscopic interface, similar in theory to the atmospheric temperature inversions that gave rise to mirages. In this case, the interface formed between the EM field and the air projected the perceiver’s body not only visually, but with a simulated—manifested—physicality.
Whatever mechanism was responsible for the manifestation’s ability to also become solid, with simulated mass and temperature, the source of it was an even harder problem, the solution still unknown and a matter of intense research. A perceiver with the ability to project his or her mass, and thus take action at a remote site, could change the world’s balance of power overnight. Ongoing research into discovering if such an ability was possible remained one of CROSSWIND’s highest R&D priorities.
What was known was that, however projected physicality was accomplished, the phenomenon involved an energy-intensive process. The leading theory was that the field extracted so-called vacuum energy from the manifestation’s immediate environment. CROSSWIND researchers considered this a possible link to the anecdotal reports of a sudden drop in temperature associated with apparitions commonly called ghosts. Sam Arlo’s researchers were already refining equations that suggested this theory might soon become fact, and that whatever ghosts might be, they were nothing supernatural. Even in the nonphysical realm beyond death, science ruled.
* * *
On a large, wall-mounted video display in the darkened lab, Laura Hart’s manifestation approached Matt Caidin’s window booth and said, “You can help me.” Voiceprint analysis had confirmed the voice was Laura’s. The source of the video’s soundtrack was the microphone Caidin had worn.
Arlo tapped a control on the arm of his chair to freeze the image. “Exactly when did she manifest?”
“We don’t know,” Caparelli said. “We had a second camera on the front door, but Laura didn’t come through it. I’d guess she took form near the door, but already inside the café. Well within range of Caidin.”
Range was an important consideration. Early on in the analysis of remote viewing, CROSSWIND’s researchers had realized that a disassociated consciousness could not usually appear at any given coordinates. In most cases, there had to be a receptive mind nearby, someone with whom the remote perceiver could achieve rapport. Subsequent CROSSWIND experiments had worked out the approximate effective range: twenty meters, little more than sixty feet.
“So she manifested in a crowded restaurant,” Chu said. The slight, almost fragile, gray-haired psychologist had been with the various incarnations of the project since it had been code-named STAR GATE, more than twenty years earlier. She’d been Laura’s personal interface technician. “And no one noticed?”
Though Chu spoke about her charge with professional detachment, Caparelli knew her level of concern was as high as his. The connection between a perceiver and his or her interface technician was hyperfocused. Had to be. For reasons still to be determined, intense emotions were key to the experience.
“No reaction from customers on the video.” To Caparelli, this was easily explained. “Busy place. People coming and going. Even if someone did see Laura materialize directly in front of them, their first choice would be to think they hadn’t noticed her before.”
“As in, ‘I don’t believe in no ghosts.’” Arlo made a note on his tablet computer, restarted the playback. All watched in silence until Caidin’s recorded voice asked: “Was General Borodin the man in the car beside you?”
“Pause,” Chu said. The video froze. “That’s new information. Borodin in the car? Where did that come from?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Caparelli said. “Keep listening.”
Arlo restarted the video.
“In the car. The car. He was just there. Not the general. One of the others—”
“Others? What others?” Kushner asked.
On the screen, Laura continued. “—One of … ODIN? No … not that one … it was TYR he sent … all those people who died in the house … they never saw them coming…”
This time, Caparelli had Arlo stop the playback. “ODIN and TYR. Nordic gods. Obviously code designations. Question is, where’d Laura get them?”
Chu looked perplexed. “They’re not from any of her mission logs.”
Kushner agreed. “I’ve never encountered them, either.”
There was no easy explanation for what Caparelli proposed next, but it was the only possibility that made sense to him. A disturbing one. “There is one obvious answer,” he said, “When Laura made contact with Borodin, wherever he was, there was a VEKTOR perceiver with him.”
Chu understood Caparelli’s reasoning. “VEKTOR back-traced Laura’s projection, and one of their perceivers manifested in her car.”
“Exactly,” Caparelli said. If a perceiver’s consciousness reached out to a location where another perceiver was present, in a matter of moments the second perceiver could identify and connect to the first, then project itself back to the first perceiver’s location, like radar automatically locking onto the launch site of a missile and instantly firing back. The phenomenon was called back-tracing, and was the key reason why both CROSSWIND and VEKTOR shielded their facilities. Neither side in their ongoing psychic war wanted one of their perceivers to come back from a mission with an uninvited passenger.
* * *
In the beginning of that war, the CIA had called their project SCANATE. It wasn’t a secret code name, but a confidential acronym for the project’s ultimate goal: to assess the ability of some people to scan for military targets simply by concentrating on map coordinates. By any other name, it was clairvoyance.
The time was 1970, and the much more public Cold War openly raged between the United States and the Soviet Union. America had just beaten the Soviets to the moon, and so the Soviets turned their attention to other arenas where they felt confident they maintained the lead.
One of those arenas was the investigation and exploitation of what were known as psychic powers, or as the Russians called them, bioenergetics.
The initial Soviet program was designated DIAMOND FIRE.
Fifty years later, its code name was VEKTOR.
* * *
“Why would the Russians do that?” Arlo asked. “All the intel Laura witnessed in the past month points to General Borodin’s planning to do something off the reservation, without official sanction.”
“Perhaps because VEKTOR’s in on it,” Chu said. “Which means Borodin’s not acting on his own.”
Caparelli had reached the same conclusion. “I agree. The general’s presence on our soil suggests a sanctioned operation.”
“For what possible purpose?” Kushner asked.
Caparelli had another thought to run by them. “To field-test their new technology.”
Chu frowned. “And we still have no idea what that is.”
“We know it’s deadly,” Caparelli said, “and it works well. My guess is that the Russians have somehow weaponized the quantum-field generator they’ve been using to enhance their perceivers’ abilities.”
Arlo looked thoughtful. “That could make sense—we’ve been working on the same for a while now. If they’ve come up with a device that generates a directed energy pulse to disrupt matter at the quantum level, they’d essentially be switching off the nuclear binding forces that keep molecules locked together. The target would fly apart. A pretty brutal weapon. Definitely matches the damage Laura reported in Mexico. Something there literally transformed the victims’ flesh into an explosive.”
“But why bring new technology here where we can see it?” Kushner asked. “Why not keep it inside VEKTOR’s protected labs? They’ve got safeguards there to block our perceivers, same as we have safeguards here to block theirs.”
“Because those safeguards aren’t infallible,” Caparelli said. “They can be compromised if the strength of the projections is sufficient.”
“Shall we get back to it?” Chu said. “I want to see what happened next.”
Arlo restarted the video.
On the screen, Jan, the waitress who had required extensive debriefing after the event, walked toward Matt Caidin’s booth with a small white plate of lemon slices. Later that night, it had taken Caparelli considerable time to convince Jan that Laura’s disappearance had been unusual, but not impossible. Jan had finally accepted that Laura had run out of the restaurant very quickly while she was distracted by having been shoved into another table. It was easier to believe something that made sense.
On the screen, Caidin reached for Laura’s hand, and Laura’s body arched in spasm.
“You! You were there!” she said. “I saw the taxi, and he was beside me, and you were there—here—in the window when—”
“Everything okay, hon?” the waitress asked.
As if startled by the question, Laura rose, whirled around—and vanished.
Chu leaned forward, intent. “Run that again for me. Slow motion.”
Arlo ran the recording back, then stepped it forward, one frame at a time.
In one frame, Laura was there, blurred by motion. In the next frame, nothing, not even a blur. The video had been shot at thirty frames per second. Laura disappeared in less time than that. Jan the waitress stared blankly at the empty space, her shock so apparent that it was understandable she had clung to Caparelli’s explanation that she hadn’t seen what was so clearly impossible.
Chu sat back with a sigh. “So that’s it.”
Kushner looked more morose than usual. “She realized what she was, and she’s gone.”
“Maybe not.” All eyes turned to Caparelli. “The video shows Laura hearing new information from Caidin. It’s not the wisest thing to give a consciousness fixed in one specific time. But there’s no indication on that video that shows that Laura actually understands her situation.”
“So she still doesn’t know she’s dead?” Kushner asked.
“If she doesn’t, it means there’s a chance she isn’t lost to us,” Caparelli said. “Not yet. Everything points to these manifestations being able to persist for six days before their energy dissipates entirely. That gives us three more days to attempt contact again.”
Hope flickered in Chu’s eyes. “For Detective Caidin to make contact, you mean.”
Caparelli nodded.
“What makes you think that’ll work?” Kushner asked.
Caparelli hadn’t achieved his position by shying from the truth. “We know emotion is at the heart of this phenomenon. Intense, primal emotion. Laura was in a horrific car accident, her body shattered, in unspeakable pain…” He hesitated, fighting down his own emotions, his own pain. “In that state, in those last moments of her life, Laura forged a psychic bond with Caidin, a link just like a back-trace. That connection’s strong, and it’s the only one we’ve got.”
Arlo and Kushner were careful not to look at Caparelli, but Chu’s sympathy was instant. “Daniel, what are you going to do?”
There was only one thing he could do. “Bring Caidin into CROSSWIND. All the way.”