New Orleans, Louisiana: 4 June, 5:40 P.M. Central time
“At the end of our last session, we explored the possibility that you might be setting extraordinarily high standards for yourself. Have you been thinking about that?”
October Guinness glanced at the psychiatrist seated on a gently worn leather chair beside the study’s empty fireplace and laughed. “My sister’s an electrical engineer making over a hundred thou a year, my brother has his own accounting firm, and I’m a college dropout. You’re the only person I know who thinks I set unusually high standards for myself.”
Colonel F. Scott McClintock had thick silver hair and kindly gray eyes set deep in a tanned face scored with lines left by years of smiling and squinting into the sun. But at the moment, he was not smiling. Templing his fingers, he tapped them against his lips before saying, “You compare yourself to your brother and sister?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Everyone else does.”
As soon as Tobie said it, she regretted it. It was exactly the kind of offhand remark McClintock picked up on. She watched him jot down a quick note, probably part of the growing itinerary for another session labeled “Family Issues” or something like that. After five months of coming here every other week, she was beginning to understand how the Colonel worked.
He was semiretired now, after nearly forty years as a clinical psychiatrist. Most of those years had been spent in the Army. He still worked with patients from the local VA hospital as a volunteer. Since Hurricane Katrina smashed the VA’s facility on Perdido Street, he’d taken to seeing his few remaining patients here, in the study of his big old Victorian just off St. Charles.
“We haven’t talked yet about the reason you dropped out of college,” he said in that soft voice of his. “Maybe now would be a good time to touch on it.”
Tobie shifted in her chair. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
There was a pause. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, a subtle sign that he was disappointed. While Colonel McClintock analyzed October Guinness, Tobie in turn analyzed the Colonel and his methods. She figured it was only fair.
“All right,” he said. “Do you want to talk about why you joined the Navy?”
“That’s easy. My stepdad told me that if I dropped out of college, he wouldn’t pay for me to go back. I joined the military so I’d be able to get the GI Bill, and I chose the Navy because I didn’t think they’d send me to Iraq.”
It was the truth—as far as it went. But it also avoided several key issues, including the fact that her real father, Patrick Guinness, had been in the Navy when he died. But Tobie didn’t see any reason to give the Colonel more fodder for his Family Issues session than he already had.
“You didn’t want to go to Iraq?” said the Colonel.
“Are you kidding? The only people who actually want to go to Iraq are either seriously delusional or very, very scary individuals.”
“It didn’t occur to you that your skills as a linguist might be found useful?”
Tobie laughed. As an expat’s brat growing up around the world, she’d been fluent in Arabic by the age of eight. “Yeah. But I thought they’d assign me to the Pentagon, or to some nice safe ship parked out in the Persian Gulf. I didn’t expect them to send me to Baghdad.”
Sometimes she wondered what her life would be like if she’d been born and raised in one place rather than being yanked around the world by her parents. Any kid who grows up in Qatar and Frankfurt, Paris and Jakarta, is inevitably going to be strange—even when all their sensory input is firmly planted in the here and now.
But Tobie had spent her childhood bringing home report cards with teachers’ notes that read, “October spends far too much of her time in class daydreaming…” Every year, her mother would sigh and get the same worried, baffled expression on her face. Meredith Guinness-Bennett’s two oldest children were studious, hardworking, normal. But Tobie, by far the youngest, was always a problem, drawing strange pictures when she should have been studying, and running with the local kids rather than hanging out with the other expats’ children. They were habits that left her with a passable drawing ability and a knack for picking up languages. But while her sister had been student body president and her brother captain of the football team, Tobie never quite fit in anywhere, even though she’d learned early to hide the things she saw, the things she knew.
She’d spent the first twenty years of her life trying very, very hard to convince herself it was all imagination, coincidence. But two experiences had ripped through that protective cloak of denial. Henry Youngblood called them “spontaneous remote viewing experiences,” but Tobie hadn’t known what they were at the time. The first was so traumatic that she’d dropped out of college. The second, in Iraq, nearly got her killed and helped earn her a psycho discharge.
She realized the Colonel was watching her closely. “Did you like the military, Tobie?”
“No,” she said baldly, and saw a gleam of amusement light up his eyes.
“And why was that?”
“I’m a lousy shot, I can’t run for shit, and I have trouble with authority. Or at least, that’s what the shrink in Wiesbaden told me. I don’t like to take orders.”
Colonel McClintock shifted his papers but said nothing. Tobie figured the report from the shrink in Wiesbaden was probably somewhere in those papers. The Wiesbaden report, and a lot of others. When you get a psychiatric discharge from the military, the process generates a slew of reports.
“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” they’d called it. But October knew even that label had provoked dissension.
According to one psychiatrist at Bethesda, October Guinness was certifiably nuts and probably had been even before they’d made the mistake of letting her into the U.S. Navy.
“Do you enjoy your work with Dr. Youngblood?” asked the Colonel, surprising her by the shift in direction.
She relaxed a little. The Colonel was one of the few people with whom Tobie could discuss Youngblood’s project. The other military psychologists she’d dealt with had all looked at her file and labeled her crazy. But McClintock had tapped his templed fingers against his lips and asked her questions about her daydreams as a child. He talked to her about what she’d seen in Iraq and how she’d seen it. Then he’d handed her a thick declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document called Training Manual for Remote Viewing and phoned his friend Dr. Youngblood at Tulane.
“I enjoy it in some ways,” said Tobie. As a child, she’d eventually come to accept the idea that she was a bit weird. But between them, McClintock and Youngblood were working to convince her that she was neither weird nor crazy. She simply had a talent she could learn how to use—and control.
“In what ways don’t you enjoy it?”
“I find it…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “…disturbing.”
“And why is that, Tobie?”
Their gazes met and held. He was no longer smiling, and neither was she. “You know why.”