Tulane University, New Orleans: 4 June 6:20 P.M. Central time
Once upon a time, Dr. Henry Youngblood had been considered a respected academic. Courted as a speaker at conferences, he’d been an easy favorite for grant money and was published regularly in all the right journals. Then he was sucked into a research program on remote viewing secretly funded by the United States government, and all that changed.
It had taken Henry a while to realize what his new interest was doing to his career. Scholarly journals started rejecting his articles. Colleagues snickered when the once esteemed Dr. Youngblood walked into a room. It was a career-wrecker, this kind of research. Not because of the involvement of the government—which was unknown—but because of the nature of the research itself. Yet Henry couldn’t let it go. Even when he had to dig into his own pocket to continue financing his experiments. Even when the demands of operating without support kept him working in his office night after night, as he was now.
Casting a quick glance at the clock, he swiveled his chair toward his desk and flipped on his computer. The monitor stayed blank except for a bright yellow message that blinked out at him. WARNING! WARNING! Unauthorized access to files detected.
Henry huffed a short laugh. The warning system was the university’s, not his. As far as he was concerned, the new hacker-protection program was just one more thing that could go wrong—and frequently did. He was a research psychologist, for Christ’s sake, not a nuclear physicist. Why would anyone want to hack into his files?
Still smiling faintly, he typed in the password to clear the warning message and hit Enter. The message kept blinking.
His amusement sliding into annoyance, Henry glanced again at the clock. He was supposed to be meeting Elizabeth for dinner down in the Quarter at eight. Elizabeth Vu was thirty-nine years old, attractive, bright, and single; Henry was forty-eight, divorced for six long, lonely years, and carrying around a gut that spoke of an expanding love affair with New Orleans food. He was so preoccupied with his research that he rarely remembered he was supposed to have something called a life. He needed to get this data entered into the files before he quit for the night, but women like Elizabeth didn’t come into Henry’s orbit very often. The last thing he had time for was computer problems.
Rapidly pecking at the keyboard with two pointed fingers, Henry punched in the password again. Then he paused and lifted his head when he heard the street door below open and close.
Tulane’s psych department had relegated Henry to an office in the Psychology Research Annex, which was what they called the old two-story nineteenth-century white frame house on Freret Street that handled the department’s overflow. The house had never been renovated to suit its new function, so what were once a dining room, parlors, and bedrooms had simply been pressed into service as offices and lab space. The place had been in bad shape even before Katrina; now it was a virtual death trap to anyone with mold allergies.
Being sent to the Annex was considered a state of exile: punishment for his determined pursuit of a project most academics considered absurd if not downright unscientific. But the Annex suited Henry just fine. He wasn’t particularly troubled by mold. His office had once been a large corner bedroom at the back of the house, so it had the kind of nice architectural touches—like double hung windows and high ceilings and hardwood floors—that he loved about old New Orleans houses. True, the air conditioner was broken and the ceiling still showed an ugly brown water stain left from when Katrina took off most of the shingles on the roof. But he’d managed to scrounge up enough funds to have one of the unused rooms down the hall soundproofed for his research and training sessions. And because the Annex was on the edge of campus, people tended to leave him alone. Most of those with offices there were graduate students. The place was usually deserted by now.
Cocking his head, Henry listened to the footsteps coming up the uncarpeted stairs. Two men, or maybe three, he thought as the old wooden floorboards creaked. He glanced out the open side window to the driveway below. It was empty except for his ten-year-old Miata.
Henry sucked in a quick breath of hot air scented with jasmine and sun-baked asphalt. He’d been working in the field of parapsychology for almost twenty years, and never once in all that time had he himself experienced so much as a whisper of premonition, a hint of anything he might have termed extrasensory perception. Until now.
His heart hammering painfully in his chest, Henry turned toward the door. He’d pushed halfway up from his desk chair when a man’s figure filled the open doorway.
The man paused, his pale blue eyes narrowing as the light from the overhead fluorescent fixture fell on the even, familiar features of his face. The two men behind him also hesitated. One was big and dark; the other more leanly muscled, with a pair of silver-rimmed glasses that lent an air of scholarly distinction to an otherwise military bearing.
“Lance.” Awash in a giddy wave of relief that left him feeling vaguely silly, Henry sank back into his chair. “This is a surprise.”
“Hey, Henry,” said Lance Palmer, and smiled.