At twelve-thirty, Tobie called her next door neighbor, Ambrose King.
“Jesus Christ, October.” He yawned into the phone. “What time is it?”
“It’s lunchtime for most of us, Ambrose. Listen, I’ve had to go out of town for a few days. Do you think you could check on Beauregard and see that he has enough to eat, and give him some fresh water?”
“Sure. When you think you’ll be back?”
“Hopefully in a day or two. Thanks Ambrose.”
“Bingo,” said Hadley, sticking his head around the corner.
Lance looked up from the city map he and Paul Fitzgerald had spread across the table.
“We got her,” said Hadley. “She called her next door neighbor to ask him to take care of her cat.”
“From a pay phone?”
“Nope. From a prepaid cell.”
“Huh. So she’s being clever. Just not clever enough.”
“Our boys sent us something else, too,” said Hadley. “Dr. Elizabeth Vu from the math department just tried to call the girl’s old cell phone.”
Lance frowned. “Vu? Isn’t she the statistician who was working with Youngblood?”
“You got it.”
“Maybe we should have paid more attention to her. Have Ross and O’Meara go check her out.” Lance pushed back his chair and stood up. It was about time they got a break. “In the meantime, pull the records on our girl’s new cell phone. Lets see who she’s talked to in the last twenty-four hours. And get the GPS coordinates. If she leaves it on, it’ll work like a homing beacon and lead us right to her.”
Jax opened the door to let the G6 air out and leaned against the side. He was parked in the shade, but it was still hot. A light breeze had kicked up, smelling of sun-baked river silt, long-growing grass, and hot asphalt. He loosened his tie and tried for the fifth time that day to call Sibel. She wasn’t answering.
Frustrated, he punched in Matt’s number.
“Where’s that information you said you were sending on the girl?”
“It’s coming. We should be able to get it out to you in a few minutes. We’ve been busy. There’s been a lot of chatter floating around the last few days, but it’s strangely hard to pin down.”
Jax grunted. “Tell me about October Guinness.”
There was a pause filled with the tapping of computer keys. Matt let out a low whistle. “She was in the Navy. A linguist. Speaks something like a dozen languages. Her stepfather’s a petroleum engineer and worked all over the place. Even did a stint in the Persian Gulf, which is where our girl learned her Arabic. The Navy sent her to Baghdad.”
That must have been a surprise. “She was wounded?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Someone mentioned the VA hospital.”
“She caught a round in the leg. Laid her up for some time, mainly because it complicated an earlier knee injury. But that’s not the main reason she’s still going to the VA. They have her in therapy. And I don’t mean just physical therapy.”
Jax squinted up at the spreading branches of the oak over his head, where a blue jay had started making an angry racket. “I don’t like the sound of this, Matt. Spit it out.”
“She got a psycho discharge.”
Jax slapped his hand against the roof of the car. “Oh, great.” He climbed in and slammed the door. “That’s just what I need.”
Tobie had never tried remote viewing on her own.
Several times in the past she’d had what she now understood were spontaneous viewing experiences. But even after she started working with Youngblood, she’d shied away from attempting on her own to duplicate the procedure he’d taught her. With his help, she’d been slowly coming to see her remote viewing ability as a talent rather than a curse. But the idea of deliberately doing it on her own still scared her.
Now she had no choice.
She drove to the zoo, found a place in the shade to leave the Bug, and walked through the trees toward the levee. The river breeze was kicking up, rustling the leaves of the live oaks overhead. A woman and two kids had spread a picnic blanket in the shade. Tobie could smell the sharp scent of their fried chicken, hear the children’s laughter, the mother’s soft voice. The woman glanced up, her gaze following Tobie as she kept walking.
She found a hollow place behind the broad, twisted trunk of an oak that looked as if it had been there since the days of Lafitte and General Jackson and the War of 1812. She sat on the grass with a pad of paper and a pen beside her, crossed her legs like a Buddhist monk, and tried to relax.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, keeping her spine straight. When she’d done sessions with Youngblood, he always gave her the targets. At first she would just focus on whoever had been sent to the target site. Then he started giving her more distant targets, designated by geographical coordinates. Once, he had a friend in Hawaii put a photograph in a sealed envelope and set it on his desk, and had her view that.
Even Youngblood admitted he didn’t understand how it all worked. But Tobie knew the link between the target, the tasker, and the viewer was always there. Neither the tasker nor the viewer ever knew what the target was—that was important, so that the tasker wouldn’t inadvertently influence or coax the viewer’s report of what she or he was seeing. But the tasker had to be aware of the selected target, in the sense that he had to be able to say to the viewer, “Elizabeth is at the target site,” or, “The target is shown in the photograph sealed in an envelope and lying on a desk in Hawaii.” Lately he’d started simply giving her coordinates, saying things like, “Focus your attention on forty-five degrees, twenty-five minutes, fifty-two seconds North, and eighty-six degrees, fifteen minutes, twenty-two seconds West.”
Would it work if she tried to set her own target?
She knew the target she was seeking: the same office that had served as the target for Henry’s funding proposal. So how could she be sure she was really “seeing” it and not simply imagining it?
A bubble of panic rose within her. She pushed it down. She needed to be receptive, to believe in herself, otherwise this wasn’t going to work. She closed her eyes, concentrated on the gentle touch of the wind against her face. But all she could see was flames dancing against a night sky. The dark vibrating shadow of helicopter gunships looming overhead. A little girl screaming and a mother’s frantic face as she ran—
Tobie opened her eyes, her breath coming hard and fast, fingers raking her hair back from her hot forehead. She stared up the slope of the river levee, where the mother was now playing Frisbee with her children.
It wasn’t going to work, October thought, her panic in full flight. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t remote view that office again. Not reliably. She couldn’t even remember what else she’d drawn in those quick, largely unintelligible sketches she made during her session with Youngblood. So what was she supposed to do now?
She was just pushing to her feet when the phone in her bag began to ring.