“I should have remembered that brass sign,” said October, pushing a small serving of scrambled eggs around on her plate. “Global Tactical Solutions. God. I saw it in the viewing session. How could I have forgotten something like that?”
They had stopped for breakfast at a small old-fashioned diner just off Lemmon Avenue. Jax tried to put in a call to Division Thirteen, but all he got was Matt’s voice mail. “You’re familiar with Global Tactical Solutions?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Are you kidding? They’re all over Iraq—almost as much as Blackwater. Those guys make more money in a day than most of our soldiers make in a month. They have better equipment, better armor, and they can kill, rape, and steal as much as they want, because the Iraqi officials can’t touch them. And because they’re civilians, the American military can’t touch them either.”
He grinned. “Not some of your favorite people, are they?”
“No. They’re mercenaries. Their very existence perverts everything this country is supposed to stand for. It’s like we’re morphing into Imperial Rome.”
“Did you know GTS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Keefe Corporation?”
She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug and shivered as if she were cold. “No. But that explains a lot, doesn’t it? Henry Youngblood obviously got Keefe interested in the use of remote viewing for mineral exploration and put in a funding proposal to them. As part of the test viewing, they gave him the coordinates of GTS’s headquarters in Dallas.” She gave a soft, humorless laugh. “They probably thought I’d describe the fountain outside, maybe a vague impression of the building. Instead, I zeroed in on a file that was lying on some executive’s desk. The Archangel Project.”
Jax finished the last of his eggs and pushed the plate away. “In a sense, this complicates things. GTS has a lot of other clients besides Keefe. They could be working on this Archangel Project for anyone.”
“Including the U.S. Government.”
“Including the U.S. Government,” Jax agreed. He reached for his coffee. “I think that bomb factory in the Lower Ninth may be the key. Right now, we don’t know if GTS set it up or if they were just watching it. But I’m inclined to think it’s theirs. After all, they’re the ones who responded to our break-in.”
She gave up all pretense of eating and pushed her own plate away. She’d barely touched it. “Bomb factories make bombs to blow things up. So what are these guys planning to hit?”
“They may not be planning to blow up anything. Sometimes the threat of a bomb can be nearly as effective as the real thing. Look at the hysteria that swept both Britain and the States when the Brits supposedly uncovered a terrorist cell that was about to blow up a bunch of airplanes with peroxide and acetone. It was actually impossible. Did it matter at that point? No. Anyone who wants to get on an airplane still needs to shove all their liquids into one of those silly little Ziploc bags. It’s a lot easier to make people scared than it is to calm them down and get them to listen to reason.”
“You think that’s what this is about? Making people afraid?”
“The box of Korans sort of makes it look that way, doesn’t it?”
“But what could that photograph of an old Skytrooper I saw have to do with this? Does anyone even still use them?”
“There must be hundreds of them still in service. Those planes are real workhorses. I know we used them in Vietnam. And I’ve heard some of the ones still flying in South America saw action during the Normandy invasion.”
She pushed her coffee aside untouched. “There were other photographs in that file. If I could just remember some of them…” Her voice trailed off, her head turning away as she stared silently out the window at the street beyond, still largely empty in the pale light of dawn.
Jax studied the curve of her cheek, the stubborn tilt of her chin. He still thought remote viewing belonged in a carnival with card tricks and palm readers, and yet…“You need to do another remote viewing session,” he heard himself saying.
She swung her head to look at him, her splayed fingers raking the hair off her forehead. “I can’t. I told you, I tried. The link between the tasker, the site, and the viewer is important. Otherwise there’s no way of knowing what is real and what is simply imagination. It’s hard enough as it is. Henry told me that’s why all the intelligence branches finally dropped remote viewing. Sometimes it’s amazingly accurate, but it’s often just flat-out wrong, and there’s no way of knowing which is which. I’m afraid that if I try to task myself, all I’ll get is my imagination.”
“So what we need is to get you to someone who knows how to do this tasking.”
“Right. Like who?”
“You said it yourself: all the intelligence branches were dabbling in this at one time or another. There must be someone around here who knows how to do this. We just need to find him.” He was reaching for his phone when it rang in his hand.
He flipped it open. “Hey, Matt. I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”
“I’ve been with the Big Man. How fast can you get here?”
“You mean, to D.C.?”
October looked up at him, one eyebrow raised in silent inquiry.
Matt said, “The DCI wants you in his office pronto.”
“Chandler? What for?”
“He’s one unhappy hombre. Someone on high has been sitting on him. You’d better be there.”
Jax let out a long, particularly crude oath.
“By the way,” said Matt, “I finally got a report on Fitzgerald. He works for Global Tactical Solutions.”
“We kinda figured that out for ourselves, Matt. What else do you have on him?’
“He is—or rather, was—a Middle East specialist. Speaks Farsi.”
“Farsi?”
“That’s right. He had an Iranian wife, but they’ve been divorced for a couple of years now. She works here in D.C., at a think tank.”
“Get her address. What about the house in the Lower Ninth Ward?”
“The FBI raided it early this morning. Everything was exactly as you described it, except there was no dead body.”
“And the security system?”
“Fed to a house in the Irish Channel. It was rented by an Iranian named Barid Hafezi. The same guy who bought the Charbonnet house two months ago.”
“Who is he?”
“A journalism professor at UNO. His wife’s a biochemist at Loyola.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“No. And get this: the guy’s missing. They’re grilling his wife right now. Her name is Nadia. She says she doesn’t know anything, but they’ve got some guys from Gitmo they’re bringing in to interrogate her.”
“Ah, Jesus. What are they going to do? Waterboard her?”
Matt made an incoherent noise. “It’s the classic scenario politicians and journos always use as a justification for torture, isn’t it? If there’s a terrorist attack about to go down and she knows about it—”
“And if she doesn’t? Or if it’s a setup?”
“You think it might be? There were traces of Semtex on that canvas bag they found.”
“Well there would be, wouldn’t there? What about the Archangel Project? Turn up anything on that yet?”
“Still nothing.”
“Listen, Matt. I need you to do something for me. Find me someone who knows how to task a remote viewer. See if we can meet with him as soon as I finish with the DCI.”
Matt gave a ringing laugh. “You’re kidding me, right? I thought you didn’t believe in this shit.”
“I don’t.”
Jax snapped his phone closed and looked up to find October watching him. “What was that about?” she asked.
He downed the rest of his coffee in one gulp and stood up. “The DCI’s got his tit in a wringer about something.”
“The what?”
“The DCI. Director of Central Intelligence, Gordon Chandler.”
“Is he the guy you said you punched at some embassy dinner party?”
“That’s him.” Jax paused to flip open his phone again and punch in a number. “Hey, Bubba. Got enough fuel to get us to D.C.?”