The Archangel Project (26 page)

“Hey, Gunner,” said Tobie, when he answered his phone.
“It's me.

“Tobie? Jesus. You okay? The police have your picture splattered all over the place.”

“I'm okay. Where are you?”

He had to shout to be heard over the noise of traffic in the background. “We're set up at Lee Circle. They're not letting us get any closer.”

“Listen, Gunner. You remember our conspiracy theory? Well, believe me, it's bigger than we imagined. Much bigger. I need to get into this reception at the World War II Museum. How can I do that?”

“Jeez. That's not going to be easy. It's not open to the public. Just Medal of Honor winners and a few select guests. One of our supporters has a cousin in the mayor's office and managed to get a couple of guest passes we thought we might use to sneak a few people inside. I'd let you use those but she said she'd meet us here at the Circle and she hasn't shown up yet.”

“What time do you expect her to get there?”

“She was supposed to be here half an hour ago.”

 

They came down off the interstate at the St. Charles exit. Mist clung to rooftops and the spreading branches of half-dead crepe myrtles dripping with old Mardi Gras beads. This part of the avenue had seen better days, the grand houses that once stood there having long ago been torn down and replaced by rows of dreary office buildings.

“Now where?” said Bubba.

“Left.”

They swept under the interstate, past parking lots dark and sodden from a recent rain. Lee Circle stood just on the other side of the freeway, a broad circular mound planted with grass, dwarf yaupons, and wildly blooming pink rosebushes. In its center rose a sixty-foot column of white marble crowned at the top by a statue of Robert E. Lee.

The Circle had been on a downhill slide even before Katrina. Now most of its ugly 1950s-era buildings stood empty and boarded up. Of all the graceful old homes that had once fronted the green, only one remained, a decrepit pink turreted house at the corner that had been turned into a bar.

“There,” she said, pointing to the small group of protestors in rain slickers who'd gathered on the right side of the mound. From here they could look up Andrew Higgins Drive, past the red stone towers of the old Confederate museum, to the concrete and glass ware-houselike bulk of the World War II Museum. There, a different kind of crowd had gathered, men in suits
and women in jewel-toned silks and aging veterans in mothballed uniforms. The reception might be limited to Medal of Honor winners and select guests, but the guest list must be mighty long, Tobie thought. The streets in all directions were lined with parked cars.

Bubba pulled in close to the Circle's curb, the white pickup behind him honking as he stopped traffic. “It ain't gonna be easy to find someplace to park in this mess. I'll meet y'all outside the museum.”

Tobie looked at her watch. “I'm not sure that's a good idea, Bubba. We don't find that bomb, this whole area could blow.”

“You don't find that bomb,” said Bubba, “and I'm never going to get paid.”

 

She found Gunner fiddling with his PA system. He'd had to run an extension cord from the Circle Bar across the street to the steps in front of the statue, and the connection didn't seem to be working very well.

He flung up his hands when he saw her. “Oh, God; stay back, Tobie. You come any closer and I'll never get this thing to work.”

“What's he mean by that?” Jax Alexander asked, giving her a hard look.

“I don't know,” she lied as she stopped and let Gunner walk up to them.

“Leila got here a few minutes ago,” he said, reaching under his rain slicker to pull out two gray cards embossed with the D-Day Museum emblem and encased in plastic sleeves suspended from black neck bands.

“Thank you, Gunner.” She hung one of the black bands around her neck and handed the other to Jax.
“What exactly are you protesting, anyway?”

Gunner pointed at the damp white banner they'd stretched across the base of Robert E. Lee's column. From the size and shape of the cloth, she thought it might once have been someone's bed sheet before it was donated to the cause and stenciled in big black letters:
MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR
.

 

Lance Palmer had cast a final look around the museum's cavernous lobby and was heading for the exit when he got a call from one of his operatives.

“We just intercepted a conversation between the Guinness woman and that guy named Gunner Eriksson,” said the operative. “She's on her way to the museum now.”

“We'll pick her up,” said Lance with a smile. He snapped his phone closed and nodded to Hadley. “We just got lucky.”

Lance Palmer kept one hand inside his jacket, the handle
of his small .380 Sig Sauer cool against his palm as he and Hadley worked their way through the press of sweating journalists and gawking tourists hoping for a glimpse of the Veep or maybe one of the Hollywood celebrities who were expected to put in an appearance.

The street in front of the museum had been closed to vehicular traffic, but they were letting pedestrians past the barricades. Only a scraggly bunch of unpatriotic lowlifes with a silly rain-drenched banner and a PA system that didn't work had been banished up a block to Lee's Circle. Which was a pity, Lance thought; he'd like them to have had a front row seat for the show that was about to take place.

“How much time we got?” Hadley asked, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the crowd. “We don't want to be standing here when that sucker blows.”

Lance glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes.”

“There she is,” said Lance, his gaze focusing on a
small woman in a pale pink sundress, with a guest pass slung around her neck. He studied the lean dude in chinos and a black polo shirt beside her. “And there's the sonofabitch who's been causing us so much trouble.”

Hadley grunted. “How'd they figure it out, I wonder?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does if they told someone.”

“If they did, it doesn't look like anyone believed them,” said Lance as they cut through the press of onlookers. “I don't see the cavalry.”

There was still a crowd of latecomers bunched at the door, held up by the bottleneck of security and metal detectors and X-ray machines. “You take the girl,” said Lance, moving into position. “The asshole is mine.”

Lance shoved his .380 into the small of Jax Alexander's back just as Hayden's fist closed around the girl's upper arm. “Put your hands in your pockets and keep them there,” Lance said softly, leaning in close to Alexander's ear. “Your hands come out of your pockets and you're dead. It's that simple.”

 

They walked down a street of painted old brick warehouses, through moist air heavy with the smell of wet pavement and machine oil. Tobie could hear the steady drone of traffic from the interstate that curled away toward their right and the rattling vibration of a helicopter hovering unseen somewhere in the distance.

She threw a quick glance at the man who held her, his fingers digging hard into the flesh of her bare left arm. He wasn't looking at her, and she had a pretty good idea why. She wanted to say something, but her mouth
puckered with a bitter taste like old pennies and she knew there was nothing she could say that was going to change what was about to happen.

“This way,” he said, jerking her around the corner into a street with brick gutters and a massive yellow Dumpster and construction crane that blocked the road, effectively turning it into a dead end. The warehouse beside them loomed some three stories tall, red brick framing old glass windows that showed wavy reflections of the day's fading flat light. They were maybe a quarter of the way down the block when Palmer said, “That'll do.”

They paused beside an ancient portico of columns and an entrance door obscured by heavy bolted iron gates. “If you know who I am,” said Jax, his hands still carefully kept in his pockets, “then you know that every last detail of this little project of yours has been turned over to the CIA and the FBI.”

Lance Palmer laughed softly. “Right. That's why they've got every bomb squad in the South crawling all over the place even as we speak. You see, I know all about remote viewing. And I know why every intel agency in the country got out of the business more than a decade ago. Because a guy sitting in a darkened room ‘seeing' things in some unexplained corner of his mind doesn't produce verifiable information. There's a difference between accurate and verifiable.”

“Maybe. But the pieces are there. An idiot could put them together.”

“Only an idiot would try. If you expect me to be scared, I'm not.”

Tobie shifted her weight slowly, carefully, her heart
pounding so hard the blood surged painfully in her ears. No one was paying any attention as she slipped her right hand into her bag. She felt for the smooth handle of the Glock and found it, her finger curling around the trigger.

It was awkward aiming through the bag's canvas side, her elbow crooked out clumsily. She pointed the muzzle blindly at Lance Palmer's chest and squeezed off two rounds—
pop pop—
the air filling with the stench of cordite and burned canvas.

Both rounds hit, blooming red across the man's white shirt. His body jerked once, twice, his eyes widening in surprise and a desperate hope that was fading even as she swung the Glock's silenced muzzle toward the man beside her.

He'd had time to pull his gun out of its holster, but he was still bringing it up when she nailed him. She squeezed her finger over and over again, his body jerking, stumbling backward. This time she was careful not to look into his eyes. But she was close enough that she felt the warm spray of his blood on her bare arm.

“Holy shit,”
said Jax.

Tobie yanked the Glock out of her ruined bag and gripped the stock in both hands, ready to squeeze off another round if she needed to. She didn't. The men were dead.

Jax wiped the back of one hand across his sweat-dampened forehead. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, although she wasn't. She swallowed, breathing hard through her nostrils, her grip on the automatic so tight she realized her hands were starting to ache.

“How'd you think you were going to get that gun through the museum's security check?”

“I forgot I had it,” she said, her voice cracking.

He put his strong hand over hers, loosening her grip. “Here. Give it to me.”

She let him take the gun.

He wiped it down, which she would never have had the presence of mind to do. Then he tossed it into one of the construction Dumpsters and put a gentle hand on her arm. “Our fifteen minutes just narrowed down to five.”

A crowd of latecomers still clogged the entrance to the
museum. Tobie clenched her hand over the scorched hole in the front of her bag and hoped no one noticed the blood splatters on her arm and the skirt of her dress.

“Keep your head down,” said Jax, leaning in close to her. “And whatever you do, don't turn around. Ever meet an NOPD homicide cop named Ahearn? Small, sandy hair, invisible eyelashes?”

The taste of copper pennies was back in Tobie's mouth. She was careful not to look around. “No. Why?”

“Because he's standing over there beside one of the uniforms at the barricades. I think he's made us.”

“What do we do?”

One of the men guarding the doors said, “Excuse me, miss. You need to put your bag on the X-ray machine and move through the metal detector.”

“Sorry,” said Tobie. As she stepped toward the metal detector, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder and saw him: a plainclothes detective with sandy hair
pushing purposefully through the crowd. “Shit,” she whispered.

Jax grabbed her arm, pulling her up the stairs into the museum's huge main entrance hall.

It was a cavernous space that soared some four stories high. The main front wall was glass, but the rest of the structure was concrete and steel. Gray walls, gray ceiling, gray floors. The only color came from a row of allies' flags ranged along a shallow second story balcony at the rear and the three green Army vehicles parked in front of the windowed wall: a Sherman tank, a half-track, and what she now realized was an old amphibious jeep. She could see its anchor, still incongruously fastened near the rear.

Jax touched her arm. “There's your Skytrooper.”

Tobie's head fell back. She found herself staring up at a huge C47. The last time she'd been here, not too long after she first moved to New Orleans, two small, single-engine planes were suspended by heavy cables from the ceiling of the museum's lofty main hall: a British Spitfire fighter and an old naval torpedo bomber called the Avenger.

The Spitfire was still there, in the far corner. But the Avenger had been replaced by a much larger C47. It hovered high over the center of the warehouse-like space, a lumbering transport with a white underbelly and rows of dark windows nearly lost in the dull sheen of its fuselage.

“Oh, God,” she said, her gaze fixing on the encircled star that was the emblem of the old Army Air Corps. “That's it. They must have hidden the—”

“Don't say it,” he warned her.

She lowered her voice. “They must have hidden the
package
in the plane when the museum made the switch.”

“The problem is, how are they going to detonate it?”

Tobie scanned the laughing, chattering throng, their voices melding together into a dull roar. Clusters of men in suits and women in silken dresses balanced wine-glasses while selecting hors d'oeuvres from the trays of passing waiters. A wizened little man in a wheelchair sat looking out at nothing in particular, a proud grin on his face, the Medal of Honor on its blue ribbon around his neck nestling next to rows of other medals pinned to the chest of his faded uniform. Beyond him, Tobie could see the mayor's bald chocolate head thrown back as he laughed at something.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Two minutes after seven. Beckham is already here. See him? By the podium.”

Tobie followed his nod. A podium had been set up between the museum's two hulking Higgins boats.

“Every minute we stay here,” said Jax, leaning in close to her, “brings us that much closer to dying.”

She looked up at him. His voice was calm, but she could see the sweat glistening on his upper lip, see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “What would happen if we yelled fire? Wouldn't that at least clear the place out?”

“No. We'd be tackled in an instant and hustled out of here.”

“Then you leave,” she said, frantically scanning the crowded hall. “There's no point in you staying.”

“Right. I'll just clear out and let you and all these other people get blown to pieces.”

She saw his eyes suddenly narrow. “What? What is it?”

She followed his gaze to where a young man with dark hair and a hawklike nose stood off to one side. He was lugging a huge video camera and had a press pass around his neck. What was it Jax had told her about the guy who owned the Charbonnet house? He was a UNO professor, wasn't he? A journalism professor.

“That's one of the guys in the visa photos Matt e-mailed me,” said Jax. “He's Iranian.”

As they watched, the Iranian raised the Canon camcorder. It was big and black, designed to take digital videos on tape. He panned slowly over the crowd, then swung to point it directly at the vintage airplane looming over them.

“Grab him!” yelled Jax, surging forward.
“There's a bomb!”

“No, wait!” Tobie knew Jax had taken one look at that long black lens and remembered the cylinders she'd sketched during the remote viewing session. But it was all wrong. “That's not it!” she shouted. But Jax had already lunged.

Women screamed, their colorful skirts swirling as they scrambled out of the way. Jax knocked into a young waitress with a platter of shrimp that flew into the air, the waitress crashing back into a guy with a tray of drinks.

The young Iranian turned to stare, his green eyes wide with confusion, not understanding until the last minute that the guy in the khakis and the polo shirt was coming at
him
.

Jax slammed into him, bowling the kid over, the cam
corder flying out of his hands to land with a shattering smack on the hard concrete floor.

Suddenly, something like a dozen guns erupted from beneath suit jackets and out of little purses, the
snick
of their hammers being drawn back loud in the hushed silence. “Get down, you son of a bitch,” yelled a Secret Service agent with a big .357 Sig he stuck in Jax's ear. “Do it! Do it! On your face! Arms out to the side! Make a move and I blow your brains out!”

Jax lay facedown on the concrete, his arms spread-eagled, a Secret Service agent's foot in the small of his back and a dozen guns pointed at his head. “The camera,” he said. “It's the triggering mechanism for a bomb.”

One of the agents—a hulking guy with a blond crew cut—leaned over to pick up the Canon. “Doesn't look like a bomb to me.”

“No, you don't understand…” Jax began.

But Tobie was looking beyond him, at the spotlights mounted on the wall behind him.
Big, black cylinders
.

“Shit,” she whispered.

She swung around. The lights were everywhere, mounted high on the walls and on the exposed steel girders. Heart pounding wildly, she let her head fall back.

The hall had been built with a semicircular observation platform that jutted out into the air from the third floor balcony. It stood just about level with the Skytrooper hanging suspended from the center of the hall's ceiling. Two flights of concrete and steel stairs climbed toward it, wrapping around the elevator shaft.

Tobie stared at the platform's familiar gray metal railings.
Whoever took the photograph of the Skytrooper in the Archangel Project file had been standing on that platform.

She looked beyond the platform, to the rear wall where a row of three black spotlights hung suspended from a pole, the last one positioned so it pointed straight through the side window of the C47's cockpit.

She raced toward the steps, taking them two at a time, just as the sandy-haired detective burst through the knot of security at the front entrance and shouted, “That woman in the pink sundress—
stop her
!”