Free The Solomon Effect by C. S. Graham Page A

and see if there’s been any interest in my being assigned to this area.”
    “Shit. I’ll look into it.” Matt drew a deep breath. “In the meantime, be careful, okay?”
    “I’m always careful.”
    Matt laughed and hung up.
    Jax sat for a time staring unseeingly at the phone in his hand. Then he went to pull the folder with October Guinness’s remote viewing session out of his bag. He’d been so convinced it was all a bunch of woo-woo bullshit that he hadn’t even bothered to look at the report. The arrival of Tweed Coat changed things.
    He thumbed quickly through the Colonel’s report, thenread the transcript of the viewing itself. Jax had witnessed one of October’s viewings last summer, and he’d done enough research on the subject to understand how RV worked…just not enough to believe in it.
    He flipped to the drawings at the back of the report and felt a faint chill run up his spine. October’s sketches were rudimentary but detailed enough that Jax had no doubt he was staring at a picture of a World War II-era U-boat resting on a long, flat barge. The barge was tied up at a wharf beside a line of what looked like warehouses. To the right she had drawn a smaller corrugated metal building located about halfway up a hill; an office, perhaps. Beyond that he could see a rocky point covered with wind-stunted pines.
    Jax thumbed back through the report. He wanted to think the Colonel must have given her some indication of the target, but Jax knew McClintock was too careful, too professional, to have frontloaded the viewing that way. There was little doubt that October had “seen” a U-boat. The only question was, how accurate was their interpretation that the target location was Kaliningrad? The arrival of Tweed Coat seemed to suggest that it was pretty damned accurate.
    It was nearly ten o’clock, long after Jax had finished his trout amandine and put the tray outside the door, when he heard a desultory squeak, squeak coming down the hall toward his room. He’d been reading Herbert Werner’s Iron Coffins. Now he lifted his head and listened.
    The squeaking stopped outside his door. He heard a murmur, followed by a knock. A female voice with the unmistakable intonations of the Bronx said, “This is Petra Davidson. I’ve got your agricultural reports.”
    Setting aside his book, Jax went to open the door.
    The woman standing in the corridor was short, probably no more than five foot two. She had thick dark hair she wore cropped boylike in a style that might have given her a gaminlook when she was in her twenties. Now that she was in her mid-thirties, the effect was somewhat different. Her body had begun to thicken with the approach of middle age, although she still looked solid. Jax had no doubt she ran her three to five miles every morning with the same determination as she practiced regularly at the shooting range. Her dark synthetic pantsuit was eminently practical, her low-heeled pumps sensible. She was a short woman in a man’s world, which meant she had to try twice as hard and be twice as tough.
    She snapped, “Jason Aldrich?”
    “That’s right.” He looked beyond her, to the two burly guys in buzz haircuts pushing a big maid’s cart covered in canvas. “And these, I take it, are the Marines?”
    The Marines were obviously anxious to get out of the hall. They shoved past Jax and into the room, the wheels on their maid’s cart shrieking with each revolution. Jax glanced down at the large briefcase Petra carried. Since she hadn’t known if she was being called to the scene of a shooting or a knifing or something worse, procedure called for her to bring along first-aid equipment, luminol, and a black light. If necessary, the luminol and black light would be used to find blood traces she’d then corrupt to prevent DNA analysis, while the first-aid kit was to patch up Jax.
    “You won’t need the kit,” he said, shutting the door behind her. “There’s no blood. I broke the guy’s neck.