Free The Archangel Project by C.S. Graham

couldn’t sink much lower at the Company, either literally or figuratively. The head of the division, Matt von Moltke, had been relegated to a cubbyhole near the maintenance department, his cramped office barely big enough for a beat-up gray metal desk, a couple of filing cabinets, and a Formica-topped conference table that looked like a sturdier version of something salvaged from a 1950s-era diner.
    Jax arrived at the office to find Matt sitting at his desk, his forehead furrowing as he studied a series of spreadsheets while wolfing down a triple-decker club sandwich.
    â€œYou haven’t been home yet, have you?” said Jax.
    A 250-pound giant of a man with wild, silver-laced black hair and a thick beard, Matt shoved the rest ofhis sandwich into his mouth, drained the can of generic diet cola that was never far from his reach, and swallowed. “Hell. It’s early yet.”
    He pushed back his chair and stood up, lurching awkwardly when his weight came down on the leg that had been mangled by a run-in with a Bouncing Betty on a rain-slicked jungle path in the Mekong Delta. He’d had a wife, once—or so Jax had heard. He still had a daughter, Gabrielle, who lived near her mother somewhere in the Midwest. But since the breakup of Matt’s marriage, the Company had become his life. He’d been sidelined here, to the division, way back in the eighties as punishment for kicking up a fuss over the U.S. funding of death squads in El Salvador. For some reason Jax had never quite figured out, the division had suited Matt von Moltke just fine. Twenty-odd years later, he was still here.
    Matt limped over to an ominous-looking pile of books and files stacked at one end of the Formica and chrome table. “You need to find out what you can about the death of this man,” he said, flipping open one of the files to extract a large black and white photo.
    Jax stared down at a picture of a balding, overweight man with gentle eyes and a pleasant smile. “Who was he?”
    â€œA guy by the name of Dr. Henry Youngblood. Professor of psychology at Tulane University. His name came up in a police report tonight. He’s on our watch list.”
    â€œWhat’s the Company’s interest in him?”
    â€œHe worked on a project for us back in the late eighties and early nineties. We need to make sure nothing that’s happening in New Orleans now involves us. Andthat nothing’s going to come out that might embarrass us.”
    Jax looked up. “Why ‘embarrass’? What was this guy doing?”
    â€œRemote viewing.”
    Jax kept his gaze on Matt’s plump, hairy face. “What the hell is that?”
    Matt cleared his throat. “It’s a term developed about thirty years ago by a couple of physicists out at Stanford Research Institute in California. Basically it’s just an academically sanitized label for the ability to observe distant places and events through alternate channels of perception.”
    â€œYou’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you?”
    The skin beside Matt’s dark brown eyes creased into a smile. “Ooohhh, yeah. Clairvoyance, telekinesis, pre-cognition…you name it, the U.S. government has studied it at one time or another.”
    â€œPlease tell me this is a joke.”
    Matt reached for another one of the fat files and held it out. “Nope. It started at the end of World War II, when we captured some reports on the Nazis’ parapsychology experiments that interested our guys—not as much as the Germans’ work on the A-bomb and jet engines, of course, but it was intriguing. Things really picked up in the seventies, when George H. W. Bush was Director of the CIA. Most of the programs back then were run through the Stanford Research Institute, but not all of them.”
    Jax perched on one end of the table and started thumbing through the file.
    â€œYou remember the Iranian hostage