The Last Oracle (Sigma Force 5)

But in that long breathless moment, staring into her caramel-brown eyes, Pyotr had known her secret. She had come to him, seeking comfort for herself, reassurance from him.

From that moment, terror and love had bonded them equally.

Along with a dark secret.

4:28 P.M.

New Delhi, India

“Did you know man can see into the future?” Dr. Hayden Masterson asked as he tapped at the computer.

Gray stirred from studying the depths of his coffee. The group shared one of the private rooms at the Delhi Internet Café and Video. Kowalski leaned against the frosted glass door, ensuring their privacy. He picked at an adhesive bandage on his chin. Elizabeth had tended to the man’s scrapes and was now stacking the pages coming out of the laser printer beside the workstation. It was just the four of them. Rosauro and Luca had gone out to rent them a new car for the journey ahead.

Though Gray still wasn’t sure where they were going.

That all depended on Masterson—and he wasn’t in a talking mood. The professor had spoken hardly a word since they’d escaped from the attack at the hotel. Attempts to draw the man out, to get him to reveal why he might be the target of assassination, had only seemed to make him withdraw.

He just continued to study the marred ivory handle of his cane. His eyes glazed—not with shock, but in deep concentration.

Elizabeth had given Gray a quiet shake of her head.

Don’t press him.

So they’d driven north out of Agra, aiming for the capital of India, New Delhi. During the ninety-mile trek, Gray had them change vehicles twice along the way.

Once they reached the teeming outskirts of the city, Masterson had given only one instruction: I need access to a computer.

So here they were, in a cramped back room of an Internet café. The professor had promptly logged on to a private address on the University of Mumbai’s Web site, requiring three levels of code to access it.

“Archibald’s research,” Masterson had explained and had begun printing it all out. He had remained silent until this cryptic statement about mankind seeing the future.

“How do you mean?” Gray asked.

Masterson pushed back from his workstation. “Well, many people don’t know this, but it’s been scientifically proven in the last couple of years that man has the ability to see a short span into the future. About three seconds or so.”

“Three seconds?” Kowalski said. “Lot of good that’ll do you.”

“It does plenty,” Masterson replied.

Gray frowned at Kowalski and turned back to the professor. “But what do you mean by scientifically proven?”

“Are you familiar with the CIA’s Stargate project?”

Gray shared a glance with Elizabeth. “The project Dr. Polk worked on for a while.”

“Another researcher on the project, Dr. Dean Radin, performed a series of experiments on volunteers. He wired them up with lie detectors, measuring skin conductivity, and began showing them a series of images on a screen. A random mix of horrible and soothing photos. The violent and explicit images would trigger a strong response on the lie detector, an electronic wince. After a few minutes, the subjects began to wince before a horrible image would appear on the screen, reacting up to three seconds in advance. It happened time and again. Other scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, repeated these tests at both Edinburgh and Cornell universities. With the same statistical results.”

Elizabeth shook her head with disbelief. “How could that be?”

Masterson shrugged. “I have no idea. But the experiment was extended to gamblers, too. They were monitored while playing cards. They began showing the same pattern, reacting seconds before a card would turn over. A positive response when the turn was favorable, and negative when it wasn’t. This so intrigued a Nobel-winning physicist from Cambridge University that he performed a more elaborate study, hooking such test subjects to MRI scanners in order to study their brain activity. He found that the source of this premonition seemed to lie in the brain. This Nobel Prize winner—and keep in mind, not some bloody quack—concluded that ordinary people can see for short spans into the future.”

“That’s amazing,” Elizabeth said.

Masterson fixed her with a steady stare. “It’s what drove your father,” he said gently. “To determine how and why this could be. If ordinary people could see for three seconds into the future, why not longer? Hours, days, weeks, years. For physicists, such a concept is not beyond comprehension. Even Albert Einstein once said that the difference between the past and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time is just another dimension, like distance. We have no trouble looking forward or backward along a path. So why not along time, too?”

Gray pictured the strange girl. Her charcoal sketch of the Taj Mahal. If man could look through time, as Dr. Masterson reported, then why not across great distances? He remembered Director Crowe’s statement about the successes the CIA project had with remote viewing.

“All it would take,” Masterson said, “would be to find those rare individuals who could see farther than the ordinary. To study them.”

Or exploit them, Gray thought, still thinking of the girl.

Elizabeth passed the last page from the printer to the stack. She handed it to Masterson. “My father…he was looking for these rare individuals.”

“No, my dear, he wasn’t looking for them.”

Elizabeth’s eyes pinched in confusion.

Masterson patted her hand. “Your father found them.”

Gray perked up. “What?”

A knock on the door interrupted the professor before he could explain. Kowalski shifted, checked who it was, and opened the door.

Rosauro poked in her head and passed to Gray a heavy set of rental keys. “All done in here?”

“No,” Gray answered.

Masterson bowled past him with an armload of papers under his arm. “Yes, we are.”

Gray rolled his eyes and waved to the others. “C’mon.”

He followed, mentally strangling the irascible professor.

Kowalski kept to Gray’s side. “He’s just getting even,” the large man said and nodded to the walking stick under Masterson’s other arm. “For what you did to his cane.”

They exited the Internet café and found Luca Hearn leaning on the hood of a pewter-colored Mercedes-Benz G55 SUV. It looked like a tank.

Rosauro circled around to the front. She already had a hand raised against his objections. “Okay, it’s not inconspicuous. I know. But I didn’t know where we were going or how fast we might need to get there.”