The Last Oracle (Sigma Force 5)

Painter sat up straighter, drawing back Elizabeth’s attention. “As to Chernobyl, we don’t know why your father went there. In fact, we ran his passport. There’s no record of him visiting Russia, or for that matter, ever reentering the United States. We can only assume he was traveling with a false passport. The last record we have of his travels was from five months ago. He flew to India. That’s the last we know about his whereabouts.”

Elizabeth nodded. “He travels there often. At least twice a year.”

Gray shifted straighter. “To India. Why?”

“For a research grant. As a neurologist, he was studying the biological basis for instinct. He worked with a professor of psychology at the University of Mumbai.”

Gray glanced to his boss.

“I’ll look into it,” Painter said. “But I had already heard of your father’s interest in instinct and intuition. In fact, it was the basis for his involvement with the Jasons.”

This last was directed at Gray, but Elizabeth stiffened at the mention of the organization. She could not hide her distaste. “So you know about them—the Jasons.”

Painter glanced to Gray, then back to her. “Yes, we know your father was working for them.”

“Working? More like obsessed with them.”

“What do you mean?”

Elizabeth explained how working with the military grew into an all-consuming passion with her father. Each summer, he’d disappear for months at a time, sometimes longer. The rest of his year was devoted to his responsibilities as a professor at M.I.T. As a result, he was seldom home. It strained relations between her parents. Accusations grew into fights. Her mother came to believe her father was having an affair.

The tension at home only drove her father farther away. A rocky marriage became a ruin. Her mother, already a borderline alcoholic, tipped over the edge. When Elizabeth was sixteen, her mother got drunk and crashed the family’s SUV into the Charles River. It was never determined whether it was an accident or a suicide.

But Elizabeth knew who deserved the brunt of the blame.

From that day forward, she seldom spoke to her father. Each retreated into their own world. Now he was gone, too. Forever. Despite her loss, she could not discount a burning seed of anger toward him. Even his strange death left so much unanswered.

“Do you think his involvement with the Jasons had anything to do with his death?” she finally asked.

Painter shook his head. “It’s hard to say. We’re still early in the investigation. But I was able to discover which classified military project was assigned to your father. It was called Project—”

“—Stargate,” Elizabeth finished for him. She took some satisfaction from the man’s startled expression.

Kowalski sat up straighter by the fireplace. “Hey, I saw a movie about that…had aliens and stuff, right?”

“Not that Stargate, Joe,” she answered. “And don’t worry, Mr. Crowe. My father didn’t breech his top secret clearance. I’d heard my father mention the project by name a couple of times. Then a decade later, I read the declassified reports from the CIA, released through the Freedom of Information Act.”

“What’s this project about?” Gray asked.

Painter nodded at the pile of papers on the table. “The full details are there, going back to the Cold War. It was officially overseen by the country’s second-largest think tank, the Stanford Research Institute, which down the line would help develop stealth technologies. But back in 1973, the institute was commissioned by the CIA to investigate the feasibility of using parapsychology to aid in intelligence gathering.”

“Parapsychology?” Gray raised an eyebrow.

Painter nodded. “Telepathy, telekinesis…but mostly they concentrated on remote viewing, using individuals to spy upon sites and activities from vast distances using only the power of their minds. Sort of like telepathy at a distance.”

Kowalski snorted his derision from across the room. “Psychic spies.”

“As crazy as that might sound, you have to understand that during the darkest days of the Cold War, any perceived advantage by the Soviets had to be matched in turn by our own intelligence. Any technological gap could not be tolerated. The Soviet Union was pulling out all the stops. To the Soviets, parapsychology was a multidisciplinary field, encompassing bionics, biophysics, psychophysics, physiology, and neurophysiology.”

Painter nodded to Elizabeth. “Like the work your father was performing on intuition and instinct. The neurophysiology behind it.”

Elizabeth glanced at Gray. From the wary look in his eyes, he seemed hardly convinced, but he continued listening silently. So she did the same.

“According to reports by the CIA, the Soviets had begun producing results. Then in 1971, the Soviet program suddenly went into deep-black classification. Information dried up. All we could ascertain was that research continued in Russia, funded by the KGB. We had to respond in kind or be left behind. So the Stanford Research Institute was commissioned to investigate.”

“And what were their results?” Gray asked.

“Mixed at best,” Painter acknowledged.

Elizabeth had also read the declassified reports. “In truth, there was little success with the project.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Painter countered. “Official reports showed that remote viewing produced useful results fifteen percent of the time, which was above statistical probability. And then there were the exceptional cases. Like a New York artist, Ingo Swann. He was able to describe buildings in fine detail when given mere longitude and latitude coordinates. His hits, according to some officials, rose up to the eighty-five percent range.”

Painter must have read the continuing doubt in both their eyes. He tapped the stack of papers. “The Stanford Research Institute’s results were replicated by testing at Fort Meade and at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. In addition, there were several prominent successes. One of the most cited cases involved the kidnapping and rescue of Brigadier-General James Dozier. According to the physicist in charge of the project, one remote viewer ascertained the name of the town where the general was being held, while another described details of the building, all the way down to the bed where he was chained. Such results are hard to readily dismiss.”

“Yet it was,” Elizabeth said. “From my understanding, the research stopped in the mid-1990s. The program was dismantled.”