River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) Read Online Free

lines—”
    “Spare me the details, please,” Truly interrupted, knowing that she could go on about them at some length, but that she would lose him by the end of the first sentence. The fact that he had been put in charge of Moon Flash, the CIA’s officially nonexistent continuation of psychic research programs Grill Flame, Sun Streak and Star Gate—discontinued in 1996, as far as almost anyone outside the building knew—didn’t mean he understood such things. “What about Ingersoll?”
    “Well, the disruption seemed to be centered not far from his home, so I asked him if he might be able to look into it. I never heard back from him, and when I tried to call him again, I got no response. Concerned, I went online and checked the Mineral County Miner , the newspaper in his town in Colorado. It said that there was a fire at his house last night. No one survived.”
    “Christ,” Truly said. His bad day was getting worse. He could almost hear the air brakes of that metaphorical semi as it slowed for another run at him.
    “Exactly,” Millicent said. “So I hoped you could investigate, see if he really died in the fire, and find out just what is going on there.”
    “I’ll check it out,” Truly said. “Thanks for the tip.”
    “One thing I’d like to make clear, James. To we practitioners of the occult arts, the immediate consequences of this sort of thing are inconvenient—and, obviously, sometimes dangerous. But the mystical energies around us can’t be divorced from the rest of life. There are vast areas of convergence, for instance, between ley lines and string theories of physics. Over the long term, this sort of disruption could affect…well, we just don’t know. Time? Weather? The very nature of reality as we understand it? If it continues, I fear that we’ll find out. But I’d really rather not.”
    Truly didn’t know what to say. Doomsday scenarios were common enough in the intelligence game, but they were usually attached to the threat of Commies or Islamic fundamentalists or some other group with access to nuclear weapons. A mystical version was beyond his imagining.
    Seeming to grasp this, Millicent kept her sigh brief and subdued. “Please let me know what you find out, James. Lawrence and I weren’t particularly close, but I like him. I would hate to not know.”
    “I will,” Truly promised.
    “At the same time, I shall be exploring some alternative angles on my end.”
    He knew she meant paranormal angles, and he didn’t pursue it. Those were the kind she was qualified with, while he decidedly was not.
    But he wouldn’t turn down the help.
    * * *
    In the next twenty-five minutes, Truly made four phone calls. The last one was to his boss, Ronald Loesser, whom he met shortly after in the atrium of the New Headquarters building (called that to distinguish it from the Old Headquarters building that had once been the main structure at the Langley campus, a compound Truly still had a hard time thinking of as the George Bush Center for Intelligence, named for the then-president and former Director of Central Intelligence in 1999), beneath the suspended U-2 plane model. Loesser hated to let Truly come to his office almost as much as he hated going into the nearly empty suite of offices dedicated to the Moon Flash project, so they usually met on neutral ground.
    Truly wore a navy blue peacoat over his suit, and when he spotted Loesser, the older man not only had a leather barn coat on but he was clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and letting steam wash over his mouth and chin. He barely glanced toward Truly, then ticked his gaze outside and started walking. Truly adjusted his course and caught up with Loesser in the courtyard, where the man had taken a seat on a bench near the main section of the Kryptos sculpture. During warmer weather, there might be agency employees standing around the sculpture—a blue-green oxidized copper wall shaped like a piece of paper scrolling out of a printer,