The Broken Clock is Right Thrice: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #4

Chapter 3 - Don't Stop Believin'

"I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud."

~ Carl Jung, psychiatrist, 1875-1961

"No Refunds."

~ The sign on the front window of Sneak Peek, before it burned down

The man in sunglasses makes his pitch. Zandra listens with one knuckle grinding between her eyebrows.

"One of your old clients, someone from the past, is planning on murdering you. Judging by your personality, that shouldn't come as a shock," the man in sunglasses says. "We're not certain of who this person is, but we're confident someone is planning on it. Our pre-screening technology alerted us to a specific pattern of communications and financial activity in this area. Long story short, we know someone is coming after you, but that's about it."

Wouldn't surprise me if there was a bounty on my head, and someone out to claim it. People are desperate for money right now.

Zandra laughs from deep in her chest, rattling something loose that she gives up to the grass. She says, "If you know someone is out to get me, why don't you just stop it? And why is there only one of you? Your partner get bored and go home or something?"

"To be frank, we want to confirm you are who you say you are, and this is the perfect opportunity to do so. Because of the sensitive nature of this situation, and your profile, we wanted to keep your points of contact to a minimum. It's just me," the man says.

But there's still a "we" in there, isn't there?

"Remind me again what organization you work for? If you're with the IRS, I promise you that an audit of my tax return would break your little brain," Zandra says.

The man in sunglasses shakes his head. "Not the IRS. I'm with the Office of Naval Research. We investigate claims of psychic activity as it relates to national security. We've been interested for a long time."

Apparently, there's a 25-year backlog. Took them long enough.

The breeze picks up, blowing the sweet smell of something blooming in the park across the road.

"That's a Cold War blast from the past. Didn't the Soviets and the U.S. already look into this stuff? All they accomplished was wasting time and money," Zandra says.

"That's right, but not in the way you think. In the 1950s and '60s, the idea was to force the Soviets to burn resources chasing their tails with psychics," the man in sunglasses says. "We knew that if we started our own programs, we could get them to match the effort. It was an arms race, and every possible advantage had to be explored.

"The public knows a little about this because we'd intentionally leak sensational information, regardless of whether it was true or not. This allowed us to track how that information flowed from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. We could plant something and watch where it came out on the other side of the planet. Great way to catch spies," the man in sunglasses says.

"That was decades ago, though," Zandra says.

"Yes, but the programs never stopped. Project Star Gate, declassified by the CIA in 2017, started in the '70s and ran through to the mid-'90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the mid-2010s, the Office of Naval Research spent $4 million on figuring out why certain U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan somehow knew to go left instead of right, so to speak, to avoid explosives and certain death. If there was no there there, the research would've stopped decades ago," the man in sunglasses says.