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Moony Runyon settled back against his chair. “Oh. It’s you. Wasn’t sure if you were coming. You have the money?”
Sam offered the fifty dollars he’d made lifting wallets in Central Park plus the twenty he’d just taken from the drunken party guest. Captain Moony gestured for them to sit. Sam dragged over two skinny chairs—one for himself and one for Evie—from a narrow table against the wall.
Captain Moony counted the money while he talked. “Heard old Ben ended up dead on an ash heap. He never was too careful. Me? I’m careful.” He slapped a knife on the table and stuffed the money into his pocket. “So. What was it you wanted to know?”
“We’re looking for the machine that reads these.” Sam handed over one of the coded punch cards. “Know where we could find it?”
Moony examined it briefly before handing it back. “I smuggle booze. Not government documents.”
Sam smirked. “Yeah? How’d you know it was a government document?”
“I seen one of those before. With Ben. Department of Paranormal, United States gov
ernment. Project Buffalo.”
Sam sat as still as he could. But inside, he was buzzing. For two years, he’d been doing nothing but hunting down leads on the secret government project that had taken his mother from him. He’d never been this close. Next to him, he could feel Evie holding her breath, too.
“You go first. Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in,” Moony said.
“We know it had to do with the government’s Department of Paranormal,” Evie said. “And with Diviners. Testing them.”
Moony poured whiskey into his mug and swallowed a third of it. “Testing them? Sure. That came later.”
Evie started to ask another question, but Sam pressed his knee against hers in private warning: Don’t say more.
“Project Buffalo was so top secret there was even a private outfit within the Bureau assigned to look after it,” Moony continued. “The Shadow Men. Ben was one of ’em once. He told me the agents all had code names. Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Adams. Mr. Jackson. You get the idea. They were a rogue agency—they could work outside the law. Word was, the whole project got private money from the Founders Club.”
“The Founders Club? What’s that, some sort of rich folks’ summer camp?” Sam asked.
“Not too far off. It’s a social club, one of those eugenics things, made up of the richest men in America, the kind who want to stay rich. They pulled the strings on a lotta things. And they were bully on Diviners. Wanted to know everything about them: What could they do? Were there ways to make their gifts even stronger? Could you use Diviners to make America the greatest, most unstoppable country on earth?”
Nothing was making sense in Sam’s head. “How were they gonna do that?”
“You still don’t get it, do ya?” Moony Runyon leaned forward and put his fists on the desk. The dim lamp cast shadows across his unshaven face. “Project Buffalo wasn’t just about testing and recruiting Diviners. It was about making them.”
The cabin suddenly felt very small to Sam. It was all he could do not to run up to the deck and breathe in clean night air. “Making them?”
“Yes, indeed. Super Americans, engineered in the womb. Pump ’em up with some concoction Jake Marlowe and that woman, Miss Walker, made. They’d work with those kids over the years, run ’em through tests to strengthen their gifts. And then they’d recruit those same Diviner kids as secret weapons. Imagine it: a private army of gifted Americans who could use their powers to predict an attack by the enemy or crack secret codes. They could read the minds of kings and rulers signing treaties. They’d know if those leaders were on the level. They’d know at a glance if a fella was telling the truth or not. If he was loyal or a traitor or an anarchist.” Moony Runyon swigged the last of his whiskey and examined the empty mug as if it might hold answers to questions he wasn’t sharing. “But from what I heard, the experiment didn’t take for most of the kids. It even made some kids come out wrong.”
“Wrong how?” Evie asked.
Moony shrugged. “But then the war broke out and something happened along the way. Ben would never tell me. And after that, they shut it all down—the program and the department, everything.”
“’Cept I heard they didn’t,” Sam said.
“Yeah? Who told you that?”
“Ben Arnold.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“You think one of those Shadow Men murdered Ben Arnold?”
“I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.”
“Why?”
Moony Runyon shrugged. “Ben talked too much. To fellas like you, for instance. That’s what a gambling habit will do to a fella. Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Go on. Get off my boat. Let me drink in peace.”
