The Delphi Revolution (The Delphi Trilogy Book 3)

by Rysa Walker

  Of course, he could be bluffing. Playing possum for a day or so to lull me into complacency. That’s certainly what I’d do in his situation. Stay back. Let me get used to falling asleep and waking up in charge of my own body for a few days. Save up enough energy for one big push to shove me out of the driver’s seat.

  But I don’t think so. If he was alert, if he was anywhere near the front, my reading material for the past few hours would have rattled him. It wasn’t picked with that intent—in fact, I ignored his personal diary for that very reason. Instead, I focused on his virtual scrapbook, filled with scanned copies of news articles, correspondence, and even a few book excerpts dealing with the early era before Delphi became Delphi. Before it was even the Stargate Project.

  At the beginning, it was a research project on parapsychology at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, known only by a series of random-sounding code names, like Grill Flame. And one of the participants in that very early stage of the research was Penelope Arnett Cregg, first wife of Ronald, mother of Graham.

  I’d always assumed that Graham Cregg was first-generation Delphi. Someone who, like my father, became so caught up in the potential of this new drug that he couldn’t resist testing it firsthand. Cregg probably did test the formula, maybe even multiple formulas, on himself. In fact, I’d be shocked if he didn’t, based on what I know of his personality. But he’s not first-gen. His mother was a guinea pig for a forerunner of the Delphi serum, years before Graham was born.

  Penelope Arnett, whose family had amassed a fortune in the auto-parts industry, was in her fifth or sixth year of art school at UC Berkeley in 1973, in no hurry and under no pressure to complete her degree.

  Two of the book excerpts written in the 1980s suggested that Penelope was having far too much fun finding herself to focus on either studying or creating art. One picture of Pen Arnett shows a willowy girl in cutoff shorts and a halter top. Her wide eyes stare straight at the camera, and her dark hair is little more than fuzz, a remnant of her brief flirtation with a cult where all members were required to shave their heads.

  Members of the cult were also required to give up all forms of narcotics. That proved to be a stumbling block for Pen Arnett. By all accounts, she managed to steer clear of heroin but freely engaged in expanding her consciousness with anything else she could lay hands on.

  Penelope’s quest for the ultimate high was what eventually led her to Stanford’s top-secret parapsychology project, known by the inexplicable name of Gondola Wish. A photographer friend of her father’s, Hella Hammid, was working with the project as a remote viewer. This task involved sketching a location sent to Hammid mentally by one of the researchers. It’s very similar to what Taylor does, except Taylor picks up vibes from objects, rather than from someone mentally projecting an idea.

  According to one older book on the project, Hammid and Pen shared an apartment for several months in the summer of 1973, and several sources reported they were a couple. Pen became fascinated by the description of the aftereffects of remote viewing, as described by Hammid and a mutual friend, artist Ingo Swann, who also worked on Gondola Wish. Both of them claimed that whenever they succeeded in picking up a signal sent by one of the researchers, it was like the most perfect hit of LSD. They swore it gave them absolute clarity of mind.

  Hammid and Swann were eventually able to convince researchers at SRI to test Penelope for the Gondola Wish project. And Penelope was a natural, showing even greater aptitude at remote viewing than Hammid or Swann.

  As an aside, the author noted that Pen also showed far more ability than a young man named Ronald Cregg, who volunteered at the end of his two-year tour of duty in Vietnam. Cregg flunked out of the program after the first round of tests, showing no natural psychic talent at all. But he did manage to land a dinner date with Penelope Arnett.

  More recent books and articles barely mention Arnett. One, however, focuses specifically on Arnett’s involvement with the project. There’s no date, but there’s a reference to Senator Cregg’s presidential campaign and the Delphi Project in the first paragraph, so it must have been written within the past year.

  The byline reads: Clayton Fulmer—San Francisco Chronicle. I suspect it’s a draft version of the final article, since there are a number of author notes in parentheses, including the names of two sources who are listed as confidential in the article itself.

  Sunlight now streams in through a tiny gap in the curtains, something that I know from past experience will wake Aaron up. I try to extract myself carefully so that I can close them and maybe get a drink of water before I finish reading.

  But Aaron pulls me back. He’s no longer sleepy. And for the next half hour, I completely forget about Penelope Arnett Cregg, her husband, her son, and the entire Delphi Project.

  Later, though, as we’re driving back to the cabin, my mind strays back to the odd article. “Do journalists usually reveal confidential sources to their editors?”

  “Sometimes. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t in Watergate. Well, at least not in the movie version. Why?”

  “Hold on. Let me check something.”

  I hunt for a few relatively unique consecutive words from the article. Arnett’s participation in Gondola Wish should do it. I type the phrase in quotation marks, and google it. No hits. I try Penelope Arnett’s name and the author’s name. Again, no hits. I search for Penelope Arnett and Penelope Cregg on the Chronicle website. Nothing.

  So . . . it’s not only a draft but an unpublished draft. Yet somehow, Cregg had a copy.

  Searching for Clayton Fulmer’s name on the Chronicle site yields a fairly long list of stories with his byline. I also find an obituary, dated December 15, 2019. A hit-and-run accident.

  I fill Aaron in on what I learned while he slept and then read the rest of Fulmer’s article aloud. It gives a basic overview of Pen’s involvement with the experiments at SRI, many of the details the same as what I just read. But his research goes beyond Gondola Wish to a second testing protocol that Pen was part of in 1974, after she moved out of the apartment she shared with Hella Hammid and into a relationship with Ronald Cregg. Pen’s success with remote viewing exceeded that of most research subjects. Her ability wasn’t perfect, but that was true for everyone in the program. There were far more misses than hits, and the government was urging the researchers to move faster, wanting more bang for their buck. Since Penelope was more accurate than most of the participants, she was recruited for a side project—a drug protocol, aimed at increasing accuracy.

  Apparently, the drug didn’t work, and the tests were abandoned. But Fulmer claims that it had unexpected repercussions. The article includes a link to a video interview with an elderly woman who was a college friend of Arnett’s. Her voice and face are digitally altered, because she wanted to remain anonymous, but a note in parentheses gives her name as Judy Hersey, followed by the words verified AC.

  In the video, Hersey states she was aware of Pen’s involvement in research at SRI, but she didn’t know the details. In late 1974, however, she attended several parties where Penelope dropped acid. That was far from unusual, not just for Pen, but for her circle of friends as a whole. What made the events stick out in Hersey’s mind, though, was that most of the people at those parties ended up tripping, even the few like Hersey who hadn’t taken anything.

  They weren’t good trips, either. At first, Hersey thought that someone had slipped her a tab without her knowing or that maybe it was a flashback. But it happened again. After comparing notes with others, Hersey realized that the common denominator was their proximity to Penelope Arnett.

  Hersey hadn’t really thought about the whole thing in years. But then she saw Ronald Cregg—the man Penelope had been dating—talking on the TV about those Delphi kids. She was surprised to learn they married. Hersey knew that Ron was verbally abusive, maybe even physically, although people didn’t talk about those things so much back then. And Penelope retaliated in her own way, taking every opportunity to tease h
im about his lack of culture and refinement. “She would toss quotes from Schopenhauer to Shakespeare in every conversation,” Hersey recalled, “and then say, ‘Oh. Sorry, Ronald. That’s from The Merry Wives of Windsor.’ Of course, none of us knew the reference either. I think she memorized them just to annoy him.”

  Fulmer’s article goes on to discuss Penelope Arnett’s marriage to Ron Cregg in 1975, along with her decision to appear before the Church Committee later that same year. The Church Committee was named after Senator Frank Church, who led the investigation into MK-ULTRA and other CIA programs that operated outside legal boundaries, including experimentation on US citizens. Pen Arnett Cregg swore before Congress that there was, to the best of her knowledge, no drug experimentation involved in the SRI program, and described the entire project as a “boring art exercise.” A photograph of her testimony shows a woman almost unrecognizable as the waifish girl with the ultrashort hair taken only a few years prior. Her hair is longer, puffed up in a style that probably required half a can of Aqua Net, and she wears a demure high-necked blouse with a bow at the neck.

  Pen Arnett didn’t look at all familiar to me in that first photograph taken in 1973. In this one, however, she kind of does. But I can’t put my finger on where I’ve seen her.

  Fulmer wraps up the article with the fact that Penelope committed suicide in 1989, and then summarizes Ron Cregg’s involvement with Decathlon Services Group and his entry into politics in the late 1990s. He never exactly connects the dots, never claims that the elder Cregg somehow managed to get his hands on the formula from that original project back in the 1970s. But the implication is definitely there for those willing to read between the lines.

  “Maybe that’s why it was never published,” Aaron says. “Maybe the paper needed more before they were willing to accuse a presidential candidate and his dead wife of stealing classified material.”

  “Or maybe nobody wanted to touch it after the author was sideswiped and left for dead. Either way, it’s definitely something that we should add to the list of things to ask my father. Because he’d know whether he started from scratch or had a sample to jump-start his research.”

  “What about the not-so-confidential sources who were mentioned?” Aaron asks. “If they targeted the author . . .”

  I can’t locate the other of Clayton Fulmer’s two sources online, but I do find Judith Hersey, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974. She managed an art gallery in San Francisco. And she died, in an apparent suicide, two days after Fulmer.

  “We need to track down the other source,” Aaron says as we turn off the road and onto the driveway leading uphill to the cabin. “It may not be easy, though. Given that the article was written in California, Fulmer’s sources were probably local, and I don’t think Sam or Porter have many contacts on the West Coast. And speaking of Sam . . .”

  The RV is parked out front now, something Taylor conveniently failed to mention when Aaron texted her last night to say that we were going to stay in Moorefield.

  Taylor meets us on the porch. “Sam’s back.”

  “No kidding,” Aaron says as he tosses her a plastic grocery bag.

  Taylor looks at me and then shakes her head in amazement. “I can’t believe you’re blushing, Anna. You guys slept in the same bed for months. Sam, and everyone else on the freakin’ planet, assumes that ship sailed long, long ago.”

  “Good to know,” I say drolly, and push past her.

  “What is all this stuff?” she asks, looking through the bag.

  “Clothes, toothbrushes, and other items that we grabbed for Sophie and Pfeifer,” Aaron says. “It will probably be safer if you deliver it, though.”

  Inside, Deo is already up and dressed. His backpack is propped against the side of his chair, and my heart sinks into my stomach.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Probably around noon. Might be later. Sam and Daniel were up talking for a while. They didn’t get to bed until three.”

  “Are you going back with them, Tay?” Aaron asks.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t go yet. I’m still digging through the data from Cregg’s tablet, and . . . I have a bad feeling about taking some of that information near Magda’s people, especially the formulas. Stan agrees. He says the paths are more stable if I stay here. If Maria needs someone to do remote viewing, Snoop—sorry, Jeffrey—can handle that. But Deo’s the only amp they’ve got. They could use you, too,” she tells Aaron. “Your spidey sense is a lot stronger than the other kid’s, maybe because he’s only like eight or nine. He tends to get overwhelmed. Maria says they’ve got enough Fivers to predict movements without Anna, though, and Stan says the paths are more stable if you both stay here. So I guess you’re off the hook.”

  I don’t argue with her, mostly because I’m pretty sure it will do absolutely no good. Taylor is smart and she’s usually fairly logical, but her conviction that Stan’s paths are the key to every problem is becoming something akin to religious belief. Deo seems pretty well convinced, too, but I wonder how much of this is because he feels needed.

  Taylor and Aaron start making breakfast while I put away the groceries. Apparently, we bought the wrong kind of orange juice and sausage. Breakfast will now suck, according to Taylor, and she gave us a list, so how did we still get everything wrong? I shove the rest of the food into the pantry and let Aaron deal with her. It’s partly because I’m tired, but also because I know she’s only bitching because she’s upset about Deo leaving. And so am I.

  Deo pushes my phone across the table. “This was in the RV. We conferred, and you are officially off telephone restrictions.”

  I smile. “Thank you, Master Deo.”

  He snorts and then frowns as he looks closer at me. “Did you sleep?”

  “A bit.”

  “You rotten liar,” he says softly. “Aaron slept and you stayed awake.”

  “I couldn’t, okay? And you don’t have to whisper. Aaron knows I didn’t sleep. We agreed to give it a few more days sleeping in shifts. Just to be safe.”

  That reminds me that I’ll be hanging with Taylor alone on my awake shift, since Deo will be at Sandalford. This is the first time that we’ve been willingly separated in nearly two years. It feels wrong. And even though I know that Kelsey will be there with him, it also feels dangerous.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, D?”

  “Do I want to? No. But I can’t just stick my head in the sand and pretend everything will go back to normal somehow. We have to do what we can to fix it. Did you guys see the latest?”

  I shake my head, not liking what I’m reading in his expression. “What happened?”

  “A mob torched a boarding school in Florida around midnight. About fifty miles outside Jacksonville. It was for special-needs kids, and someone got it into their heads that special needs meant special abilities. The death toll was over forty last time we checked, including several police officers who were trying to put down the riot and even a few of the rioters after one of their own turned and opened fire on them. Most of it’s on video, but . . .” He grimaces, and I decide that I really do not want to see that video.

  “Senator Cregg won the primary in Florida by a comfortable margin,” Taylor says as she shoves the plate of eggs onto the table. “That was over a month ago. I wrote out a list of questions for Pfeifer last night and slid them under the door so he could answer them. About formula and timelines, and so forth. He said once the local dealers have the formula for OA3, one of the two that they sold to the contact in Florida, it probably only takes a few days to mix up a batch, assuming they have a decent lab. That means it could have been on the market down there for three weeks.”

  “So those two-letter abbreviations—” Aaron begins.

  “Are codes for the formulas each state was sold,” Deo says. “Just as Anna thought. Pfeifer recognized most of them, although there are apparently a few new ones in the mix. Not too surprising, since they’ve had other scientists working on them since he wa
s hospitalized.”

  “The OA class . . .” I say. “That’s the temporary serum, isn’t it? The one he called the on switch. That’s the one the military was interested in the most back then. He said they were working on an off switch just before my mom was killed.”

  “But who would be crazy enough to inject something into their body that completely alters the way their brain—” He stops. “Oh. Addicts. People already injecting other rotten stuff into their body.”

  People looking for a new high.

  People like Penelope Cregg.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mathias, West Virginia

  April 26, 2020, 5:31 p.m.

  Aaron whispers. “Would you take your turn?”

  “I think you’re bluffing.”

  “Not bluffing, Daniel. They’re both words.”

  “Then define them. Use them in a sentence.”

  “That’s not how the game works. If you don’t think it’s a word, then challenge it. And when I’m right, again, you lose fifty points.”

  I rub my eyes and prop myself up on the pillow. The lamp is on the floor, and the two of them have turned the nightstand into a makeshift Scrabble table.

  “No,” I say. “Not fifty points. That’s the bonus you get for playing all seven of your tiles. He’d just lose his turn.”

  “Way to go, man,” Aaron says. “You woke her up.”

  “No, you woke her up. And I’m adding back the fifty points you made me deduct earlier.”

  “Fine,” Aaron says. “But then you have to skip a turn for that challenge. And you have to decide whether you’re going to challenge these two words.”

  Daniel snorts. “No. I’m not going to challenge your stupid teeny-tiny words. But look them up because there is no way both of those are real.”

  I peek over Aaron’s shoulder. He’s played an x to make xu and xi. “They’re real words. Xi is a Greek letter. Xu is a coin. Japanese . . . no, Vietnamese. Is that on a triple-letter tile?”