Dahlia Black

by Keith Thomas

  While her investigation brought these cases to light, it did not assign blame. Nor did it determine what group or groups (if there were any) were behind the supposed “murders” of these scientists.

  Today, Carla lives in Seattle. She teaches writing workshops and writes poetry. Having grown tired of what she calls “the rigid formalism of journalism,” she enjoys crafting experimental poetry—mostly of the “concrete” variety (the careful arrangement of words and images to create typographical effects).

  Wiry, with one leg always bouncing, Carla, now in her mid-fifties, has red hair that she keeps quite short. We meet in her home office, where several cats lounge on the windowsill and watch a busy bird feeder in the backyard.

  I first heard about the death of Dr. Andrea Cisco at a cocktail party.

  You’d be amazed how many stories are broken when people are drinking. This was a black-tie affair I was dragged to by my editor. The world was going nuts around us: the whole Elevation thing had just exploded across the front pages of every real and semi-real news outfit. People were going insane about it, thought it was the end of the world. And here we were, sipping drinks at some rich dude’s mansion. I guess you can only cover breaking news for so long.

  Everyone needs a break, right?

  It was late. I’d honestly had too much to drink and just wanted a fresh scene. So I stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the bay. I’d taken in a few lungfuls of sea air and listened to a few sweet minutes of traffic when Austin FranksI walked out, breathless and sweating like he’d run up about twenty flights of stairs to find me. Turns out, he pretty much had, but with his bulk, three flights were as good as twenty.

  “You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been trying to track you down,” he said, settling on a bench and wiping the sweat from his face with the end of his tie. “Did you get the files I sent you? The ones about Dr. Cisco.”

  I hadn’t. If I had, they were buried somewhere on my desk or my in-box.

  “You do know about the insanity happening out there, right?”

  I pointed out to the ocean but meant the larger world.

  “Yeah,” he said, “of course.”

  “So this is more important than that?” I asked.

  He nodded cryptically, almost like he’d been expecting this.

  Austin Franks was exactly the kind of guy you’d expect a dramatic “spy” performance from. Every month he had a new lead that would “change everything I thought I knew” or “shock me to my core.” I was fooled a couple times, I’ll admit. He said he had dirt on the CEO of a weapons manufacturer sneaking guns to the Taliban. It was a dead end. Second time I just should have known better, but by then Alan had a lock on my particular areas of interest: toppling high-ranking misogynists, exposing graft in Russia. He was able to wrap them all together in a particularly salacious tidbit, and I wound up chasing my tail for near three weeks.

  This time, however, he wasn’t his usual rambunctious self. He was more subdued, outright concerned. I figured it was just a new angle he was milking. The whole distressed whistle-blower thing.

  “I sent these files to you two weeks ago in an email. They were encrypted. But I’m not surprised you didn’t see them.”

  He went on to suggest that my computer was compromised—everyone’s was—and that talking to me was the best option. “I just need to tell you what I’ve discovered and then maybe you can start connecting the dots for me.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to hear another wild-eyed theory and tried to shut him down then and there. I reminded him that both the leads he’d sent me before didn’t pan out. But this time he was genuinely scared.

  So I listened, and that’s how it started.

  The way Austin presented the story, Dr. Cisco died in a car accident on her way home from a rushed conference in Washington, DC. She’d flown back, called her family from the airport, and checked in briefly at work before sending a cryptic email to a colleague about an “anomalous code” she’d been asked to analyze. A code she called “Pulse radio.” The email hinted obliquely at the fact that she had a copy of this code on her person and she might have sent part of it to several associates she’d trusted.

  While the afternoon was clear and sunny, it had rained several hours earlier and the roads were slick. Drivers reported seeing Dr. Cisco’s car weaving across lanes on Route 40 as though she were drunk. Minutes later her car collided with a concrete barrier. Paramedics arrived at the scene eight minutes after the crash. Dr. Cisco was unresponsive at the time. She was pronounced dead en route to the hospital. Tragic story; nothing particularly new and nothing worth acting like a spy who came in from the cold for.

  But obviously there was more to it.

  Before he could tell me the rest, Austin pulled me aside and we walked across the patio down near a row of hedges where the sound of traffic was louder. He eyed the building behind us, looking at the windows and people passing by inside. He said, “Coroner ruled the death as accidental. Said something along the lines of Cisco likely being overtired, maybe from travel, and that she fell asleep at the wheel. Case closed. But I know someone who worked in the hospital where she was taken. They did blood work and found she’d been drugged. Here, I have the results.”

  Austin pulled a folded piece of yellow paper from his back pocket and pressed it into my hand. I told him I wasn’t sure what I could do with this information. I’m not a biochemist. I’m also not a coroner.II

  Austin just shook his head and then, even more softly, said, “Cisco’s not the first. There are others, at least three that I’m aware of—two here in the States and one in England. All three of them astrophysicists; all three of them died in . . . unexpected accidents. And just like Cisco, all three had been sent this anomalous code, Pulse radio, to analyze. I haven’t seen the code; I don’t know who sent it or what it relates to. That’s why I need your help, Carla. That’s why I need someone with your expertise to come in and see the patterns, the associations, I can’t.”

  Sure, Austin’s demeanor had me concerned, but everything he was telling me was so vague. Deaths made to look like accidents, a mystery code—it was all too much to believe. And I didn’t want to wind up with the journalists who’d chased the GEC-Marconi conspiracy theoriesIII to their early retirements.

  Still, Austin seemed certain, and there were tangible, in a sense, clues: the deaths, the anomalous code, and the paper he’d handed me. Despite every neuron in my body telling me to just walk away, I told Austin I’d look into it. He seemed instantaneously relieved. And that made me feel even worse.

  So I did what I do.

  I began an earnest investigation into this whole thing while the world was going nuts over the Elevation and every editor in town wanted scoops on what was causing people to suddenly be able to see ultraviolet light or hear the creepy ultrasonic calls of insects. You were there, of course. I’m sure you read all those headlines. Some of the worst were online. I remember all the disgusting sites . . . There was one in particular: a, uh, New Order . . .

  New Old World?

  Yes, that’s it. They peddled some of the more repulsive stories about what was causing the Elevation. I think the worst was an article claiming it had something to do with single mothers who worked more than one job . . . I don’t . . . Anyway, let’s not rehash that hot garbage. Even though I never fell in with any of those fake news blowhards, the Pulse Gate stuff was as close to a true, dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy as I’d ever seen. Someone killed those scientists, and it had everything to do with the Pulse and the Disclosure Task Force.

  Dr. Cisco was murdered and it was done to cover up the fact that she’d leaked the Pulse Code to several of her colleagues. I can’t speak to her mind-set. Maybe she saw it as an opportunity to get a leg up on everyone, a chance to publish before the fray. Or maybe it was money. Everyone she talked to about this is dead. They either died in the Elevation or were murdered.

  You being a writer, all the research you’ve been doing, I’m sure you already k
now who was behind the hit on the scientists. But you don’t know the details like I do. Your readers, they think they know how this went down, but really they don’t.

  You want me to tell you whodunit?

  You’d love that, right? Have that scoop in your book.

  I told Carla that, sure, that would be huge. But I also told her that I wasn’t there to solve every twist and turn in this mystery. I was there to tell a story about how humanity was transformed, how the Finality left the United States crippled and how that led to the state we find ourselves in today: a less-than-whole country trying to rebuild itself.

  I told Carla that if she were to trust me with the information, I would present it in the best light possible. I would frame it as her tale—unverified, of course, but true to however she wanted to present it. She agreed and said the following:

  Took me three solid weeks of digging.

  I’m talking three solid weeks of little sleep, no food, and an occasional lap swim just to process some of the more convoluted angles in the story. But I did it. I got to the bottom of what happened and who was involved and then I gave it to my editor. She was delighted and frightened about what I’d found. Then, of course, it was shut down. The paper threw out the story. My editor told me they’d done some of their own digging; the ombudsmen found inconsistencies in my work. She accused me of being sloppy. Of failing to see errors and buying a bogus story hook, line, and sinker ’cause I clearly had an agenda.

  My reporting ended up being only about the deaths.

  I linked them as well as I could, but by the time the editorial shears had butchered my story, it looked like just another conspiracy rant about weird demises. Pulse Gate was just a catchphrase, a couple buzzwords for the online nutjobs to throw around like Molotov cocktails anytime they suspected something the government was telling them wasn’t exactly kosher.

  So the story died.

  I considered resurrecting it as an online post or even a book, but by the time that was possible, the Elevation had already wrecked the landscape. Truth is, during the years that followed the Finality, no one would have cared; they were all too busy picking up the pieces of their lives.

  The Twelve did it. They’re the killers.

  It started, as far as I was able to determine, in the 1960s with a group called Majestic 12. Originally they were set up as a consulting group—some military people, some scientists—analyzing data related to the UFO phenomenon. That didn’t go very far. Folks in the government didn’t really care, and, for the most part, everything they looked at was easy to debunk. There were no spaceships entering our skies, no string-bean–looking aliens were abducting weirdos, and no one ever got an implant that wasn’t some random chunk of cartilage. The Majestic 12 that all the UFO fanatics talk about? It ended as soon as it began, late 1960s.IV

  But life is circular, right?

  Majestic 12’s corpse was resurrected in the 1980s as a disinformation tool. Turns out the government had a use for the UFO fruitcakes. Experimental aircraft, war games, advanced technology—the UFO community was a good smoke screen for that. It worked, and so it continued: there was a very public dump of faked Majestic 12 material in the late ’80sV and into the 2000s and beyond. Continued long enough to become a meme in and of itself. Then a joke . . .

  However, a core group of the CIA agents creating the disinformation campaign at the heart of Majestic 12 went in a very different direction. There were originally three of them, but the most important figure was a man named Simon Household.VI I don’t know if that was his real name, but that’s what he was called. If you do some digging, you’ll come across a few biographical sketches of Simon; I wouldn’t trust any of them but print them if you want.VII

  This group, the core team, was called the Twelve.

  And they were an assassination squad.

  At last tally, as of about six years ago, I counted eight murders—or suspicious deaths, as they say—associated with the Twelve. These individuals died in car accidents, of drug overdoses . . . A few of them were killed in seemingly random crimes like muggings. The one thing that connected all these people was, boom, the fact that they were researching signals from outer space. In the 1990s, there was an Italian physicist who claimed to have picked up an unusual fast radio burst. He died in a plane crash and all his data, poof, went missing. The same thing happened to Dr. Cisco: she sent some colleagues information about the Pulse Code and she died. The people she gave the code to also died, all in accidents or as a result of suicide.

  Far as I could determine, Simon and the Twelve set it up.

  They made it happen. I don’t know if they’ve got a little band of merry killer elves or a few of those gray aliens I hear so much about working for them, but they got these jobs done quick and clean. Then they vanish like ghosts protecting the world from . . . ? I have no idea, honestly. That’s the thing I could never figure. The Twelve has this reach; they have some important secrets they want safeguarded.

  I never figured out what those were, however.

  Simon Household and the Twelve killed those scientists to stop them from looking at the Pulse Code or sending it to anyone else. The million-dollar question, of course, is: Why? And that, my friend, I’ve got no answers for.

  * * *

  I. “Austin Franks” was a pseudonym used by Walter Gottsegen, a muckraking journalist associated with a number of online news digests of questionable newsworthiness. He frequently allied himself with fans of the New Old World site and propagated unsubstantiated rumors of conspiracies within the Ballard White House—in particular, a long-running suggestion that David Ballard wasn’t suffering from Parkinson’s but an undisclosed mental illness.

  II. Carla provided me with the results that Austin gave her. While that original crinkled note didn’t survive the ensuing years, a photocopy of it did. I showed the note to a coroner and, sure enough, it seemed quite clear that Dr. Cisco had a significant amount of a powerful sleep aid in her system. Did this mean she was drugged? Well, not in and of itself. But the coroner that I spoke with also mentioned that Dr. Cisco had a high dose of fentanyl on board—a particularly dangerous combination. It’s a huge red flag.

  III. The GEC-Marconi theories relate to a string of “mysterious” deaths in the early 1980s. Between 1982 and 1990, over two dozen computer scientists working in Britain on classified defense projects (including US projects) died in what reporters categorized as unusual ways: bizarre accidents, unexpected suicides, etc. When one looks over the list of deceased scientists and their sometimes decidedly strange causes of death—carbon monoxide poisoning, sexual misadventure, drunk driving, jumping off bridges, and even one scientist who attached wires to his chest and then pushed the other ends into an electrical socket—it is easy to imagine that these were actually murders. Those who attempted to find a link between the deaths and, even more, lay blame on some nefarious agency—the Russians, the US, the mob—could never pinpoint a perpetrator. The case was soon forgotten.

  IV. Carla does a pretty good job here of succinctly summing up the history of Majestic 12 but I’ll add this additional note: the entire existence of Majestic 12 was in doubt the moment they appeared on the UFO scene. The whole concept of the Majestic 12 group first emerged in the early 1980s through a series of documents mailed to a UFO believer and researcher. Those foundational documents had long been considered fakes, crafted either by other believers or as part of a government disinformation campaign. What is most interesting here is that my research suggests that while Majestic 12 did exist—in both the early incarnation and, later, as just the Twelve—the documents were indeed fake. So something of a double-blind.

  V. These 1988 documents were mailed to various people in the UFO community: writers, researchers, and troublemakers. The documents detailed the discovery of a downed intergalactic spacecraft, complete with little alien bodies on board. Some UFO researchers used the documents as proof of larger conspiracy theories, and antigovernment advocates looking for more ammo bandied th
em about.

  VI. He’d come up before under the name Simon Grieg.

  VII. To wit: Simon, aged forty-nine at the time of the Elevation, was raised in Portland, Oregon. He lost his parents to cancer at a young age and joined the military after high school. A quick learner with a brilliant mind for strategy, Simon excelled as a soldier. His skills soon caught the attention of Majestic 12 agents, who groomed him for his eventual role as the head of the secretive organization.

  28

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #321—11.7.2023

  A day after I was discharged from the hospital, the White House called.

  Forty-eight hours of being watched by nurses and drugged by doctors, and I was almost ready to pull my hair out. I wanted to go home, but everyone—even me—agreed that I shouldn’t be alone. First time for everything, right?

  So I went to Nico’s place.

  The doctors had diagnosed me with a psychotic break and chalked it up to stress and excitement. I didn’t tell them about the Pulse, just that I’d been working insanely long hours and staring at impossibly distant objects. Somehow, when they found out what I do for a living, they weren’t surprised that I went little nuts and claimed to see gravitational waves.

  They took away my painkillers and gave me sedatives.

  I slept for about fifteen hours. When I woke up, I was in Nico’s guest room and beyond thirsty, in a way I haven’t been since college. Valerie was in the kitchen reading when I stumbled in looking for a glass of water. She sat me at the table and gave me a pitcher of cucumber water she’d prepped for a party that evening. I drank until my throat stopped burning and then told her how embarrassed I was about the fainting incident. I hoped that the boys weren’t too scared.