Metevier shrugged. “All lost. Probably just decayed. Dust-to-dust, as they say.” He unlocked the case and carefully removed the skull. “Luckily my great-grandfather was a scientist and knew how to preserve bones. But back then not many people knew about bacteria and humidity and other things that cause bones to decay.”
Lovecroft nodded. He had spent a summer in college on an archeological dig; he knew that certain soil conditions and burial practices would preserve a body for thousands of years but that once out of the ground the skeleton would quickly decay.
Metevier handed him the skull. “Look at the double rows of teeth,” he said.
Lovecroft’s face began to flush. He focused instead on the skull’s sloping, angular forehead.
“You can actually fit it over your head, like a mask. Go ahead, try it.”
Lovecroft was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. “No, thanks.” They were handling the head of an actual person, studying it like it was part of some kind of freak show. The Cherokee believed all bones should remain buried with the body, but especially the skull, which is where the soul resided—without the skull, the soul could not travel to the afterlife. In fact, his grandfather taught him that Native Americans scalped their enemies to destroy the skull and therefore prevent the soul from coming back to exact revenge. Had this soul been suffering in some kind of purgatory for the past 140 years? He took a deep breath. “Fascinating. Truly fascinating.” He glanced at his watch. “I wish I could see more of this collection.”
Metevier took the hint. He gently placed the skull back in the case and turned to his guest. “Of course, I’ve had this tested. It’s the real deal. No chance of it being fake.”
They began to walk back toward the door. Lovecroft hoped Metevier would not be offended by a blunt question. “As you know, I believe the Bible is the word of God. Which means I believe in giants. You said you just came back from Utah so I am assuming you may be Mormon: May I ask if your interest in giants is tied to your religion, whatever that religion may be?”
Metevier nodded. “Fair question, and good assumption. And, yes, that was my original interest. But the truth is the truth, no matter what you believe. What’s that expression? Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. Facts are facts.”
“Yes,” Lovecroft smiled. “As John Adams said, facts can be stubborn things.”
Metevier gestured back toward the giant skull. “And it is a fact that these giants existed. No offense, but what I don’t get is why you folks in Washington keep trying to cover it up.”
“Us folks in Washington?”
“Yeah, the Smithsonian. They must have some of these giant bones. So why not let people see them?”
Lovecroft nodded. It was a fair question, and someone should ask it.
But preferably not until after the election.
Cam hadn’t returned from Rhode Island yet, and Astarte had gone home on the bus with a friend, so Amanda was alone in the house as the winter sun began to set in the late afternoon. She had maxed-out on her giant skeletons research, the voice inside her head in a repeating loop:
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.
She finally played some Eric Clapton on her iPod to clear her head and tried to catch up on some reports for the museum she worked for. For a long period of her life listening to Clapton made her sad. There was a longing and loneliness in his songs that mirrored her own life—his song “Layla,” lamenting his unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, wife of one of his best friends, George Harrison, used to bring her to tears. But that had changed when she met Cam—she had found what so many others sought, and Clapton’s music reminded her how fortunate she was.
But even Clapton couldn’t settle her. That small voice in her head—the one that nagged you when you forgot your wallet or left the stove on—called to her. She had learned to listen to that voice, to tune into it. John Emmert, it said to her. Amanda looked through her notes: Emmert was one of the Smithsonian archeologists who had been called in to examine and investigate many of the giant skeletons found in the late 1800s. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that. But there was something else about the name that rang a bell, something important….
She did a quick Google search and almost fell off her chair as an image of the Bat Creek carving popped up next to his name: Emmert was the archeologist who first discovered the Bat Creek Stone in Tennessee. Eyes widening, she stared at the screen. Could this be a coincidence? From Emmert to the Smithsonian until eventually the bracelet found its way into a bag of Chinese food. At some level it made sense: Emmert’s job was to excavate Native American burial mounds. So of course he would be called in when giant skeletons were found. But even so….
She moved to the big chair overlooking the lake and called Venus to join her. The temperature had crept up to thirty, which brought all sorts of activity to the frozen surface. Ice fisherman, skaters, dog-walkers, snowmobilers. Amanda watched them, content to sip her tea with Venus’ head on her lap and wonder about ancient giants. A glint of light caught her eye and she focused on a pair of men not far off the shoreline. They looked queer, somehow out of place just standing there with no poles or sticks or other implements of winter recreation; one of them even looked to be wearing dress slacks. She slid behind the curtain and angled her binoculars toward them: A pair of Asian men, one middle-aged and the other in his twenties. The older one held a pair of binoculars also, aiming right back at her. Her heart thumped as she made the obvious association to Cam’s abductors. “Venus, here girl,” she called.
Amanda threw on her winter coat and some gloves and grabbed her cross-country skis and Venus’ leash. She jogged to her Subaru in the driveway, secured the skis on the ski rack and navigated her way to the other side of the lake to the public beach. There, she stepped into her skis and, Venus by her side, powered her way to the middle of the lake. She checked her watch—seven minutes had elapsed since she left the house. The men had not moved.
She approached to within fifty yards. Now what? For one thing, nobody knew where she was. She sent a quick text to Cam: “2 strange men on lake looking at our house. I’m on X-country skis with Venus checking it out.”
Maneuvering herself so the setting sun was at her back, she circled around and skied directly at the men, her smart phone in hand. As she approached, and as the men squinted back at her, she snapped a couple of quick pictures.
“Hey,” the older man yelled. “What you doing?”
She ignored him and began to ski away.
“Hey, stop!” The two men ran after her on the snow-packed surface. A couple of ice fisherman heard the commotion and jogged toward them from the shoreline. The younger Asian man didn’t seem to have his heart in the pursuit, but the older one had an angle and surprised Amanda by closing on her quickly. She probably could have outdistanced him, or perhaps even turned Venus on him, but the idea of being spied on really cheesed her off. Plus these were the guys who tried to snap Cam’s finger off. As her assailant moved to within six feet, she turned toward him, took one last powerful stride and, emboldened by the approaching ice fishermen, lowered her shoulder into his chest. It had probably never occurred to him that she would turn on him, and the surprise attack sent him sprawling to the frozen surface.
Venus lunged at him, growling, her teeth bared. “Down, Venus,” Amanda said. She caught her breath, kicked off her skis and put her ski pole into the man’s chest as he scrambled to right himself, shoving him back down. He swatted it away, but she whipped the other pole around and caught him on the ear. That quieted him.
“I know who you are,” she hissed. “If I see you here again, I’m going to take this pole and poke out your eye. Got it?”
He nodded, his eyes wide with fear behind a pair of snow-crusted glasses. As she lifted the pole again, threateningly, Venus yelped and lunged as the younger man bound toward them. Neither
man was huge, but both outweighed her by a good forty pounds. The younger guy kicked Venus aside and charged Amanda, his head down as if ready to make a football tackle.
Acting on instinct, she waited until the last possible instant before dropping to her back, lifting her legs and planting her feet into the man’s midsection. Using his own momentum against him, she flipped him up and over her. He landed on his back—the impact on the ice and the sound of his breath escaping combining for a thud-thud sound that echoed across the open space of the lake. Venus scurried over and barked, her face inches from the prone man’s neck. But the man only moaned, his weight shifting side-to-side as he writhed in pain.
Amanda lifted the stick one more time to subdue the older man, snapped close-up pictures of both men and stepped back onto her skis as the ice fishermen arrived.
“She crazy lady,” the older man said.
Her heart raced but she fought to keep her voice calm. “Yeah, well, this crazy lady just kicked your ass.” She faked a swing of the pole; the man recoiled, covering his face. One wary eye on her assailants, she nodded at the ice fisherman, powered three strong strides and was on her way. “Venus, come!”
Halfway across the lake her cell phone pinged. Cam, probably. Well, she’d have a story to tell over dinner. In fact, she’d ask him to pick up something on the way home. Anything but Chinese.
As they approached Westford on their way home from Rhode Island, Randall Sid—who was beginning to think of Randall as his real name, sort of the way people started to dream in a foreign language after immersing themselves in it—instructed Cam to drop him off on a side street a half-mile away from the Dunkin’ Donuts. “After I jump out, circle the block two times. If I do not phone you, after the second pass leave the area and return in an hour to retrieve your car.” Randall was pretty certain they had not been followed, but in his business ‘pretty certain’ was often as close to ‘dead wrong’ as your crotch was to your underpants.
“In the meantime,” Randall continued, “I have something to discuss with you.”
“Okay.”
“Use caution around Astarte.”
“How so?”
“She is an obvious vulnerability. A young girl, not your natural daughter, residing in your home.” He shrugged. “It is almost too easy.”
“Are you saying the CIA would make up stuff? About me?”
He shrugged again. “I am merely pointing out it is an obvious play if they wish to discredit you. Folks tend not to trust child molesters.”
Cam exhaled. “Great. These people have no boundaries, do they?”
“If they do, we have not reached them yet.” He pointed. “Now, pull over here and circle the block as I instructed.”
Randall hid in the woods while Cam made his passes. No tail. Randall waited a few more minutes to be certain and cut through the woods along a rail bed and some snowmobile tracks back to the strip mall. He studied the customer parking lot from behind a tree.
In addition to Cameron’s car, there were nine others. He memorized them and waited, daydreaming about finishing up this MK-Ultra business and then taking a trip somewhere. Not a cruise like his brother—that would be torture, stuck aboard a floating fiberglass palace with nothing to do but await the next buffet spread. He preferred to travel someplace exotic, try new foods, see new sites, meet new people. Asia was usually a good choice for him, which was one of the reasons he so enjoyed living in Chinatown—there, he has merely short, not grotesque. Perhaps Indonesia, where the average height was just over five feet….
Six of the vehicles in the parking lot departed in the first ten minutes as people scurried in and out of the donut shop and the convenience store and ATM enclosure next door. Another left a few minutes later. That left two vehicles. One was a pickup truck with a plow on the front—not likely that an Agency operative would drive that. The other was a dark-colored SUV with Massachusetts plates. No bumper stickers, no car magnets, no decals. He waited another twenty minutes: no activity. There was nothing in the strip mall that would occupy someone for more than a half hour, and the employees all seemed to have parked in the rear lot. Perhaps he had underestimated his former employer.
Game on. Indonesia would have to wait.
Sticking to the woods, Randall circled around to the far end of the strip mall, following the footsteps Cameron had made earlier in the day. He went into the convenience store first—a couple of housewives with kids, and a trucker buying cigarettes. The ATM room was empty. That left Dunkin’s. A twenty-something guy in a Red Sox cap sat in the corner reading the newspaper, chatting up one of the counter girls. That explained the pickup truck. Which meant the SUV belonged to a clean-cut man in a business suit sipping on a cup of coffee with his laptop open in front of him. From the looks of the debris in front of him, he had been there a while.
Randall approached the counter and ordered another blueberry muffin. “Do you have WiFi in here?” he asked.
“No, sorry,” the girl replied.
Odd place for a business man to set up shop for a day. He glanced a second time at the man. Thirty-something and far too intent on whatever was displayed on his computer screen. It was to make room for agents like this that Randall had been put out to pasture. The idiot had probably tracked Cameron here and then been fooled by the Robert-doll ruse. Now, six hours later, he was just hoping Cameron would return for his SUV so he could pick up the trail again. This promised to be entertaining.
Randall walked to the far end of the donut shop and found a framed Board of Health permit. Next he went out to the parking lot and dialed the number of the tow company printed on a sign warning against using the lot for day-long parking. “Hello, my name is Jeremy McDonough,” he said, using the name from the Board of Health permit. “I am the proprietor of the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 40 in Westford. I’d like to request a tow from our lot—a car has been parked here illegally all day.” He described the SUV and hung up.
Ten minutes later a tow truck arrived. The agent had situated himself so he could see Cameron’s vehicle through the window, but not his own. As the truck began to pull away, Randall walked over to the agent. He smiled and motioned over his shoulder. “I am sorry to interrupt what I am certain is important work. But I believe that is your vehicle being towed.”
Randall had not chosen Cameron Thorne randomly; there were a half-dozen other New England researchers the CIA had targeted and Randall could have chosen to focus on any of them instead. But Thorne was special: He lived in Westford.
Randall’s walk through the woods back to the Westford Dunkin’ Donuts, across a stream that emptied into a pond in the distance, had brought back a flood of memories. Randall had stopped for a few minutes, eyes closed. In his mind he had added sixty degrees and subtracted sixty years. And once he began to remember he could not forget.
In his car now, he and Cameron having re-traded vehicles, Randall circled those same woods and found the entrance to the campground within. A sign greeted him: East Boston Camps. So it was still here. Unbelievably, after more than sixty years. Did immigrant kids from East Boston still board yellow school buses every July—bathing suit, toothbrush and a few changes of clothes stuffed inside a duffel bag—for a summer in the country as he and his brother had done? He counted the years back. He had been fifteen, so the year must have been 1949. World War II was over and the Cold War had not yet begun. Or if it had, Randall had not yet learned of it.
He followed a pitted, snow-covered road along the railroad tracks and then into the woods, climbing slightly—his were not the first tracks, so the woods were apparently in use even in winter. A few seconds later, as if in confirmation, a woman walking a dog rounded the corner ahead. She smiled and waved, strands of red hair flowing from beneath a white wool cap. Randall’s heart jumped, then he smiled. Red hair. Of course. Hello Consuela. It has been a long time since I have thought of you. Actually, that was not true. Correction: I think of you every day. But it has been many years since I have allowed myself to rea
lly remember.
A few hundred yards later a gate blocked his way, so he parked and continued on foot. He crested a hill; ahead, in a clearing, a cluster of clapboard cabins sat on a rise above a now-frozen pond. Amazingly, the site had changed little. Perhaps an extra building or two, and of course a winter scene greeted him rather than a summer one, but the cabins and picnic tables and basketball hoop and beach area were just as he remembered them. How odd—in life memories rarely seemed to match reality. He chuckled, almost a giggle, really. Yes, how wonderfully odd. A quote from Mark Twain popped into his head, and he voiced it aloud: “When I was younger I could remember everything, whether it happened or not.”
He walked down the slope toward the beach and leaned against a majestic oak. He watched his breath rise and dissipate in the light wind for a few seconds before closing his eyes and allowing the years again to fade and his memories to replace them.
He had met her the first time here on the beach. “Are you here for sailing?” she asked. “My name is Consuela. I’m a counselor.” Long red hair, a bright smile, freckles dotting her nose and upper cheeks.
He was alone, his brother having chosen to work on some craft project. “Yes,” he stammered. “I would like to learn to sail.” It seemed like something successful people did, and he intended to be successful someday.
“Well, looks like you’re the only one today. Help me put up the sail. How old are you, twelve or thirteen?”
“Fifteen,” he mumbled.
She put a hand on his arm. “Now that I look more closely at your face, I can see you are a young man. I am sixteen but everyone thinks I’m younger too.” It was a lie, though a kind one. Her breasts had budded and Randall had a tough time keeping his eyes from dropping.
“Consuela is a funny name,” he had blurted out.
“It’s Cuban.”
Randall’s parents were from Cuba originally. But they looked nothing like Consuela. “You don’t look Cuban.”
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series) Page 10
