The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series)

by David S. Brody

  Cam sensed danger immediately, his fingers tingling as if to confirm his fear. He threw his SUV into reverse and began to spin around, only to see a dark van screech to a sideways halt behind him. An Asian woman glared at him from the passenger seat. Chung’s mother. Three men poured out of the van. They must have followed him from the bank and called ahead to set up the roadblock. He was blocked and surrounded.

  Tearing the Ziploc bag from the cardboard box, Cam leapt from his vehicle and sprinted toward the woods lining the road. Chung and his sons broke after him, followed by the lumbering box truck driver. As Cam hurdled the snow bank he cursed, remembering he had left his cell phone in the cup holder. So much for calling for help.

  He sank to his knees in soft snow as he fought his way to the woodlands bordering the road, stuffing the bracelet into his jacket pocket for safe keeping. Outracing his pursuers deep into the woods shouldn’t be a problem. But then what? Presumably they had weapons, and presumably they had chosen this spot to ambush him because they had scouted the area and likely planned to use those weapons under the cover of the forest.

  He scanned the landscape; he had been here before. The woods surrounding him were part of town preservation land. Just off the road sat a turtle-shaped rock formation he and Amanda had visited a few times as part of their stone structure investigations, and a nearby trail led to a mysterious stone chamber known as the Acton Potato Cave. Not that any of that would help him now. But there was one thing that might….

  Following a cross-country ski trail he ran deeper into the woods, perpendicular to the road. A hundred yards in, the trail came to a T. Cam sprinted to the right another thirty yards, his boot tracks clearly visible in the snow, before leaping up to grab a low-hanging branch. Hanging down, he hand-walked his way to where the branch met its trunk and dropped into the deep snow a couple of body lengths off the trail. Crouching low, he edged his way back toward the T just as Chung and his two sons ran by, following his footprints. Cam waited a few seconds for the box truck driver. He must have stayed on the road. Still in the woods, Cam continued to double-back toward the T. When he reached the T, Cam followed the opposite trail stem, which angled parallel to the road alongside a small pond. Cam sprinted another fifty yards before again leaving the trail; he forced his way through the snow and underbrush, this time to peer across the pond back toward the street. There. Just as he remembered.

  By now his pursuers would have realized he had doubled-back, but Cam had a decent head start. Taking advantage of some cross-country ski tracks on the pond, Cam raced across the frozen surface, fought through more underbrush and emerged at the mouth of a stone tunnel, built by a farmer in the early 1900s to allow for his cattle to cross safely under the street and drink at the pond. Ducking under the massive stone lintel, Cam crab-walked through the tunnel, the frigid groundwater almost up to his ankles, and emerged on the far side of the road. He peered around the cow tunnel toward the street. Chung’s mother and the truck driver had pulled their vehicles to the side of the road and also apparently rolled Cam’s SUV into a ditch, presumably as a cover story in case the police arrived—only four or five minutes had passed and with traffic flowing again apparently the police were not rushing to the scene. The tiny Asian woman and the burly trucker now stood on the far shoulder, peering into the woods, their backs to Cam.

  Cam surveyed the situation and took a deep breath. Now was as good a time as any. Using the tunnel structure to partially conceal himself, he pulled himself up the road embankment and crept toward the box truck, careful to keep his footsteps quiet. He peered through the driver’s window. No keys. Damn.

  One more chance. And no reason to keep quiet now. Sprinting again, he spanned the short distance between the box truck and the dark van, his wet feet thwacking along the pavement. The old woman turned. “Hey! There he is!”

  Cam ignored her and pulled open the van’s front door. Jackpot. Leaping in, he turned the keys—the motor fired. Exhaling, he spun the van around and sped away. Tapping the horn twice, beep-beep, he stuck his hand out the window to wave goodbye.

  Unfortunately he feared it was not likely their final farewell.

  Cam fruitlessly searched the van for clues before dumping it at a shopping plaza. He took a taxi home, called a tow truck to retrieve his SUV and phoned Amanda to update her on his morning run-in. “Are you at the courthouse?” he asked.

  “Yes. We got the restraining order. I’m still with the Westford detective. Should I tell him what happened?”

  “Sure. But I don’t want to press more charges yet. We can talk about it when you get home.”

  Amanda returned late morning. “I made sandwiches,” Cam said. “I never made it to Lexington so I thought we could drive in together now.” More than ever, he wanted to get the bracelet tested.

  She grabbed a couple of Diet Cokes from the fridge and smiled. “You just want me along to fight off the bad guys.”

  “Speaking of which, I want to make sure we’re not being followed again.”

  “By the CIA or by Chung?”

  “Either. Both. Whatever. I’ll meet you at the town beach in twenty.”

  Cam kissed Amanda, threw on his coat and boots and went out the back door. Venus pawed at the door behind him. “Sorry, girl, you have to stay.” Following the shoreline he walked along the lake to a spillway where the lake emptied into a stream that ran, eventually, to the Atlantic. In order to leave their neighborhood and drive to the town beach, Amanda would need to cross over the spillway. Cam crouched low behind a dock and made himself comfortable.

  Five minutes later Amanda drove past in her Subaru. Cam waited, watching to see if anyone followed. He checked his watch. Seven minutes and nothing. Clean so far. He jogged across the lake.

  “So we’re okay?” she asked as he jumped into the passenger seat.

  “One last thing. Maybe they have some kind of tracking device on the car. I think it’s time for a car wash.”

  Amanda drove to a self-serve wash in Chelmsford, where Cam turned up the pressure to full and blasted the under-carriage of her car with a soap-filled stream of hot water. “Unless they have top of the line equipment, that should fritz any GPS device.”

  “Where to now?”

  “Lexington. But take the highway this time.”

  “You know,” Amanda said as they headed south, “Chung and his family really are a bit inept. They’ve come after us three times, and three times they’ve failed.”

  “Well, the first time was only because Pugh showed up.”

  “Even so. What’s that old expression? A hero is only as heroic as his adversary is admirable.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “That’s why in great literature the villain is always so … daunting. The white whale in Moby Dick, Moriarty with Sherlock Holmes—”

  Cam interjected. “The Penguin, the Joker, the Riddler, King Tut…”

  She turned and smiled. “Batman is hardly great literature, but you get the point. In our case, I feel like we’ve bested Elmer Fudd.”

  Cam weighed her words, balancing them against Randall Sid’s warning the CIA was playing mind control games with him. “Do you think this is all some sort of … game?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He held up his broken pinky. “This didn’t feel like any game.”

  “And it felt pretty real out on the ice yesterday also,” she said, shrugging. “But still….”

  They rode in silence for the better part of a minute.

  “Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” Cam said.

  “It’s not paranoia if they really are after you,” Amanda responded.

  He nodded. “So who are they? And what do they want?”

  Evgenia Samsanov-Johnson pulled her collar up and wrapped her scarf around her lower face as she rode the escalator up from Washington D.C.’s Union Station subway station. “Just snow already,” she muttered as the cold, wind-driven rain whipped against her skin. Winter was fine, but this w
ind and freezing rain shit was miserable. Turning to the left, she stepped off a curb and splashed muddy slush left over from the last storm onto her long black skirt. “Goddamn it. I hate this city.”

  Actually, that wasn’t true. Climate aside, she loved Washington. Where else could a woman in her mid-twenties without an advanced degree find a job that paid almost six figures without taking her clothes off? And the city was alive, vibrant, powerful. The center of the universe in many ways.

  Head down, she angled up Massachusetts Avenue into the residential section of Capitol Hill. There were other neighborhoods closer and with an easier commute to her office in Virginia but they were too antiseptic for a six-foot tall, biracial woman who grew up in inner city Detroit. Capitol Hill, at least once you got a few blocks away from the Capitol itself, had some soul—Black families that had lived on the Hill for generations, a large gay and lesbian population, group houses filled with students and interns, young families pushing strollers, even a few senior Congressional staff. Evgenia didn’t happen to fit into any of these categories, but the Hill had been home to her ever since she came to Washington from Detroit three years ago.

  Ah, Detroit. Where in the winter actual snow fell from the sky. As also, famously, did octopi, thrown from the rafters by zealous hockey fans during Red Wings games. She had pretty much grown up watching her father play and the octopi fly at Joe Louis arena, the only place in America where if you drove a golf ball due south it would land in Canada. Not that she was allowed in the locker room with the other kids—she was relegated to the back of the press box with her mother, a former ice girl who worked her way up to a position as marketing director for the team. That was her mother’s official position, at least; unofficially she was the African-American mistress to the smooth-skating Russian defenseman. Her dad’s wife and kids stayed back in Moscow, where he returned in the offseason. But to his credit he acknowledged Evgenia, visited regularly, and in his own way even parented her a bit.

  Most importantly, he taught her to play chess.

  And playing chess is what she did for the CIA. Not chess in the traditional sense, on a square board using onyx pieces. But chess in a virtual sense, on the streets of America using flesh-and-bone pieces.

  What she thought of as chess her coworkers referred to as puppeteering in their office suite in Langley, Virginia. Evgenia and a half-dozen others, euphemistically called masters, pulled the strings. Presumably they all had undergone the same series of rigorous personality, psychological and intelligence tests she had. The entire operation was overseen by a man they called Dr. Jag. Someone above him picked the targets, the puppets. Dr. Jag then assigned a master to each puppet, guided the masters and provided whatever support and assistance might be necessary.

  Last week Dr. Jag had assigned Evgenia a new puppet. Some geology professor from Maine researching early exploration of North America. She recalled the conversation:

  “New assignment for you, Evgenia.” He dropped a red manila file on her desk. Always red, for some reason. “Name is Antonopoulos, Stefan Antonopoulos. Friends call him Ant.”

  “Ant? That’s the best they could come up with?”

  Dr. Jag shrugged. “It’s Maine.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That mean he has six legs? If so, I’ll need more strings. And a raise.”

  “Nice try.” A tall, angular, middle-aged man, Dr. Jag stood in front of her desk, his hands folded behind his back like a math teacher, the oversized blue blazer he wore every day speckled with flakes of dandruff and strands of cat hair. She and the other strategists assumed he was a bachelor; he must have left the office to care for his cat, but nobody ever saw him do so. His glasses rested unevenly on his nose, and she had to resist the urge to reach over and clean the smudges off with a tissue. “You know the drill,” he continued. “Step on the ant.” He liked to talk tough like that, but Evgenia bet he had never so much as kicked a dog.

  “You mean discredit him?”

  “Yes. He’s doing some pretty compelling work showing exploration of America before Columbus, based on a bunch of stone carvings. Discredit him, and his research.”

  “Why do we care?”

  He tilted his head at her. “Really? You’re still asking questions like that? We don’t care. The people we work for do.” He motioned out the window; they were ensconced in the center of the CIA complex in Langley. “And they want him discredited.” He smiled at her, showing a row of straight but yellowing teeth. “We work on a need-to-know basis…”

  She finished his sentence. “And I have no need to know.” The compartmentalization and secrecy had bothered her at first; it drove her crazy sometimes that she was not allowed to see the big picture, the entire mission. Dr. Jag would give her an assignment—last week it had been to entice a foreign diplomat into investing in a start-up internet sales company—but never told the reason why. She didn’t know if the end game was to bankrupt the diplomat and then later buy his loyalty or rather provide him with a financial windfall so he would be more resistant to being purchased by some enemy nation. And she would never know. Once she completed her task she never saw the file again. But, in her three years at the Agency, she had come to see that the system worked. Someone high above her pay grade kept track of all the moving pieces. And the Agency, bloated as it was, did some of the best intelligence work in the history of the world.

  Pointing at the Antonopoulos file, Dr. Jag added: “I will say that this assignment came down with a little more urgency than usual—”

  “So you put your best agent on it,” she interjected. Smiling, she flipped open the folder and studied the professor. Classically handsome face, features you’d see on an old statue in Athens or Rome. Mid-thirties, wife, three young kids, nice smile. One of the top-ranked amateur tennis players in New England. “Okay. So what are his buttons?” Every puppet had buttons to push, some weakness or flaw or character trait that could be exploited and eventually used against him. Sometimes money, sometimes women, sometimes a desire for fame or power or glory.

  “He’s pretty solid; by all accounts a genuinely nice guy. I’d say if he has one weakness it’s that he’s obsessed with getting tenure. Top of his class at Bates, came back to teach, would be the youngest guy ever to become a full professor. Enjoys being the smartest guy in the room, and never had any reason to doubt he was. But some of the old-timers don’t like his research, especially the history faculty. So tenure’s not a sure thing.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of them came up during the ‘Columbus-first’ era. They’ve spend a lifetime debunking anything before 1492. So if they’re proven wrong, they’ve all got egg on their face. Lots of it.”

  She nodded, glanced at his photo again. Too bad women weren’t his weakness. “So is he? Smart, I mean.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “So what’s the play?”

  “He’s coming to town for a conference. He’s meeting a woman from Baltimore who has a stone artifact her mother found in Vermont in the late 1970s. It has strange carvings on it that Antonopoulos thinks might be important.” Dr. Jag pushed his glasses up his nose. “You’ll need to contact the woman—name is Rachel Gold—and tell her we’re investigating this professor. Tell her he has a history of ‘borrowing’ these artifacts and then selling them to collectors after authenticating them. Overseas, which is why the CIA is involved.”

  “Does he?”

  He grimaced. “Of course not. Tell her you’d like to come with her when she meets the good professor so you can witness him taking the rock. Tell Antonopoulos you’re college friends or something. The Rachel woman grew up in Connecticut, where the mother still lives.”

  “Then what?”

  “See how it plays out.” Dr. Jag dropped three more folders—older ones, faded red—on her desk. “These are a few older cases. Same kind of deal. Researchers trying to prove ancient explorers came to America. One guy, Fell, was a linguist; Whitewood was an archeologist; Glynn was just a guy who loved history. We dis
credited them all. Take a look through, maybe you can get some ideas how to go after Antonopoulos.”

  She glanced at the folders. “Why do I need new ideas? What about just sticking with him selling other people’s artifacts?”

  Dr. Jag shrugged. “If you think you can make it work, fine with me. There’s an incident documented in the file where our professor took some liberties with an artifact that had been lent to him—he claimed it was given as a gift.”

  Evgenia considered the option. It wasn’t the most artful ruse, but sometimes the best plans were the simple ones. And he already had a prior incident—effective lies were always build on a foundation of truth. “I could set up a fake email exchange in which he offers to sell the artifact.”

  “I think you’ll need more than that. In the end you’ll need to actually put the money in the good professor’s account if we’re going to make this stick.”

  “Do I have it? Money, I mean?”

  “It is the one thing, my dear, the Agency never seems to lack,” he said as he walked away.

  A week had passed and she had set into motion a plan involving Antonopoulos. It was a straightforward assignment and not all that difficult; she would be playing chess against a man who didn’t even realize the game was on and who only possessed a single piece on the board—himself. It was impossible to control or even predict Antonopoulos’ every move, but it was only a matter of time before she used her superior forces to position him into a corner and limit his options. She kicked at a chunk of slush in her path. The problem was that he seemed like a nice guy who had done nothing wrong. And she, on behalf of their government, was in the process of destroying him.

  She trusted there was a good reason for it. Or at least hoped there was.

  The phone rang as Cam stood in front of the stove, stir-frying chicken and vegetables. Astarte had an indoor soccer game tonight so they were having an early dinner. He turned down the burner.