Randall had just nodded off in front of an old Bette Davis movie when his cell phone rang. He slapped his face and answered the call. “Ms. Spencer-Gunn. A pleasure. What can I do for you?”
She explained that Cameron had driven to New Hampshire to confront the hostile blogger and had not been heard from since. Randall sucked in his breath. “I wish he had informed me. I would have been pleased to accompany him on his excursion. Are you aware that the most popular wintertime activity in New Hampshire is ice fishing?” He shuddered. “Not the kind of territory a man should venture into alone.”
“Yes, well, I am concerned.”
“As you should be.” The Agency would not take kindly to Cameron questioning the blogger, who could hardly be counted on not to reveal whom he worked for. And if, somehow, the Agency had already learned Evgenia had gone rogue, they would be even more skittish—an agent was missing, and a secret operation in danger of being revealed, perhaps embarrassingly so. Things were moving more quickly than Randall had anticipated. Too quickly. “We have been poking around the hornet’s nest for quite a while, Cameron and I. We cannot now be surprised when we are stung.”
“As far as I can tell, only Cameron has been stung.”
“Yes, quite.” If Cam really had been abducted, it is likely he would be brought to Langley for questioning. “In any event, I suspect we might soon find ourselves journeying to Washington, D.C.” He made a rough plan in his head. “I suggest you pack a bag and make arrangements for your daughter. We will travel by automobile. You will need to bring ample cash.” He paused. “And Amanda, one additional item.”
“I am listening.”
“Cameron is in grave danger. He has told me of your friend working for Senator Lovecroft. We may need the Senator’s assistance in order to save your fiancé.”
Amanda knew she needed to be strong, knew that Astarte would smell any fear on her like a cat on the prowl.
She knocked on the girl’s bedroom door; Astarte was playing with her dolls on the floor as Venus napped in a box of sun by the window. “Honey, I need you to pack an overnight bag. You are going to sleep over at Julia’s house tonight.”
Her cobalt eyes looked up. “Why?”
“I need to go to Washington, D.C.”
She nodded. “Dad-Cam is in trouble, isn’t he?”
How did she know? “Yes, I think so.”
Astarte nodded again. “Okay then.” She stood and gave Amanda a tight hug. “He’ll be okay, Mum. It seems like people are always trying to hurt him, but they never really can.”
Holding his finger aloft, Dr. Jag snapped the end off a wooden ruler, found some medical tape in his desk drawer and taped his throbbing middle finger and the ring finger next to it to the ruler span. He popped a couple of Advils, dropped a handful of ice cubes into a sandwich bag and returned via elevator to the detention room in the subbasement of the sprawling CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, the ice bag on his hand.
He was not angry at Cameron Thorne as much as he was angry at himself. He should not have been alone with his prisoner. But Evgenia had gone AWOL and Thorne had somehow connected MK-Ultra to the Smithsonian through Leonard Carmichael—he had hoped to earn Thorne’s trust and cooperation with a personal, one-on-one approach. His discolored and swollen finger made it clear the personal approach had been the wrong one.
As he rode the elevator he replayed the Evgenia series of events in his head. She had been spotted by an agent in Vernon, Connecticut, where she presumably ascertained that her Agency boss had been lying to her about the Vermont stone carving. She would be angry, Dr. Jag knew—she would figure she had earned the right not to be played and manipulated. And she was right, under normal circumstances. But normal had given way to abnormal, and abnormal was well on its way to yielding to crisis. No doubt disaster was not far behind.
Crisis or not, one of his agents was missing. Yesterday afternoon in Connecticut was the last anyone saw of Evgenia. But Thorne had attended Professor Antonopoulos’ lecture in Boston, and it seemed reasonable to assume Evgenia had been there also. Yet there was no sign of her. That would be the first of his questions for Mr. Thorne.
It was one of those Catch-22s that Cam would normally find fascinating, but for the terrifying reality that the conundrum involved him: No doubt there was a law banning the CIA from giving prisoners drugs to erase their memories. But if the Agency ignored the law, and the prisoner had no memory of his memory being erased, how then would anyone ever learn of the crime? It was like a tree falling deep in an empty forest. Except Cam was a lab rat caged deep in the bowels of the most sophisticated mind control operation since the Nazis and Josef Mengele….
On that happy note he slid off his bed and did twenty-five jumping jacks to try to clear his head. He knew that part of the mind control game was sensory deprivation—they would keep him alone in a colorless, noiseless cell, provide as little stimulation as possible and prevent him from sleeping. Bread and water only. The uncertainty and boredom and isolation and lack of sleep would weaken him, make his mind malleable. Exercise would help, as would keeping his brain sharp. For some reason the prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement in the old movie, Papillon, popped into his head. Emulating the prisoner, Cam pounded out fifty pushups on the floor, then tried to estimate exactly how many foot-lengths in width his cell was. His guess of eleven-and-a-half was three-quarters of a boot shy. He’d save the length and diagonal for when he got really bored.
The door opened and Dr. Jag ambled in, surprising Cam—he figured it would be hours before he had a visitor. There must be something they needed in a hurry. “A doctor is on his way to examine you. Before we can give you the drugs we need to make sure your body is strong enough to take them.”
Leaning against his bed, the only piece of furniture in the room, Cam smiled. “Your finger can attest to that.”
Dr. Jag ignored the comment. “Do you have any drug allergies?”
Delay, always delay. At some point help will come. “Why should I make this any easier for you?”
His captor adjusted his glasses. “It does not matter to me if you break out into hives.”
“Sure it does. You need me alive to answer your questions. Not to mention even the CIA can’t just go around killing U.S. citizens.”
“We won’t let you die, Mr. Thorne. We are not amateurs.” He lifted his clipboard, as if that somehow proved his point. “I’m simply trying to save you some discomfort.”
Cam remembered something he had read about CIA mind control experiments. Feigning resignation, he said, “I’m allergic to Dramamine.”
Dr. Jag flinched slightly. “I see. Are you certain?”
“I puked my whole way through a Caribbean cruise because I couldn’t wear one of those seasickness patches.”
Holding his pen with thumb and index finger only, he made a note on the clipboard. As he did so, his sleeve pulled up and Cam caught a glimpse of his watch—9:37, presumably in the evening. “Very well. Anything else?”
Delay, delay. He was over five hours late returning home. Hours ago Amanda would have assumed the worst and contacted Georgia and probably also Randall. “I don’t like beets. Food shouldn’t be that color.”
Dr. Jag tapped the board with his pen. “Any other drug allergies, Mr. Thorne?”
Why not? The more he could come up with, the harder it would be to start injecting him. He had chosen Dramamine because one of its active ingredients was also used by the CIA as a mind control drug. “Aspirin and ibuprofen. I have something called Stevens-Johnson syndrome.” It just popped into his head, a memory from an ex-girlfriend. “And I’m allergic to most kinds of nuts.” Let their doctors try to figure out a safe way to inject him.
Dr. Jag eyed him skeptically. “You know, this would be much easier if you would just tell me what we want to know.”
Delay. Cam furrowed his brow. “Best I can remember, you haven’t asked me any questions yet.”
“All right, then. Answer this: Where is Evgenia Sams
anov-Johnson?”
“Who?” Cam didn’t even try to mask his surprise.
“One of my agents. Tall, biracial, attractive. And missing.”
So that’s what this was about. “I have no idea. Maybe she defected—I hear the Russians pay well these days.” Again, delay.
“Are you also going to claim you don’t know Professor Stefan Antonopoulos?”
Cam saw no reason to lie. “I saw him last night at a lecture in Boston. Did he defect also?”
Dr. Jag was growing irritated by Cam’s jabs; apparently the man was not used to be being treated disrespectfully. He took a deep breath. “Why were you at Vito Augustine’s house?”
“The guy rips me on his blog for no reason, what do you expect? I wanted to know why.” Cam shifted. “A better question is why were you there? Which leads to a whole bunch more questions, such as why are you doing everything you can to sabotage our research? Me, Professor Antonopoulos, Laurence Gardner.” This last name caused Dr. Jag’s eyes to flicker—Cam had hit a nerve. He turned his palms up. “I don’t get it. It makes no sense. Go chase terrorists or something.”
“Thank you for the career advice, Mr. Thorne.”
Buy more time. “You’re surprised I know about Laurence Gardner, aren’t you?”
Dr. Jag swallowed, considering his response. Apparently he had concluded that Cam wouldn’t remember any of this conversation anyway. “Yes. Discrediting him had been one of our most difficult tasks.”
Cam played another card. It was the last hand of the night, and he was way down anyway. “I also know about the Mellon family.”
Cam’s mention of Laurence Gardner had surprised Dr. Jag; the mention of the Mellon family caused outright consternation. Dr. Jag strode toward him, his face reddening. “What exactly do you know about the Mellon family?”
Locked in a cell in the basement of CIA headquarters, about to be drugged and tortured and brainwashed, Cam somehow was enjoying himself. “I know they helped fund Project MK-Ultra. I know they produced the LSD you used to experiment on soldiers and students and prisoners. I know they helped you bury and discredit research proving there were waves of Europeans here before Columbus—sometimes rather clumsily.” Cam paused. “What I don’t know is why.”
“Let me answer your question with a question, Mr. Thorne: Have you ever heard of war games?”
“Of course. Armies have been playing them for centuries.”
“And rightfully so. How else do you prepare for actual battle? It is the same in the intelligence community, especially in the field of PsyOps and mind control: We need war games. We need to prepare our agents to go out in the field in the real world and do their jobs.”
“I’m not following you.”
Dr. Jag closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. “Think, Mr. Thorne. How would you design war games for the CIA? How would you give our agents practice in the real world, a dress rehearsal if you will?”
Cam considered the question. “Honestly, I don’t know. You can’t just go around brainwashing people you pull off the street anymore—Congress put an end to that. So it would be difficult.”
“Exactly. Difficult, but crucial. We needed to come up with a Petri dish, a laboratory, a venue in which our agents could ply their craft.”
“I’m still not following you.” It was true. And better yet, this conversation was killing more time.
Dr. Jag stared him for a long beat. “You are the bacteria in that Petri dish, Mr. Thorne. You and all the other self-important, sanctimonious, ego-fueled researchers in your field. Barry Fell, Laurence Gardner, Scott Wolter, Daniel Whitewood, Stefan Antonopoulos. You all think you are smarter than the historians, smarter than the history books. You all think you have a monopoly on truth, of all things. But there is no truth. Truth is whatever we believe to be real. It is a perception.”
Cam nodded. He understood. “Whatever you can convince people is real, becomes reality. Mind control. You used us as your lab rats. If you could suppress us, if you could convince the country that Columbus really was first, then you had won.”
“Not won, Mr. Thorne. But proved we could win, when the stakes became real. We don’t care what people think about Columbus or the Vikings or Prince Henry Sinclair. But we need to train our agents, to test our methods, to determine if mind control works in the real world. And when I use the term ‘mind control,’ what I am really talking about is behavior modification, of course. That is the ultimate goal: Can we change what people believe or think, and thereby alter their behavior?”
“So for, what, sixty years, you have been discrediting researchers, destroying careers, covering up the true history of this country—all for some kind of dress rehearsal?”
Dr. Jag nodded. “The truth is we have done very little real harm. A few careers have been damaged, that is true, but don’t you think it remarkable that we have been able to operate such a large-scale experiment for so many years with such impressive results and so little collateral damage?” He shook his head. “It is truly one of the great accomplishments in modern intelligence.” He smiled smugly. “We have convinced an entire nation to believe a history that is false, despite the best efforts of brilliant and devoted researchers like yourself, Mr. Thorne.”
The whole thing was obscene, reeking of Big Brother. And it was wrong. Yet it explained so much—Cam had always sensed that opposition to pre-Columbian research was fueled by an almost religious zealousness, that there had to be something more behind it than a simple disagreement regarding the evidence. That something, it turned out, was the full weight of the federal government. “So that’s how Leonard Carmichael got involved? He was a behavioral psychologist who happened also to have control of the nation’s historical artifacts, which gave you the tools you needed to run your little experiment.”
“Exactly. Had Carmichael been the chair of, say, the Library of Congress rather than the Smithsonian, perhaps we would have used the card catalog as our Petri dish. But it just so happened that Carmichael had the keys to the country’s attic. In the end, it was a marriage made in heaven. You and your fellow researchers have been tenacious and skilled over the decades in your efforts to rewrite history—worthy adversaries for our agents and our methods. Barry Fell almost won the day back in the 1970s; were it not for his large ego we may not have been successful in discrediting him.”
Cam’s mind raced. What this meant was that all of the artifacts and sites that had been debunked over the years—the Kensington Rune Stone, the Newport Tower, the Westford Knight, the Tucson Lead Artifacts, the Bat Creek Stone, dozens of others—were probably authentic. An entire chapter of America’s history had been whitewashed away. Just as Cam’s memory was about to be…
As if on cue, the door opened.
At least the snow had stopped. Amanda weaved Randall’s Ford Taurus through traffic on the George Washington Bridge, fighting to get clear of the Saturday night New York City crowds for the second half of their run to Washington.
“You drive rather … fast,” Randall said.
“As fast as is needed.” It was just after nine-thirty, three hours after they departed Westford. She smiled sideways at her white-haired, white-knuckled passenger. Cam was in danger, and the elderly, retired CIA agent next to her was her best bet to rescue him. And he seemed to like to flirt. “If we get pulled over, I shall claim we are eloping to Atlantic City.”
His dark skin may have blushed a bit. “Yes, well, at my age it is probably wise to hurry.”
Early in the trip Randall seemed in no rush to talk about how he planned to rescue Cam. Instead he spent the few hours feeling her out, gauging her intelligence and character. He had asked about her giant research—apparently the Biblical giant Nimrod played an important part in Freemasonry, which had sparked Randall’s curiosity in the subject.
She accelerated past eighty-five as they crossed into New Jersey and looped south. Absent some accident, the bridge should be the last of their traffic problems, which should put them in McLean, Virg
inia a few minutes after midnight. She pressured the accelerator and watched the gauge edge up to ninety.
Randall cleared his throat. “If we die in a fiery crash, we cannot be married.” He turned to look at her. “Or help Cameron.”
“It was your suggestion to drive rather than fly.”
“Yes, because no doubt they will be watching for you on the planes and trains and buses. We have very few weapons at our disposal. The element of surprise is one of them.” He cleared his throat. Now, apparently, it was finally time to discuss the rescue. “Speaking of which, I will need to wear some kind of disguise to avoid being recognized. You will introduce me as an attorney, as is Cameron’s right.” He smiled slyly. “Even at Langley, the Constitution can not be totally ignored.”
She nodded. He was correct about the element of surprise. The other possible weapon they had was Senator Lovecroft. Georgia and the Senator were flying to Washington now, scheduled to land at Dulles within the hour. Georgia had promised that the Senator would make sure they would get to see Cam as soon as they arrived.
“You know these people,” she said. “What are they doing to Cam?” She almost hated to ask.
“The Agency prefers not to abduct American citizens, as it can create quite a mess. If they did abduct Cameron, it is because they view him as a serious threat or because he has vital information they require. In either case, standard operating procedure calls for a three-step approach.” He held up his index finger on his left hand. “First, they will conduct a medical examination to ensure that he is healthy enough to survive an interrogation. Second, they will administer drugs that render him incapable of withholding information. And third, they will administer more drugs that block his memory of the entire episode.”
She drove in silence for a few seconds. “If they have these drugs that turn people into … zombies, why do they bother with all this mind control silliness?”
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series) Page 24
