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

by David S. Brody

  Randall puts his hands together in front of his chest, like a person praying. “Because a zombie can follow instructions, but only up to a certain extent. I could drug you, for example, and order you to withdraw money from your bank and give it to me. But if a policeman arrived and asked if you were in distress, you would be unable to strategize an appropriate response. If, on the other hand, I convinced you it was in your best interest to withdraw funds for my benefit, you would smile at the kind officer, offer a few reassuring words, and send him on his way.” He raised his eyebrows. “Zombies are of limited use, whereas puppets are invaluable.”

  She swallowed. “And the drugs they use. Are they safe? Are there any side effects or repercussions?”

  “The drug du jour at Langley is scopolamine. It is sometimes referred to as Devil’s Breath.” He paused, seeming to expect a response.

  “Is it foul-smelling?”

  Randall shook his head. “On the contrary, it is odorless. It gets its name from the way it is often used in Colombia, where it is most prevalent: Criminals blow a handful of scopolamine powder into a victim’s face, removing the victim’s free will. The active ingredient is the same as in the belladonna plant, used in ancient times as a love potion.” He paused. “Many victims have no recollection of what they have done while under the drug’s influence.”

  He had not answered her question. “Yes, but is it safe?”

  “Usually so. But it can cause powerful hallucinations.” He raised his eyes to hers and shrugged. “And in some cases it can be fatal.”

  Georgia and Senator Lovecroft’s flight from Kansas City landed; a member of the Senator’s staff met them at the Dulles terminal when they disembarked.

  “Where to, sir?” the young aide asked, taking Georgia’s overnight bag.

  “Straight to Langley, Jason. And I’ll carry my own suitcase, thank you.” It was just after ten at night.

  The Senator bent forward as they walked through the terminal, stretching. He insisted on flying commercial, and even refused an upgrade to first class. “You know,” Georgia said, “when you get to be President you’re not going to be able to fly United.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose my back will thank me. But if Lincoln can make the trip from Illinois to Washington by stagecoach, who am I to complain about a two hour flight?”

  The Senator did not often openly compare himself to Lincoln, but Georgia knew he idolized the sixteenth President and strived to emulate him.

  The twenty-minute ride east across northern Virginia passed quickly. Jason dropped them at the main entrance to the modern, sprawling, glass-and-chrome CIA headquarters building. The arched glass entrance always made Georgia feel she was about to step onto an escalator and descend to an underground subway platform. As it turned out, after clearing security they were indeed escorted by elevator into the subbasement of the complex.

  The new building boasted the latest in sophisticated technology and security. But it never smelled right to Georgia—instead of shoe leather and old smoke and dusty files the building smelled sterile and cold, like a rental car with its air conditioning turned up too high.

  The deputy director of the CIA waited for them in a carpeted conference room. Ming Wang was the number two man at Langley, a man who probably knew more American secrets than any person who had ever lived. Yet most Americans had no idea he even existed. In his mid-seventies, Wang had worked his way up in the Agency after arriving from China in the late 1940s as a college student just before the Communist takeover and taking a job with the CIA a few years later. Sharp, hardworking and fiercely patriotic, he had overcome the cultural bias against Asians in the intelligence community—the prevailing belief was that Asians, for cultural reasons, would always remain loyal to their homelands—to serve under a dozen administrations. As far as Georgia knew, had accomplished the almost impossible task in Washington of having never made an enemy.

  He stood and greeted them cordially, his thin gray hair combed neatly across the top of his head. “Senator Lovecroft, Agent Johnson, a pleasure to see you both.” He bowed his head to each and introduced a few underlings sitting around the table. “Dr. Jag is with Mr. Thorne in the interrogation room. He will join us shortly.” He spoke slowly, enunciating each word, as if aware his accent made him difficult to understand.

  The Senator cleared his throat. “That is why we are here,” he said, still standing. “We do not want him to be interrogated.” He looked apologetically toward Georgia. “At least not yet.”

  Wang nodded. “I understand your concern. In fact, I happen to have a certain amount of fondness for Mr. Thorne myself.”

  “You?” Georgia blurted out. “How do you even know him?”

  Wang smiled, his teeth browned by a lifetime of pipe smoking. “I assume he informed you of the Bat Creek Stone bracelet he found in a bag of Chinese food?”

  “Yes. Then he was kidnapped.” She leaned forward, wondering where this was going.

  “Thankfully I am not yet too old to go out into the field. Mr. Thorne knows me by the name Pugh Wei. I delivered his Chinese food.”

  Georgia’s eyes widened. “You?” This was exactly the type of convoluted plan the CIA would come up with to suck someone like Cam in. Why just knock on his door and give him the bracelet when you could instead manipulate him through lies, fear and torture?

  Wang smiled again. “Mr. Thorne is a good man. One can usually tell by the way a man tips when nobody is watching.”

  A thirty-something woman in a light blue lab coat strolled into the interrogation room carrying a black medical bag. She nodded to Dr. Jag and smiled kindly at Cam. “I am Dr. Smith.”

  Delay. “Dr. Smith?” Cam sighed. “What, Jones was taken? Are you really even a doctor?”

  “Johns Hopkins,” she said humorlessly. “Top of my class.”

  Even in glasses and with her hair pulled back, Cam noticed she was attractive. Why he noticed this, he had no idea—obviously he wasn’t going to ask her out. But it was somewhat comforting that she didn’t look like the Kathy Bates character in that Stephen King movie, Misery. He glanced around. “I see you’re on quite a career track. Perhaps someday you can be in charge of water-boarding.”

  “This is not torture, Mr. Thorne.”

  “Easy to say when you’re on your side of the needle.”

  “I see you are a diabetic. When was the last time you checked your blood sugar levels.”

  “It’s been a while. I should probably eat something.”

  She handed him a granola bar. “Start with this.”

  She asked him to strip to his boxers. He thought about resisting, yet that would just mean a couple of grunts would come in and do it for him; better to bide his time and attempt something less futile later. But he was running out of time. The thought of his captors crawling around inside his head and learning his most private secrets reminded him of the despair he had felt as a young boy when a bunch of neighborhood bullies barged into his house and ransacked his bedroom. The bedroom had been permanently and irreversibly violated; he finally convinced his parents to let him switch to a spare room in the basement. But he couldn’t very well switch to another head.

  The doctor gave him a quick physical, checking his pulse, blood pressure and respiration as he sat on the bed. She glanced at Dr. Jag’s clipboard. “You really allergic to all this stuff?”

  Buy time, wait for help to arrive. “Yup.”

  She sighed. “Give me your arm.” She swabbed a handful of different solutions onto his forearm and then lightly pricked each of them with a needle.

  Cam knew how this worked—if he was allergic, there would be some kind of reaction on his skin within fifteen or twenty minutes. But that was fifteen or twenty minutes more of a delay. “Can I get dressed?”

  She shook her head. “Negative.”

  He knew this was part of the process, the dehumanization of the prisoner. Cam slid off the bed, reached down and pulled his jersey over his head. Then he stepped into his jeans. A small act
of rebellion.

  Dr. Jag didn’t seem to care. He said, “After we inject you with the scopolamine, I will be asking you a series of questions. You may be surprised to know that I will be asking you a number of questions about giants.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because we have found that the scopolamine can make subjects lethargic, sometimes even dimwitted. Forcing subjects to focus on certain material beforehand allows them to recall more information under the effects of the drug.” He smiled. “You know the old childhood game, where someone tells you not to think about pink polar bears and, of course, that’s all you can think about? Well, Mr. Thorne, please do not think about giants.”

  “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Cam retorted. But he was curious: Why giants?

  The doctor took a long needle from her bag. Suddenly Cam didn’t care about giants.

  “Wait, so you set this whole thing up?” Georgia asked, looking directly at Deputy Director Wang. He was technically her boss, but she didn’t really care about offending anyone at the moment. “You intentionally put Cameron and Amanda in danger as part of some mission?”

  Wang put up a hand defensively. “Please allow me to explain.” He sighed. “Perhaps it would help if I were to give you some history on Project MK-Ultra,” Wang said, still articulating every syllable. “You may know its original mission was to develop mind control techniques during the Cold War. Today, it is more concerned with behavior control. But the intention is the same: To surreptitiously change behavior. Often this is accomplished by changing beliefs.”

  “And I know for some reason you have chosen the field of pre-Columbian history as your testing ground,” Senator Lovecroft said.

  “Correct. Our agents use various tools and strategies developed at MK-Ultra to undermine and discredit research in this field—if we can, for example, convince American citizens that Columbus was here first, then we can use these same strategies to, say, convince Afghani villagers that the Taliban is evil.” He shrugged. “We have nothing in particular against pre-Columbian research or researchers; it is simply that Dr. Carmichael’s position as Secretary of the Smithsonian gave us control of the artifacts in this field.” He paused. “And controlling the artifacts allowed us to control the debate.”

  “When you say controlling the artifacts, what you really mean is tampering with the evidence. You buried artifacts that didn’t support your claims, and you altered others so they did. You cooked the books.”

  Wang didn’t seem to take Lovecroft’s comment as a criticism. “Correct. For example, we arranged to have the Vinland Map donated to Yale so we could control who was allowed to study it. But we did not focus on just the artifacts themselves—we built up or tore down the reputations of many researchers in the field. And it worked.” He arched an eyebrow at the Senator. “To this day there is not a single textbook—cooked or otherwise—that recognizes European exploration of the United States prior to Columbus.”

  “I’m sure George Orwell would be very proud of you,” the Senator said. “Continue.”

  “In early 2011, just after Fidel Castro stepped down, we received some disturbing intelligence from a senior Cuban official who lost a power struggle with Castro’s brother.” He waved his hand in the air as if the particulars did not matter. “The intelligence was that a Cuban sleeper agent had infiltrated the CIA. Our source did not know many details, but one thing he did say led us to believe the agent likely worked on the MK-Ultra program.” Wang sighed. “As you might imagine, we have been striving to learn the identity of this sleeper agent.”

  Georgia interjected. “And, of course, to use this information to your advantage.”

  “If possible, yes. But primarily to neutralize any threat. We can’t have a Cuban agent lurking inside Langley.”

  “But what does any of this have to do with Cam and Amanda?” Georgia asked.

  Wang nodded. “I’m getting to that. One of the agents we suspected might be the sleeper was a young woman named Evgenia Samsanov-Johnson. Her father was a Russian hockey player who played in Detroit. We thought perhaps her heritage would make her sympathetic toward Cuba, an old Soviet ally.”

  Georgia sat forward in her chair. “Wait, Cameron told me about her. She’s the one who tried to discredit that professor with the fake rune stone.”

  Wang bowed his head. “Yes, she was trying to discredit the professor. But she knew nothing about the fake rune stone. We were playing her, testing her—we wanted to get her out of the office and into the field, so we assigned her to Professor Antonopoulos.” He lowered his voice. “As it turns out, we may have been wrong to suspect her. She is dead.”

  “Dead? How?” Georgia asked. It was rare for a CIA agent to be killed on American soil.

  “We do not have many details; I just received the call a couple of hours ago. The Boston police found her body outside the Masonic Grand Lodge. Presumably she was tracking the professor.” He paused and rested his dark eyes on Georgia’s. “But your man Thorne was at the Lodge last night also. Which is one of the reasons Dr. Jag is so anxious to question him.”

  Georgia doubted Cam had anything to do with the agent’s death, but she also knew an agent was dead and that everyone would be considered a suspect until proven otherwise.

  Wang’s phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. The deputy director listened for a few seconds and then to Georgia and the Senator: “Thorne’s fiancée is here, with a lawyer.”

  The Senator nodded. “This is still the United States of America. Have them brought down.”

  Amanda cut off Georgia before she could finish the introductions as they stood in the doorway of the conference room. She appreciated the efforts her friend was making to help, but this was not the first time she and Cameron had been targeted by overzealous federal authorities. “Not to be rude, but where is Cameron?”

  Randall interjected. Dressed in a three-piece suit and carrying a leather briefcase, he would not have looked out of place addressing a jury. “My client is correct. You have no right to hold him, and I am prepared to obtain a writ of habeas corpus if necessary. The Sixth Amendment demands—”

  Senator Lovecroft cut him off. “We are familiar with the Constitution, sir. And I don’t think you’ll have much luck finding a judge at midnight.” He turned to the older Asian man. “Nonetheless, it hardly seems as if Mr. Thorne is a threat to national security. I see no reason to further deprive him of his due process rights. I suggest you take us to him.”

  The Asian man nodded. “Very well. But, Senator, if I may first have a brief word with you and Agent Johnson, that would be appreciated.”

  Randall and Amanda waited in the hallway outside the conference room as Senator Lovecroft, Georgia Johnson and Deputy Director Wang huddled together, their backs to the hallway window. It seemed to Randall as if Wang was doing most of the talking and, from their body language, it seemed as if what he was saying was important. Randall hoped they were not talking about him.

  This was the most dangerous part of tonight’s mission. If somehow Wang recognized him, or doubted he was an attorney, the whole thing could blow up. The three-inch lifts in his shoes had helped, as had the heavy-rimmed glasses. And he and Wang had never met. But Wang had not become the number two man at Langley by being an idiot.

  “What are they talking about?” Amanda asked.

  Randall guessed this might be a stall to allow whatever drugs they were giving Thorne to kick in, or perhaps they were waiting while someone checked on Randall’s bona fides. But he could not verbalize either possibility to Amanda. “Probably figuring out a way to deny this ever happened if it blows up in their faces.”

  Randall bent over to tie his shoe; surreptitiously he removed the shoelace from his wingtip and dropped the black lace into his pants pocket. He had hoped to dislike Senator Lovecroft, but he found the man honest, steadfast and, most of all, humble. The Oval Office could use some humility. But it would be with someone other than Lovecroft sitting behind the famous Resolute Desk if R
andall had any say in the matter.

  After ten minutes the three conferees stood and entered the hallway. “Thank you for your patience,” Wang said. “We will take you to see Mr. Thorne now.”

  Randall exhaled. Wang led the group down the hallway, Randall in the rear working to stay balanced atop his lifted and now lace-less left shoe. They stopped in a vestibule area where a half-dozen monitors sat on a shelf against the long wall of the room. A pair of guards with holstered sidearms, along with a woman in a lab coat and a couple of white-shirted men, eyed them as they approached. Randall glanced at the monitors—each displayed a sole figure of a man slouched in a banquet chair in the middle of a square white room. Amanda gasped as Randall recognized a dazed-looking Cameron being interrogated across a banquet table by an angular man in a blue blazer. Randall’s heart dropped. It was Dr. Jag—he would surely recognize Randall.

  Randall thought quickly. He raised himself up. “I demand to see my client. Immediately. And alone.” He pointed at Dr. Jag. “And I demand that man’s full name and address. He is conducting an illegal torture interrogation in violation of both federal law and the Geneva Convention. We plan to hold him fully accountable for his crimes.”

  “Mr. Thorne is heavily sedated,” the woman said.

  “Even more reason why I demand to see him.”

  “As for the gentleman with Mr. Thorne,” Wang said, “I am afraid we will not be able to comply with your request.” He turned to one of the white-shirted men. “Please escort our associate out the back door of the interrogation room.” And to Randall. “You may meet with your client once they have departed.”

  Amanda interjected, her voice shaky. “I’m coming in also.”

  Randall touched her arm, relieved he had successfully handled the Dr. Jag problem. He was so close now. “Please, Amanda, let me handle this.” He leaned closer. “I am not sure you want to see him like this.” Louder now, so everyone could hear. “And I need you to make sure our conversation is private.” The monitors, for now at least, did not project any sound. “Please bang on the door if our conversation is in any way audible.”