by Simon Rose
The scene then abruptly shifted. Max felt as if he were walking along a dark tunnel, although he couldn’t feel his feet touching the ground. At the end of the tunnel was a brilliant white light along with shapes that were continually shifting, which prevented Max from bringing them into focus. Then he heard someone speak to him inside his mind.
“You must go back, but to the beginning, where it all began.”
Max recognized the voice. He’d heard it before when Deanna had first sent him back into David Dexter’s memories. Once again Max sensed a connection to the speaker but this time he believed that he knew who the voice belonged to.
“Where am I?” said Max. “Who are you?”
“You must go back, but to the beginning, where it all began. Only you have the power to change the path that’s been taken. You must trust your new friend. She has the gift. Trust her.”
Suddenly the tunnel and the white light vanished, and the scene shifted again. Max was now restrained on a table in a scientific facility filled with computers and instrument consoles. Beside his shoulder was a shallow metal tray containing surgical instruments, including a long hypodermic needle. Beside the tray was a shiny black circular device, connected to the floor by a mechanical arm. The device had a series of coloured lights, switches, and a small dial, along with cables attached to a nearby console.
A tall slender woman dressed in a white lab coat approached the table. She leaned over and peered into Max’s face. He immediately recognized Dr. Evans from Kovac’s team at the waterfront.
“She’s ready, Doctor.”
A man with dark, thinning hair and thickly framed glasses walked up to the table. It was Kovac.
“Thank you. Tell Lawrence to get the van ready.”
Max tried to scream but no sound came out of his mouth as Kovac picked up the long needle from the instrument tray
“Don’t worry, my dear,” said Kovac, with a chilling smile. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
MAX WOKE UP in his bed in shock, sitting up and gasping for breath. His elbow knocked the lamp off the bedside table, and the bulb broke as the lamp hit the floor. Max quickly checked his phone. It was just before 6 am. As impossible as it seemed, Max knew now that his mother was trying to contact him. The terrifying dreams and her appearances as a ghost had left Max in little doubt. It also now appeared clear that his mother had been subjected to Kovac’s experiments at the waterfront as well as in Europe when she was a teenager.
Max got out of bed, went over to the desk, and switched on the laptop. He quickly accessed the SecretConspiracyXpose website and initially intended to study the list of victims again. However, he knew that he’d obtained as much information as he could from the photographs and biographies and instead clicked on the Contact page. He had no idea if the mythical and presumably elusive Jesse even existed. Max only had Julia’s word for that. Based on the website’s content, its owner also probably received hundreds of emails a week and might not even read any of them. Julia had remarked that Jesse was very selective regarding the people with whom he engaged in correspondence. Bearing this in mind, Max took care to compose his message.
My friend at school said that she’d contacted you before and that you sometimes reply. I’m hoping that you can provide some answers about the page on your site about the Aleksander Kovac operation back in the 1990s. My name is Max Garrison and my mother’s picture and biographical details are listed on your site as being connected to the operation. Her death was a suicide but you seem to think that it’s an unsolved murder case. I also recognized another picture on the site of a man that I know for certain was part of Kovac’s operation. Please reply to this message.
Max
Max knew that he probably shouldn’t refer to Julia as his friend since he barely knew her, but he was becoming increasingly desperate. He simply had to know if the SecretConspiracyXpose website was genuine and only the mysterious Jesse could prove that. Max wasn’t sure if he should give his own name but he was hoping that it might at least get Jesse’s attention. Max read the message through one more time, then with his hand trembling, he clicked on the send button. There was a notification informing him that the message had been delivered. Now all Max had to do was wait for a reply.
Chapter Seven
Confirmations
MAX HAD NO classes with Julia on Wednesdays but sometimes noticed her in the hallways or near the lockers at different times throughout the week. However, he saw no sign of her that morning. He wondered if she was avoiding him but that seemed foolish, since if anything he’d be avoiding her after what she’d said about seeing ghosts at school. Anyone would be unnerved by that kind of talk. It never occurred to Max that Julia might not even be at school at all.
Max checked his email periodically throughout the day, but there was nothing from Jesse and Max admitted that he wasn’t really expecting a reply. Despite what Julia had said, Max doubted if the owner of the site ever communicated with visitors in person.
Fortunately, Max didn’t have any classes with Jason that day and didn’t see much of him. Max just didn’t feel like talking to anyone after what had happened recently. After school, he went straight home, avoiding Jason and any invitations to hang out after school.
ONCE HE GOT home, despite his fatigue, Max was determined to stay awake. Yet once he stepped inside and locked the door he realized just how tired he was. Although he knew that he might have more terrifying dreams, he put his laptop and his phone on the coffee table. Max yawned as he lay down on the sitting room couch and soon fell asleep.
The vibration of his phone woke him up. Max’s dad had sent him a short text about not being back until quite late that evening. Max was relieved since he really didn’t feel in the mood for small talk over dinner. Quickly checking the clock, he realized that he’d been asleep for over four hours. He hadn’t had any dreams this time and felt well rested. There was also an earlier message from an unknown number. It simply said check your mail, but Max figured the message was spam so immediately deleted it.
Max picked up his laptop and went upstairs. He briefly stopped at the bathroom to wash his face to help him wake up. He then went into his room and turned on the laptop. He looked around as the computer warmed up. The wooden box was just where he’d left it on top of the dresser. Nothing else was out of place either. When the laptop was ready and he opened his email there a message from an address that he didn’t recognize. He was about to send it to the trash when he decided to check who it was from. He opened the email, and it only contained a link but significantly the word “Jesse” was typed beneath it.
Max clicked on the link but at first nothing happened. The screen was blank and it seemed to be a website that was out of service. Then without warning an image appeared on the screen. The room was shrouded in darkness and all Max could see in front of the screen was a figure draped in a black shadow. He couldn’t even make out if it was a man or a woman.
“Hello, Max,” said a voice.
“Jesse?” Max asked.
“Yes, or at least that’s what I call myself on here. Did you get my text?”
“That was you? How did you get my phone number?”
“I checked you out. I needed to know as much as possible about you. It’s pretty easy when you know how.”
“Why can’t I see you?”
“Just a security precaution. The email is routed through a lot of different places that are changed on a regular basis too. Nothing’s a hundred percent secure these days and I have to protect myself.”
“What do you want?”
“You sent me a message,” Jesse replied. “It’s you that wants something. You said that you’re interested in this because of your mom but also mentioned that you recognized someone else on the site.”
Max paused before replying. He couldn’t tell Jesse how he knew that Wallace had been at the waterfront facility.
“That was a mistake,” he said. “I saw a picture but didn’t check the guy’s bio details before I e
mailed you. I thought I recognized someone but it turns out I don’t know them after all.”
Max wanted to determine just how much Jesse knew without revealing too much of his own knowledge of Kovac’s operation.
“I don’t usually connect with people that send me messages,” said Jesse.
“So why did you reply to me?”
“Like I said, I checked you out. I can always look at medical and school records and other things that most people can’t access to verify someone’s identity. I can’t be too careful. My site has a lot of stuff that you won’t find elsewhere online and sometimes it’s too close to the truth for the authorities. The FBI, law enforcement, and other more secretive agencies sometimes pretend to be someone else in order to trap people like me. I know all about you and your family, Max. That’s how I know that you’re telling the truth about your mom. You also mentioned someone at your school. Who was that?”
“Her name’s Julia. She said she’d contacted you before.”
“Oh, right, the girl with that blog. I didn’t think she had any friends, or at least that’s what she told me.”
“Can you tell me more about Kovac and the other things you mention on the site?” asked Max. “I’ve been trying to do some research but can’t find any information on him.”
“You have to know where to look, Max,” said Jesse. “Kovac cropped up in some other stories I was researching for the site a few years ago about secret experiments on psychics in the former Eastern Bloc. He disappeared when Yugoslavia started falling apart and the next thing you know he’s here in North America, working for the federal government and the military.”
“How did you find that out?”
“That part wasn’t particularly secret. He was listed as working for the defence department as a medical doctor and that’s how I retrieved the details of his associates like Lawrence and Evans. Given Kovac’s work in Europe and the fact that disappearances started happening in your area around the time he arrived here, I did some digging. There were always rumours of a secret facility somewhere in the city, although it was naturally hard to verify that. I believe it was at an old navy warehouse at the waterfront. They renovated that area and took down all the old buildings but back in the first half of the ’90s, the waterfront would have been an ideal place to hide something. Lots of abandoned buildings and of course that warehouse was government owned, so it was easier to keep a lid on things.”
“Why do you think it was there?” said Max.
“I have my contacts, although people are still reluctant to talk about it and how it was hushed up. I would imagine many of them fear for their lives.”
“Was Kovac really doing experiments on psychics?”
“Project Mindstorm planned to use psychics as weapons, but that’s all I know. From what I can gather they used a drug to make people forget what had happened to them. People got dumped in fields and in the woods. Some were found dead, either from the treatment they endured or were already dead when they left the waterfront. Others were too badly injured and died before someone found them.”
So far, Jesse had confirmed just about everything that Max knew was true about Project Mindstorm.
“So they’d never remember being experimented on?”
“That seems to have been the plan but nothing’s foolproof,” Jesse replied. “Since these people had enhanced mental abilities some of them might have started to recall their experiences. I found one person that made what were called wild claims before being sent for some kind of therapy. She disappeared from the record but died in an accident not long afterward. Perhaps Kovac’s people thought this would happen to all the others eventually, due to the drug failing over time, hence the decision to silence everyone. They wouldn’t want to kill everyone at once, of course, so they stretched it out over the last fifteen years or so. I researched one of them to see how they coped afterward and learned that they died in a freak accident. I then started to look at the others and their deaths. There are accidents, sudden illnesses, suicides, but it all seemed highly suspicious. And those are just the ones that I could research in public records or news reports. There are probably a lot more.”
“And this was definitely a secret government operation?” asked Max. “I think you said that on your site.”
“Jonathan Dexter was closely connected to programs that Kovac worked on. Dexter was quite a high flyer for a while and was even thought to be considering a presidential run. However, he retired from politics around the same time that the operation shut down. He went into private business and died earlier this year.”
“Was he murdered too?”
“I don’t think so,” Jesse replied. “It seemed to be natural causes. His son took over the business; that’s all I know. But I think Dexter might have had something to do with Kovac back then. I haven’t had time to look into his son and see if there are any links.”
Max was relieved that Jesse didn’t appear to know too much about David Dexter. If he started digging, he might find out about Kane’s visit to David’s house, although the incident seemed to have been hushed up by the authorities since Max had seen nothing in the local news. By now he also realized that Jesse seemed to have some excellent sources. If he started to look into David and his family, he might even learn about Max and Deanna being at the house. That would then lead him to investigate Deanna, if he wasn’t already aware of her involvement in the Kovac operation.
“But you can’t be certain that all these deaths are connected and that everyone was murdered,” said Max.
“No,” Jesse admitted. “But as far as I’m concerned the evidence is pretty compelling.”
“Well, I know my mom’s details are correct on your site so I’m assuming that all the others are too, but how do you know so much about the causes of death? They were all natural causes, accidents, suicides, or illnesses, nothing sinister.”
“I’m very sure about the causes of death, Max, that’s all you need to know. I can’t tell you how I got that information, but you know I’m right about your mom.”
“Yes, but she was sick. My dad told me all about that. She jumped in front of that train. You’ve got no evidence that she was part of any secret experiments.”
“Wasn’t she missing for a few days and found in a remote area, with no memory of what had happened to her?” said Jesse.
“Yes, but like I said, she was quite sick. That’s why she took her own life at the station.”
“Yes, I saw that newspaper report and investigated her medical history. It was murder, Max. Her case is one of the few that I’ve proved to myself beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
“How?”
“There’s security camera footage that was taken at the station. It’s not perfect quality but it’s pretty clear that she was pushed. She was at the edge of the platform and someone stepped out of the steps to the underpass. They pushed her then stepped back into the underpass as she fell in front of the train.”
Max shuddered. Jesse’s description almost matched exactly what he’d seen in his dream.
“Where’s this film?” Max asked.
“The police confiscated it during their investigation and then the film disappeared. It’s not even supposed to exist but I’ve seen it.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you that. Although I checked you out thoroughly, they could still be watching you. Now that you’ve started checking into this, your online traffic will have been noticed.”
“What? That’s crazy. I don’t know anything.”
Max, of course, knew a great deal but he wasn’t going to tell Jesse that. And who’d believe him anyway, if he confessed that he’d changed the previous timeline to form the current series of events.
“They’ll be onto you soon enough, Max, if they’re not already. I don’t know if they’ll go after your friend Julia as well. She’s interested in the paranormal rather than in conspiracy theories. The psychic stories are probably what brought her to my site in the first pl
ace. But these guys don’t mess around. I’ve seen what they can do, and they can kill anyone they want without any fear of being caught. You need to be very careful from now on. Just about everyone connected with that secret operation that might have been experimented on is dead. The murders began about five years after it closed down.”
“That’s around the time my mom died.”
“Exactly. There are still a few people I haven’t been able to track down. A young woman from the university was supposed to have been taken but I haven’t been able to find out anything else about her yet.”
Max suspected that Jesse meant Deanna, who’d been snatched from the university but then had been discovered by David and taken safely home. Since she’d never been found abandoned in the park, it wouldn’t have made the news. And of course, since the younger Deanna knew all about the case once she’d spoken to Max as David, she knew to keep quiet in the years that followed. And yet if Jesse was right and someone was killing everyone connected to the case, Deanna might still be in danger. It seemed unlikely that she’d been left alone but Jesse seemed to think that not everyone had yet been accounted for. Deanna might simply have been lucky to escape detection. As far as Max recalled, she’d kept to herself and saw people very rarely in her role as a psychic medium.
