Project Cain (Project Cain)
Page 3
But what if the person who was “IT” had a gun?
What if the person who was “IT” wanted to kill you?
This is the game I played for more than six hours. Because of the man downstairs. He’d been there all night. He even found my dad’s secret room.
And the funny thing is, the fear of trying to maybe sneak past this man and maybe being shot by him wasn’t even the real reason I kept hiding. The real reason was worse.
I kept hiding because I still had no idea what else to do.
None.
It was the most horrible feeling in the world.
• • •
Eventually, the guy with the gun found me.
I suppose it was only a matter of time. He’d found my dad’s secret room in about three minutes. How tough was it to find a complete douche hiding in his own closet?
The guy was Castillo.
And he was not one of the two DSTI guys from the car.
He was something else.
• • •
About Shawn Castillo.
He grew up in New Mexico. His father was from Old Mexico. His mother was from Albuquerque. He wasn’t much in touch with either anymore.
He’d been a linebacker on his high school football team.
He’d joined the Army at eighteen.
There are 500,000 soldiers in the US Army. From those, just 2,000 are selected to join the Rangers. He was a Ranger at twenty.
He was the first in his family to go to college, and he got a degree in international economic history. During this same time, he also learned Desert Warfare Operations and Demolitions. He fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.
From those 2,000 Rangers, 40 are selected to join Delta Force. He was selected. They taught him counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence techniques. Once, he had to make fire using ice. (Seriously!) When his beard was long, he could pass for a Turk, Afghan, or Egyptian. He’d lived in a Yemen village for four months and everyone had thought his name was Ahmed. Once, during a Delta Force training exercise in Hamburg, he’d pretended to be Italian.
He spoke three languages well. Two others well enough.
With Delta, he captured men named Fazul Abdullah, Binalshibh, and Sheikh Mohammed in places like Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and Pakistan. Sometimes, per his assignment, he just killed these men. He had twenty-three confirmed kills.
His squad nickname was “Sting.”
He’d once been caught and badly tortured.
He’d been awarded three Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars for valor, two Silver, and a Distinguished Service Cross.
He had horrific nightmares that woke him a couple of times each month.
He preferred brunettes over blondes, but his last girlfriend, the first he’d ever truly loved, was a blonde.
His favorite band was Pearl Jam. He disliked snow. He liked to fish. Talked sometimes about a place called Bluewater Lake, where he liked to camp.
He’d been honorably discharged a year before against his wishes and now worked with the Department of Defense as a consultant of some kind. This was always kept unclear. In the end, the papers all reported he was a security consultant/guard at DSTI. But that was a total lie.
When we first met, he pointed his gun at me and cursed a lot.
• • •
I climbed out from the closet, the whole thing more embarrassing than scary. Freeing myself on all fours like that, glasses half off my face, some guy shouting at me. I’m sure I looked astoundingly moronic. At this point, I’ll admit, for a dozen different reasons, I basically just wanted him to shoot me anyway. He didn’t.
Instead he made me sit down on the end of my bed and then started asking questions. Where was my dad? Who else lives here? Last time I saw him? And so on . . .
I mumbled the few truths I knew as best I could.
He’d put his gun away, and now he pulled up the room’s only chair to sit across from me. He asked if my father had any family or friends nearby I knew about. Asked if I knew employees from the school, two nurses named Santos or Kelsoe. Asked if I knew about anything, any place, called Shardhara. I gave him mostly shrugs and one word answers. The one-word was almost always NO. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. They were really all I had to give. Eventually we got around to the heart of the matter.
Something happened at the school, he said. Something bad.
• • •
By “the school” he meant the Massey Institute.
Massey was a private school and treatment center maybe a half mile down the road from DSTI. On the same property and everything. The “treatment” part of the equation was for things like mental health, anxiety issues, anger management, eating disorders, suicide, drug and alcohol rehab. That kind of thing. A lot of the “treatments” were built upon advanced pharmaceuticals developed and provided by DSTI, who justified it all as approved “clinical trials” while openly funding and operating Massey.
For years I’d known Massey as a good place. A place where scientists like my father could help fix kids. But now I knew the truth.
Massey is where DSTI kept all their lab rats.
And instead of in cages, their teenage “rats” waited in classrooms and group sessions.
• • •
About fifty kids went to Massey.
All boys. Between the ages of ten and eighteen.
Most of the guys were normal kids.
Some . . . some not.
Some, I knew now from my father, were more like me.
• • •
clone (noun)
from the Greek word klōn, for “twig”
(1) a group of genetically identical cells descended from a single common ancestor; (2) an organism descended asexually from a single ancestor such as a plant produces by budding; (3) a replica of a DNA sequence produced by genetic engineering; (4) one that copies or closely resembles another, as in appearance or function; (5) me
• • •
It started with peas.
An Austrian monk named Mendel tried some biology experiments in the small garden of the monastery where he lived. It was the 1850s. His specific scientific interest was heredity: how and why children retain certain traits of their parents. No one understood this stuff yet.
To study it, he grew peas. Thirty thousand pea plant “children” carefully bred from specific pea “parents.” He pollinated each plant himself. Wrapped each pod individually. Examined and recorded the most minute detail: blossom color, pod color and shape, and pod position. Thirty thousand times.
It took seven years. He almost went totally blind staring at all those peas. Seriously.
He wrote only one paper about what he’d discovered during all that time and got it published. In the paper, he proved how specific genes in the parent peas controlled the traits of the children peas. Some genes were strong, or dominant, and others were weaker, or recessive. The strong genes won when the two met in an offspring. He started mapping them all out and eventually could figure out exactly what the next plant would look like.
This guy had invented genetics.
Very few people read his paper, however. He wasn’t a “real” scientist, the real scientists all decided. He was just a monk with a small pea garden. So he was completely ignored.
Mendel next tried bees. He kept five hundred hives with bees collected from all over the world. African, Spanish, Egyptian. He built special chambers for the various queens to mate and bred brand-new hybrid bees that made more honey than any other bee ever before on Earth. Mendel’s bees were also more aggressive than any other bee ever before on Earth. They stung the other monks and soon took their stinging ways to the nearby village. Mendel had to destroy every hive. He killed ten thousand bees.
He went back to plants, which didn’t sting, but tried something other than peas—a plant called hawkweed—and it didn’t work out. Not at all. He couldn’t verify his original findings.
He grew depressed and stopped doing experiments of any kind. Then Mendel died, and the abbot
who ran the monastery burned all of Mendel’s old notes and unpublished essays on heredity.
It was another fifty years before other scientists really rediscovered Mendel’s original paper. This time, however, they liked what they saw. Using Mendel’s original conclusions and evidence on genetics, scientists quickly moved from peas to frogs. From frogs to mammals. They soon figured out how to make detailed maps of DNA. To isolate certain genes and decipher how they worked. How to modify them.
They eventually cloned a whole sheep from a single strand of DNA. Took one single cell from a “parent” sheep and made a perfect copy. Identical. Two of the exact same sheep.
They named the copy Dolly. Dolly became famous. It was 1996.
Now it was game on. The next five years was an explosion of clones.
Japan constructed Noto the Cow. Thousands of Notos. The Italians cooked up Prometea the Horse. Iran made Hanna the Goat. South Korea made Snuppy the Dog and Snuwolf the Wolf. The Scots made pigs; the French, rabbits. Both China and India made water buffalo clones; Spain and Turkey, bulls. Dubai crafted the exact same camel a hundred and four times.
America, of course, did it better than all of them combined. More labs, more commercial interest, gobs more money. Cloning and biogenetic research was added to every pharmaceutical company in the nation. Even university kids were making clones. Did you know that there are more colleges in New Jersey alone than in all of Germany? Everything progressed in a hurry.
Cumulina the Mouse. Ralph the Rat.
Mira the Goat. Noah the Ox. Gem the Mule.
Dewey the Deer. Libby the Ferret. Ditteaux the African Wildcat.
CC the Cat. Tetra the Monkey.
Jeff the Serial Killer.
Beans to frogs to rats to primates. Just five years.
Insert chants of “USA, USA . . .” right here.
Cloning humans, by the way, is still completely legal in America.
Everyone just assumes it’s not.
A couple of states have banned it. Most haven’t. And Washington, DC, keeps out of the way. The Human Cloning Prohibition Acts of 2003 and 2007 were both voted down by Congress. The 2009 version of the bill has been buried/forgotten/hidden in various subcommittees for forever.
Our scientists can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they don’t openly use federal dollars. Cloning is currently legal in twenty other countries. See above.
We’re everywhere.
CHAPTER FIVE
Castillo showed me a list. A terrible list.
The names of all the students and Massey employees who’d been killed the night before.
Twelve people.
Now just little black lines stacked up on top of one another like dirty dishes.
Twelve.
Dead. Murdered in cold blood.
Nine were kids. I knew some of them. And I told Castillo so.
My dad’s name was not on this list.
• • •
Later, I admit, I would wish it had been.
• • •
They didn’t know where my dad was.
Me either, I said.
Castillo told me they did know my dad had been at Massey the night of the murders—from the security system. And that it looked like . . .
That it looked like my father probably, maybe, likely, had something to do with it.
“It” being the murders.
I wish I’d found that possibility more surprising.
• • •
Castillo then showed me another list.
This next list was about to become my whole world.
Albert Young. Jeffrey Williford. Henry Roberts. Dennis Uliase. Ted Thompson. David Spanelli.
These were the six students who were missing. Six who’d been at the school that night that no one could find now. They probably, Castillo explained, had something to do with the murders. That’s all he’d say at this point.
These were not their real names. These were their adopted names.
Their real names (their ORIGINAL names) were:
Albert Fish. Jeffrey Dahmer. Henry Lee Lucas.Dennis Rader. Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz.
How many of these names do you recognize?
Except for one, which I’d learned only the day before, I’d never heard of any of them.
They happen to be six of the most famous serial killers ever.
That’s why they were chosen. Why they were born again. Manufactured.
An Olympic Dream Team if the Olympics murdered and raped people. All added up, they’d killed almost two hundred people. Though “killed” doesn’t quite capture the specifics, but it will have to do.
My dad wanted only the best. So he went out and got their DNA and made clones of the best.
Now the “BEST” were all teenagers again.
And they’d apparently restarted their KILL COUNT at twelve.
• • •
Castillo asked if I knew these guys. He’d not yet brought up the clone thing at all. He was still speaking about these six boys like they were just Albert Young, David Spanelli, Henry Roberts, and so on, etc. But something in his voice, his look, made me realize he knew exactly what they were.
He’d just come to my house directly from DSTI, just spent hours in my father’s secret room while I’d cowered in the closet. Yes, I imagined, he knew the New Truth all too well.
Castillo shook me from my ever-darkening thoughts, asked again: Do you know these guys?
I admitted I knew three of them. I’d met Henry and Ted. And David. Various events and programs at the Massey school my dad had brought me to. David had always seemed like a pretty cool kid. Funny. And I told Castillo that. He wrote it down like it mattered somehow.
He asked specifically about Henry and Ted.
I shook my head. Explained what I thought of them. Told Castillo they, to me, seemed like “BAD KIDS.” (Not knowing how much my silly notions of such classifications would be challenged and changed over the next two weeks.) When pressed for more specifics, I told him they just seemed to be like people who might be involved in something, well, “BAD.”
Maybe that was unfair. I mean, guys like my father and Mr. Eble had always seemed “GOOD,” and this was clearly no longer a given.
Part of the New Truth.
Castillo asked me a bunch more questions about Henry, Ted, and David.
What they liked to do. Places they talked about? Girls? Etc.
I told Castillo everything I could think of. It wasn’t much.
I mean, how much do you really know about people you’ve met only a couple of times?
As to the other three guys he was looking for . . .
I told Castillo honestly I’d never met them.
I’d certainly have remembered meeting Jeffrey Williford.
Meeting another copy of myself.
• • •
Castillo had told DSTI about finding my dad’s secret room and about all the materials and documents within. He projected DSTI would return in about thirty minutes to pick it all up, and then he made it pretty clear that wasn’t ideal for me. Turns out he had the exact same assessments of DSTI my dad did: I probably should keep as far away as possible. It occurred to me briefly that his warning and concern were some kind of cruel trick and that he was just gonna drive me straight to them anyway.
But Castillo didn’t work for DSTI. Just with. (At least that’s what he was telling me.) And that small difference made ALL the difference in the world, I think. Castillo was working for the government. The Department of Defense, ultimately. For some guy named Colonel Stanforth. And the gang at DSTI hadn’t told Castillo (or this Stanforth guy) they were coming to clean out my father’s office before Castillo got there.
And they sure as heck hadn’t told Castillo anything about me. That I even existed.
Castillo’d had to figure that part out on his own after a night in my dad’s secret room reading his journals. Watching videos of various patient interviews and of top-secret tests conducted.
And I think it kinda pissed him off.
So he didn’t plan to take me to DSTI.
Instead he asked me to help.
• • •
Castillo told me he wanted to help these six kids. And my dad, too.
He didn’t know yet if they’d all scattered in different directions or were still together somewhere.
And he didn’t know if my dad was a hostage of some kind or—he suspected—more “involved.”
But he said he didn’t care about any of that right now because he wanted to do more than capture these guys. He said they were in a real bad place and needed real help. He said they might be murderers and my dad might be helping them somehow but that he was only interested in making sure things didn’t get worse.
And I believed him. Even if he was lying, it didn’t matter.
I had to believe in something.
Maybe I should have just said no. I didn’t.
I said yes.
He asked if I needed anything.
They already took everything, I said.
He nodded.
I’m Castillo, he said and held out his hand.
Hi. I shook his hand. I’m Jeffrey Dahmer.
• • •
It was a shitty thing to say. But I wanted this guy to know that I knew exactly what I was. What these other guys were too. He didn’t have to pretend anymore.
Maybe I also wanted Castillo to feel as sucky and revolted as I did.
I think it worked.
• • •