L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  Forty

  Talk about brave new world—as Hans and I talked for another forty-five minutes, he made passing references to actual research that I’d have thought was pure sci-fi.

  The government had been working for years on top-secret technologies with names like Haarp, Gwen, Pandora, and no doubt others that weren’t known—with precisely the object of electronic mind control. This was especially chilling because it targeted not just particular people but masses, and at distances that might be thousands of miles.

  On related fronts, there was a phenomenon called synthetic telepathy, with the sender encoding thoughts in electronic impulses that were beamed to the receiver and decoded. The military was developing helmets that did essentially the same thing, reading a field commander’s brain impulses and transmitting orders straight to his troops with no need for speech or other communication. Another similar process looked very promising for controlling prosthetic limbs.

  Then there were the nanoparticles. Getting people to inhale them on a widespread basis wouldn’t be hard. The industry was virtually unregulated. They were easy to buy or manufacture. Besides all the ways they were already being used in cosmetics and clothing that we breathed in throughout the days, other possibilities were easy to imagine. Air circulation systems in buildings, airplanes, buses.

  And Hans made another disturbing speculation—that Kelso’s filmmaking might really involve experimenting with specific light and sound frequencies as substitutes for the microwaves, as a means to transmit signals. If you wanted to stir up a crowd, it would be like Hitler’s propaganda techniques on steroids.

  With that thought hovering, Hans’s gaze on me sharpened.

  “I think you need to be most cautious, Tom,” he said. “Not just about Kelso himself. As you can see, the consequences of this are potentially explosive. Intelligence agencies would go to any lengths to possess such technology. It’s safe to assume that they haven’t lost sight of Kelso, in spite of his self-reinvention; with a man like him, they don’t. And perhaps other governments as well; when he was in Sweden, he very likely worked with Russians, and they are enormously interested in the field of mind control.

  “Someone is bound to realize soon what he’s doing—they may already know. They will want to keep this matter absolutely secret, with good reason. If you talk to anyone, even law enforcement authorities, you might put important plans at risk. It could even put you at risk personally.”

  Jesus—bad as the situation was already, I hadn’t even thought of that.

  So what could I do? Take the chance and talk to authorities anyway? Go on the run? Try to hide from Kelso? Start wearing a cap lined with tinfoil? I shook my head, bitterly amused. I’d always thought of that as sheer buffoonery.

  Or sell my soul and give him what he wanted—my family’s assets, plus my own personal obedience?

  I might actually have considered it, except for Nick. If Kelso really was responsible for his fall off the cliff and maybe even his aneurysm, then it was, for all intents and purposes, murder.

  “Do you have any advice, Hans?” I said. “Kelso’s expecting to hear from me soon, and the choices all look bad.”

  Hans got up out of his chair with some effort and stumped over to gaze out a window overlooking the garden, his hands clasped behind his back and the cane dangling from one wrist.

  “When I left Germany in thirty-seven, I had family and friends who could not or would not also go,” he said. “Most of them died. I have lived every day with guilt for abandoning them. But if I had stayed and died, too, I could not have played my small part in ridding the world of that filth.”

  When he turned again to face me, I got a glimmer of a very different man from the benign, charmingly eccentric professor I’d always known.

  “My advice is that you should compromise for now and gain time,” he said. “You haven’t told anyone else about this?”

  “Not a syllable.”

  “Does anyone know that you came here to see me?”

  “No.”

  He nodded tersely. “I still have contacts in the intelligence community. Let me make a call.”

  After he left the room, I started pacing. Now that I had a better handle on what Kelso was doing, I was starting to wonder about why. It wasn’t just for money, even a lot of it; little as I knew him, I was sure he wasn’t that venal.

  What made more sense was that, carefully concealed under his genial exterior, he was supremely egotistical—not in the usual petty ways, but seeing himself as a Nietzschean type of superman. He was above all laws and moral constraints; he should make the rules, and others should obey them; anything he wanted, he should get. His ego was gratified, his superiority proved, by the covert control technology that he’d been brilliant enough to develop. Probably there was also a messianic streak involved, a drive to impose his ideas on the masses; to some extent, he might even believe them himself.

  But my two-bit psychoanalysis didn’t offer any insights into how to deal with him.

  After a very long twenty minutes, Hans came back into the room and kept on walking to the front door, motioning me to come with him.

  “Someone will contact you soon,” he said. “Go directly home. Keep up a pretense of normality with your family and friends—make up a plausible excuse for these missing hours. And of course, absolute silence about all this.”

  I put my arm around his shoulders and engulfed his frail body cautiously. “I owe you a huge debt, sir.”

  He smiled, but it was grim. “You are going from frying pan to fire, Tom. I hope with all my heart that this will help you, although I can’t promise that. I can promise that you will be dealing with people who are not at all pleasant.”

  I opened the door and stepped outside. “Give my best to Becky, will you?”

  His smile saddened. “I will—if I can think of a way to, without telling her I ever saw you.”

  Forty-One

  It was around eight in the evening when I climbed the stairs to my apartment, and I was feeling the day. On top of everything else, now the mysterious “contact” that Hans had set up was hanging over my head, without me having a clue as to what form it would take or what it would entail.

  I didn’t have to wonder long. I opened my door, stepped inside, and stopped, staring.

  A man I’d never seen before was standing across the room, facing me, his hands folded casually at his belt. He was so ordinary looking he was hard to describe—the kind of guy you could sit next to on a cross-country flight and not recognize as you walked past him two minutes later. Maybe fifty, neatly trimmed brown hair, glasses, dressed in slacks and a light jacket. A canvas courier bag was slung over his shoulder.

  “I’m not going to show you any credentials, Dr. Crandall,” he said. “You can call me Venner. We’ll work on a need-to-know basis. I assume you’ll cooperate fully.” His voice was quiet, emotionless, and it did not allow for the possibility of disagreement.

  I nodded.

  He set the shoulder bag on the coffee table and got out a laptop.

  “Let’s start with you pinpointing the location of this film set,” he said, bringing up a GPS grid of L.A. and the surrounding area. I touched a square with my fingernail. He expanded the image, and I narrowed it down a few more times, until the grid showed the exact site of the Lodge.

  “We’ll get a better picture in a minute,” he said, tapping the touchpad and a few keys—apparently relaying the coordinates to somebody or something. “Meantime, I’d like you to sketch the layout, with approximate distances. I’m particularly interested in access—any back ways in or out—and exactly where that laboratory is.”

  This guy was all business, and Hans had relayed the essentials precisely.

  I was able to do it fast and accurately, I knew the place so well. But it was an eerie feeling; from the pointed questions he kept asking, it seemed clear that I was helping to set up some kind of raid.

  When we finished that, Venner turned back to the computer. This
time he brought up an overhead satellite close-up of the property; a flashing digital chronometer at the bottom of the screen showed that it was being filmed right now.

  It looked like somebody was still at the Lodge; the building was lit up, with the Yukon SUV and the Hummer I’d seen earlier parked outside.

  “We’re trying to get a fix on who’s in there,” Venner said. “We think it’s just Kelso and Cynthia Trask, but we don’t want any surprises. Do those vehicles tell you anything?”

  “That jibes. I saw Kelso driving the SUV this morning. I think the Hummer is hers, although I’m not certain. There was another man with her then and a third car, but it’s gone. I didn’t see anyone else, but again, I can’t be sure there wasn’t.”

  Venner nodded, then spent a minute silent and unmoving—running the computer in his head.

  “All right, we want to do this without anyone ever knowing we were there,” he said. “We can handle Kelso and Trask, but if there’s someone else, that could be a problem. So we’re going to make you our miner’s canary. He’s expecting you to call him and set up a meeting, is that correct?”

  Miner’s canary?

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re going to tell him you want to come up there and talk to him right now. I’ll have my team in place when you go in. You signal us with this.” He held up what looked like a keychain LED flashlight, a disk the size of a quarter with a tiny protruding button. “Two clicks means it’s just Kelso and Trask. One more click for every other person.”

  I was starting to feel shaky. “Look, I want to help, but I’m not any good at this kind of thing.”

  Venner did not seem sympathetic. “Just stay cool, follow his lead, and above all, don’t say anything to make him suspicious. Best for us if we can get this done tonight, but if he doesn’t want to meet, don’t get pushy about it. Call him now. I need to hear what he says, but I don’t want to bug the phone. I’m going to stand right behind you—hold it cupped away from your ear and pointing toward me.”

  I took a few slow, deep breaths like I used to do before a race, and then made the call.

  “Well, Tom, where do we stand?” Kelso said when he picked up.

  “I’m ready to have that talk, Dr. Kelso.”

  “Have you come to any conclusions?”

  “Mainly that everything you’ve said makes a lot of sense. It’s still hard for me to accept, and I have a lot of questions. But I’m starting to see what you mean about it being to my advantage. Tapping into that kind of power—the thought of it’s incredible.”

  I could almost see his look of satisfaction.

  “Excellent,” he said. “We’ll need to meet here at the Lodge, at a time when we can be alone. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

  I glanced at Venner. He shook his head and mouthed the word now.

  “My day’s pretty chewed up tomorrow,” I said to Kelso. “Would tonight work for you? I could be up there in an hour or so.”

  Kelso didn’t speak for a few seconds. I waited nervously, thinking I’d somehow raised a red flag in his mind.

  But then he said, “Yes, all right. Come directly to the tavern in the film set. I’ll see you soon.”

  I clicked off the phone and let out a long breath.

  Forty-Two

  The last stretch of forest-shrouded road to the Lodge was as dark as a cellar; the night was clear, but the moon only a pale crescent just starting to show over the mountaintops. I was alone. Venner had followed me in his own vehicle but had just split off to position his special operations team, who were already here waiting. If everything went right, they would move in at my signal. Surprise was crucial—not to give Kelso time to destroy anything or escape. My job was to play along and keep him distracted until they were on top of him.

  Having that on my shoulders was a very queasy feeling. I kept reminding myself fiercely what this was first and foremost about—Nick.

  When I got up to the ridgetop vantage point, I stopped as usual to scope out the valley floor. No lights showed in the Lodge building now; it was just a shadowy, barely visible hulk. But the film-set city was lit with that same ghostly glow as when Kelso had first taken me there—a phosphorescence of no particular color or maybe all of them, which seemed to coat the ground like a sheen of water shifting with subtle movement. The sight had been weird enough in daytime. Now it was downright eerie.

  In its midst, a single building stood out—the bar called the Velvet Glove, with its sinister neon iron fist and dim smoky windows that offered the same allure and menace as every tavern since the first one opened its doors.

  I got back in the Cruiser and drove on down to my rendezvous with Kelso.

  Nervous as I already was, by now I’d started to notice another factor entering into the mix. Trouble was stirring inside my head again.

  This wasn’t anything like the violent jolt in the swimming pool at Lisa’s, at least not yet—more a creeping unease, a sense that some hostile force was watching me, maybe stalking me, a vicious enemy hovering just out of sight. It was almost like an inner whispering made worse because I couldn’t actually hear it—and worse still because it was so intimate, right at the core of my being, with no way to escape it. For the first time, I had a real inkling of what schizophrenics must suffer from their voices.

  With my rational mind, I was sure it was another of Kelso’s manipulations. I was physically within his sphere of influence, and he must have been sending out a microwave frequency to trigger the nanos in my brain to that particular level of disturbance.

  But a deeper, more primal part of me didn’t give a damn what my rational mind thought. I was scared.

  I drove across the open meadow to the film set and parked. Tonight, the security gate was open. I stood quiet for a moment, listening, before I went through it; but all was still except for the usual night sounds of nature. I started walking.

  As I crossed the trailer compound and then into the city itself, the tension inside my head kept rising like the flame of a burner being slowly turned up. The eerie shimmering light seemed to create half-seen shapes that flickered at the corners of my vision, streaks slithering around my ankles and shadows fading behind corners. By the time I got to the fake tavern, I was damp with sweat, my teeth clamped tight and my face feeling like a rictus. I pushed open the weathered wooden door.

  The room was empty except for one person—Cynthia, sitting at the horseshoe-shaped bar with a martini glass beside her. She was wearing a short, low-cut black cocktail dress slit almost to the hip, and she looked as relaxed as a longtime regular enjoying happy hour.

  “Come in, Tom,” she said. “You’ll be safe here.” Her smile and voice were inviting, and her fingers were toying flirtatiously with an oval gold pendant between her breasts.

  But I had the sudden distinct certainty that it was really a transmitter or control—and that if she wanted to, she could have me clutching my head and roaring in agony within a heartbeat.

  She released the pendant. The seething in my head backed off, subsiding to a level I could just feel—like it was letting me know it was still there, barely held in check. My taut face and jittery body relaxed a little, although I stayed very aware of how close her hand got to that golden oval.

  I hadn’t expected to be seeing Cynthia tonight, let alone meeting her like this. I hadn’t known what to expect. But I’d rehearsed several lead-ins, and I quickly pulled up one that seemed to fit.

  “Cynthia, I want you to know, I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “There’s been a lot of strain about Nick this past week. I’ve been confused, not paying attention. Now I want to set things right.”

  “Of course—Gunnar and I understand all that. He’s waiting for you.” But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry. She raised her glass to her lips, sipped, and set it down again. “He’s impressed with you, Tom. He’s going to give you special status.”

  That did not ease my mind. “How so?”

  “He usually teaches in an arc. It starts out New Agey—s
ort of like using parables, but with scientific overtones. Then he clarifies the ideas over time and shifts the balance until the science aspect takes over. Most people don’t have the training to grasp it right away. But you do.”

  All this time, her fingers had stayed on the glass stem, toying with it the same way she’d done with the pendant. She was a force, no doubt about it—relaxed but purposeful, utterly assured, and exuding her cool, compelling sexual presence.

  “I’m honored,” I said.

  “You should be. All right, let’s cut to the chase.”

  She pointed to a door in the rear wall, marked with a cheap, dingy plaque that read VIP ROOM.

  “He’s in there,” she said.

  Forty-Three

  I’d held off signaling Venner up until now, wanting to be as sure as I could about who was around this place tonight. But as I walked to the door of the “VIP Room,” the thumb of my free hand slipped casually into the pocket of my jeans and touched the button of the clicker device he’d given me. If Kelso was alone in there, then I was going to assume it was just him and Cynthia. There was an outside chance of someone else in the wings, but it seemed unlikely, and the clock was ticking.

  I turned the knob and pushed open the door. Kelso was alone, all right—standing in front of and apparently playing, of all things, an old-fashioned slot machine. There were a dozen of them lined up along the walls, ornately handsome one-armed bandits. The overall setup was a recreation of a tawdry gangster-era back room, where the “VIPs” could enjoy illegal gambling.

  When you thought things couldn’t get much stranger, that was when they stomped on the gas.

  I pressed the clicker button twice and then pulled my hand from my pocket as I stepped into the room.

  Kelso turned to me. Unlike Cynthia, he hadn’t adapted his appearance to the role; he was dressed the same as the first time I’d seen him, in a loose linen tunic and pants, and he had the same austere presence.