“Like I said, he was SS,” she continued, understanding the revulsion he felt. She felt it too. “A premier physician at age twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two?”
“Young, yeah,” she said reacting to the surprise in his voice. “One of Hitler’s favorites. A perfect prototype for the superior Aryan race. He was a genius—and, I suspect, a little mad with it. Doogie Howser on LSD. He carried out experiments in the death camps. Horrifying, monstrous experiments.”
She stopped, swallowed back the nausea that always accompanied this terrible truth. “After the war, the U.S. turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by many of these men, ‘believed’ them when they denied being members of Hitler’s death squads. My grandfather was one of many doctors and scientists brought to the States. Their medical expertise and the data they’d collected on their human experiments were considered vital to the Cold War effort in the forties and fifties.”
“Some of the greatest and yet most perverse minds in the world,” Dallas muttered.
“You’re aware of the experiments at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, the secret I. G. Farben Labs in Maryland, of Willowbrook?”
He nodded, his face grim. “Your grandfather was a part of Willowbrook?”
Willowbrook had been a snake pit in the 1950s and 1960s. A mental institution where the administrator and staff had systematically infected children with strains of the hepatitis virus in the name of medical research.
“No. Not Willowbrook. He was in charge of the Blackbird project.”
“Blackbird?”
“One of their top secret projects. Established to counter Soviet and Chinese advancements in brainwashing and interrogation techniques.”
“Okay, yeah. I remember reading about similar programs. Artichoke. MKULTRA. Others that escape me now. The CIA was all hot to learn the state of the art of behavioral modification.”
“Right. The government was concerned about the inexplicable behavior of persons behind the Iron Curtain and American POWs who appeared to have been subjected to brainwashing.”
“Manchurian Candidate,” he muttered under his breath. “Bourne Identity. Great book plots.”
“Only what happened to my mother wasn’t fiction.”
Amy felt a chill eddy through her blood at the mention of the Manchurian Candidate. It was John Marks’ book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, that might have landed Amy and Jenna McMillan in the danger they were in today.
“Tell me.”
“My mother wasn’t any more than a means to an end for him,” she continued, forcing herself not to think about what might be happening to Jenna right now. “He wasn’t in the States for over a year when most of his funding was pulled because the powers that be were getting squeamish about the government sanctioning the type of experiments he was into. But that didn’t stop him. He conducted his own research, off site—until the CIA was formed in ’47.”
“And then they recruited him?”
She nodded. “Changed his name to Edward Walker so he wouldn’t be connected to the SS. They put him in charge of the Blackbird project.”
His silence encouraged her to go on.
“From what I’ve pieced together, he had an affair with one of the nurses on his new project. He was twenty-seven at the time.”
“Twenty-seven. That makes him…?”
“Eighty-nine now,” she preempted as he did the math in his head. “My mother was the product of that affair. According to the records, her birth mother died in childbirth.”
She could see the reaction in his eyes and in the white in his knuckles as he clutched his hands tightly together. “Handy coincidence,” he said darkly.
She became quiet for a moment, contemplating the horror of her next disclosure. “According to his notes, he started his experimentation on my mother when she was seven years old. Drugs. Shock therapy. Psychological deprivation—all under the sanction of the CIA.”
He swallowed back his revulsion. Shook his head.
Amy understood. What was there to say that hadn’t already been said? It was horrifying. Her grandfather was a monster.
“You keep making reference to his documents or his notes,” Dallas said quietly.
“Right. About a year ago Jenna McMillan found my grandfather’s name among some documents recently released by the government.”
“Jenna McMillan?”
She watched his face as he processed this information.
“The journalist? Writes for Time? That Jenna McMillan?”
“Yeah. That Jenna McMillan. She’d been fascinated with Marks’ book for years. Wanted to revive the story on the CIA’S mind-control experimentation—a kind of ‘where are they now’ piece—and had done some extensive research. She accessed several of my grandfather’s papers through the Freedom of Information Act. She found out he’d had a daughter, located my mother, then found me.”
“Go on,” Dallas encouraged her when she fell silent.
“Jenna thought she was merely tracing a family history. She never dreamed she’d find an actual victim when she found my mother.”
Amy stared hard at the seat back in front of her. “Jenna made all of his documents available to me.”
She’d never forget that day. The shock of it. The horror as she realized that what she was reading was a history of the terror her mother had been through.
“Because of Jenna, I finally pulled my head out of the sand regarding the cause of my mother’s mental condition. I accepted what I’d suspected but hadn’t wanted to face. That my memories had been real. That the dreams had been real. My grandfather had done this to her. That’s when I went looking for him.”
“In Manila?”
“I had a lead that he was there at the time.” She looked at her hands. Looked at him. They both knew what happened to her in Manila.
“Just what is your mother’s condition?” Dallas asked gently.
Amy closed her eyes, gave a weary shake of her head. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
Time. Once Amy had marked time in terms of weeks, months, years. Now she measured it in how much longer she could stay alive. How much time she had before she found her grandfather and confronted him.
Time had healed her physical wounds. And time bred hatred. Changed her life.
She dragged a hand through her hair, met Dallas’ probing stare. And went back in time.
“I was ten or eleven, I guess, the first time I grasped that my mother was emotionally unbalanced,” she confessed, because to relay the entire story, she had to go back to her childhood. “Most of the time, she’d just be this normal mom. Baking cookies, going to work, shopping.
“On the days when she wasn’t herself, I just took it in stride. It was the norm for me to come home and find her sitting in a chair or lying in bed totally gone. She wouldn’t hear me. Didn’t seem to see me. She’d just lay there for hours on end. I’d eventually go to bed, and in the morning, she’d be back. Mom again.”
“What about your father? Was he in the picture?”
She shook her head. “Mom always told me that he’d died in a car accident right after I was born. It wasn’t until Jenna made my grandfather’s papers available to me that I discovered the truth.”
Her stomach still knotted when she thought back to that day. She wasn’t even aware that Dallas had reached out and covered her hand with his until the warmth from his skin seeped into her fingers.
“Subject 29. That’s how he referred to her in his papers. Not his daughter. Not a human being. Not Karen Walker. Just Subject 29. Female. D.O.B. 2-4-45.”
“Amy…I hate to point out the obvious, but if your mother was never mentioned by name, only by number—”
“I know what you’re thinking, but I remember things, okay?” She made herself settle down when she heard her own defiance and anger at his doubt. “I…remember things. And the more I read, the more I remembered…and I knew he was writing about my mother.
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“It explained so much. Like the dreams I’ve had for as long as I’ve had memories.”
The dreams about them doing horrible things to her mother that now got all tangled up with her captivity on Jolo.
“I was experiment number 42, by the way,” she added, almost to herself. “They—my grandfather and his gang of merry men—had attempted artificial insemination eleven times and Mom had always spontaneously aborted. They’d actually given up, but on a whim, decided to try one more time.
“She was thirty-six by then. The CIA funding had long since been pulled, the mind-control projects all deep-sixed. But he just…he just couldn’t leave her alone. All those years he abused her, conducted experiments on her…controlled her even as an adult.”
She had to stop. Collect herself. Rein in her anger. Dallas’ voice steadied her.
“Amy…I’m trying to go with this, so, for the sake of argument, let’s say these papers are about your mother. How did he hide the effects of his handiwork when she was a child?”
Again, she understood his skepticism. “Private schools. Discretion at all costs. And money, the common denominator, talked as well then as it does now.”
“What happened,” he asked softly, “what happened to make you finally realize that she wasn’t well? That she was different from the other mothers?”
“The catatonic states became more frequent. Started getting longer. Sometimes they’d last for days and I couldn’t rouse her. When I started showing up for school in the same clothes, dirty, hungry, tired, the school social worker finally made a home visit. Long story short, Mom ended up hospitalized until she was stable again and I’d ended up in and out of foster care.”
She could see in his eyes how that news affected him.
“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds—not for me. She was the one going through hell.”
“You were a child. Without a father. Often without a mother. How can that not be bad?”
Okay. It was bad. But she wasn’t going there. He must have realized it, because he released a resigned breath and nodded.
“So where was your grandfather during all of this?”
“The Freedom of Information Act had been loosened up considerably and for the first time the public was made aware of the mind-control experimentation program—again, thanks mostly to John Marks’ book.”
“The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” Dallas reflected.
“Yes. Anyway, my grandfather must have known that once the information was made public someone would be coming after him and his kind. He must have known that society was no longer willing to turn a blind eye to his atrocities and he skipped out—I was around ten years old.”
“Did he…did he ever…”
His eyes were bleak when she met them. She realized then what he wanted to know, but couldn’t seem make himself ask. She understood that he wasn’t even certain he believed her story. And still, he was worried about what might have happened to her.
“No. No, he never experimented on me. At least I have no recollection of it. I was supposed to have been a boy, you see, and since I wasn’t, I didn’t hold any interest for him as a subject. He…he was into boys by then.”
His long breath was weighty with relief. A prayer answered. His face was washed in it. His eyes were tortured with lingering thoughts that she might have been subjected to her grandfather’s special form of abuse.
An unexpected sense of comfort and warmth enveloped her. She turned her palm under his, linked their fingers and squeezed. “I’m sorry. It hadn’t occurred to me that you thought he’d used me too.”
Yeah. He was starting to believe her. Good, bad, somewhere in between, she could tell he was starting to believe her.
“Look. I know it’s a hard sell, but it’s real. What they might be doing to people even now is a real possibility, too. Jenna said she found something,” she added, countering his doubt. “Something to corroborate the stories about a second and third generation of SS operational and active in South American. Specifically in Argentina.”
He looked incredulous. “That’s what this is about? Argentina and the ODESSA myth?”
“Jenna’s convinced it’s not a myth.”
“And because she believes, you do, too? Christ, Amy. A journalist goes on a hundred wild goose chases to uncover one valid lead.”
“And how many of them disappear when they’re on the trail of a story?”
Dallas sobered. “Disappeared?”
She had his full attention now. “She called me two days ago. From Buenos Aires. Said she had a lead on my grandfather. That he’d left Manila recently and returned to Argentina. I told her I’d come. That night I was run off the road. I’ve been on the move ever since. I haven’t heard another word from her. And she hasn’t answered my calls.”
His eyes were on her face, but his mind was racing to parts unknown.
“So…this is as much about her as it is about your grandfather.”
“I’m afraid something’s happened to her, Dallas. The same kind of something that almost happened to me. She’s running out of time. And so am I.”
Time. There it was again. The element that couldn’t be quantified. Not for Jenna. Amy didn’t know how much time Jenna had. Or how much time she herself had before they found her again.
“He’s still out there. My grandfather is still out there. I’ve got to find him. I’m going to find him and expose what he’s done. I’m going to make him pay for what he did to her. For what he did to me when he made me fair game for those animals on Jolo.”
“Amy.” Cajoling. Soliciting reason. “He’s eighty-nine years old.”
To urgency she added anger. “And he’s still a monster.”
“An old man.”
“I have to find him, Dallas.”
“You almost died once searching for him.”
She looked out the portal. Yes. She’d almost died. And there was a reason she’d lived. She had a debt to pay.
CHAPTER NINE
MC6 compound, El Bolson, Argentina
Erich Adler hung up the phone with calculated care. He leaned back in his desk chair to the creak of springs in need of oil. He was a big man: over six feet and stocky—built more like a laborer than a visionary. More like a brawler than the head of MC6, an organization that was on track to, someday, control the free world.
His nose was bulbous and crooked from multiple breaks, from the many beatings that had left scars on his ruddy face. He was battle hardened, purpose driven, and human life held as much sanctity for him as the fly he caught midair and squashed between his fingers.
He wiped his hand with a tissue and, fastidious as always, applied a small amount of liquid cleaner on his fingers. Then he contemplated where to go from here.
He could not afford any setbacks. Not now. Final plans were already in the works and he would be damned if he’d let an inconsequential fool of a woman do anything to disrupt his timetable.
He stared into space as a rage he fought to keep under control bred and beat against the wall of composure he always maintained.
His office door opened after a timid rap. Annoyed, Erich shifted his gaze to the thin, stooped man in the white lab coat and wire rim glasses walking into the room. Henry Fleischer was a brilliant scientist. He was methodical, precise, without conscience, and leading a team on the verge of the breakthrough that had eluded the organization for close to six decades.
Henry had as much at stake in taking Amy Walker out of the picture as Erich. They were the new guard. The future of MC6. The future of the world.
Unfortunately, Amy Walker and her meddling journalist friend, Jenna McMillan, were proving to be more than mere pesky flies in their ointment. Both had been on their watch list for over a year now. And both needed to be dealt with immediately. The time for discretion was long past.
That’s why Erich had dispatched Subject 451 to New York to dispose of the Walker woman once and for all. Subject 451 had been programmed to kill. Had twice proven
capable of carrying out direct commands. Efficiently. Proficiently. Without memory or emotion.
And yet, Amy Walker had destroyed him. Years of work, gone.
“Did you locate him?”
Fleischer’s question jarred Erich back to the moment. “Yes,” he admitted after a lengthy silence. “I just received a call. He was found dead. In New York.”
Henry’s lab pallor faded to the color of bleached bones. Subject 451 had been one of Henry’s masterpieces. A perfect human receptacle programmed with care, tried and tested and proven.
“How?”
“Shot, apparently, by his assignment. Somehow, she managed to place a bullet between his eyes.”
To his credit, Henry held back tears. It wasn’t the human loss that affected him. It was the work. The destruction of his perfectly programmed assassin. “And the Walker woman?”
Erich rubbed a forefinger over his upper lip. “Remains a problem.”
Henry’s expression didn’t alter. He knew better than to reveal his anger in Erich’s presence. “We never should have agreed to that old fool’s plan.”
Henry was referring to Aldrick Reimers, of course. The Walker woman’s biological grandfather. He was also the only remaining founder of MC6. The old man may have once been brilliant, but that brilliance had dulled and diluted into mad incompetence during the past few years. Yet his position must be respected even though Erich agreed with Henry’s assessment.
It had been Reimers’ idea to have his granddaughter abducted when she’d gotten too close to him in Manila last year. It had been Reimers who had assured the organization that she would die at the hands of the Abu Sayyaf terrorists and therefore eliminate the need for further MC6 intervention, guaranteeing no implications to cast attention on them.
But she hadn’t died. She’d lived. And now she’d survived yet another attempt to take her out of the equation. Not only survived, but destroyed decades of work. Subject 541 had been forty years old. Had been programmed since birth. The loss was huge to the program. And they could not afford any more losses.
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