Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  “If you’re right about Dietrich assuming Dawkins’ identity, what ever happened to Dawkins?”

  “I imagine he’s dead. He was an only child and had no immediate family. Who was left in the world to claim his body and foot his funeral costs? When nobody claims a body, they pop the inmate into a plywood box, write his name on it with a Sharpie, and bury it in an unmarked grave in a field out back of the prison. But I guess there’s the remote chance he’s still alive and in storage at Kranston today.”

  “Why would they release Dietrich to the outside?”

  “They wanted to test their research in the real world. They wanted to see if he would kill on command. I was the target, maybe my family too. With my murder, they could claim success to the CIA. Maybe continued funding depended on showing results. If they could show they had a killing machine and eliminate a threat to their research by killing me all at the same time, so much the better. Once Dietrich completed his mission, they’d either kill him or take him back to solitary. He was their Manchurian candidate.”

  “Why do you think they harassed Dietrich so much on the outside?”

  “No different than what Cameron tried to do with his victims by isolating them on the inside. They wanted to keep the pressure on Dietrich—isolate him on the outside—so he’d follow through and kill me.”

  “Do you imagine Officer Carlson’s family is in on this?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. I think the family may be part of the experiment. The spooks want to see if the relatives notice any difference between Dietrich and Dawkins. If they could fool the family, they could fool anyone.”

  “How about Edith Nowak? Does she know that Dietrich is Dawkins?”

  “I don’t have a clue. But if she knows that Dietrich got tortured to become Dawkins, I’m sure she’s not losing sleep over it. She’s probably still ticked at him for not following through on his marriage promise.”

  “Do you think the Kranston superintendent or the state commissioner are behind all this?”

  “I don’t think so. I think this is way bigger than the two of them. I think the CIA is directly involved. They probably have their own people in place at Kranston. How else could they keep it secret for so long? I don’t know how much knowledge the superintendent and commissioner even have of the program.”

  “David, if the CIA is involved, then this is way bigger than the both of us,” Julius suggested cautiously. “I don’t think the FBI is a part of this, but one thing I know for sure: the higher-ups here won’t like me poking and probing the CIA. I’m just a grunt trying to do a good job for my country and keep my nose clean so I can retire ASAP. The FBI guys running this show in DC are way too political and will rip me a new one if they want to keep a lid on this.”

  “I understand. I don’t want to mess your life up,” David replied in his most soothing voice. “You know I appreciate what you’re doing. I’ll play this any way you like to shield you.”

  “I’ll just finish what I started. They’ll ask even more questions now, if I back off. It’s too late for that. But I need to be more careful going forward.”

  “Got it. Be honest with me, Julius. Do you think I’m crazy here?”

  “No, it adds up, though it does sound crazy. But remember what I said before about you getting all paranoid?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I told you to be careful because paranoia is contagious. Well, you caught it first and now I might have caught it from you.”

  Immersed in his reverie about the tangled web surrounding Phillip, David wondered how long his Mustang had been sitting in front of the supermarket. The sun was getting low in the sky and he was hemmed in by empty shopping carts. It was a wonder someone hadn’t called the cops on him.

  David wanted to know the truth about what was going on with Phillip Dawkins and he needed to know it now. His instincts told him that knowledge was power—the more he knew, the more he could leverage it all to somehow fix everything.

  David realized that only the truth could save him, his family, and even Phillip—if he was still alive. At this point he would stop at nothing to get the real story.

  That night David cranked up his computer and read all he could find on Cameron, his research, and the CIA operations in the 1950s. It dawned on him then that while knowledge might be power, too much knowledge could end up killing him too. He was walking a very fine line in a dangerous game. At any time, the CIA henchmen might arrange an “accident” for him if they decided he knew too much. They could effectively stop the spread of his knowledge with his death. Before he could fix anything, the CIA could fix him—for good.

  Chapter 22

  The next morning at 9 a.m., David sat across from Jim Fletcher at his Mohawk City office. He watched as the other lawyer rummaged through a few layers of papers on his desk. The sun pierced the cloudy film of his second-floor picture window that overlooked the gilded dome of City Hall. A sash window was open; it gathered a breeze that stirred a few dead flies lying belly up below the screen among the paint chips on the sill. Cicadas in the surrounding trees screeched intermittently. The vibration hummed in the downtown air over the sound of traffic like a dentist drilling out a cavity. Their early whining forecasted a hot and humid day ahead.

  “You used to have a window air-conditioner in your office, Jimbo.”

  “It broke yesterday,” was the terse response.

  “You’re going to need one today,” David prophesied.

  “As soon as I get a paying client, I’ll go right out to Wally World and grab one.”

  “On that topic, I insist that you bill me for this work.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it. Oh, here it is.” Jim handed David a stapled pile of papers that he had fished out of one of the piles.

  “Is that the document you told me about on the phone?”

  “Yep.” Jim was looking a little pleased with himself.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a small section from a memoir written by Dr. Robert A. Cleghorn, published in 1990.”

  “And why should I care about this guy? Nice name, by the way. Any relation to Foghorn J. Leghorn, the cartoon rooster?”

  Jim chuckled. “I don’t know about that. But he was the director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.”

  “Wait, I thought Dr. Ewen Cameron was the director.”

  “You know about Cameron?” Jim gasped. He seemed crestfallen that David was up to speed.

  “Yeah, I had my contact at the FBI do research on the man because of the letters from him in the file at Kranston.” David proceeded to tell Jim all about the letters in the Kranston file from “EC” to Boris. He briefed him on the background work Julius had done on Cameron.

  “Well, Cleghorn immediately followed Cameron in the role of director at the Allan in 1964,” Jim added. “He established the Laboratory for Experimental Therapeutics there in 1946. He was only remotely involved with Cameron’s research work—he was doing his own thing there—but was intimately familiar with it. After the CIA’s relationship with the Allan and Cameron was exposed in 1977, I think Cleghorn wanted to go on record as to the goings-on that took place there under Cameron. He was afraid of the shadow Cameron would cast on his legacy. So he published this section of his memoir in 1990, five years before his death.”

  “What’s your take on it?” David asked, riffling through the pages.

  “I think Cleghorn, the shrink, needed a shrink of his own to deal with his relationship with Cameron,” Jim replied with a shrug. “He calls him Chief throughout, compliments him, and in the next paragraph he criticizes him, almost overshadowing the compliment.”

  “So Cameron was God to Cleghorn but not really.”

  “Exactly. Cameron was a great man but . . .”

  “Okay, that’s interesting. How does this relate to what I’m dealing with here?”

  “Well, in one of Cleghorn’s critical moments he mentions that Cameron had a ‘blind spot for psychopathic personalities.’
So much so that he hired at least one of them as a lab assistant.”

  “Maybe that apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.”

  “Good point.”

  “So when Cameron wasn’t around, did this psychotic run the asylum?”

  “Apparently so. Cleghorn asks rhetorically in his memoir, ‘Who was his second in command?’ His answer: ‘There wasn't one.’ According to Cleghorn, this lab assistant liked to give electroshock treatments to anyone who walked through the door and he could never give enough of it. Cleghorn called it ‘therapy gone wild’.”

  “So, who was this guy?”

  “Cleghorn doesn’t identify him. Maybe he was afraid of being sued for libel if he printed his name. He calls him an ‘oddly-assorted young man’ who was ‘indigestible’.”

  “Indigestible?” David snorted. “Interesting word choice there.”

  “For sure. Anyway, I asked the Allan Memorial Institute if they could help me identify this guy. They were of little help. Then I read about some former patients who were suing everyone associated with their treatment. I contacted them. These ladies are pretty old today, but two of them said the name of this guy was Boris Dietrich. They have hospital records that even mention his name. They’re sending me copies of those documents.”

  “Great work, Jim! Thank you.” David sensed a bright spot on the horizon.

  “No problem.”

  “What happened to Dietrich?”

  “Cleghorn says later that this guy was ‘indubitably a menace’ and he had to force him out after Cameron left.”

  “Well, that explains things.”

  “How so?”

  “In one of Ewen Cameron’s letters to Boris, he calls him ‘overzealous.’ That fits Cleghorn’s description of him.”

  “Interesting.”

  “My bet is that Cameron got him a job at Kranston through his contacts as a favor to Dietrich, when they forced him out. In that way, Cameron could continue his work there on men exclusively, after being ousted as the director at the Allan Memorial Institute.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “But after Cameron died in 1967, Dietrich lost his support and influence for doing the research. At some point, perhaps Dietrich became a menace to the CIA at Kranston. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with him, while at the same time they had decided that he knew too much.”

  The pieces all fit together in David’s mind. The CIA had determined that Dietrich had outlived his usefulness; so the agency had decided to try out the brainwashing tactics on one of its own. Dietrich became disposable. Why just eliminate Dietrich when the agency could use him to further their mad research in the process? There’s nothing more efficient than using someone and then losing him in the process. They would simply recycle the man into someone else.

  David knew all too well that his assassination by Dietrich was the measure by which the grand scheme either succeeded or failed in the eyes of the CIA. He also knew that if the experiment failed, that wouldn’t stop the CIA. These creeps always have some contingency plan in the event of failure. David knew he was an accident waiting to happen at the hands of the CIA--if Dietrich didn’t kill him first. It was a no-win situation for him. He had to do something about it before it was too late.

  Chapter 23

  While David was meeting with Jim Fletcher that morning, Phillip lay wide awake in his bed at the Red Apple. His anxiety was now matched by his determination to make a new life for himself. He was not going to sit at his motel picture window and watch life pass him by on Central Avenue today. He refused to be the fish trapped in the aquarium or the chipmunk stuck in the window well.

  As far as Phillip knew, he was Phillip Dawkins. Phillip had no reason to believe he was really Boris Dietrich. It never crossed his mind. He didn’t have any memory of being the psychotic man who delivered electroshock torture to countless victims as Boris Dietrich. The screams of agony echoing down the corridors of Allan Memorial Institute during electroshock sessions did not exist in his mind. The memories of the victims’ faces—flushed, grimacing, eyes bloodshot—crying, begging for release from the pain of voltage frying their brains and flesh, were absent as if they had never occurred.

  Even though he heard Julius Moore say that Ewen Cameron successfully wiped memories clean through frequent, massive dosages of electroshock treatment, Phillip didn’t reckon that he might be a victim. He didn’t consider that any memory of the electroshock treatments he received could have been erased, too, in the process of wiping out his memories of life as Boris Dietrich.

  After showering and shaving, the man who knew himself only as Phillip Dawkins donned his favorite violet-blue turtleneck and cargo pants. He tried to convince his inner convict to leave the carving knife at home, but he couldn’t do that. He needed it for protection; he needed it for peace of mind; he needed it to get his ex-con self out the door. When he was all set to go, he opened the shabby curtains to look out at the world that awaited him. As he pulled the frayed cord, the sun hit his torso and the lavender glow lit up the room. The view was crystal clear and it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

  Phillip had cleaned the smudges off his picture window the night before with some glass cleaner he borrowed from the motel clerk. The TV weather forecaster said that it would heat up and grow humid that day, but so long as the view was good, Phillip felt he was ready to head out. Fluffy clouds sped overhead racing the traffic on Central Avenue. Annie and David had paid him for doing chores around the house. Today he planned to put that money to good use. It would be the first time Phillip ventured outside without an escort since the day he arrived on David’s front doorstep.

  While riding with David or looking out his motel window, Phillip had seen the buses travel up and down Central Avenue. There was a bus stop a short walk away. When he shopped for food with David at the Price Chopper Supermarket across the street, he saw you could buy a bus pass swipe card at the customer service counter. It was as good as cash money to the bus driver. All he had to do was purchase the card like anyone else without calling attention to himself. That was his first planned destination for today.

  After doing his breathing exercises to calm himself, Phillip picked up his wallet, keys, pen, and a pocket-sized spiral notebook off the dresser. He distributed his booty among the many pockets of his cargo pants, stepped out into the beautiful morning and then locked the door behind him. With the soft, fabric lunch bag Annie had bought him in one hand, he strode across the rutted parking lot like he owned the place. Stepping over the cracks in the concrete sidewalk to the striped crosswalk, Phillip hit the big red button on the light pole like he was an old pro. He watched the red hand on the screen across Central Avenue as if he didn’t care if it ever turned into the walking man figure. Not that he wasn’t afraid, but he learned fast in prison never to act scared. If you looked weak or lost, it was like declaring open season on yourself. He figured that this same rule applied to living on the outside of Kranston too.

  When Phillip entered the Price Chopper, he picked up a circular from the rack in front of the potted petunia hanging baskets. He did this not because he planned to do his weekly shopping, but because he saw a customer in front of him do it. To Phillip, after decades of sensory deprivation, Price Chopper was like the Great Bazaar of Tangiers—a swirling symphony of sights, sounds, and smells. It was too much to tackle right away, without his wing-man David protecting his flank. He hung a left at the crowded checkouts, weaving through the patrons loaded with groceries and notions. Then he got in line at customer service, leaned on one of a dozen stanchion posts tied together by drooping velvet rope, and waited his turn. He was stroking the velvet absently with one hand when he heard the voice of the woman behind the counter.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  For a split second, Phillip didn’t realize she was talking to him. No one had called him sir in as long as he could remember. He stepped right up and brightly replied, “Yes, ma’am. I’d like to buy a bus pass.”

  �
��Would you like a monthly pass or a pay-as-you-go pass?”

  Uh-oh, decision time—another problem he never had in the box. “Which is more expensive?”

  “The monthly pass costs more upfront. It’s for commuters, “she explained patiently. “If you don’t plan to ride every day, the pay-as-you-go pass is a better deal.”

  Phillip jumped in with both feet. “Thank you. I’ll take the pay-as-you-go pass. How much is it?”

  “It’s one dollar per ride. But after the second ride on any given day, you can ride the bus all you want for free.”

  “Okay, I’ll take twenty dollars’ worth of fares then.” Phillip forked over a twenty dollar bill out of the wallet that Christy made for him out of duct tape. He accepted the pass from the woman with a nod, placing it in the spot where the twenty had been. Then, he picked up a bus schedule and map from the counter display rack. He was excited to learn that he could ride the bus all day long on the cheap. That fit nicely with his plans.

  Phillip’s head swelled with accomplishment; he felt good that he’d done something all by himself. Maybe too good. Go back to the motel room now. You’ve done enough for one day.

  But the new Phillip suppressed the voice in his head and pressed on. Skirting the confusing aisles jumbled with unfamiliar products, he made his way around the outer edge of the store past Frozen Foods, Dairy and Meat. He made it safely to the deli counter and picked up a roast beef sandwich—his favorite, thanks to Annie. She made them for him whenever he visited the house. Then he spotted a bottle of Coke in a cooler there and a bag of Doritos—his prison comfort food—on a display rack. So he grabbed those too. He was looking for all the support he could get to continue the ordeal of his solo outing. He nearly sprinted down the candy aisle on the way to the cash register. Phillip was amazed by how he could smell the sugar right through the cellophane bags; it made his head spin. After paying in cash, he loaded his three old friends into his lunch bag. His final test was to use the public restroom before heading for the bus stop.