by Mark Lukens
“They planted these . . . like these triggers in them. After the soldiers were back home they didn’t remember anything about being hypnotized, but they would get a phone call, someone telling them to deal a hand of cards. And then they would see the Queen of Hearts—that was their trigger. They wanted them to assassinate people.”
A shiver ran through me as I looked at Alicia. “And you think that’s been done to me?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Someone is making you get up in the middle of the night to do things, to go across the street, to send numbers to an email address, commands that are buried deep inside your mind.”
“Maybe I should send a message to that email address,” I said. “Tell them I’m on to them. Tell them I want to see Michelle.”
“No,” Stan barked. “That might tip them off.”
“So what?”
“We need to find out who’s doing this,” Stan said.
“Yeah, through the email.”
“You really think they’re going to just tell you who they are and why they’re doing this?”
Stan was right. I was getting frustrated, too emotional. I needed to calm down a little.
I looked at Alicia. “You already suspected something like this, didn’t you? That I was being hypnotized and manipulated by someone.”
“I watched the video that Stan showed me. I couldn’t believe that you might really be that suggestible. You don’t know how rare that is. But yes, I had my suspicions.”
“Now we need to find out who’s doing this,” Stan said. “It’s got to be someone close to you. Someone close had to have planted these triggers.”
I caught on to what he was implying immediately. “Are you trying to say Michelle was doing this? That she’s involved with this somehow?”
“Zach,” Stan said. “You have to admit that some things seem strange. Michelle left with a man last Friday night from a crowded restaurant. She quit her job three weeks before that without telling you, pretending like she was still going to work. She had that bank account that she didn’t tell you about, the one she kept adding money to.”
“So you think Michelle is doing this.”
“I’m not saying that,” he said quickly. “I’m just saying we need to look at everything here.”
“What about Dr. Valentine?” I asked, grabbing at anything else that wasn’t Michelle, clinging to it like a life raft. “Maybe it was her. If anyone would know how to hypnotize me, plant triggers, it would be a psychiatrist. Right? It would be her.”
Alicia nodded in agreement. “She could be in on it. You said she prescribed you some medications, the medications that Stan asked me to look up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You said the medications seemed like normal stuff.”
“I guess. Do you think I could take a few pills with me and have them tested? I know a chem major who would do it for me.”
“Sweet on you?” Stan asked.
I noted just the hint of jealousy from Stan.
Alicia didn’t answer Stan—she just smiled.
“Okay,” I said. I went to my bedroom and grabbed the bottles of pills and shook out a few of them into a plastic sandwich bag for her. The kitten was curled up in a small blanket in the bottom of the cage on the newspaper. I didn’t want to look at the cat, didn’t want to think about what I’d been manipulated to do, what I could still be manipulated to do.
Stan and Alicia were getting ready to go.
“I’m going to get the results back on these pills as quickly as I can,” Alicia said.
“You don’t think they’re what the label says?”
“I don’t know. I just want to make sure. Rule things out as we go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Three hours later Stan came back. He had an overnight bag with him.
“Moving in?” I asked him.
“Someone needs to keep an eye on you.” He set his bag down on the couch and turned to look at me. “But first we need to go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I know two guys who might be able to help.”
“Why do you think these guys can help?”
“Because they used to be in the deep state. At one of the alphabet organizations.”
Immediately I was doubtful. “Where did you meet these two?”
He hesitated for just a few seconds before answering. “Online.”
“What? Like a chatroom or something?”
“I’ve talked to them for a few years. They just came down here to Florida.”
I must have given him a quizzical look. I wondered if he had talked to them about me, and if they had come to Florida because of that—was that what he was trying to say?
“They travel around a lot,” he explained. “They try to stay on the move. They’ve moved around since they left the agency.”
“Left?”
“They don’t really talk specifically about what happened there, not online at least. But I’ve corresponded with them through encrypted emails. And yesterday I told them a little about you.”
“Stan,” I groaned.
“Let’s just say their curiosity was piqued. And today, I sent them a few videos from my laptop. All encrypted, of course.”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Look, these guys might be able to help.”
I couldn’t help thinking Stan was some kind of fanboy hoping to meet his idols.
“Where else are we going to go?” he asked. “You want to talk to your detective buddies about all of this? About the money in the bank, the numbers written on the walls in the house across the street, the mannequin, the videos of you sleepwalking?”
For just a second it sounded like a threat.
“There are a number of crimes here, Zach.”
“Sleepwalking’s not a crime,” I said. “And the other stuff is minor. Vandalism and trespassing.”
“You know they’re trying to pin Michelle’s disappearance on you. And you know as well as I do that there are others involved with all of this.”
“Others besides Michelle, you mean.”
Stan stopped talking for once.
“You think Michelle is involved with this. You have from the beginning.”
“Even if Michelle and Dr. Valentine are involved, you have to see that they can’t be the only ones. There have to be others behind them. Somebody . . .” He paused for just a moment like he was searching for the right word. “. . . programmed you for something. I’m guessing a lot of people were involved with this, and a lot of money was spent. Whoever they are, they’re going to want to complete what they started. Or end it all. I can’t help feeling like we’re running out of time.”
A chill ran across my skin. Deep down I knew he was right.
And Stan seemed to sense that. “Come on, man. Let’s just go talk to these guys. If they can’t help, at least we tried.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Good,” Stan beamed. He grabbed his laptop to take with him. “I found some pretty interesting things that you need to see.”
“What?”
“I’ll show you on the way. But first you need to take your battery out of your phone.”
*
I had taken my battery out of my cell phone and left it in the center console of my truck. I looked over at Stan as I drove my pickup truck. He was looking stuff up on his phone while he puffed on a cigarette. I usually didn’t let him smoke in my truck, but I let him tonight. He kept the cigarette outside the window most of the time.
“How come you haven’t taken the battery out of your phone like I did?”
“This isn’t my phone. I left mine at home. This is a clean one.” He glanced at me for a second. “But I’m going to take the battery out before we get there. It’s one of their rules.”
I looked back at the road again. “You didn’t tell these two guys about the bank account Michelle was putting money into, did you?”
“Vaguely. I didn’t say how much money was in there.
”
“Stan, these guys could be setting this up to rob us.”
“I know these guys. Besides, you’ve got bigger fish to be worrying about than two old guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been on Facebook lately?”
“I just posted a few things about Michelle,” I told him as I drove. “Just that she was missing, and if anyone knew anything to contact me.”
“Did you get any responses?”
“Only a few sympathetic ones, a few likes and emojis with teardrops. Stuff like that.”
“What about Michelle’s page? Did you reach out to anyone there?”
“Michelle doesn’t have a Facebook page.”
Stan looked at me like I was an alien from another planet.
“She didn’t like Facebook. She never went on there.”
Stan looked back down at the phone in his hand.
“You don’t go on Facebook, either,” I added.
“I’m not so sure the Facebook page you’re seeing on your computer and phone is what everyone else is seeing.”
“What do you mean?”
He held up the smartphone; the screen was lit up. “I got this phone from someone else. It’s a clean phone. Not connected to me in any way. Or you.”
“So?”
“So I looked up your social media accounts on here: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.”
“I told you, I don’t have a Twitter or Instagram account.”
“You do on here.”
My heart seemed to stop for a moment. I clenched the steering wheel harder, driving past trees and houses, but everything seemed a little blurry in my peripheral vision suddenly. “What do you mean?”
“Let’s start with the Facebook account first,” Stan said, looking back down at his phone again.
My eyes were back on the road.
“For the last three weeks you’ve been posting racist things.”
“Racist things?”
“Mostly about Jewish people and Israel.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stuff about Jews running the world. Praising the guys who shot up the synagogues. Even praising terrorist groups that target Jewish people.”
“I didn’t write that stuff. I don’t believe in that kind of stuff. You know me. I’m not even religious.”
“Remember when I looked up your Facebook page the other night? I told you that you didn’t have that many friends, but you remembered it being more. Well, maybe they’ve been unfriending you because of statements like these.”
“But I didn’t write those things.” Then I stopped. I thought about the sleepwalking episodes. “Did I write them in my sleep?”
“Maybe.” Stan said. “I guess it’s possible. Maybe those strings of numbers are codes that trigger pre-written statements to be posted on your pages.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But that would mean that you’ve been sleepwalking for longer than you thought,” Stan continued. “It would mean that you’ve been sleepwalking before Michelle left. Like I said, some of the posts on Facebook and Twitter are from three weeks ago.”
Stan didn’t have to say that this new evidence only reinforced the idea that either Michelle knew about my sleepwalking and got scared, or that she was involved with this. I still wanted to cling to the idea that maybe Michelle knew that I’d been sleepwalking and she’d gotten scared. Maybe she had set it up with some friends to leave me. Maybe she left me at the restaurant so there would be witnesses and it wouldn’t look like foul play.
But it already looked like foul play. If Michelle left me at the restaurant so there would be witnesses, then it had backfired. Only one old lady with dementia had seen her leave. And the security cameras hadn’t been working. And Michelle had left her purse behind. She hadn’t left a note or tried to contact me or anyone else I knew or the police since she’d left.
Yes, I was trying to cling to the theory that Michelle wasn’t involved with all of this, but it was getting more and more difficult to do so.
“Here’s some stuff on Twitter,” Stan said.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Stan obliged my request. “I bet if I went to the dark web I’d find anti-Semitic posts from you all over the place. And angry posts about violence and guns. Praises about assassins, bombers, and terrorists.”
My stomach was flip-flopping as I drove.
“I bet if I researched some white supremacist sites, I’d find your posts on there too.”
I felt sick, sure that I was going to have to pull over and puke. “And you think I sent all of these?”
“Maybe. But maybe not. You said you thought people might have been in your home while you were sleeping. Maybe they made a slave of your computer so they can post from what looks like your IP address. Same thing with your phone. But they must have installed a program into your computer where you see what they want you to see on social media sites. They wouldn’t want you seeing these crazy posts too soon. You would be posting that you didn’t write these, or you would start deleting all of them.”
“That’s what I want to do. I want to delete them.”
“Well, there’s a few problems with that. Number one, even if you delete them using this phone or another computer, those posts are already out there on the internet. I guarantee they’re saved in some places, most likely by the ones who are doing this. Those posts will pop back up. Once it’s on the internet, it’s on there forever. When these people want to use these against you, they’ll pull them back up. The other problem, like sending an email to the address you’ve been sending the numbers to, both of those would tip these guys off that you’re on to them, that you’ve figured out what they’re doing.”
I didn’t answer. I stared out the windshield at the trees whipping by.
“We’re getting close,” Stan said as he slipped his “clean” phone into his pocket. “Make a right up here. At the RV park.”
“RV park? That’s where we’re meeting these guys?”
“I told you they travel a lot.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The RV park was rundown, many of the RVs looked permanently parked there, some with arrays of lawn furniture situated in front of them, rusty cookout grills, flags and banners. A few of the RVs and travel trailers had what looked like wooden and metal awnings built right onto the sides of them. Under one of the awnings was a set of living room furniture. The RVs and trailers were each on their own plots and spaced far enough apart, but with the cars, trucks, and motorcycles parked next to them, the whole place looked crowded.
“They said they’d be towards the back,” Stan said. “Lot 376.”
I navigated the twisty paths through the trailers and RVs, meandering through the maze of metal. Elderly people walked along the side of the road, a few riding bicycles.
We passed a block building that housed restrooms and showers, and we had driven by a building near the entrance that must have been some kind of clubhouse. Beyond a chain-link fence was a swimming pool with no water in it and signs warning to keep out.
“Nice place,” I said.
Stan didn’t respond to my quip. “It must be down that road.” He pointed at a narrower side street. A wooden sign carved in the shape of a large arrow with sets of numbers etched into it pointed the way.
I drove down the side road and found Lot 376. The RV parked there looked newer than the others. There was no lawn furniture or grills outside on the concrete pad it was parked next to. There were no cars or trucks or motorcycles next to it in the grassy areas between the RV and their closest neighbors.
I pulled up to the left of the RV, next to the concrete pad in front of the door on the side of the large vehicle. I watched the door, expecting to see someone open it. But no one did.
We got out and walked to the RV. Stan had his small laptop tucked up underneath one arm. He stepped up to the door and knocked three times, then twice, then three more times.
A code? Wha
t was this, a secret knock on a kid’s clubhouse?
A moment later I heard someone coming to the door, and then it swung open. A large man stood in the doorway. He was a few inches taller than me and at least fifty pounds heavier. He had very little hair left, just a patch above his ears that went around to the back of his head. Even though he looked soft and fleshy, there was something solid and hard about him. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes, but I could tell that the eyes behind those shades were going to be small and cold, watchful like a predator’s eyes. I could also tell from the almost unnoticeable movements of his head that he was studying the two of us, taking in every detail like he was photographing us with his mind and then analyzing the data with the lightning quickness of a computer. It was the same feeling I’d gotten when the two detectives had questioned me, like I was being scrutinized and measured.
“Adam?” Stan said, breaking the momentary silence. He didn’t reach a hand out toward the man to shake, and the man didn’t reply. He just looked at Stan. “I’m Stan. I’ve been corresponding with you online.”
I had expected a hokey display of secretiveness from these two men, ready for a fake display of shiftiness and wariness, two guys hunted by the feds and desperate enough to protect their secrets. I had prepared myself not to laugh and to keep an open mind for as long as I could. But in those few seconds I felt that everything Stan had said about these men was true. I couldn’t describe it—it just seemed to be something I felt in my bones.
The man still hadn’t spoken; he just backed away into the RV, leaving the door wide open.
Stan took the open door as an invitation and climbed the steps. I followed him inside, closing the door behind me. As soon as we were inside, Adam had some kind of thick metal wand in his hand, waving it in front of Stan like it was a metal detector. I could hear the slight vibrations coming from it.
These guys obviously took their security seriously.
He passed the wand in front of me a few seconds later and then seemed satisfied with the readings he was getting.
The RV was much bigger inside than I thought it was going to be. I realized that it was one of those vehicles where the sides could be moved out to make more room. The place was neat and clean, with computer equipment tucked into shelves.