by Mark Lukens
Adam sat down at a built-in dining room table and gestured at us to join him. Stan sat down on the bench seat, moving around to the inside, and then I sat down beside Stan. A moment later another man came out from the back rooms of the RV.
“This is my partner, Joel,” Adam said as the man walked past us to the front of the RV. He swiveled the passenger seat around and sat down. Where Adam was tall and large, Joel was shorter and lean, bordering on emaciated. His skin was darker than Adam’s, and his curly hair was black with strands of gray streaking through it on the sides. His eyes were dark little pebbles staring at us.
Joel nodded at us and we nodded back.
Adam turned his attention to Stan—he still hadn’t taken his sunglasses off. “You’ve sent me some interesting things. Otherwise we would never be meeting like this. I try to help as much as I can online, from behind the scenes. I rarely ever meet anyone in person.”
Stan looked honored.
Adam looked at me. “You’re Zach.”
“Yes.”
“Your wife left you almost a week ago.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me everything that’s happened so far, if you would.”
I told him everything. I didn’t leave anything out. Stan jumped in a few times to make the details a little clearer, but other than that no one interrupted me. Adam and Joel waited patiently, listening with the same intensity as their stares.
Twenty minutes later I was finished with my story.
Adam seemed to be thinking everything over for a minute after I was done, and then he turned to Stan. “Could I see the tape of this hypnosis session with Alicia?”
Stan pulled it up on his laptop within seconds and slid the machine over to Adam.
Adam watched the video in silence. I heard myself talking on the video, my voice sounding a little tinny as it came from the laptop. I heard Alicia tell me to put the kitten in the oven, to shut the door, to set the oven for three hundred and fifty degrees. I cringed, embarrassed at what I had done so willingly.
“Highly suggestible,” Adam said. “And it looks like it’s more than just some simple triggers planted, some pre-suggestions loaded into the subconscious.” He looked right at me. “It looks more like you’ve been programmed. Like mind control.”
“So, someone’s controlling my mind?”
“To a degree, yes.” He glanced back down at the laptop, frowning. “Programming like this takes a while. Years, usually.”
My stomach sank as I glanced at Stan. I could tell that Adam was going to say the same thing Stan had been dancing delicately around for my sake—that Michelle had been involved with this from the beginning.
“How is this program triggered?” I asked. “I mean, if I’m being hypnotized, then who’s doing it? Nobody’s been at my house for a few nights. I’ve recorded myself, and I just wake up in the middle of the night and get dressed. Then leave the house and go across the street. But who’s telling me to do these things?”
Stan was already pulling up the videos he had stored on his laptop in case Adam wanted to see them.
I waited for Adam’s answer. It was almost like I had challenged him to come up with an answer because I still didn’t want to believe Michelle was involved. If she’d been the one who had been hypnotizing me before, then who was doing it now that she was gone?
“I don’t know,” Adam answered. “Maybe the triggers were pre-programmed weeks ago. Months ago. Instructions set at certain times and dates—almost like an alarm clock going off in your mind. Or maybe someone’s beaming signals at you.”
“Beaming them at me?”
“Like from a parabolic microphone. They have these directional microphones now that can transmit as well as receive. And they’re unbelievable sensitive and effective. A person could use one and whisper something to you from fifty feet away—hell, a block away—and you would swear you’d just heard the voice in your own mind. You would swear that it was your own thoughts. Or maybe the signal’s coming from somewhere inside your own house. It could be coming from anywhere.”
“What about an RFID chip?” Stan suggested.
Adam gave a slight shake of his head. “No, those are usually used to track people.”
“I don’t have one of those, do I?” I asked.
“No,” Adam said. “I checked for those when I scanned you earlier.” He paused for just a second. “I was thinking more along the lines of smart dust.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Smart dust is dust so small you can’t see it with the naked eye. When it’s inhaled, it sticks to brain cells and then can become a network of antennas to receive signals beamed to it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think . . . I can’t have that inside of me.”
“There are other ways to create an antenna to receive signals,” Adam continued, ignoring my protest. “There are metals like mercury and aluminum that can collect in the brain to help receive signals. The metals cling to the cells, staying there for life. There are also things called carbon nanotubes in aerosols.”
“Yeah,” Stan said. “The ones they spray from the chem trails.”
I began to feel overwhelmed, like I had just stepped onto a professional playing field without ever learning the rules of the game.
“Obviously they want him to do something,” Stan said to Adam. “Like a Manchurian Candidate.”
Adam gave a slight nod, and his expression managed to say that Stan was stating the obvious.
“Who’s they?” I asked. “The government? Our own government? Another government? A terrorist group?”
Adam took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose, his mouth a tight line in his jowly face. “Any of them could be possible. It seems to me, with all of the social media posts, your wife leaving and telling coworkers that she was afraid for her safety, with all of that, they’re setting you up as a patsy.”
“A patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald,” Stan said, jumping in. “Or Sirhan Sirhan.”
I’d heard Stan’s conspiracy theories many times before about the JFK assassination, how Oswald had never fired a shot, how a different man had been at the sixth-floor window of the book depository building, shooting three times, one of the bullets hitting the street, but the kill shot had come from the other direction. Stan believed that once Oswald realized someone else was shooting from the building, he panicked and ran.
I didn’t believe in all of that stuff; I just wanted to know what they—whoever they were—had planned for me.
“Our government and the Soviets experimented with mind control,” Adam said. “But there were probably more: the British, the Chinese, the Koreans.” He shrugged like the list could go on. “They did all kinds of experiments; one of the most famous was the MK Ultra project, where they used LSD. They created LSD as a mind control drug, but it never worked the way they wanted it to. They tested it on both willing participants and others who had no idea they were being given the drug, like patients in mental hospitals, soldiers in the military, and prisoners. Some famous people who had been used in the experiments were: Whitey Bulger, Ken Kesey, and Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber. In one famous experiment, prostitutes would slip the LSD into the drinks of their johns while CIA agents watched and filmed from behind a two-way mirror. They hoped the LSD would make a person tell the truth, and maybe even become highly suggestible or able to be manipulated. But like I said, LSD had a different effect on most people. But it wasn’t like they just gave up on mind control after a few failed experiments. They moved on to other techniques.”
“It’s hard to believe our government experiments on people like that,” I said.
“They’ve been doing it for a long time,” Adam said. “Not just giving people LSD without their being aware of it, there was also the experiment where the CIA gassed a subway station in New York City with bacteria to see how long it would take for the bacteria to get to the people in the tunnels. The bacteria wasn’t dangerous. It was just a trial run.”
“The Tuskegee Experiment,” Stan said.
I had heard about that one before, probably from Stan.
“Like I said,” Adam continued, “they didn’t get what they wanted from LSD, but it wasn’t like they just gave up on mind control. They went in a different direction, finding people who are highly suggestible, then programing them over a long period of time. There could be hundreds of people like you all across America, thousands of them, all over the world. They call them sleepers. Maybe many will never be used, but when one is activated . . .” He let his words trail off like the rest was too grim to speak of.
“Activated,” I said. “Like I’ve been.”
Adam didn’t answer.
“How?” I asked. “I mean how do they know that I’m this suggestible?”
“DNA,” Adam answered. “It’s in your DNA.”
“But how did they get my DNA?”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe you signed up to search your genealogy.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Maybe your DNA came from your medical records. All information is online now, all susceptible to hacking, all shared and sold to each other by the cabal. DNA collection has been going on for decades, long before citizens knew the power of DNA. Just like data mining—listening to and collecting all of your phone calls and emails—goes on now, so they have them if they need to use them in the future. DNA works the same way. They’ve been collecting a database of DNA for a long time. They’re so far ahead of what you think of as far-fetched sci-fi; whatever you think they might be doing in the future, they’re already doing now.”
“You said cabal. What’s that? Is that the people who are doing this to me?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Many call those in power the deep state, but I like to think of it more like a cabal, a secret group of wealthy and powerful people: CEOs, world leaders, intelligence directors, billionaire investors, Old-World money. These people get together and make decisions about the world, how to rule it, how to control it. This group isn’t nationalistic, their decisions aren’t based on race or religion, it’s all about power. True power. And I believe they’re getting close to the total control and power that Orwell couldn’t have even imagined.”
Adam paused a moment, pulling out a cigar from his shirt pocket and a lighter from his pants pocket. “You mind?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“The cabal needs a few things to ultimately control the population of the Earth,” Adam went on after inhaling a few puffs of his cigar. “They need to control the information, the food and drug supply, the guns and weapons, and the money or banking system. They’re very close with the information and money supply. As more and more speech is shut down on the internet, and more and more media is controlled by those in power, less and less of the truth ever gets out to the masses—the ‘useless eaters,’ as the elites like to call us. Tech companies are controlled by the cabal—it’s a dream come true for them. And as far as money is concerned, the closer we get to a cashless society, the more control the cabal will have. Imagine that you do something the elites don’t like. They just freeze your account. You can’t buy anything. You can’t put gas in your car to go to work. You can’t buy food or pay your electric bill. You would be out in the streets with no way to take care of yourself, except by begging for scraps.”
I had to admit that his dystopian view of the world was scary, but I wasn’t so willing to believe that we were as close as he said we were.
“It’s all about population control,” Stan said.
If Adam was annoyed that Stan was jumping into his little speech, he didn’t show it. He inhaled on his cigar again and then blew the smoke out away from us. “The cabal knows that the Earth’s resources aren’t going to last forever, maybe not even much longer. I think they’re planning something to wipe out huge sectors of the population. And those who survive whatever pandemic or disaster that’s coming, the cabal will have total control over once they control the money, the food, the information, and the guns.”
“They want to keep us divided,” Joel said.
I looked over at him—it was the first time he’d spoken. He had a deep voice with just the trace of an accent I couldn’t name.
“They control the information,” Joel went on, “and they want the masses at each other’s throats: black against white, Christians against Muslims, conservatives against liberals, nation against nation, old against young, rich against poor. And on and on. The more divided we are, the weaker we are, and they know it. They want people more and more dependent on the government. They want us conditioned to unending wars. They want us afraid of bogeymen: terrorists. They want us afraid to travel outside of our own country, afraid to meet other people and expose ourselves to other cultures. They want people of other nations and cultures to be the faceless monsters, animals to be exterminated before they flood into our country and take over, before they infect us with disease, before they take our jobs and cripple our economy, before they kill us with their bombs. They need the constant fighting, the constant division between us. They need us to hate.”
“Why do you think there have been so many advances in technology and weapons compared to healthcare, medicine, and alternative fuels?” Adam asked. “With tech, the cabal can control everything: the information, the money supply, all of your data stores somewhere to be used against you if need be.”
“But what are they wanting me to do?” I asked.
“So far, it seems like they want you to send those numbers via email.”
Stan pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I wrote down the numbers on the wall in the house across the street.” He unfolded the piece of paper and handed it to Adam, then looked at me. “And you got the notecards.”
I pulled the notecards I’d found inside my wife’s boot along with the bank receipts and gave them to Adam.
Adam studied the numbers.
“We think we’ve figured out one of the string of numbers,” Stan said, trying hard not to beam with pride. “This one. We think it’s a time and date. Four o’clock, April eleventh.”
Adam didn’t say anything, but he nodded in agreement.
“But we can’t figure out the other ones,” Stan said. “Maybe it’s some other kind of code.”
Adam didn’t say anything. He looked at Joel who got up from the passenger chair and came over to the table to have a look at the lines of numbers.
“A code?” I asked. “You mean like A equals 1, and B equals 2, and on and on?”
“Nothing that simple, I’m sure,” Adam said.
“It’s not computer code, is it?” I asked.
Stan looked at me like I was dumb.” No.”
“Some of the number lines are six digits,” Joel said. “Some seven numbers. Some eight and nine. This one is twelve numbers. This one fourteen.”
“I thought they might be account numbers at first,” I said. “But they don’t match the account Michelle was putting money into.”
“Passwords?” Stan offered.
“Or a code that turns into words,” Adam said. “Or passwords that release larger amounts of data.”
“Just like I said,” Stan said, smiling.
“Coordinates?” Joel suggested. “Some of them could be coordinates on a map, longitude and latitude.”
Adam nodded at Joel, who hurried back to his seat with his phone in his hand, already looking up the coordinates.
“There’s got to be something else we’re missing,” Adam said, shaking his head just a little and stubbing out his cigar into a metal ashtray. Then he froze and looked at me. “Didn’t you say that the company that rented Dr. Valentine’s office was the same company that owns the house across the street?”
“Yeah. D&C Logistics.”
Adam went to work on his computer.
“I looked them up,” Stan said. “It’s just a dummy website and email. Phone’s disconnected.”
Adam just nodded impatiently, his fingers flying
across the keys.
“No luck on the coordinates,” Joel said. “Only one matches a set of coordinates, and it’s in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”
Adam stared at his computer screen; I could tell he was reading something.
“What is it?” I asked him.
Stan leaned forward with anticipation.
Adam turned his laptop toward me and Stan, showing us the screen. “It’s a list of other businesses this company owns.”
“How did you find that?” Stan whispered in awe.
Adam didn’t bother answering.
“Their businesses are all over the place,” Adam said. “But there are three around here. One was the rental office in Daytona Beach, where your psychiatrist had her office. One is the house they own—listed as a rental property—the house across the street from you. And this one. It’s a storage unit company.”
“Storage units,” I whispered, my skin crawling, my stomach sinking. I could feel acid trying to creep back up into my throat. “I’ve got a storage unit there, don’t I?”
Nobody answered me, but I could see it in their eyes that I was right.
“While I was . . . was under hypnosis, I took something there, didn’t I?”
“Maybe one of these series of numbers is the code to get into the storage facility,” Joel said. “Or one could be the code to a combination lock.”
“They’ll have a record of you owning a storage unit there,” Adam said. “And you can bet they’ve got a recording of you dropping something off there or picking something up. More evidence against you.”
“We need to get into that unit,” Stan said. “We need to see what’s in there.”
“I wouldn’t even know which unit is mine,” I said, my stomach still sinking. I had no intention of calling the storage company, and I definitely didn’t want to go there.
“You could call them,” Stan said. “Tell them you forgot which unit is yours. I bet people do that all the time.”