Randall glanced at his watch. “Not before nine o’clock. The Agency has grown soft since the end of the Cold War. Nary an agent will begin his day without a good night’s sleep and a hot cup of coffee. In my day, the early morning hours made for ideal surveillance—nobody expects to be spied on before brushing his teeth. Oh, and by the way, you will want to keep that bracelet. You may find you will need it.”
“Need it for what?”
Randall shrugged. “Barter, perhaps.”
Another non-answer. And Cam still didn’t know why the CIA was trying to brainwash him. He tried a different tact. “Okay, so how are they brainwashing me?”
“Perhaps a better word than brainwashing would be behavior control. Brainwashing has such a Frankenstein-like connotation. You saw the movie, The Manchurian Candidate?”
Cam nodded. “Some war hero was brainwashed and turned into an enemy assassin every time he saw the Queen of Diamonds playing card.”
“It was actually an enjoyable little film. And I suppose being able to completely reprogram someone would be quite useful; that was the initial goal of the MK-Ultra program. But as I told you last week, we have come to learn that the human mind is more complex than that. The Agency now influences behavior rather than puppeteers it.”
“Okay, but my question still remains. How? How are they doing it?”
“In ways you never would think of. For example, have there been any significant changes in your life recently?”
“Let’s see: I was almost disbarred three years ago, then two years ago I met and fell in love with Amanda and we stumbled into this whole field of pre-Columbian research and almost got killed a couple of times. And then last year we got engaged and Astarte moved in with us. Oh, and I bought a new hockey stick.”
“You should consider all of those events. Could any of them have been orchestrated by the Agency?”
“Come on, Randall. The government can’t make me fall in love.”
“No, it cannot make you fall in love, Mr. Thorne.” Implicit in Randall’s response was that Amanda’s feelings might be in question. Cam’s gut twisted—everyone always said she was too good for him. Randall continued. “And it can … remove certain hurdles when an unmarried couple attempts to adopt an unrelated young girl from out-of-state.”
“Are you saying Astarte is some kind of mole?” This was ludicrous.
Randall sniffed and shook his head. “I said nothing of the kind. I simply do not know how or what the Agency is doing.” He raised his chin. “If I did, I would not need your assistance, would I?”
Cam fought back his frustration. “And my helping you will help me figure out how they’re brainwashing me.”
“And perhaps why.”
“So what’s next?”
Randall turned to walk away. “Tomorrow morning. Meet me at nine o’clock at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 40. Wear a blue baseball cap, park facing the woods in the rear of the lot, leave the car unlocked, and go in and order coffee and muffins. Return ten minutes later.”
Randall smiled. “Oh, and I prefer blueberry.” He pronounced it blue-burry.
Vito Augustine sat at his computer, as he did at least one hundred hours every week. The view wasn’t great through the 3M plastic covering his bedroom window—the smokestack of an old textile mill peeking out between a couple of oak trees, and on a clear day the distant peaks of the White Mountains. But it was no worse than most views in central New Hampshire, and at least he was upwind most days from the apartment complex and the stomach-turning stink that wafted from its failing septic system.
Sitting at the desk in his boyhood bedroom was hardly the job he anticipated coming out of Cornell with a master’s degree in U.S. history, but he had never done well in interviews and the job paid a grand a week. And he was beginning to make a name for himself as an internet blogger. Which meant people had stopped laughing at him so much.
But not everyone—his stepfather still called him Phineas J. Whoopee. Vito had to Google it: Whoopee was a pompous, know-it-all cartoon character from the 1960s. That was actually one of Rusty’s kinder jabs. Usually he called Vito a bum or a slob or a loser—as if being the manager at a car wash was such an accomplishment.
“Vito, come down here and help me shovel.”
Vito walked to the door and yelled down the stairs. “I’m working.”
“I don’t give a shit. Get your lazy ass down here.”
Vito yanked on a pair of thick socks and shuffled down the stairs.
Rusty crinkled his nose. “Maybe if you took a shower once in a while you’d find a girlfriend,” he said. “What does Phineas J. Whoopee say about personal hygiene?”
Vito pushed past him to the porch where he found his boots and a shovel. It was great to have a real job, but what he really wanted was to get a place of his own. Hopefully someplace warm. But he’d have to pay down his student loans before that happened.
Rusty joined him on the porch. “Seriously, even the cold air doesn’t help. You smell like old bologna.”
Vito had shut him up a few months ago when he wrote a check for five hundred dollars and wrote ‘September rent’ on it. The jabbing resumed after a few days, but with Vito’s mom laid off from the diner during the winter months, Vito’s monthly contribution went a long way to keeping food on the table and heating oil in the tank.
An hour later he was back at his computer. In many ways, this was the ideal job for him: He had been given a list of television shows, documentaries and books, mostly focusing on the topic of exploration of America before Columbus, and told to blog about them. He had written his master’s thesis on the danger to academia posed by the growing popularity of alternative history: A generation ago only university-trained historians, usually with a graduate degree, were considered experts. Today any enthusiast with a laptop, an internet connection and an overactive imagination could declare himself a historian and breathlessly claim to have discovered our “true” and “hidden” and “secret” history. If you listened to these kooks, everyone from the Knights Templar to the Phoenicians to the Lost Tribes of Israel to reptilian aliens had settled in America—it’s a wonder the Native Americans hadn’t been squeezed out. Vito blew on his hands and shook his head. Nobody asked a geologist to take out their appendix; so why did people listen to amateurs when it came to their history?
Unlike the amateurs, Vito understood the rigor and discipline needed to be a true student of history. Fluent in Latin, he prided himself on going back to original sources, of ferreting out obscure foreign-language references, of never using Wikipedia as a source.
Fortunately a segment of the population had not been swept up in the tide of alternative history. These were the people he was writing for. It was good, honest work—intellectually satisfying and, in a small way, helping make the world a better place. Or if not better, at least more enlightened.
His view out the window was to the north, but his thoughts often were directed five hundred miles south, to Washington, D.C. He worked for a think tank called the Heritage Foundation, a self-described conservative organization dedicated to promoting “traditional American values.” From what he could learn, the foundation had been endowed in the 1970s by members of the Mellon banking family, the Coors brewing family and other wealthy conservatives. Vito wasn’t technically a Heritage Foundation employee—rather, they contracted with him on a monthly basis to write his blog. A middle-aged woman named Mrs. Conrad had flown up to Cornell to interview him, and a payroll services company on K Street sent him his monthly paycheck and reimbursed him for the few out-of-pocket expenses he had, but otherwise he had almost no contact with his employer. Other than an occasional email from Mrs. Conrad directing him to focus his blog on a particular broadcast or publication, he was completely on his own.
On his own in a physical sense, but not a virtual one. After a slow start, he had gained readership to the point that as many as a thousand people a day visited his blog. Most of them came to read his critical reviews on the
various alternative history shows and documentaries on television. The shows were all garbage, but one of the unfortunate consequences of the dumbing down of America was that people believed everything they saw or read—half the country still thought fluoride in the water supply was part of some Communist plot because of the Dr. Strangelove movie.
The readers of his blog, at least, had not been completely dumbed-down. They may not be as educated as Vito, but at least they knew enough to turn to his blog for answers. In the end, that was the essence of his job: preventing reasonably intelligent Americans from becoming as misinformed and deluded as most of their neighbors.
He began today’s entry, discussing a documentary that had aired the night before about the so-called “beehive” stone chambers of New England and New York. He introduced the subject matter and pasted an image for those who had not seen the show, this chamber from a site called “Calendar 2” in Vermont.
Calendar 2 Chamber, Vermont
He wrote: “Many of these chambers were Colonial root cellars. Others were Native American sweat lodges—stone huts used for ritualistic purification ceremonies. Those who think they were built by Europeans exploring America before Columbus are either idiots or racists. Sorry to be blunt, but there is no third choice.”
Vito smiled. He had quickly learned that blog posts required a different tone than academic papers—his audience wanted name-calling, passion, maybe some blood. As long as he didn’t libel anyone, he could pretty much say anything he wanted.
The documentary had made a big deal about the fact that many of the chambers had openings too narrow to fit a wheelbarrow, which the host argued negated the possibility of a Colonial root cellar. Vito countered. “It may be that a modern wheelbarrow, purchased at the local hardware store, would not fit through the doorway of a particular chamber. But here’s a thought for the geniuses who insist the chambers are pre-Columbian: In the olden days farmers made their own wheelbarrows. That’s right, they made their own. And they made it any size they wanted.”
Vito went on for a while, rebutting the evidence that the chambers often faced the rising eastern sun and were therefore some kind of pagan ceremonial structures. “And, yes, most chambers open to the east. But that does not mean they were built as structures from which to observe the summer and winter solstice sunrises. Here’s another thought: They were built this way so the morning sun would shine in and keep the interior warm. It’s simple, folks. Occam’s Razor: The simplest theory is usually the correct one.”
He concluded. “As I watch these shows, and listen to the so-called experts, it strikes me that perhaps I should amend my original statement. The people promoting these theories may be neither idiots nor racists. They may instead be charlatans, the twenty-first century equivalent of carnival hucksters. If someone’s willing to pay them, they’re willing to parade out all sorts of historical frauds and hoaxes. As circus owner David Hannum famously said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ And, no, dear reader, it was not P.T Barnum who spoke these wise words.”
Vito reread the last sentence. He was tempted to add, “And that’s why you need someone smart like me to tell you what really happened.” But it seemed unnecessarily redundant. And also repetitive, duplicative and superfluous. Vito grinned. He loved his job.
“I’ve been thinking about it. I think we should get the bracelet tested,” Amanda said as Cam settled onto the chairlift next to her. Cam had been so unnerved about being brainwashed that Amanda suggested they drive up to New Hampshire to ski for the day while Astarte was in school. Amanda worked part-time as a museum curator but had Mondays off; Cam could make some calls from the car and catch up on his cases when they returned late afternoon. She had loaded the car while Cam showered after his jog.
Cam smiled at her as he kicked the snow off his skis and closed the safety bar. She knew there was no way he was going to give the artifact to Chung. “What the hell. I’ve still got nine good fingers.”
So much in their lives had changed, but that unassuming, crooked smile was the same one that had first charmed her. He really had no idea how ruggedly good-looking he was, which made him all the more attractive. He wasn’t handsome in the traditional sense, but his face was strong and solid—sort of like the actor Liam Neeson. She leaned over and kissed him. “Just don’t let them hurt these lips.”
He smiled again. “Next time I get tied up and tortured, I’ll be sure to tell them that.” Cam looked out over the White Mountains. “We can get the bracelet tested,” he said, “but we both know it won’t matter to the so-called experts. They’ll dismiss it even if the dates come back to the second century. You know, provenance and all.”
“Piss on provenance. Unless your friend Pugh is lying, that bracelet was found with the Bat Creek Stone. So it’s either a 19th century fake or it’s the artifact that rewrites history. One or the other.”
“Pugh has no reason to lie. But like I said, the archeologists will still say there’s no way to prove it’s the same bracelet that got pulled from the ground. They’ll say Pugh flew to Cairo or something and bought it in the antiquities market.”
“So who cares what the archeologists say? The bloody lot of them are wrong more often than they’re right anyway. If a nuclear bomb wiped us all out tomorrow, and a thousand years later a team of archeologists dug up our churches, what would they conclude?”
Cam shrugged. “We hadn’t invented cushioned seats?”
She smiled. It was good to have him joking again. “Assuming all the prayer books and other writings were gone,” she continued, “they’d say that since the churches all faced the rising sun in the east, we must have been sun worshippers.”
“Of course,” Cam said. “That’s why we go to church on Sun-day.”
“And our most important holiday is just after the winter solstice, celebrating the rebirth of the sun.” Not the birth of the son, as in the child. But the rebirth of the sun, as in the orb in the sky. She continued. “And because of all the crucifixes with Jesus nailed to them they’d likely conclude we sacrificed humans on the cross, probably as an offering to our sun god.”
Cam raised an eyebrow. “The red wine would be to get people drunk before sacrificing them.”
She continued. “And our religion of sun-worship would be confirmed when they found a picture of the Pope parading around with his monstrance.”
“Monstrance?”
“The thing they use to display the Eucharist. It’s sun-shaped.” She removed her mitten and pulled out her phone. “Here it is.”
Pope with Monstrance
Cam leaned in. “That’s either a sun or the Pope was playing with his Spirograph.”
She cuffed him playfully with the mitten. “It’s a sun. So looking just at the evidence inside the churches, our future archeologists actually wouldn’t be far off—much of Christian ritual is in fact based on old pagan sun worship. You couldn’t really blame them for being wrong.”
“But wrong they’d be.”
She nodded. “And I can blame them for being arrogant. They take snapshots in time and act like they have the whole bloody picture.”
They had had this conversation before. Life was more complicated than a few snapshots—what if some future archeologist happened to uncover the remains of a Halloween party? Who knows what kind of crazy conclusions they would draw. Or a skateboard: The obvious deduction would be it was an early iteration of the automobile.
Amanda pulled her mitten back on and changed the subject. “So what does this fellow Randall have planned for tomorrow?”
Cam shrugged. “Don’t know. He sort of talks in riddles. I’m not sure if it’s because of his age or his training.”
Amanda removed her goggles and turned her face to the sun. People often told her she had beautiful skin, but it came with a cost—she burned like a marshmallow over a flame. But a few minutes shouldn’t do too much harm, and the warmth felt glorious. Perhaps, deep down, all humans truly were sun worshipers….
Eyes c
losed, she said: “This Project MK-Ultra your government dreamed up. I mean, it’s so bloody … frightening. Mind control experiments on your own citizens? What were they thinking?”
“I think they would argue their motives were pure, trying to win the Cold War and all that. And Randall made a good point—the only way to experiment with mind control is to experiment with mind control. As he said, there are no firing ranges where you can test mind control weapons. But I agree with you. It’s like trying to justify torture—the ends don’t justify the means.”
“I still can’t imagine why they are targeting you of all people.” She smiled. “Other than your hockey equipment, you’re hardly a threat to national security.”
“Hopefully Randall can help us figure that out.”
The chairlift approached the top of the mountain. “You want to go left or right?” Amanda asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” he smiled. “Either way I’m going to be eating ski bunny dust.” She had only skied for a few years, but her gymnastics training made balance sports like skiing easy for her.
Grinning, she chose the expert trail on their left and skated toward it. “Have it your way, then. See you at the bottom.” She looked over her shoulder. “Speaking of bunnies, meet me at the gondola.”
“Thanks for that,” Cam said as he carried their skis back to the car.
Amanda bumped up against him. “Do you mean the skiing or the gondola ride?”
He grinned. “Both. But especially the gondola.” One of the nice things about midweek skiing was having a gondola car to themselves. Somehow they had been able to wriggle out of their snow pants and long underwear and still manage to be dressed again when the doors opened at the top of the mountain twelve minutes later. Not exactly their most languid session, but Amanda had a wild side that kept things fresh and, well, wild.
She grinned back at him. “Why do you think I chose Loon? Waterville doesn’t have a gondola.”
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series) Page 5