“Aha.”
She continued. “What do you think they did back in the days of the rope tow?”
He laughed. “That’s going to be a tough image to get out of my head.”
They had packed sandwiches for the ride home and left in time to meet Astarte at the bus stop. “I was thinking,” Amanda said, turning serious, “we should call Georgia. See what she knows about this MK-Ultra stuff.”
Cam nodded. “Good idea.” Georgia Johnston was a CIA agent they had met at the same time they first met Astarte and her uncle. Later they had worked with her to unravel the mystery of a replica Art of the Covenant found in the Arizona desert. Along the way they had become friends.
“I think she’s back to her day job as a political consultant.” When not actually on mission, Georgia’s cover was working as a political strategist. And it wasn’t just a cover—she was one of the best political strategists in the country.
Cam knocked the snow off the skis and laid them diagonally across the bed of their SUV. By the time he started the engine Amanda had already dialed Georgia’s number. On the fourth ring it went to voice mail. “You’ve reached Georgia Johnson, director of political outreach for Senator Webster Lovecroft.…”
Amanda hung up. “We’ll try again later. I didn’t know she was working for Lovecroft.”
“Me either. Has he officially announced his candidacy?”
“No, but everyone knows he’s going to run,” she said. “There’s still a year before the first primary.”
“Hopefully she can do better for him than she did for Romney.”
“That wasn’t really her fault. She gave good advice, told him he needed to show his personal side and stop being so bloody stiff. And she did a great job making the whole Mormon thing irrelevant. If the candidate doesn’t follow her direction, what can she do?” American politics fascinated Amanda—even today the idea that any child in the country could rise to the Presidency was foreign to the European way of thinking.
“Good point. This guy Lovecroft is a lot like Romney. Good-looking, conservative, unblemished record.”
“Except he’s a fundamentalist Christian, not a Mormon.”
“Which should help him.”
“And he’s tall like Romney. What is it with you Americans and your tall Presidents? Since Kennedy I think they’ve all been at least six feet.”
“Carter was just under, but you’re right. Some people think that’s a big reason why Dukakis lost back in ’88.”
She smiled. “Well, if he had been taller he probably wouldn’t have fit into the tank for that silly photo-op. So you’ve got a point on that one. Anyway, Lovecroft is six-ten, I think.”
Cam nodded. “Almost one of your giants.”
“If so, he’s a gentle giant. I read he’s one of the kindest blokes you’ll ever meet. He spends his free time volunteering at a homeless shelter.”
“So tell me more about him,” Cam said as they wound their way south on the interstate. If Georgia liked him, he was worth considering.
“Give me a second.” Amanda punched at her phone and read for a few minutes. “Fascinating candidate. Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fundamentalist Christian, like I said. Believes in the literal word of the Bible. But he seems to walk the walk, as you Americans say. Works with the poor, gives a ton of money to charity, a real ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ type of bloke.”
She paused again, reading and summarizing. “This one reporter spent a day with him. Says he’s religious, but not preachy. If you want to be Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or an atheist, that’s fine with him. ‘Lots of roads lead to Heaven,’ he likes to say. Tries to model himself after Abraham Lincoln, and not just because he’s tall.”
“Can he win?”
She bit her lower lip. “Perhaps. He’s not a traditional candidate. And he has some radical ideas. Says here he wants to gut the food stamps program so it only covers the basic food needs.”
“So no using your food stamps for manicures and lottery tickets….”
“But then he wants to take that money and make all state universities free. He says educating the poor so they can find a job is smarter, and cheaper, than feeding them.”
“Makes sense. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”
“And he wants to increase the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour.”
“Fifteen? No way will business groups support that.”
Amanda again read in silence for a few seconds. “Lovecroft’s idea is that the government will pay the difference. So you earn, say, nine dollars per hour at your job at Wal-Mart and then the government gives you another six through tax credits or subsidies or whatever.” She sipped from a can of Diet Coke. “The idea is to give the poor an incentive to work. As it stands now, it almost makes more sense to go on welfare than accept a job at minimum wage.”
Cam drummed on the steering wheel. “You know, these are the types of proposals that if the Democrats made them they’d be shot down in a second. But coming from the far right, they might have a chance. Republicans will trust him not to give away the store.”
“I’m guessing that’s why Georgia is working for him. People are tired of the gridlock in Washington.”
“And they’re even more tired of the hypocrisy.”
“Well, apparently Lovecroft’s favorite saying is that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. He seems genuine—again, like Abraham Lincoln.”
“Georgia must think he has a good shot or she wouldn’t work with him.” Cam motioned to the phone. “Let’s try her again.”
This time Georgia picked up on the second ring. “I hope you’re calling to ask me to come up and babysit Astarte,” she sang. In her early sixties, she had no children of her own.
“No, just calling to chat.”
Georgia laughed. “I’ve been working in Washington forty years, Amanda. Nobody calls just to chat.”
“Guilty as charged,” Cam responded. “We need to pick your brain.”
“I hope it’s something racy. I’m stuck out here in Kansas with Lovecroft and his folks. Nice people. Too damn nice. They go to church and then go home and actually do what the pastor tells them. It’s freaking me out.” She laughed. “I need someone to swear at me or something. Maybe even pound some tequila. Half the state is dry.”
“We’ll take a rain check on the tequila,” Amanda said, “but I’m happy to call you a stupid bitch.”
For some reason Amanda was able to get away with saying things most people could not. Maybe it was the accent. Or maybe it was because people sensed she really didn’t have a nasty bone in her body. When Georgia stopped laughing, Cam said, “We were hoping you could tell us what you know about Project MK-Ultra?”
Georgia repeated much of what they already knew. “They say the operation has been shut down, but I don’t buy it. Nothing at the Agency ever gets shut down. It might get renamed or reorganized, but they don’t call Langley the home of spooks for nothing—nothing there ever dies.”
Cam recounted his encounter with Pugh and his family. “So do you think it’s possible the bracelet he gave me really is from the Bat Creek Stone mound?”
“That predates this stupid bitch’s time at the Agency, but I did look into the Bat Creek Stone as part of my prep for the Jefferson January mission.” January, Astarte’s uncle, collected ancient artifacts he believed proved explorers came to America long before Columbus, just as the Book of Mormon said. “I remember reading something in the file about a bracelet going missing. I can check it for you if you want.”
“Yes, thanks,” Cam replied. “Hey, you don’t by chance know an agent by the name of Randall … no, wait, I mean Morgan Sid. He’s around eighty, just retired.” Cam described their meeting, knowing he could trust Georgia not to blow the old man’s cover.
“No, sorry. Over twenty thousand people work for the CIA, and that doesn’t include shad
ow agents like me. But I’ll look into that bracelet for you. And I’ll ask around about MK-Ultra, see if it’s still active.” She paused. “But you have to do me a favor in return.”
“What?” Amanda asked.
“Come visit. These people are driving me crazy. The other day a woman paid for my coffee because I was fumbling in my purse. And when you come, bring something to drink.” She laughed. “Something strong.”
Randall Sid—the name by which he insisted on thinking of himself in order to ensure his identity-switch ruse succeeded—spent the afternoon pacing his brother’s condominium, memorizing lines for tonight’s Masonic ceremony. Both he and his twin were longtime Freemasons, members of a Lodge in the Boston suburb of Arlington. Randall enjoyed the camaraderie and sense of history that came with being a lodge Brother; his brother, on the other hand, had devoted his entire adult life to the Craft. He was a 33rd Degree Mason and past Grand Master who had memorized every ritual and recitation and rarely missed a Lodge event. Which meant Randall needed to memorize every ritual and recitation and rarely miss a Lodge event.
What an absolute waste of both time and brain cells. And at age eighty, both were in short supply.
Duping his Lodge Brothers had been Randall’s most difficult challenge so far; many of them had been his brother’s friends for decades. His first task had been to refine his accent. He had struggled for years to rid himself of his East Boston twang, even going so far as to take diction lessons after college when he had first joined the Agency because he was convinced his accent made him sound like a buffoon. But his brother still spoke like a, well, like a driver’s education teacher. Randall could not bring himself to refer to their Arlington lodge as ‘All-ington,’ but nor could he employ words like ‘indubitably’ and hope to pass for his twin. A couple of them eyed him quizzically at the first Lodge meeting after the switch, and one of them even questioned him, but he terminated the conversation with a smile and, “You think I wouldn’t trade places with my brother and be on that cruise right now?” After a few weeks the odd glances had ceased.
To the outside world, Freemasonry was cloaked in mystery and intrigue. It was equally mysterious to Randall, but for different reasons. Freemasons essentially founded the United States, and over the country’s history many of its top politicians, industrialists, inventors and philanthropists had also been Masons—in short, Masons had done more to build this country than any other group. And yet American society had diverged far from the core beliefs and values of Masonry. Freemasonry was a true meritocracy—at tonight’s initiation ceremony the new candidates would enter the fraternity as equals, stripped of their clothes and jewelry and clad only in a rough robe. A janitor and a judge would stand side-by-side, each rising through the ranks based solely on their merits. In fact, the current Master of Randall’s Lodge was a plumber, while his deputy, called the Senior Warden, was a world-renowned surgeon. Yet outside the Lodge the country had moved away from meritocracy, a development that could if unchecked undermine the foundations of the United States. Men were born with head starts based on wealth and status, and achieved success based on family connections and patronage. Sure there were exceptions to this, but not nearly enough. To Randall, the true mystery was why powerful Masons had not done more to arrest this slide away from meritocracy. Randall, for example, had never risen above a certain level at the CIA because he had not attended an Ivy League college. Didn’t the country’s leaders see that moving away from meritocracy undermined the very foundation of American society?
Back to tonight. Randall would need to take over his brother’s duties of administering the oath of initiation to the new members. The Masonic Brothers—clad in tuxedos and aprons and white gloves, with many carrying swords—would serve as witnesses as the initiates stammered through their initiation oaths. Many initiates would pause, their eyes widening, as they vowed not to reveal secrets of the Craft, under penalty of death:
I promise and declare that I will not at any time hereafter reveal or make known any part or parts of the Trade secrets of Free Masonry. The penalty for breaking this great oath shall be the loss of my life. That I shall be branded with the mark of the Traitor and slain according to ancient custom by being throttled, that my body shall be buried in the rough sands of the sea where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in the twenty-four hours, so that my soul shall have no rest by night or by day.
It was quite an oath, and most initiates would perspire and laugh nervously as they allowed themselves to be led around, blindfolded and with a cord tied around their neck, before being lowered into a shaft from which they would be figuratively ‘resurrected’ by their Lodge Brothers. Thus reborn, the initiates would retire to the basement bar for cognac and cigars—usually too much of both. By then Randall’s accent would no longer matter.
There would be one less initiate tonight than originally expected. During last week’s Lodge meeting, after the candidates had been vetted and questioned, Randall emptied the mahogany ballot box only to find a black marble mixed in with the dozens of white ones. A blackball. As was required, Randall instructed the Brothers to line up a second time—he again handed each Brother a white marble and a black marble and, again, one-by-one they filed past the box to cast their votes regarding the candidate in question. Again the candidate was blackballed. Apparently, Randall learned later, one of the Brothers had witnessed the candidate berate a teenage umpire in a youth baseball game and believed him to be unworthy of Masonic membership and, as was his right, blocked the man’s candidacy.
The blackball left four initiates for tonight’s ceremony. Randall had been involved in hundreds of Masonic ceremonies, and hundreds of times he had memorized the various recitations without paying much attention to the words—Freemasonry was an ancient craft with rituals and customs dating back to the early days of the Old Testament. But for some reason today he focused on the title of the initiation oath: ‘The Oath of Nimrod.’ Other Lodges Randall had attended no longer used this historic name for the initiation oath, but Randall’s home Lodge continued to cling to the old English traditions.
Nimrod? Why Nimrod?
“Well,” he said to himself, “it seems I have another mystery to solve.”
It probably would have been easier to conduct research on the internet, but there was something particularly gratifying about prying open the pages of an old book, the smell of leather and dusty paper filling one’s nostrils. Fortunately his brother possessed an extensive library of Masonic literature; Randall found a seven-volume history of Freemasonry written in 1898 and pulled the last volume from the shelf. Opening it slowly so as not to crack the leather binding, he searched for ‘Nimrod’ in the index and was directed to a short chapter at the beginning of volume one.
He sat in his twin’s leather recliner angled to face the television set. Skimming through the thick prose of the hundred-year-old tome, Randall slowed down and reread words that, at first glance, seemed to make little sense: The prose identified “Nimrod, King of Babylonia” as “the first Grand Master” of Masonry. How could this be? Randall had always been taught that Solomon was the first Grand Master and that the earliest Masons had been Hiram Abiff and the other builders of King Solomon’s Temple, circa 800 BC. So what was this about Nimrod?
He read further. King Nimrod, a great-grandson of Noah, ruled in Mesopotamia, which is present-day Iraq, in approximately 2000 BC. Randall found an image, an ancient copper portrait of the powerful king:
King Nimrod of Babylon
While king, Nimrod constructed the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Bible, God destroyed because he found it hubristic. But the construction itself was an engineering and construction marvel, made possible through the efforts of thousands of craftsmen Nimrod organized and trained. These workmen, known as “operative” masons, were the ancestors of those who later built King Solomon’s Temple and who eventually became the “speculative” (non-working) masons of modern Freemasonry.
Randall gathered a few othe
r volumes and spread out at the kitchen table. So what happened to Nimrod? One source in the 1700s listed Nimrod along with Moses, Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar and Augustus Caesar as the greatest of the Grand Masters. Why had this once-revered figure been shoved into the shadows of Freemasonry? It was a long fall, from first Grand Master to complete obscurity; Randall, who considered himself a history buff, knew nothing about Nimrod. So, again, why had modern Freemasonry tried to erase Nimrod from its history?
The more Randall read about Nimrod, the more he understood.
First and foremost, Nimrod was a pagan. Nimrod and his people rejected the God of Abraham and instead worshipped Baal and a pantheon of other gods and idols. As part of this worship they often sacrificed children to Baal. Tellingly, the main root of the word ‘Beelzebub,’ meaning devil, was the word ‘Baal.’ In fact, Nimrod himself was also known by the name ‘Belus,’ a name later shortened to ‘Bel’ and then ‘Baal.’ So not only was Nimrod a pagan, he later apparently became identified as the pagan god Baal himself.
The second reason for Nimrod being scrubbed from the Masonic historical record, and this was closely related to the first, was that Nimrod openly challenged God’s authority and revolted against him. This revolt explained why God found the Tower of Babel so offensive and destroyed it—the edifice was meant by Nimrod as a direct challenge to God’s primacy and divinity. In fact, the name ‘Nimrod’ derived from the word ‘marad,’ meaning ‘we will revolt’ (against God).
Third, Nimrod descended from Noah’s son Ham. Abraham, on the other hand, descended from Noah’s son Shem—it was Abraham’s line that became the ‘Semites,’ the ancestors of today’s Judeo-Christian peoples. In other words it was Abraham’s line (which included Solomon) whom God declared to be the ‘chosen people’ of the Bible, while Ham and his line, as Noah’s least favorite son, were considered of inferior stock.
Perhaps, Randall mused, this aversion to Ham is why Jews do not eat pork. Or perhaps he was getting giddy and needed a short break. He stepped onto the rear deck of the condominium and breathed in the winter air before making himself a cup of tea and returning to his work.
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series) Page 6