The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book #4 in Templars in America Series)

by David S. Brody

  It was not supposed to be like this. Was not supposed to end like this. Consuela was supposed to be here with him. Or him in Cuba with her. But he had chosen duty, chosen his career, over love. Often he indulged in an imaginary conversation with Consuela: Had you chosen otherwise, she invariably said, then you would not have been the man I fell in love with in the first place. He sighed. Would she really have let him off the hook like that, or was this imaginary conversation simply the self-serving musings of an old, sad man? The answer did not really matter. He had made his choice. Daily, his loneliness attested to it.

  Tomorrow, at least, he could kill an hour with his weekly walk to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground to the gravestone of Mr. Prince Hall, an early Boston resident and abolitionist who founded a Masonic Lodge for Boston’s black community. Randall made the regular trek to the North End for three reasons: first, Hall was a hero of his; second, Randall loved Italian pastries; and third, he had made a vow almost sixty years ago to visit the grave weekly to look for a single yellow rose meant as a secret signal to him. He had long given up any expectation of seeing that rose, but he could not bring himself completely to give up hope. Or the pastries….

  But Copp’s Hill would be tomorrow’s activity. Perhaps today he would take the subway to Suffolk Downs and watch the simulcast races from Gulfstream and the other warm-weather tracks. He and his brother had practically grown up at the track—most of their father’s career was spent riding there and their mother worked one of the betting windows. His parents made an odd couple—he was slight and lighter-skinned and soft-spoken while she was a tank of a woman with dark skin and a booming voice. Once, as kids, they had held a color swatch from a paint store up to their parents’ faces and decided Dad was maple while Mom was ebony. Their parents had always told them they came from the Dominican Republic—apparently for immigration reasons—but while in high school Randall discovered they were actually from Cuba. Funny how the discovery meant nothing to his twin brother but completely altered the course of Randall’s life….

  A life that was winding down. Eighty may be the ‘new seventy,’ but either way it was still old. He wondered about his legacy. What meaningful thing had he done, what accomplishment would cause his death to headline the day’s obituary page? There was nothing, unfortunately. He went to work, did his job, came home and ate Chinese food. What had happened to his dreams?

  The phone rang, rescuing him from his melancholy. “Good morning, Cameron.”

  “Not really.”

  Well, this might be interesting, at least. “How so?”

  “I just emailed you a link. Read it and call me back.”

  Randall sat at his computer and did as instructed. Yes, this was getting interesting. He phoned Cameron. “I was always partial to Fred Flintstone. He was a loyal member of the Water Buffalo Lodge, which of course was meant to poke fun at us Freemasons.”

  “Well, I’m the one being poked fun at now.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Do you think this is related to the CIA targeting me, or is it just random?”

  “Nothing is just random. So, yes, I think it comes from the Agency.”

  “Why?”

  Randall stared out his window at the Hancock Tower rising up out of a field of Back Bay brownstones like a single oak in a pasture. His brother had the better views, but his own Chinatown apartment was only a block away from dim sum. Really, it was no contest—one could not eat a view. He turned away from the window. “Why indeed? That is always the question with mind control, with PsyOps. What is the ultimate goal?”

  “So you think this blog post is trying to get me to react in some way?”

  “Precisely. It is designed to trigger some kind of behavior modification. It will be our task to determine what that modification is. That will put us one step closer to solving this mystery.”

  Cameron tried in vain to push him for more answers for a few more minutes before they hung up. He was looking for answers Randall either did not have, or did not care to share.

  Stefan Antonopoulos returned to his hotel room from the morning seminars and gently laid the Vermont stone onto the bed. He had barely heard a word of the day’s lectures, his mind totally focused on the artifact. But instead of gleeful anticipation, there was a throbbing in his gut. Something didn’t feel right. He had read something recently about a second brain in the stomach that warned of impending danger. He needed to listen.

  He was supposed to check out and catch a flight back to Portland late this afternoon. He stared at the artifact for a few seconds before making a decision. He phoned his teaching assistant. “I’m going to need you to cover class tomorrow morning. I’m stuck in Washington. I’ll fly straight to Boston Friday night to give that lecture.” Calls to his wife, his travel agent and the hotel front desk completed his task.

  And marked the beginning of a new one.

  So what next? A young woman claimed her mother found a carved rock almost forty years ago in Vermont. That and a few pages from a teenager’s diary was all he really knew about the find. What was that old expression: When something seemed too good to be true, it usually was.

  But why? Why would a young woman go to the trouble of trying to interest him in an artifact that might be fake? He hadn’t offered any money for it, and even if he did it wouldn’t be enough to change anyone’s life. He grabbed his coat. He wasn’t going to figure anything out sitting in this hotel room.

  He tried Rachel’s cell while walking through the hotel lobby. Straight to voice mail. He sent her a quick text: Want to update you on exam of artifact. I’m staying in town extra day. Please call. He really knew nothing about her, other than she was from Baltimore. Pausing in the lobby, he Googled her: A gazillion hits. He narrowed the search to Baltimore, but that still left thousands of possibilities. Why couldn’t she have had a unique name … like Evgenia.

  He replayed the evening. Evgenia lived in Washington. And she knew the bar had just been renovated, which meant she probably lived on Capital Hill. Okay, that was a start. Something to do while waiting for Rachel to get back to him. How many six-foot-tall African-American women named Evgenia could there be in one neighborhood?

  Antonopoulos ducked into the Bethesda Metro station a block from his hotel, his fingers and toes numb from the brisk wind. He had left his heavy winter clothes in Maine, mistakenly figuring the D.C. winters would be mild. He had the rest of today plus the first half of tomorrow to try to figure things out, then he’d have to fly north. Just as he was about to take the escalator down, his phone rang. The number came in as ‘private.’

  “Hello.”

  “Hi Professor. This is Rachel Gold returning your call.”

  He made small talk for a minute before getting to the point. “Rachel, I noticed some interesting things on this carving. Did your mother clean the rock in any way?”

  Rachel laughed. “Actually, that’s a funny question. When she found it in the attic it was covered with dust and cobwebs. My mom is a bit of a clean freak so she put it in the dishwasher.”

  Antonopoulos bit his lip. Would that explain the pristine condition of the carved grooves? Maybe. Or maybe he was being paranoid. He kept his tone light. “So that’s it. I couldn’t figure out why the rock was clean enough to eat off of.”

  “Knowing my mom, she probably used the ‘Heavy Wash’ setting.”

  “Okay, thanks again for your help. I’ll be in touch.”

  He hesitated at the top of the escalator. Was Rachel lying? Maybe he had seen too many movies, but he had the sense last night that she wasn’t being totally honest with him. And why did her number come in as private? On the other hand, the dishwasher could explain the clean grooves. And a private number combined with a hunch someone was lying to him was a pretty flimsy reason to stick around Washington.

  He took a deep breath and went with his gut. Rachel was in Baltimore, but her friend Evgenia was in Washington. Glancing at a subway map, he plotted his course to Capital Hill.

&nbs
p; Cam needed to get some legal work done, and he knew if he sat around at home he’d just fixate on the blog post and the CIA mystery. So he drove to his uncle’s law office located in an old Colonial near the Westford Town Common, where Cam subleased space. He returned some calls, plowed through a couple of Purchase and Sale Agreements, and researched a case involving a dispute between neighbors over use of a shared driveway. Nothing particularly momentous, but at least nobody tried to attack him.

  Mid-morning he took a break to watch a video someone had emailed him. It was a parody, making fun of fellow researcher Scott Wolter, a Minnesota geologist. Purportedly put out by a group of Mormons, the video, entitled “America Revealed,” criticized Wolter for not considering that the Book of Mormon offered an explanation for the mysterious artifacts he had uncovered in his research and discussed on his television show, “America Unearthed.” The video was of high quality and humorous, but the tone struck Cam as unnecessarily personal. The video attacked Wolter as much as it did his research, portraying him in a buffoon-like manner. It reminded Cam of the blogger attack. Was Wolter under attack also? Was this another example of MK-Ultra trying to discredit a researcher, this time by trying to make him look like a bumbling idiot? It sure seemed that way.

  Cam considered ferreting around more, trying to learn where the video originated. But that was the problem with conspiracies—if you believed there was a conspiracy beneath every rock, then you spent all your time, well, looking under rocks. Closing his browser, he returned to his law work and finished up around noon. He phoned Amanda as he walked to his car. “I’m heading home. Want me to pick up sandwiches?” He held the phone close to his ear as a winter wind whipped across the Common and sent swirls of snow dust spinning in the sunlight. They hadn’t seen Chung for a couple of days, the police were still patrolling, and Cam had the sense Chung may have given up—a boatload of money didn’t do you much good if you were locked in jail. Even so, he didn’t like Amanda being home all day alone.

  “Greek salad for me, please. And here’s something to think about while you’re driving.”

  “Thanks. Because my mind is so totally empty right now…”

  “Yes, well, Roger that. But make some bandwidth for this: There simply must be some intersection point between everything that’s happening, some common thread that ties the bracelet to the CIA and to the blog post and to our research and maybe even to the Mellon family.”

  “Agreed. But what?”

  She sighed. “Yes, that’s the crux of it. I feel like we’re trying to construct a jigsaw puzzle but all the pieces in the middle have been removed.”

  He reached his car. “I’ll keep thinking about it. I also want to look into any connections between the Mellon family and the CIA. As you said, there needs to be some common thread. See you in twenty with takeout.”

  “Oh, Cam, one more thing.” She paused for effect. “Please make sure there’s nothing in the bag besides lunch.”

  Cam spent a couple hours after lunch surfing the internet at the kitchen table, Venus at his feet, reading everything he could about the Mellon family. The internet was an amazing research tool, allowing him to explore dusty corners of history that twenty years ago would have been hidden from even the most serious of researchers. By mid-afternoon his eyes were bleary but he had filled almost four pages of a legal pad.

  Amanda brought him a Diet Coke and took the seat opposite him. “Forty minutes until Astarte gets home. Care to join me on a trip down the rabbit hole?”

  “Depends what’s down there.”

  She smiled. “All sorts of things. Shape-shifting aliens, human sacrifice, MK-Ultra, your boy Laurence Gardner.”

  “Makes Lewis Carroll seem downright unimaginative.”

  She took a deep breath. “I Googled reptilian aliens and Gardner, just to see what popped up. There were dozens of sites—some of them fringe but a couple of them legitimate—talking about this. Some guy wrote a book about something called the Boys of Montauk. Supposedly these boys were raised out on Long Island to be used for human sacrifice by a group of reptilian, shape-shifting aliens who secretly control the world.”

  “Let me guess: They claim Gardner is one of these aliens.”

  “Not just him, but George Bush Senior, the British royal family, Henry Kissinger.”

  “Pretty much the usual suspects for conspiracy theorists.”

  “Anyway, I watched a video in which a woman calling herself Starfire claims she witnessed Gardner and others shift from their human form into giant reptiles and feast on the young boys.”

  “Feast, as in eat?”

  “Yes, as in devouring the boys’ internal organs.” Amanda erased the image with a shake of her shoulders. “The point is that Starfire maintains she was brainwashed to serve as den mother to these boys by the CIA. She even names Project MK-Ultra, says MK-Ultra doctors drugged and brainwashed her.”

  “Really? She names MK-Ultra? That’s pretty specific.”

  “And very public. The video has over a hundred thousand views.”

  The CIA surely didn’t love Starfire outing MK-Ultra, but overall they were probably pleased with the video’s popularity—thousands of people turned off to Gardner and his research. Cam smiled. “I’m lucky all I have to deal with is some two-bit blogger. Think about what poor Gardner had to endure.”

  “The whole thing is repulsive.”

  “And effective. It totally tarnishes Gardner’s work.”

  “And we still have no idea why the CIA felt the need to target him.”

  “Randall has no idea either. That’s why he’s still digging around. He wants to see the big picture.”

  She shifted in her seat and exhaled. “All right, now your turn. What did you learn about the Mellon family?”

  He took a swig of his soda and leaned forward. “No reptilian aliens, but some interesting stuff. I’ll start with Paul Mellon and work from there. Paul was the son of Andrew Mellon, who made a fortune in banking.”

  “So Paul was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple?” She smiled. “That’s one of my favorite American expressions.”

  “Actually, no. Paul was a decent guy from what I read—he entitled his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, which is pretty self-deprecating when you think about it. Now his son’s a different story. But back to Paul. Born in 1907, went to Yale, then during World War II he was the station chief of the London office of the old OSS.”

  “OSS is the precursor to the CIA, right?”

  “Yes. So that’s our first clear connection: Paul was a big shot at the CIA.”

  She leaned forward. “As presumably were many of his mates from Yale. What else?”

  “Connection number two: After the war, the CIA used a number of Mellon-funded foundations to funnel money to covert operations around the world. That continues even today—they help fund something called the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.”

  “Okay, not surprising based on what we know of Paul Mellon.”

  “Later, in the 1960s, the CIA director, Richard Helms, spent a lot of time at the Mellon family estate in Pennsylvania. Weekends, holidays, that sort of thing. Apparently he and the Mellons were very close. Oh, and care to guess the name of the young CIA operative who first founded MK-Ultra just after the war?”

  “Our boy Richard Helms?”

  “Yup. So that’s connection number three.”

  Cam looked down at his notes and continued. “You already know about some of the other stuff: Paul bought the Vinland Map and donated it to Yale. Later his son tried to make a trophy out of the Narragansett Rune Stone. And after Paul died, his second wife, Bunny, gave all that money to John Edwards to help bury the whole scandal with his mistress. Oh, and this Bunny was close friends with Jackie Kennedy and spent a ton of time at the White House in the sixties. So that’s another connection to the government.”

  Amanda sat back and chewed her lower lip. “Some interesting connections, but nothing particularly earth-shat
tering. I suppose any family with that much money is going to do many of the things you just described.

  “Except of course for stealing a rune stone.”

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “There’s actually more than that.” He smiled. “I’ve saved the best for last. And I think you’ll agree this is not something most wealthy families would do.” He took a deep breath. “The main focus of Project MK-Ultra was experimenting with drugs as a form of mind control. Pugh talked about that, how he and other Chinese nationals were used as guinea pigs in those New York experiments. Well, one of the primary drugs they were using was LSD.”

  “Okay.”

  “So they did a lot of lab experiments on convicts, students, immigrants, whatever. But when it came right down to it, nobody knew more about LSD in the 1960s than a professor at Harvard named Timothy Leary. He was part of the Beat Generation. At one point Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America.”

  She nodded. “I read about Leary. ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out.’ LSD is still a big deal in England, even today. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and all that.”

  “So here’s where it gets interesting. Our boy Paul Mellon has a first cousin named William Mellon Hitchcock. Billy, as he was called, owned a mansion north of New York City called the Millbrook Estate. He basically gave it to Leary, who moved in with all these counter culture poets and musicians. They spent five years there experimenting with LSD—it was essentially one giant acid trip.”

  “And you think the CIA was behind it all.”

  Cam nodded. “Wait. It gets better. Care to guess where Leary and his gang got their LSD?”

  She shrugged.

  “Cousin Billy. He bankrolled an illicit LSD manufacturing operation. Interestingly, the government never saw the need to shut it down.”

  Amanda pushed her chair back and walked toward the living room windows. She stared out over the lake for a few seconds. “You know, everything else you said about the Mellon family could be shrugged off as the typical actions of a wealthy family—friends in high places, donations of artifacts to universities, connections to the intelligence community. But this LSD business is different. I’m certain wealthy people use drugs. But donating a flop house to Leary? And operating a black market LSD manufacturing plant? What you’re describing is on a whole other scale.”