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

by David S. Brody

  “Oh, and by the way,” Cam said, “this was during the time frame when Richard Helms, the CIA director, was spending weekends at the Mellon family compound.”

  Amanda turned and looked at Cam. “Clearly, the Mellons didn’t need the money. And nobody, no matter how wealthy, just gives up their home to strangers for use as a drug den for five years. I don’t know what other conclusion you can reach: The Mellons were fronting for the CIA. Fronting for Project MK-Ultra so they could run their LSD experiments.”

  Stefan Antonopoulos sat and watched the tunnel walls fly by. Washington was a funny place. In many ways it was the most important city in the world, yet the local government was as dysfunctional as a Third World backwater—as his taxi last night crossed the border from Maryland into D.C. the road went from bare pavement to a thick layer of slush and slop. And it hadn’t snowed in three days.

  Thankfully, the Metro system was as modern and efficient as any in the country. He had no idea what was going on and the anonymity of public transportation fit his mood. He disembarked at Metro Center and descended to a blue line train. Six stops later he arrived at Eastern Market, a couple of blocks from the Hawk & Dove. He checked his watch. Three o’clock. Probably a good lull time to ask a few questions of the staff.

  He entered and wandered around, hoping to see their waitress from last night. But no luck. He ambled to the bar and ordered a burger and beer. Was it worth concocting some story? He decided to play it straight. “Hey, I met a woman in here last night, upstairs. And like an idiot I didn’t get her number. Tall, pretty, I think bi-racial. Long, straight hair. Name is Evgenia. Drinks Sam Adams. Any ideas?”

  The bartender, a short, pony-tailed guy with a barrel chest and thick arms, eyed him. “I think I know the one.” Aussie accent, maybe New Zealand. “She pops in every week or so. Fancies the hockey games.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “None that I’ve seen.”

  He smiled. “Good. Any idea how I might find her?”

  “Negative, mate.”

  Antonopoulos thanked him and paid, leaving an extra twenty as a tip. “If you think of anything else, here’s my card.” He dropped another twenty. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  Evgenia sat at her cubicle, trying to fight off the mid-afternoon malaise. She desperately wanted a ten minute catnap. But she couldn’t very well curl into a ball on the floor beneath her desk. Instead she opened the hockeyfights.com webpage and watched a couple of battles from last night’s games.

  Her father had not been a big fighter, but he explained to her that there was a code of honor the players abided by—you never fought a smaller man, never hit a guy once he was down, never waited for a teammate to fight your battles. And most of all, if you were going to knock out someone’s teeth you better make sure they deserved it. Not that, as her mother liked to point out, sometimes the code wasn’t broken. But for the most part it worked.

  Awake now, she focused on the three red files in front of her, each representing a researcher the Agency had puppeteered—Fell, Whitewood and Glynn. Barry Fell’s file sat on the top of the stack; she spread its pages across her desk. Fell, author of a 1976 bestselling book entitled America B.C., was the most famous of the three. The book claimed that waves of pre-Columbian Europeans visited North America, including Irish Druids in Vermont and ancient Phoenicians in both the Great Lakes region and New England. Evgenia examined a photo of an inscription found at a site in New Hampshire called America’s Stonehenge, which Fell described as an offering to the pagan god Baal, a deity worshiped by the ancient Phoenicians and their precursors, the Canaanites. Fell translated the inscription as, “To Baal of the Canaanites, This in Dedication.”

  Baal Stone, America’s Stonehenge, New Hampshire

  The America’s Stonehenge site also contained a stone slab called the Sacrificial Table; the Canaanites were known to offer human sacrifices to their gods. Evgenia peered closer. A grooved channel ran along the border of the stone slab, presumably to drain the blood away.

  Sacrificial Stone, America’s Stonehenge, New Hampshire

  Fell’s work piggy-backed on many other researchers, but because Fell was a Harvard professor his message resonated nationwide. Fell’s problem—his button to push, as it were—was his massive ego. He based his research on his ability to read an ancient language called Ogham, which in many cases consisted of no more than a series of squiggly lines. Fell’s ego apparently was such that he believed every marking on every stone was an ancient writing that only he could decipher. Some of the engravings were indeed ancient artifacts, but many others were nothing more than natural fissures or glacier marks in the stones. It had been a simple matter for an agent—in fact, a twenty-something Dr. Jag—to plant some promising-looking carved stones in the woods and wait for Fell to pounce on them and trumpet their import. Once the stones were revealed to be fakes, of course, Fell’s reputation plummeted and his body of work became discredited. Evgenia shook her head. All his work had been dismissed—the world had no idea that much of it was legitimate.

  Why, she wondered, did the CIA even care? Was Professor Fell some kind of threat to national security? Fell was discredited in the early 1980s, which was the height of the Cold War. But what did his research have to do with the Soviets?

  As if on cue, Dr. Jag shuffled into Evgenia’s cubicle. As usual, the pockets of his blue blazer were stuffed—keys, glasses, a phone, papers, pens, a pipe and, based on the smell of egg wafting off of him, perhaps even half a breakfast sandwich. “How did last night go?”

  She quickly closed her browser. Dr. Jag would no doubt think hockey fights were barbaric; this from a man who regularly ordered his employees to ruin peoples’ lives. “Fine,” she answered. “Antonopoulos took the artifact, like we knew he would.”

  “Good. He suspect anything?”

  “There’s nothing to suspect yet.” It was an odd question. “He set up a meeting to examine a carved rock and, well, that’s what happened.”

  “Okay. So how you going to play him?”

  She pointed at the red files. “Don’t know yet. Hoping for some inspiration.”

  “I’ve got more if you need them.”

  “More files? How many people are out there researching this pre-Columbian stuff?”

  He turned and left. “Too many.”

  She returned the Fell materials to their folder and quickly read the summary pages of the new files. Three stories. Three innocent men ruined. In many ways, three American tragedies. And now she was in charge of making sure Antonopoulos would be a fourth. She sighed. Perhaps this job didn’t pay so well after all.

  Perhaps it was time to take a page out of the hockey fight code of conduct and make sure Antonopoulos really did deserve getting his teeth knocked out.

  Cam watched as Astarte worked at the kitchen table, turning a smart phone and old webcam lens into a microscope for a fourth-grade science project. Whatever happened to papier-mâché volcanoes?

  Amanda stomped in. “Aargh, this is so frustrating!”

  “What?”

  “It is impossible to prove giants existed without the actual bones. But the NAGPRA law made it illegal to keep the bones—they’ve all been reburied. No bones, no bloody proof.”

  “I can’t believe there’s not a few skeletons still around in private collections.” He paused for a second. “Maybe I should call Herm Gablonsky.” A widower, Herm was the father of one of Cam’s college roommates; he lived outside Boston, in Newton, and possessed a large collection of Americana documents and artifacts. Once things turned serious with Amanda, Cam had brought her to meet him and get his approval.

  “But Herm doesn’t collect bones.”

  “No. But he might know someone who does. He’s been collecting for decades, and these guys love to show off their collections. If someone in the state has a giant skeleton, chances are Herm would know about it.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough. God knows I’m getting tired of looking at old newspapers.”


  “I’ll call him.” It was better than sitting around thinking about all the people reading on the internet what a racist idiot Cam was. “I’ll offer to drive down tonight with a couple of pizzas and some Kimball’s ice cream.” Cam smiled. When he had moved back to Westford from Boston a couple of years ago, Herm had cursed him for leaving the city for farm country. Are you going to keep chickens, Cameron? And read by the goddamn candlelight? But Herm never turned down a gallon of homemade cherry vanilla chip. Luckily Amanda had stocked up for the winter.

  “Wait, you’re going to give him our last gallon?” Amanda pouted.

  “You know we can’t show up without it.”

  She sighed. “The sacrifices we make for science.”

  Stefan Antonopoulos stood outside the modern, glass-topped Eastern Market subway station. Periodically he ducked inside to get warm but only from the top of the escalator could he see everyone leaving the station. Evgenia would surely stand out in a crowd, but he didn’t want to risk missing her amongst the sea of evening commuters.

  He shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets, wondering if he was just wasting his time. His flight home would have landed already and he could be a short drive away from a family dinner, a glass of wine and a Disney movie with the kids. What was he thinking?

  He killed another half hour, bouncing and blowing on his hands to keep warm. At this point everyone looked alike—he started following a woman down the street only to overtake her and realize she was in reality a tall man with a long beige scarf.

  It was approaching seven o’clock, and Antonopoulos was about to give up, when his cell phone rang. “Howdy, Governor.” The bartender. “Your birdie just walked in. Watching the hockey game on the telly.”

  Herman Gablonsky was the type of American that Europeans often made fun of—loud, opinionated, gruff, even a bit crude. And Amanda adored every bit of it.

  Cam parked in the driveway of an expanded ranch in a quiet Newton neighborhood, ten miles west of Boston. Herm met them at the door, bear hugs for all. “And there’s my Astarte,” he boomed. “You better have a kiss for Uncle Herm!”

  Astarte, rarely intimidated, planted a pair of wet lips on his cheek and pushed by him to roll on the floor with his Chocolate Lab, a half-sibling to Venus. “Hello, Benjamin Franklin,” Astarte said, rubbing the dog’s stomach. “Have you been a good boy?”

  “Good?” Herm bellowed. “Hell no! He chewed up a letter signed by President Andrew Jackson.” He faked a kick at the dog. “He’s lucky I don’t make him sleep in the garage.”

  Amanda was always surprised Herm was of only average size when she saw him—in her mind’s eye he always seemed a hulking presence. Perhaps his large, bald head contributed to the illusion, or perhaps it was simply a function of his personality and thundering voice. Or perhaps, she concluded, it was because his living room was so stuffed with display cabinets and bookshelves that he seemed completely to fill the room.

  Herm showed them some of his recent acquisitions, most notably George Washington’s surveying compass, before they reheated the pizza. Herm cleared a stack of papers off the kitchen table; Cam had brought paper plates and plastic silverware, anticipating Herm would likely not have washed his dishes.

  Herm made a face. “Is this Westford pizza?”

  Cam grinned. “No. We swung by Brooklyn on the way here.”

  “Well, it’s not bad for the boondocks. You guys ever see polar bears up there?”

  Amanda saw her opening. “No, but we found a wooly mammoth buried in the ice.”

  Herm stopped mid-bite, cheese hanging from his chin, and smiled at Cam. “I like her. I really do. Sassy. Miss Sassafras.” He shook his head. “Wooly mammoth.”

  Cam took her cue. “That sort of segues to why we’re here, Herm.” He explained Amanda’s research on giants. “We were wondering if you’ve ever heard of anyone with any giants bones.”

  Herm sighed. “Why you guys wasting your time on this stuff, Cameron?” He motioned to the living room. “We have so much fascinating history—this country was the first great experiment in democracy. And it worked, it succeeded! Why are you so focused on what happed before that? Who cares if the Phoenicians or the Chinese or the Greeks were here thousands of years ago. They came, caught some fish, maybe traded with the Indians, took a dump in the woods, and left. Yippee shit.” He squared his shoulders. “Our Founding Fathers were some of the greatest men in the history of the world; they built something never seen before! Why not focus on them?”

  Amanda knew that Cam knew this argument was coming—it always did. And Cam was ready. He put an arm on Herm’s shoulder. “Because the truth matters, Herm. The truth matters.”

  Herm exhaled loudly. “The truth.” He shook his head. “You are such a pain in my ass.” He stood, found a leather address book in a drawer, and dialed a number. As it rang, he said to Cam, “Of course I know a guy; you think I don’t?” He shook his head again. “But we’re not going anywhere until we eat some of that country ice cream of yours.”

  Evgenia sat at the bar and sipped her Sam Adams. As soon as she walked in the bartender had motioned to her. “A bloke was in here earlier asking for you. Dark hair, about my height.” He smiled. “Handsome bugger, just like me. Said he met you last night.” It had to be Stefan Antonopoulos. But why?

  Had he grown suspicious of her or Rachel? She was fairly certain the professor’s intentions were not amorous; she had tried a couple of times to flirt last night and he had not responded. She replayed the evening in her mind: There was nothing that should have given him pause. They had a drink, he examined the artifact, he asked to keep it, Rachel agreed, they said goodnight. That was it. Vanilla.

  She positioned herself near the far end of the bar. From there she could look at the television in the center area of the bar and also glance at the mirror beneath the TV to see the front door reflected in it. Half a beer later Antonopoulos edged through the front door, shook the water from his coat and, partially covering his face with his arm, pushed through a crowd at the far end of the bar. Obviously he did not want to be seen.

  So what was proper procedure here? A mark was following her. She was an analyst, not a field agent—she had some basic training in hand-to-hand combat and in surveillance and avoidance, but she was no expert. On the other hand neither was Antonopoulos. She tried to recall her training. Priority one was her own safety. Priority two was not allowing her cover to be exposed. Priority three was to maintain the integrity of her mission. She sighed. None of these priorities told her what actually to do. Perhaps she should have called Dr. Jag while she waited, though he would have just told her to follow her training. She looked at her half-empty beer—whatever she did, getting drunk was probably not a good idea. She ordered a Diet Coke. And waited.

  Twenty minutes later Antonopoulos was still hiding, hunched at the far end of the bar. Enough already. She dropped a twenty on the bar, grabbed her coat and strolled to the door, careful not to look in the professor’s direction. She pushed out the door. Wanting him to show himself in the open, she jaywalked across Pennsylvania Avenue midblock, darting through traffic. When she reached the far side she ducked into a darkened storefront and waited.

  Antonopoulos followed, his head on a swivel as he alternately watched for traffic and scanned for his prey. He had lost her already. He jogged to the corner and scanned the cross street; not seeing her he jogged back down Pennsylvania toward where she hid. She reached into her purse and took a deep breath. As he passed, she called out. “Professor, stop.”

  He spun toward her as she stepped from the shadows. Before he could react she held up a small canister and sprayed his face.

  Herm sat in the front seat while Cam drove, with Amanda and Astarte in the rear. It was a cold night and the heat hadn’t even kicked in yet when Herm said, “I actually do know something about these giants of yours.”

  Amanda and Cam exchanged glances, not sure if he was being serious or not. “Really?” Amanda replied.

 
“You know I’m a history buff, especially Colonial history. There’s a monument down in Cumberland, Rhode Island called the Nine Men’s Misery monument. Nine Colonists were ambushed, captured and tortured by the Native Americans during King Phillip’s War in the 1670s. Brutal, nasty stuff. They identified the bones because one of the Colonists, a guy named Benjamin Bucklin, was supposedly almost eight feet tall and had a complete double row of teeth.” He shrugged. “That’s how they knew who they were. So maybe there is something to these giant stories.”

  Cam and Amanda exchanged glances again. They had not told Herm anything about double rows of teeth. “So what happened to the bodies?” Amanda asked.

  “They were reburied, except according to an old book I have Bucklin’s skull was given to the Rhode Island Historical Society in the 1800s. But they lost it.”

  “Of course they did,” Amanda replied. “Do you know if by chance this Bucklin was part Native American?”

  Herm shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Especially down in Rhode Island a lot of the Colonists took Narragansett wives and mistresses.” Herm switched subjects. “So anyway, I gotta warn you, this guy we’re going to visit is an odd duck. Works at Boston College as some kind of archivist. Married into some old money, but the wife is a recluse, even more nuts than him—I think her father invented the stapler or the paper clip or something. Anyway, the big thing you should know is he’s one of those guys who thinks the government is corrupt. You know, Big Brother and all that conspiracy crap.”