Omens ct-1

by Kelley Armstrong

  That’s how he saw it. She’d been tested. She’d failed. Just as I’m sure his mother had, enough times that he hadn’t doubted Desiree would take the bait. Maybe he was right. Maybe she would have fallen off the wagon anyway, and if we could give her a push to our own advantage, then I shouldn’t feel so guilty. But I did.

  We walked down the street in silence.

  “Can I ask you not to do that again?” I said as we turned the corner. “Not on my case?”

  “It was very specific circumstances that I highly doubt would repeat themselves, so the chances of—”

  “Can I just ask you not to? Please?”

  We were at the next corner before he said, “While I will reiterate that I was not involved in any drugs being given to Ms. Barbosa, I will agree to allow no such thing to happen again on this case without your knowledge.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter Fifty-four

  We’d been on the road for about ten minutes when I said, “Are we going to discuss what Desiree said? Or are we presuming it’s drug-addled crazy talk? I mean, obviously the CIA isn’t killing people by posing as serial killers.”

  “Likely not. It’s an intriguing concept, and actually quite brilliant, but it would suggest more creative thought than any government agency is capable of.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, well, I also doubt Peter and his girlfriend would be murdered for discovering that his father used to work for the CIA, but do you give any credence to the rumor that Will Evans did work for the CIA? That Peter may have, coincidentally or not, discovered it shortly before his death?”

  “I’m quite certain it’s true. As for whether the discovery was coincidental, that’s what we need to find out.”

  “You really think Evans could have been CIA?”

  He didn’t answer right away. As he drove, he seemed to be relaxing, the tightness leaving his face.

  “I’d be willing to lay a wager on it,” he said finally.

  “Meaning you know something, because I’m quite sure you don’t gamble unless you’re guaranteed to win.”

  He didn’t smile, but he flexed his hands on the wheel, losing a little more tension. “Yes, I’ve heard that William Evans was at one time employed by the CIA. It came up during my initial background checks.”

  “So it wasn’t a secret.”

  “It isn’t something he brings up at cocktail parties, I suspect. But his employment doesn’t seem to be a classified matter. I couldn’t confirm it at the time, but admittedly, I didn’t try very hard because I didn’t see the relevance. Now I do, so we will investigate.”

  We decided to postpone our visit to Pamela. We had a lead and should concentrate on it. That wasn’t an easy decision to make. She would have been told we were coming and been looking forward to it. Canceling felt cruel.

  But we did have a lead to pursue. And we were starting with a stop at Gabriel’s office.

  As we walked in, a voice called, “Finally, I’ve been trying to ring you all day, Gabriel. I realize it’s a Saturday, but I told you I’d be working and I’d really like to be able to contact you when I am.”

  It was the same throaty voice I’d heard whenever I called the office. Gabriel’s admin assistant, Lydia.

  When I saw the woman sitting behind the reception desk, I had to do a double-take and, for a moment, thought the words were coming from someone else. Whenever I’d pictured the woman on the other end of that sultry voice, I’d imagined someone suitably ornamental, the sexy secretary befitting the successful young lawyer. Instead, I saw a woman old enough to be my grandmother. Small and trim with short, steel-gray hair. She hadn’t turned but was still tapping away at her computer.

  “Perhaps, Lydia, we could maintain the illusion that I’m in charge of this office, at least when there’s a client present.”

  “Client…?” She turned and saw me. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Walsh. I”—she waved at a tiny screen—“saw you get out of the car and you seemed to be alone.”

  “I am not.”

  “You never bring clients to the office on the weekend.”

  “So it’s my fault. Naturally. Lydia, I’d like to introduce you—”

  “Ms. Jones. Of course.” She came out from behind the desk. “Please forgive my manners. May I get you a coffee or cold drink?”

  I looked at Gabriel. “Are we staying?”

  “We are.” He turned to Lydia. “We need to conduct research involving your former employers. Don’t bother with drinks. You should go enjoy your weekend.”

  She nodded, and I said good-bye as Gabriel led me through a second door into his office.

  Back in high school, I’d had a friend whose father was the kind of guy who never flew business class … because he never flew commercial at all. Her family made mine look positively middle-class. Her house had been a twenty-thousand-square-foot ode to modernity, yet her father insisted on having a study that he’d literally had transplanted from a historic manor. I remembered how much I loved that office, like something out of a Victorian novel. Gabriel’s reminded me of that, though his actually suited the building.

  The walls and floor were wood. The ceiling was decorative plaster, the design so intricate that I could lie on my back and stare at it for hours. And he had the chaise longue for exactly that, though from the looks of the leather, it didn’t see much lounging. There was a massive fireplace along one wall, with the faint smell of ashes suggesting that did get used. The other three walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. It even had a wooden ladder on a track, for reaching books on the top shelf. That, too, didn’t look used—Gabriel would stand head and shoulders above your average Victorian.

  Gabriel pulled out the red leather chair behind his wood desk. Then he paused, frowned, and looked around. It took a moment before I realized he was looking for a second chair.

  “Lydia must have taken it out,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t see clients in here. I’ll pull one in from the meeting room.”

  As he left, I looked around. He didn’t meet clients here? It was certainly impressive enough, and I’d presumed that was the point.

  When he rolled in a chair, I said, “You said we’re researching Lydia’s former employer. She worked for the CIA?”

  “For twenty years. Secretary to the Chicago field office special agent in charge.”

  In thinking Gabriel would hire a pretty young thing, I’d committed an unacceptable misjudgment of character. Would he really waste a decent salary on eye candy? Not when he could hire someone with ten times the experience for the same rate.

  “You sent her home,” I said. “I’m guessing that means we’re about to use access she’s given you, and you don’t want her to be culpable, should it ever be discovered.”

  He popped open his laptop. “Not quite. Lydia no longer has access, and even if she did, I doubt she’d betray her previous employer by providing it. She has, however, shown me a few alternate routes to obtain information.”

  “Back doors?”

  He nodded. “Anything Evans did before Peter’s death would be at least twenty-two years old. That means it’s unlikely to be classified. However, given that my simple background checks did not reveal precisely what he’d worked on, I’m presuming it’s something that the CIA would prefer not to post in easily accessible locations.”

  “Unclassified, but only if you know where to find it.”

  “Correct.”

  Gabriel typed and navigated too fast for me to ever replicate his path, but he let me sit there, watching, which surprised me. Hell, after our spat over Desiree, I was surprised he hadn’t called it a day and done this on his own. Likewise, he could have insisted I take that lunch break while he visited the Saints’ clubhouse.

  I could take this as a sign that our partnership had progressed to the point of actual trust. What’s that old joke? “A friend helps you move; a real friend helps you move a body.” We weren’t friends; I knew that. But helping someone hide a body does ta
ke a relationship to a whole new level. Maybe it was trust. Or as close as we could get.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Dr. Will Evans had indeed worked for the CIA. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t on his résumé, either. Gabriel said that wasn’t unusual. While his position didn’t seem to have been classified, the CIA didn’t exactly publish its employee lists.

  At first, Gabriel wasn’t able to get much more than confirmation that his name appeared on old records. Evans had been young, just out of grad school, and he’d worked on various projects as a psychologist.

  “What did the CIA use psychologists for in the sixties?” I asked. “Things like post-traumatic stress? Or was the party line still ‘suck it up and deal’?”

  Gabriel didn’t answer, just typed in a few search terms. When the results came in, he frowned. He clicked on one. Skimmed it. Frowned deeper.

  The angle of his laptop was off just enough that I could see the screen, but couldn’t read much.

  “Got something?” I said.

  “Mind control.”

  “What?”

  He turned the laptop my way. “They did use psychologists and psychiatrists for therapy, but during the Cold War, they employed more of them for experimentation. Drugs, behavior modification, and mind control.”

  I read the article. “The Manchurian Candidate? Seriously?”

  His frown grew.

  “Not a movie buff?” I typed search terms into another browser window. “Huh, it was a book, too. From the fifties. The movie and the book were about a Korean War vet who was brainwashed into becoming the perfect assassin. He’d be ‘activated’ by seeing the queen of diamonds card. He’d kill someone and forget all about it. Complete fiction. I mean, obviously, right? But not according to that.”

  I pointed at the other browser window, then scrolled through the Wikipedia entry for The Manchurian Candidate. At the bottom, I found a link for Project MKULTRA. I clicked it. I read it.

  Another window. Another search, this time pulling up academic references and the proceedings of a joint Senate Select Intelligence and Human Resources committees hearing from the seventies, exposing and detailing MKULTRA.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. “Could Evans have been involved…?”

  Gabriel took the laptop back and typed. Typed some more. Read and frowned. Typed. Read. Turned the laptop toward me.

  There is was, on one of the pages he’d accessed through his back door. Just one reference linking Evans and MKULTRA, but it was enough. We backed up from there and spent the next hour researching the project.

  MKULTRA was a code name. It didn’t mean anything—it was just an umbrella term for a wide array of CIA mind control projects starting in the fifties.

  We got a few bonus history lessons from our research, the kind of thing they don’t cover in class. When the U.S. stepped onto the world stage during WWII, the intelligence community realized its intelligence programs were pathetic compared to those of the British. They set about trying to rectify that.

  Most of those early projects were more amusing than frightening. That changed after the war, when the CIA realized the potential of psychology to produce the ideal soldier and assassin, and to provide foolproof methods of extracting information from enemy spies. Thus began a decade of experimentation with drugs—particularly LSD—and extreme psychiatric measures like electroshock therapy, sleep therapy, and sensory deprivation.

  We could complain about government interference today, but compared to what I read, we’d come a long way. Shrinks subjecting psych patients to treatments that erased their memories permanently. Agents slipping drugs into drinks at bars, inviting people back to parties and spraying LSD in the air. Nothing said it better than a quote I found from George White, an OSS officer heavily involved in the experiments: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

  That was the crazy, fucked-up piece of American history that was MKULTRA. What did it have to do with William Evans? With the murder of his son? There were no obvious answers here. We had to go deeper.

  The only lead we found was the name of Evans’s supervisor, Edgar Chandler. He wasn’t just Evans’s boss at the CIA—he’d been his thesis adviser in school, too. So it seemed that Chandler had worked for the CIA then and brought his prize student along.

  While Gabriel made coffee, I continued searching and learned that Evans had been in private practice since Peter was born. Did that mean he’d quit the CIA? Or only pretended to?

  The deeper we went, the harder the slog. Finally, we hit a story that hammered home exactly how classified MKULTRA had been in its day.

  In 1974, as word of MKULTRA was just beginning to leak, a hungry young Chicago journalist caught a whiff of it and saw a career-making break. As she researched the story, doors were slammed in her face. Colleagues advised her to drop it. CIA representatives strongly advised her to drop it. All this only seemed to strengthen her conviction that this story needed to be told. The government was trying to stop her. She would not be stopped.

  Except she was. While walking to her car one night, a man approached her in the parking lot. He didn’t say a word, but she later provided a perfect description of him to the police. Not surprising, given that his face was the last thing Anita Mosley ever saw.

  Her attacker had thrown acid in her eyes, blinding and scarring her for life.

  When speculation arose that the man was connected to the CIA, all the local news outlets received a letter from the attacker, claiming he was simply a patriotic American teaching a lesson to a Commie woman reporter. The police never found him to test that claim.

  After that, Anita Mosley disappeared from reporting for a while. She might have been scared off, but from everything I read about her, I doubted that was the case. Maybe a significant other urged her to take some time off. Maybe her employer forced her onto disability leave. All I could tell was that she went quiet until the Senate hearing on MKULTRA, and then she reemerged as an authority. That’s where I found the connection to Evans’s boss, Chandler. She’d mentioned him in an article. Nothing damning, just one name on a list. But it was a start.

  “She still lives in Chicago,” I said. “Freelance these days, but there’s nothing here to suggest she’d like to put MKULTRA behind her. She spoke about it last year at Northwestern.”

  “She’s still angry,” Gabriel said. “Certainly understandable, given the circumstances, though it does seem a little…”

  “Pathetic?” I regretted the word as soon as I said it. Unfair to use against a woman who’d fought so hard and suffered so much. And yet I couldn’t help seeing an element of pathos. She’d fought the CIA and lost. By the time she rebounded, the “secret” was common knowledge and she couldn’t hurt those who’d wronged her. Yet she wouldn’t drop the matter, either, doggedly struggling to keep alive a scandal no one seemed to care about.

  Still, it didn’t bother me enough to suggest we leave the poor woman alone. She’d chosen to make this her life’s work. We’d be foolish not to take advantage.

  “She’ll see us,” Gabriel said when he hung up.

  “Really?”

  “Are you surprised?” he said. “I doubt anyone other than academics has asked for her expertise in a very long time. She’s quite eager to impart it. At a price, of course.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred for an hour of her time now, plus an hour of follow-up, if required. Given the usual rate for an expert, it’s a bargain.”

  “It’d be more of a bargain if it was free.”

  “True. But think of it as a charitable donation to the victim of a tragedy. That should make you feel better.”

  “Only if I can get a tax write-off.”

  He shook his head and we left.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  We met Anita Mosley at a coffee shop. It was a neighborhood of
office buildings, meaning the shop was closed on a Saturday. She was at a stone table outside, sitting with military stiffness, hands folded on the table, staring straight ahead as cars zipped past. She was in her early sixties, a trim figure in a stylish pant-suit and perfectly coiffed brown hair, artfully streaked with gray.

  “Ms. Mosley?” I asked as we approached.

  The shades swung my way.

  “Do you want to stay here?” I said. “Or find a shop that’s open?”

  “The fact that this one is closed is why I chose it. It is public yet not public.” Her tone was crisp. “May I ask whom I’m speaking to?”

  “Olivia Taylor-Jones.”

  “Ah. The girl.” She turned to Gabriel, as if sensing him there. “And you would be the infamous Gabriel Walsh, I presume.”

  “I am,” he said as we sat.

  “Excellent. Now, I have received confirmation that the payment has been wired to my account. Thank you for that, Mr. Walsh. I know it is an inconvenient way to do business, but until the American government sees fit to print bills I can read, I’m stuck with that. Unless I emulate Ray Charles and ask to be paid in singles.” A brief, humorless smile. “Which would hardly be more convenient for either of us. Now, I believe it is Ms. Taylor-Jones who wishes the information? You do still go by that name, I presume.”

  I tensed a little. A reaction I doubted even a sighted person would notice, but she seemed to pick it up.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “Let me assure you, serial killers hold no fascination for me, and their actions have no bearing on you. I have met monsters, and they all had quite normal parents. I will admit that I find it curious that your investigation would bring you to MKULTRA, but you are being thorough, and I cannot fault that. So Ms. Taylor-Jones, is it?”

  “Olivia,” I said.

  “Thank you. Now let us begin. I can confirm that Dr. William Evans worked for the CIA from 1960 to 1969. He began as a PhD candidate under his adviser, Edgar Chandler, who was also employed by the CIA. Chandler was in charge of several MKULTRA subprojects. His name can be found in the documents turned over to the Senate subcommittee.”