by Mark Davis
“And there were some rough moments in our investigation,” she said. “Also, some … unwanted feelings of attraction. Not at all appropriate to these circumstances.”
“A man you’re working with?”
“Yes,” she said. “And a woman.”
Professional to the core, George only emitted a quick chuckle.
“This is a new side of you,” he said, smiling.
“Tell me about it.”
George Adler Abelman had a squat, strong frame. As an undergraduate at Yale, he had been a champion wrestler, an air of athleticism he retained decades later. George’s most distinctive feature had not changed, his blue eyes, clear as cut glass after cataract surgery. Those eyes appeared moist and slightly magnified by his glasses, which combined with his ever-present slight smile and salt-and-pepper mustache, gave George an aura of beneficence.
George’s unkempt hair had now gone completely white, a wreath framing his pink face.
“I will always be when and where you need me,” he said. “You were my best student and my worthiest successor.”
He turned to walk again before he could see Elizabeth blush.
“But I came to Oslo for other reasons,” he said. “Research, something that may wrap up my lifelong quest to map the suicidal impulse.”
“Really, what’s that about?”
“Elizabeth, my dear, you know all about it. I just arrived here to begin research on the Pulpit Rock suicides.”
“What?”
“Clear examples, I believe, of cult manipulation. It will make a hell of a paper. Probably a book.”
They walked in silence for a few beats as Elizabeth took in this news.
“But George, I am here to do the same thing.”
“I thought you were working on this as an active consultant to the U.S. government, through the State Department, I believe.”
More likely, Elizabeth realized, through the CIA budget, given what she had learned from Nasrin. That meant she was really working for Charlie Bowie.
“Yes, I am an active consultant,” she said. “What better way to conduct research?”
“And you think that is ethical?”
George’s question wounded like a pinprick, though he voiced it in that friendly way of his.
“I wouldn’t be planning it if I thought otherwise.”
George nodded.
Elizabeth knew what he was thinking—that it would be hard to balance the act of active analysis for the authorities while also organizing the data in front of her into theoretical constructs. Promises would be made, data parsed for certain confidentialities.
But it was not impossible. And certainly not unethical.
“There are many mysteries in this one,” George said. “Clear signs of cult conversion and indoctrination.”
“And yet most cults physically and socially isolate the subjects,” she said. “These people probably never met each other until their last dinner together, which apparently was quite festive.”
“Festivity is common before these events,” George said. “I’d be festive too if I focused only on all the things that I would no longer have to do … no longer attend faculty meetings, no longer make my TAs clean the lab, no longer have to floss or pay taxes.”
“No longer see a sunset,” Elizabeth replied. “No longer trace the lines of a lover’s palm.”
“Or eat chocolate,” George said.
“Or drink a really good indie beer on a hot day. This case leaves us with the likelihood that all the work of conversion and reality distortion occurred over the Internet.”
“That is what brought me over here,” George said. “Internet cults are common, but they exist to lure one into the trap. They have never before, at least in my experience, been the trap itself.”
“And there is something else,” Elizabeth said. “There is a distinct religious element at work.”
“That does not surprise me in the least, as you would know,” George said.
“What will surprise you is the religion that was used to foment this ideation.”
He turned his palms to the sky, looking to her for the answer.
“Ásatrú,” she said.
He laughed.
“You mean Odin and Thor and other cartoon characters?” he said. “Are you telling me that these erudite people became Vikings?”
“I am convinced they became followers of Freyja, the goddess who receives the honored dead and leads them to a paradise hall much like Valhalla.”
George stopped again, his expression fierce.
“That’s preposterous,” he said in a tone with which one would admonish a dog or a graduate student. “An XRO executive. A drug company CEO. An award-winning playwright and a bestselling novelist. Worshippers of a goddess last seen painted on the side of vans at stoner concerts!”
“Their belief was subtler than it sounds. They saw Freyja as a symbol, a guide to a numinous reality.”
“Sounds like the Heaven’s Gate suicide so many years ago, only that was about a …”
“Comet.”
“Yes, a comet,” he said, looking a little embarrassed by his memory lapse. “Hale-Bopp now, wasn’t it? Supposed to take them to a new realm. But Heaven’s Gate was a full-on indoctrination cult in San Diego, if I recall correctly. And yet you say this was all done on the Internet?”
“So I can see you are just getting started,” Elizabeth said. “When I find out, George, you can read about it in my paper.”
He laughed, but his eyes didn’t.
___________
“What is N, uh, Dimethyltryptamine?”
A moment before hearing this question, Elizabeth had given George another hug and had agreed to discuss the issue of research further. Her little jibe had prompted George to bring up the prospect of working together, a paper that could be “our final collaboration.” He seemed thrilled at the prospect. Elizabeth was not. This was her find and he was poaching.
But she didn’t say that. Not yet.
After bidding goodbye to George, Elizabeth walked down Karl Johans gate, a broad avenue lined with T-shirt shops and overpriced restaurants. She heard a ringtone coming from her purse—Abba’s “Mamma Mia”—programmed by Max, another sign of his puckish humor.
But it wasn’t Max on the line. It was Nasrin with her question.
“It’s called DMT,” Elizabeth replied. “A hallucinogen—ayahuasca, or Vine of the Spirits—used by some Amerindians in the Amazon for spiritual journeys. Why, are you thinking about taking some the next time you go clubbing?”
“Not yet, though a few more meetings that include Charlie Bowie and I might,” Nasrin said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been a real inspector, and the drug beat was never my thing. Tell me you don’t have to actually go to the Amazon to get it?”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “DMT was first synthesized by a Hungarian scientist in the Fifties. As a recreational drug it is not common, but not unheard of, either. Why?”
“DMT was apparently the drug of choice for our suicides,” Nasrin said. “There were no surprises in the coroner’s final report except for this notation of N-Dimethyltryptamine. Traces were found in the bloodstreams of Shrewsbury, Drummond and Goddard.”
“Does the report put any numbers to that?”
Elizabeth heard the rattling of paper over the line.
“Yes, uh, ‘widespread lipophilic binding in all subjects let’s see—87 mg, 46 and 78 ...’”
“Are you sure you read that right?” Elizabeth said. “Even if it had been in their fat for a while, at these levels they had to have taken a substantial dose a few hours before, probably on their way up the mountain. They must have been merrily tripping all the way to the top.”
“Like LSD?”
“No, more like psilocybin, you know, mushrooms.”
“And with it you might see God or unicorns or anything?”
“Not quite,” Elizabeth said, and
paused. “Now this is interesting. The odd thing about this drug is that in majority of users it induces a particular kind of hallucination, usually an encounter with a shamanistic entity. There is something about how DMT interacts with the human brain that causes these entities to often appear to users as shapeshifting elves. Aficionados call them ‘fractal elves’ and sometimes, ‘machine elves.’”
“Or perhaps Freyja’s elves?” Nasrin asked, voicing what Elizabeth was already thinking. “Ready to escort one to Fuckvanger or some such?”
Elizabeth thought of the beings the seven might have seen in the dark shadows of the early morning forest on their way up to their deaths … sprites, fairies, trolls, strange and dark divinities of the forest. Those images made her shudder.
“If they took it in the morning at the start of their journey, it would have partially worn off by the time they jumped,” Elizabeth said. “Their exertion would have helped burn it off.”
“Determined lot,” Nasrin said.
___________
“Sign this.”
Charles Bowie set down a glowing tablet. Elizabeth read the contract. It contained a non-disclosure agreement just between her and the U.S. State Department—I, Elizabeth Barrett Browne, M.D., Ph.D., agree not to disclose, discuss, by omission, commission, any business of such and such and so and so, by which and forthwith, so help me God.
She signed it with her fingertip.
“I was supposed to have taken care of that right away,” Bowie said. “I should have flown back to London and brought you here myself, instead of letting you catch a free ride with Nasrin. I gave her a chance to get her hooks into you.”
“I’ve always understood that my work was for the U.S. government,” Elizabeth said.
“Still, I got a demerit all the same for waiting to make it official,” he said.
Bowie tucked the tablet away in a briefcase next to his seat. They sat in adjacent pools of lights, just the two of them in the cabin as the government-issued Gulfstream roared through the black, moonless sky over the North Sea toward Britain.
“I want to impress upon you, Elizabeth, you’re not just working for Uncle Sam,” he said. “You’re working for me. You have been all along.”
“You mean the CIA.”
“I mean not MI6. Friends though we are with our cousins across the sea, you may not share intel with any foreign government. And do watch out for Nasrin. I hear she can be a nasty piece of work, though she’s not bad looking for a dyke.”
“Are we in the same century?”
“Probably not.”
Bowie rested a scotch and water on his stomach. Elizabeth picked up her little plastic cup with Ringnes beer from her tray and took a sip.
“Why bring me along?”
Bowie looked down at his drink, his bearded jowls spread like cake batter.
He bit his lip, weighing a decision.
“Did you really understand that contract? What we discuss, you can never reveal.”
“You can see all my fingers,” Elizabeth said. “None of them are crossed. Besides, I don’t want to be sued by my own government.”
“We need you because what we’re dealing with here involves the science of the mind,” he said. “None of the agency shrinks are quite up to this, not anymore. We once had top-notch research psychologists. But the shrinks we have now are mainly for PTSD and rooting out problem people. And when it comes to theoretical research, everyone says that you’re the tops.”
He took a sip of scotch. He had something more to say.
“You’ve surely come across MKULTRA in your reading.”
Elizabeth nodded, wary, not sure where this was going.
MKULTRA was the CIA’s infamous mind-control experiment in the Fifties and Sixties to develop push-button mind control through psychedelics, hypnosis and abuse—mental, physical and sexual. It was a front-page scandal when it spilled out of a Senate investigation in the 1970s.
“Today’s kinder, gentler CIA can’t touch anything like that, but we still have all the research, miles and miles of paper,” Bowie said, leaving her to wonder if he was dangling forbidden data like a treat before a dog. “The sensational stuff with drugs and sex got all the headlines. But the really intriguing results have to do with RF.”
“You mean radio frequency?” Elizabeth said. “For what?”
“For brain hacking.”
She set her drink down on the armrest.
“Are you telling me the CIA found a way to control someone’s brain remotely? With radio waves?”
Bowie smiled.
“Why not?” he said. “It’s no secret that we can use RF to resonate and control cellphone circuits. Why not RF for the brain?”
“I’ll tell you why not. A cellphone is digital. It has discrete on and off circuits that electromagnetic waves can ping. The brain is wet tissue. It is analog. And it is supremely complex. We still don’t know how it all works. So there’s no way to ping a wet, analog brain with RF.”
“We don’t understand quantum mechanics, either,” Bowie countered. “But modern technology is based on it.”
“Are you telling me that you made RF control of people work?” Elizabeth said. “Should I make a tin foil hat?”
“Not quite,” Bowie said, lifting his drink again, which had left a dark ring on his blue shirt. “But the agency was convinced back then that Remote Neural Monitoring and Control was possible with the right kind of electromagnetic signal.”
“And this has what to do with the Pulpit Rock?”
“Think about it. Leading executives and cultural figures fall for an implausible cult my stupid cousin Vern would see through, to kill themselves in such a preposterous way. Something had to be working on them.”
“DMT,” she said.
“I’ve read the autopsy results, too,” Bowie said. “The drug was a factor. But the eggheads at Langley wonder if the drug was the charge and RT was the trigger.”
“Why do you persist in thinking that?”
Bowie stared at her, as if he were noticing something on her mouth that needed brushing off.
“Are you seeing someone?” Bowie said, leaning in a bit, smiling for once.
“I’m not seeing you,” she said, looking right at him.
___________
Shafts of golden light broke through low clouds to inflame barns, bushy oaks, meandering lanes and villages of stone and thatch. They touched down at a private airport near the village of Kemble.
A black sedan from the embassy idled a few steps beyond the stepladder of their jet. A young driver took Bowie and Elizabeth along a winding Cotswold road for the half-hour drive to GCHQ, stopping once to let a shepherd herd his flock off a narrow road.
The hulking mass of the Government Communication Headquarters rose like an alien thing out of a landscape of mossy rock. Morning sunlight glinted off glass walls framed by brushed steel under a round roof of bright aluminum. While their driver presented his credentials to a military guard with a submachine gun, Elizabeth noticed children running around a swingset in a playground behind razor wire.
“Welcome to GCHQ,” the guard said.
Nasrin, Thor and a young lady in a corporate uniform waited for them on the other side of the security checkpoint. The young woman’s name was Glenda, and she was pleased as punch to be escorting them around “the Doughnut” on this fair morning.
“How was your flight?” Nasrin asked Elizabeth, sotto voce.
“Fine,” she whispered back. “Only one clumsy attempt at the mile-high club.”
Glenda led them down an open walkway just inside the structure’s three-story glass walls. The heels of many shoes echoed off the native limestone interior as they circumnavigated the Doughnut. British officers in crisp blue-gray RAF uniforms walked among nerds loping about in short-sleeves, jeans and tennis shoes.
Glenda took them into the office of Bureau and Legal Affairs, where under Charlie Bowie’s guidance, Thor, N
asrin and Elizabeth signed further statements promising not to disclose anything they happened to learn or accidentally see while inside the Doughnut, so forth and such with, so help them God.
___________
“Iceland, always bloody Iceland,” Thor said.
A digital map of Europe glowed on a large HD screen. An animated redline shot straight from Reykjavik to Hommelvik, and then a blue line shot back.
Glenda had turned them over to Ian, a wiry young man in a thin gray sweater and jeans. Ian’s head was thatched with an unruly tuft of straw. After some introductions, and the mutual sniffing of nerd pheromones with Thor, Ian led them through his digital tracking of what he called the “Hommelvik intercept.” As he spoke, Ian rocked back and forth in his executive chair in front of a large Apple monitor. All the while, an officer in an RAF uniform stood erect against the wall behind them. She had not introduced herself and did not say a word.
“No surprises there, Thor,” Ian said. “All roads do tend to lead to Reykjavik.”
Ian performed a few clicks, and the globe swiveled and Iceland took on geographic features. Reykjavik swelled until the whole screen was filled with a crystalline image of five or six large structures along a dock. A man smoked a cigarette at the water’s edge.
“That is about a ten times improvement over Google Earth,” Thor said.
“Oh, that’s nothing, you should see—”
The female RAF officer in the back of the room ahemed.
Ian glanced back at her.
“Sorry,” Ian said.
He hit a few toggles and the image of the buildings fluoresced, the roofs turned a dark magenta, bright red blobs floating off the heat vents.
“The servers in there must have the power of a small city running through them,” Thor said.
“Good thing the Icies have geothermal energy,” Ian said. “There’s a little fish restaurant just a hundred feet to the south of there by the way. Spectacular crab soup.”
“So all this digital illustration is impressive to look at,” Nasrin said. “But it tells us nothing we didn’t already know.”