She gave an odd little laugh. “Sounds rubber-room worthy when you put it like that, but it’s hardly a new concept. Certain principles in quantum physics suggest that the universe is made up of a framework of dimensions connected by these doorways. We’re unaware of their existence because our physical senses only allow us to perceive our own three-dimensional reality. But what if our perception of reality is just an illusory phenomenon?”
“Meaning?” he asked skeptically.
“Meaning that experiments on the subatomic level have determined that our own consciousness can and does affect matter outside our physical bodies. Therefore, consciousness can and does affect our perception of reality. That’s the essence of the Quantum Theory of Observer-Created Reality. There is no such thing as an objective reality. It’s all in our heads. Everything is consciousness. Remember that. You’ll need to grasp that concept in order to understand the rest of what I have to tell you. That is…if you want me to continue.” She gave him a doubtful glance, but it seemed to Lassiter that she was no longer reticent about talking to him. In some ways, she appeared almost eager, as if she found it a relief to finally have someone willing to suspend disbelief long enough to hear her out.
“Why didn’t you use one of these invisible doorways earlier when you were running away from me?”
“I didn’t want anyone to see me do it. And besides—” she made a helpless gesture with her hand “—it’s not something I like to do. It’s not…normal. And it’s dangerous on the other side. Unstable somehow. I’m afraid once I’ve gone through, once I’ve ‘phased,’ the doorways will close up and I won’t be able to find my way out. I’ll just become energy or matter or…something.”
“How is it you can see these doorways when no one else can?”
She glanced away for a moment, and Lassiter had the feeling that she’d come to the part of her story that made her the most uncomfortable. “I can see the doorways because my mind has been programmed to see them. My consciousness has been altered to accept them as part of my reality.”
He frowned. “Are you talking about brainwashing?”
“It goes farther than that.”
“Who programmed you?”
She got up and walked over to the window to stare out. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve done some research…” Her voice trailed off as she moved restlessly back to her chair and sat down. “I think it goes back to my childhood. My family used to live on Long Island, not far from the old Montauk Air Force Station. When I was five, I was abducted from our backyard by two men whose faces and voices I can’t recall. In fact, I have no memory at all until four years later when I was returned to the same backyard.”
“Wait a minute,” he said sharply. “This isn’t some alien-abduction fantasy, is it?”
Melanie laughed again, this time with a hint of real amusement. “I’m pretty sure the men who kidnapped me were human. But as far as what they did to me…” The laughter died away and she fell silent.
Lassiter went cold inside as he watched her. Her head was bent. She was staring at her hands, but he had no idea what she was really seeing. “Were the kidnappers apprehended?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t give the police anything to go on because I didn’t remember anything.”
“Did you ever try regression hypnosis?”
“My mother wouldn’t allow it. She wouldn’t allow any kind of therapy. We never even talked about what happened. She thought we were both better off not knowing. She managed to convince herself that some kindly couple had kidnapped me and had taken very good care of me until their guilt made them bring me back home.”
“My God.”
Her eyes closed briefly. “I know.”
Those two words, spoken in such a soft voice, said it all. The despair and helplessness. The subtle edge of anger. No wonder once she’d allowed a tiny crack in the dam, it had all come pouring out. “So how did you cope with all this?”
“I didn’t. Not very well, at least. I went through some pretty rough years. I guess for a while I tried to pretend right along with my mother that everything was fine, and maybe I could have convinced myself that it was if it hadn’t been for the screams.” Her gaze lifted to Lassiter’s. “The screams of the other children.”
He went almost deathly still. “There were other kidnapped children where you were?”
“I can’t remember them, but I have a sense that there were…a lot of them.”
Her restlessness suddenly infected Lassiter, and he got up to pace. “You have no idea who abducted you or why? Or where you were taken?”
“I didn’t for years. But after the first incident of phasing, I began to do some research. The natural place to start seemed to be my abduction. I was stunned to find literally mountains of information about the Montauk Air Force Station and a covert, subterranean operation known as Project Phoenix. Have you ever heard of it?”
Something clicked in Lassiter’s mind, but he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What about the Philadelphia Experiment?”
He stopped his pacing and stared at her. “That’s one of those stories that conspiracy nuts get off on. Like who shot JFK. They’re always backed up with a lot of rumor and speculation but very few facts.”
“But like all legends, there’s usually a grain of truth in them,” Melanie said. “And as this story goes, a U.S. Navy ship undergoing an experiment using magnetic fields back in World War II disappeared from Philadelphia Harbor. I don’t mean it went missing. It literally dematerialized. When the Eldridge returned to its original position hours later, the sailors aboard were all violently ill. Some of them were insane. Some were dead. And at least one crew member was missing. The survivors were eventually dismissed from the military as unfit to serve.”
“So you’re saying when the ship disappeared, it entered this other dimension?”
“That seems to be the consensus, yes.”
Lassiter rubbed the back of his neck. “Wasn’t there a movie made about this experiment? Are you sure you’re not just regurgitating the Hollywood version of what happened?”
“All the information I gathered was out there long before any movie was ever made,” Melanie said. “And I’m not trying to sell this to you as fact. I don’t know if any part of it’s true. I’m simply telling you the trail I followed when I tried to figure out what had been done to me. The technology is grounded in quantum physics and seems to lead back to the experiment that was conducted on that ship back in 1943.”
Lassiter started to pace again. “Go on.”
“After the ship rematerialized, the scientist in charge of the operation, Dr. Nicholas Kessler, was so appalled by the condition of the crew that he tried to sabotage his own project in order to ensure that the experiment could never be repeated. The congressional oversight committee was terrified that the technology would fall into the wrong hands, so they cut off funding and shut down the project entirely. But you can’t un-open Pandora’s box. A clandestine rogue agency got involved. Their private funding allowed them to operate beneath the radar of congressional oversight, as well as the CIA and NSA, and they persuaded Dr. Kessler’s protégé, a man named Joseph Von Meter, to continue the experiments.”
“At Montauk.”
She nodded. “Yes. In a series of underground bunkers. At first, Dr. Von Meter concerned himself with the side effects suffered by the ship’s crew. He concluded that the intensity of the magnetic fields in the original experiment had produced a kind of artificial reality around the ship. An abnormal plane of existence that had no relation to our three-dimensional reality. Therefore, anyone trapped within the magnetic field became severely disoriented, sometimes to the point of insanity.”
“In other words, their physical bodies were placed in a situation their minds couldn’t accept.”
Melanie nodded. “That’s exactly right. Von Meter experimented with ways to overcome this problem by creating reference points for the individual test subjects. I don
’t really understand how it worked, but it had something to do with generating a false electromagnetic background that would give their physical bodies something to lock on to. A false earth link, in effect. Later, when Project Phoenix expanded into altered states of consciousness and observer-created realities, a much simpler and effective method was devised. The test subjects were simply given a new reality.”
“Who were these test subjects?” Lassiter asked.
“Initially, they used indigents and military personnel who had no families, but then they discovered that children were far more susceptible to altered states of consciousness than adults. Most of the subjects were males between the ages of nine and twelve. They were called the Montauk Boys, and their acceptance of engineered realities was so complete that they could phase in and out of dimensions without the use of computers or electromagnetic equipment.”
“How were they persuaded to accept these…what did you call them? Engineered realities?”
Lassiter thought he saw her shudder before she answered. “A number of methods were used, including sleep deprivation. But fear was the prime motivator. Some of those children were literally scared out of their minds.”
It had suddenly become unbearably stuffy in the room. Lassiter walked over to the window and opened it. He stood for a moment, gazing down at the street as he tried to block the screams inside his own head.
“Shall I go on?” she asked softly.
He nodded without looking at her.
“When they grew older, the Montauk Boys were also trained in combat, but I’m not sure if they were physically trained or simply programmed. They became a kind of special-ops team of super soldiers known as Delta Force, although oddly enough, there seems to be no connection to the army’s elite commandoes. But even as far back as Vietnam, there were rumors inside the military of a special-forces team connected to Project Phoenix that could enter a heavily guarded building behind enemy lines, carry out a mission and return to their home base without ever having been seen.”
Finally Lassiter turned to her. “You said most of the test subjects were boys. Why did they take you?”
“My father was a scientist who worked for the government.” She hesitated. “Or at least, that’s what I was always told. Now I believe he was part of the Montauk projects.”
He gazed at her in disbelief. “You think your own father had you abducted and subjected to mind-control experiments?”
Lassiter couldn’t see her expression clearly, but for a moment, he could have sworn he saw tears glistening in her eyes. Then she glanced away. “That’s what I’m here to find out. And now that I’ve told you everything, I need to know what you plan to do with the information I just gave you.”
He turned back to the street. “We had a deal, remember? You tell me the truth and I’ll help you find your father.”
“I don’t need your help,” she bit out. “I need you to stay out of this. I need you to go back to guarding Kruger’s oil wells and forget what you saw last night. Forget what I told you just now.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“Why not? Look, everything I just told you, I got from the Internet, mostly from so-called conspiracy-theory Web sites. For God’s sake, any normal person would have already written me off as some sort of mental case.”
“Not if they’d seen what I did last night,” Lassiter said. “You may not want to admit it, but you’re involved in something that has the potential to turn the world as we know it upside down. And that’s a very dangerous situation to be in.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Whether she really believed that or not, Lassiter had no idea. She didn’t strike him as the naive type, but he had no doubt she could be stubborn.
“Besides,” she said with a frown, “why should you get involved? Why do you care about any of this?”
“I care. Let’s just leave it at that.” He turned and started walking toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked anxiously.
“It’s late, and I have to be up early in the morning. And I’ve got some thinking to do.”
“About what?” When he didn’t respond, she said in desperation, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
He still didn’t answer her.
“Lassiter!”
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder.
She rose from her chair and started toward him, as if she meant to somehow physically restrain him. “I need to know something else before you go.”
“What?”
Her hand trembled as she pushed back her hair. “How did you get in here? The safety latch is still on the door, so you couldn’t have used a key. Did you climb up the lower balconies and jimmy the lock on the French door?”
He gave a slight shrug. “That would be one way to do it.”
Then he turned, took a step toward the door, and…disappeared.
Vanished into thin air.
Melanie sank to the floor, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Chapter Five
By midafternoon the sun had burned away the low-lying fog that drifted down from the mountains, but in the higher elevations, where guerrilla activity was heaviest, a lingering mist—and what it might hide—had Lassiter worried.
He’d been dogged by a premonition of doom all day, and the feeling had only grown stronger when Danny Taglio called him on the radio that afternoon and asked to meet him in Sector Seven.
Lassiter had a pretty good idea what was on the younger man’s mind. Taglio had clearly been disturbed by what the surveillance camera had picked up two nights ago, and he wasn’t the kind of man to let the matter drop.
He paced anxiously near the fence when Lassiter arrived at the rendezvous point a few minutes later.
Lassiter parked the jeep and got out. “What’s going on?”
Taglio shrugged, but there was something in his eyes, a telltale gleam of nerves that made him glance away. “Hell if I know, Lassiter. I keep coming over here trying to figure out how she did it.”
Lassiter frowned. “What’s to figure out? I thought we agreed it was just an illusion created by the fog.”
“I’m not so sure about that now.”
Lassiter let the barest hint of derision creep into his voice. “What’s the matter, kid? Still think you saw a ghost?”
Taglio’s expression turned defensive. “Hey, you have to admit, the way she disappeared was weird as hell.”
Lassiter shrugged without comment.
“But even if it was an optical illusion,” Taglio persisted, “that still wouldn’t explain what she was doing out here in the first place. Santa Elena is the nearest village, and the only other civilization within miles is the guerrilla encampments in the mountains. What the hell was she doing out here all alone in the jungle?”
“Maybe she got lost.” Lassiter kept his expression neutral, but his tone dropped a couple of octaves, sending the clear and unmistakable message that he didn’t appreciate having his time wasted like this.
But Taglio ignored the warning. “I’ve been giving this some thought, and the way I figure it, she was either nosing around trying to get a fix on our security or she came out here to meet someone. And I’m thinking maybe it was both.”
“Meet someone? Like who?”
Taglio paused, his gaze shifting away from Lassiter’s. “Why don’t you tell me? You disappeared awfully fast that night. And you refused to put the camp on alert. I guess I’m wondering why.”
“You got something to say, spit it out,” Lassiter said coldly.
Taglio’s gaze slid back to his. “All right, I will. You wouldn’t be playing both ends against the middle, would you, Lassiter?”
The accusation caught Lassiter by surprise, mostly because it was so far off the mark. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Taglio pulled a videotape from his jacket pocket and held it up. “I’m talking about the fact that one of the cameras picked up an intruder and you
not only refused to put the camp on alert, you didn’t even report it to Kruger.”
“Not that I need to justify myself to you, but why would I bother Kruger with something like that? You said yourself none of the alarms were tripped.”
“Maybe because somebody had already disarmed them. And maybe that somebody was you.”
Taglio had guts. Lassiter had to give him that. “You better be careful here, Tag. You understand me?”
“Oh, I understand all right.” The younger man suddenly seemed emboldened. “I’ve got a few sources of my own around here, and they’ve been telling me for weeks that an outsider, maybe someone connected with this camp, is working with the rebels. I think that someone is you, Lassiter. I think you sold Kruger out.”
“You’re full of it, Taglio.” Lassiter turned back to the jeep, but the other man caught his arm. Lassiter flung off his hand and gave him a look that had made men with far more experience that Danny Taglio squirm.
He took a step back, still clutching the tape. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t turn this over to Kruger.”
Lassiter gave a low, humorless laugh. “You think you got something on me, go ahead. Show it to Kruger. And after you do, pack up your gear and get the hell out.” He started walking toward the jeep.
“Maybe the tape alone doesn’t prove anything,” Taglio said behind him. “But I think Kruger would find it pretty damn curious that you didn’t want anyone else to see it. And I think he’d be even more interested to learn you were in that woman’s hotel room last night.”
That stopped Lassiter cold. His features went tight with anger as he spun back around.
Taglio’s eyes glinted in satisfaction. “I thought that would get your attention. See, as it happens, I was in Santa Elena myself last night. I spotted you hanging around outside Hotel del Paraíso, so I decided to go in and have a little talk with the desk clerk. I gave him your description, slipped him some bills, and he couldn’t have been more helpful. He said you’d been in earlier asking questions about an American woman named Melanie Stark.”
His Mysterious Ways Page 6