And there were other images, photos of worse quality and even some crude sketches by people who claimed to have seen such a device or worked on it while employed either by the government or a defense contractor.
“Guys,” said Bug, “I am ringing all sorts of bells here. Seriously. Orpheus Gate? Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. Let me put some people on this and I’ll get back to you with the bullet points.”
Dr. Hu stared gloomily at us from a window in the big screen. “Let me study the data.”
His window vanished and we stared at each other.
Junie was thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “You said that this project was under the directorship of Marcus Erskine, right? I know that name. He’s been in the conspiracy theory rumor mill for a while. Back when I was making my list of possible governors of M3, Erskine was always in my top twenty. His sister, Lyssa, was married to Oscar Bell. She was nice but Oscar was a total shit. I think he’s the reason she committed suicide. Poor girl. She never should have married him.”
“Bug told me Bell was on your podcast once.”
“Whoa, wait,” interrupted Bolton, looking completely thrown, “you knew Oscar Bell?”
“Personally?” said Junie. “Not really. I knew Lyssa through the conspiracy community. She was a regular caller on my podcast.”
“And Bell was a guest?” asked Bolton.
“No. He called in once. I didn’t like him very much.”
“Please tell us about it,” said Mr. Church.
She nodded. “I was interviewing a man Oscar used to know. Oscar called in, clearly drunk, and laid into my guest. Accusing him of lying and distorting the truth. He accused him of having driven Oscar’s son, Prospero, to suicide, and then he accused him of keeping his son as a prisoner. Oscar was irrational and contradictory. It really upset my guest, and when Oscar threatened to find him and kill him I ended the interview. I was furious because we were really getting somewhere. We were talking about this amazing dream diary one of his patients had kept, and how the things in it were clear proof that other worlds exist and are accessible.”
Harcourt Bolton leaned forward. “Who was that man? Who was your guest?”
“Dr. Michael Greene. He used to be a psychiatrist in the Hamptons but he closed his practice, sold his house, and went into hiding after he was threatened by men in black. Closers.”
My pulse jumped. “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. His name was Michael Greene? You’re sure?”
“Positive. Why?”
“Because,” I said, “last night Bug found a police report that Oscar Bell walked into a diner in Washington state and killed the only three people in the place. A waitress, the cook, and Dr. Michael Greene. Then he killed himself.”
She stared at me. “Oh my God.”
Mr. Church removed a folder from his briefcase and placed it on the table, drummed his fingers on the closed cover for a moment, and then slid it across to Junie. However, he kept his hand there to keep the folder closed.
“Do you know who Prospero Bell is?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “He was Oscar and Lyssa Bell’s son. He was Dr. Greene’s patient.”
“Have you ever seen a picture of Prospero?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” asked Bolton.
I said, “Junie has total recall.”
“Why do you ask?” Junie said to Church.
He nudged the folder an inch closer to her. “Because so much of this centers around Prospero, I asked Bug to get me a complete workup This is a photograph taken while he was a cadet at Ballard Academy in Poland, Maine.”
There was something about the way he said this that made Junie hesitate. I hadn’t seen the photo yet, either, so I leaned against her as she opened it. I felt her body go rigid, her muscles tense as soon as she saw the picture. It was a high-res color photo of a seventeen-year-old boy in a military school uniform. Blond wavy hair, blue eyes, a splash of freckles across his cheeks.
He was male and he was twenty years younger, but in every other respect he looked like an almost identical twin of Junie Flynn.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 8, 12:41 P.M.
Harcourt Bolton looked at the photo and then at Junie. A deep frown line appeared between his brows. “I don’t understand. Did I miss something? Is Prospero Bell related to you? Was he your brother?”
Junie picked up the photo and stared at it for a long, long time. A tear broke and rolled down her freckled cheek. “Oh God,” she murmured. “There’s another one out there.…”
“Another … what?” asked Bolton.
She touched the face of Prospero Bell. “I—I think he’s like me,” she said in a ghostly whisper. Her skin was dead pale beneath her freckles and there were ghosts of old memories haunting her eyes. “I think he was another hybrid. Another hive child.”
Church looked like Church always does. The man could be on fire and he wouldn’t twitch. He ate a cookie, though, and I’m almost positive there’s some kind of subliminal code when he chooses to do that. Bolton, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to jump out of his skin. He almost looked like he was going to leap across the table and kiss Junie.
“Miss Flynn—may I call you Junie? Yes? Great … Junie, can you tell me exactly what Dr. Greene said about Prospero?”
“First off, understand two things,” she replied, “first is that Greene never named him. He referred to him as Patient X. I made the connection only after Oscar Bell accidentally outed his son when he called in to attack Greene. Second, the interview was cut short when Oscar Bell actually threatened Greene.”
“Okay, but what did he say?” repeated Bolton.
She told us a story that was equal parts fantastic, tragic, and horrible. About a genius boy who never believed he was entirely human and who found comfort only in two things. His dreams and science. Prospero said that the idea for his escape machine—that was how Greene referred to it—came to him in dreams. He said that its design was somehow encoded in the parts of his DNA that were not human. In order to find his way home—or to the place he truly believed was his home—Prospero began building versions of a device. A doorway. A gateway. The God Machine.
When Oscar Bell realized the potential for the machine, he took the first prototype away from him and sold it to the military as a new weapon of war. The thing was that the prototype was far from complete and it malfunctioned constantly. But it was those malfunctions that were the basis of the contract the kid’s father sold to the Department of Defense.
“Did he explain the nature of those side effects?” asked Bolton. He seemed very excited by this and was even sweating a little. I guess we all were.
“In general. Dr. Greene was not a physicist,” she said. “And also the Closers took all of his case notes. He had to rebuild everything in his files from memory. But … sure, he said that there were two of these ‘faults’ that Oscar sold to the government. One sounds like what’s happening around the country, like what happened in Houston, though I don’t understand how ISIL could have gotten their hands on it.”
She described the first fault for us. When the machine was first turned on there was something like a reverse power surge. All machinery around the machine—but not including the machine itself—would stop working. This included batteries. It only affected nonorganic electrical conduction. It did not shut down the central nervous system of people inside that nullification field cast by the machine.
“That’s Kill Switch,” I said, slapping the table. “There’s no way it’s not.”
“Agreed,” said Church, and even Bolton nodded.
“This means that we know what they were doing at Gateway, and it means that the ISIL attacks are our case. Boom,” I said. “Get the president on the phone.”
Bolton patted the air with a calming gesture. “Slow down, Joe. This is still theory. We can’t prove
any of this.”
I started to say something loud and nasty, but Junie touched my arm. “Let me tell the rest of it, honey,” she said.
“Do we need to hear more?” asked Bolton. “Kill Switch is the thing we need to be afraid of and it’s what we need to stop. My guess is that Erskine was using it to create a weapon to be used against drones. Don’t forget, they had a project in the works called Freefall.”
“And we’ll pursue that,” said Church, “but for now let’s hear the rest of what Ms. Flynn has to share.”
Bolton looked annoyed and impatient. I could sympathize. I wanted to jump right on this. If ISIL had a directed-energy weapon that could knock down our drones, then it would cut our combat effectiveness down by one hell of a lot. I started to say something but caught Church watching me. He gave me a tiny shake of his head.
Junie said, “Dr. Greene said that one of the other faults of the machine was that while it was in idle mode some people—not most, just a small percentage—experienced two distinct types of unusually vivid dreams. The largest majority of those affected had dreams in which they saw monsters and alien landscapes and images that can best be described as psychedelic. Surreal. The boy told the doctor that he believed these people were actually traveling to those worlds, that the energetic discharge transported their consciousness through the dimensional barriers so that what they saw were beings and locations that existed in other worlds than ours. Greene said that the boy was convinced that the entire surrealism art movement was brought into being because certain people had been touched, in one way or another, by this energy. They had journeyed to other worlds in their dreams and then tried to capture what they’d seen in their paintings. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst … artists like that. Greene said that the boy told him that there was a whole group of writers who had been similarly influenced.”
“Let me guess … H. P. Lovecraft and his crew?”
She frowned. “How did you know that?”
“We’ve been chasing pieces of this,” said Church. “Continue, please.”
“Well,” she said slowly, “even though Greene lost contact with the boy and had to flee the Closers, he never let go of this. He did a lot of very quiet research. He thinks the energetic discharge may have been what drove Hitler mad. And he thought that these same kind of dreams might have been what kicked off the psychedelic movement of the sixties. People who’d had those dreams who were using drugs to find their way back to that other world.”
“I don’t see how this is useful to us,” said Bolton. “It’s interesting as a cultural phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem like it poses a threat. The Kill Switch is our primary concern.”
She looked at Bolton for a long, thoughtful moment. “You’re with the CIA?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“I’m surprised you don’t already know about this stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remote viewing,” she said. “Project Stargate?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.
“It was a program started by the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“Wait,” I said, “I’m lost. Wasn’t Stargate an old TV show?”
“This is different,” said Church. “Project Stargate was a clandestine research project.”
He gave us the lowdown. The Stargate project had been a covert line of research based primarily at Fort Meade in Maryland and overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency and SRI International, a defense contractor. The goal of Stargate had been to determine the authenticity and potential of psychic phenomena. The officer in charge of it was Lieutenant Frederick Atwater, known as “Skip” to his friends. Skip was an aide to Major General Albert Stubblebine. According to DIA and CIA legend, Skip was a “psychic headhunter” for the project, searching for candidates who scored high on the ESP evaluations. People whose abilities might open the door to the first generation of psychic spies.
The project was high concept and, had it worked, it would have changed the nature of espionage. Imagine it. A psychic spy was, according to Stargate, an operative who would not need to physically visit an enemy location or foreign country, but who would instead be able to project his consciousness there and remotely view the enemy, view their installations, overhear conversations, and so on. It was an outlandish idea that everyone took seriously, and the United States was far from being the only nation actively involved in this research. The Russians had gone farthest with it and had spent millions trying to not only get inside the heads of enemy agents and scientists, but to hijack them, to psychically control their actions. It was like carjacking someone’s mind.
Scary stuff. Considering that I have at least three people inside my head at any given time, I knew the terror of ceding control. I was a different person when the Modern Man or the Killer was in the driver’s seat.
Junie said, “The DIA handed the Stargate program to the CIA.”
“And the Agency canned it,” said Bolton, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “It was nonsense and it didn’t work.”
He told us that the Agency officially concluded that ESP was not provable, any results were not reproducible, and it was all, essentially, a waste of time and money. If the Russians got anywhere with their program, which was nicknamed “Remote Control,” it didn’t keep the Soviet Union from collapsing. Bolton said that everyone dropped their research on it. A book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was written about it, published in 2004 and made into a George Clooney movie in 2009. Neither the book nor film actually mentioned Stargate, though conspiracy theories abounded. From the military intelligence perspective, however, it was a failure and it was dumped.
“And yet,” said Junie, “Prospero Bell told his therapist that this kind of thing was a side effect of this machine. This God Machine or Orpheus Gate, or whatever we need to call it.”
“Sorry,” said Bolton, “I’ll buy the electrical null field, because we’re seeing that in play. But psychic projection and psychic possession is too far-out, even for me.”
I turned and studied him. “Then how do you explain what happened with Rudy Sanchez, Captain Craft, Glory Price, and a lot of other people? How do you explain the two surfer boys who attacked me yesterday? No offense, Harcourt, but are you going to sit there and tell me that you’ll believe in interdimensional travel, electrical null fields, and this God Machine and not the psychic projection stuff? I mean, come on, Erskine had a project division coded Dreamwalking. What the hell else could it have been?”
He gave me a tolerant smile. “For the record, Joe, I never said that I believed that the God Machine did anything more than disrupt electricity. I certainly don’t think we’re dealing with cross-dimensional travel, and I’m sorry, but psychic warfare was researched ad nauseam and all they discovered was a way to squander a whole lot of taxpayer dollars. No … I’ll buy a lot, but that doesn’t work for me.”
He stood up, smiled and glanced around, then gave another shake of his head.
“Junie,” he said, “you are a remarkable woman and you’ve brought us some incredibly valuable information, but we need to stay focused. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I need to get on the phone to the president. I have to try and convince him that the DMS hasn’t lost a step getting to first base and you, Captain Ledger, have to be taken off the bench.”
He left behind a big and very pregnant silence. Church sat for a moment considering the door that Bolton had closed behind him as he left. He slowly ate a Nilla wafer and made no comment about Bolton’s parting remarks.
Something occurred to me and I dug a sheet of paper out of our case notes and placed it in front of Junie. “Bug said that there was a list of ancient books among the papers of one of the Gateway team. He ran it by Circe and she said that it was part of something called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”
“Oh, sure, the Pauline Index. What about it?”
I told her about the inclusion of the supposed fictional works by H. P. Lovecraft and the others.
; “Oh,” she said, “you’re talking about the Unlearnable Truths.”
Church stiffened. “How is it you know that phrase?”
Junie shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Greene called those books. When Oscar Bell called, one of the things he ranted about was how he’d ruined himself by trying to find those books.”
“Did he say why he wanted them?” asked Church, and maybe there was some actual human emotion in his voice. Some real excitement.
“Prospero seemed to believe that these books contained some kind of mathematical code that would help make his machine run correctly. And by ‘correctly’ he meant that it would open the door to his world. The conversation never got farther than that—that’s when Oscar Bell started making threats and it all fell apart.” She touched Prospero’s photo. “I heard rumors that there were experiments with certain cell lines. Not clones exactly, but what they called ‘birth pairs.’ Until now I never knew if that was true.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Now I know. God … Prospero Bell was my brother.”
We sat there in silence for a while, each of us deep in speculation as to what this all meant. Then two things happened that changed the course of the day. Maybe the course of the world.
A call came in on Church’s private line. He didn’t put it on speaker, so I only heard his half of it. “Violin,” he said, “it’s good to hear from you. Your mother said that you’ve been off the radar for quite a while. She was concerned.” He listened. Listened some more. Then he said, “You should have called me. I would have been able to bring you in. No, I don’t care what your mother has been telling you about us. The DMS is not falling apart.” He shot me a look that dared me to contradict him. I mimed zipping my mouth shut. To Violin he said, “Where are you now? Very well. Go to the Hangar. Aunt Sallie will arrange transport here.” He paused. “I’m sorry, who did you say you were with? Really? That is very, very interesting. Yes, bring him along. I would be extremely interested to meet him, too. Fly safe and don’t worry. Bring the item with you.”