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

  Randall smiled again and motioned toward the ballroom. “I believe the term for this type of event is ‘large tent’—there is sufficient room within for any and all conspiracy theories. Much like a Jesse Jackson campaign rally. I do not blame your Amanda for passing on it.” He chuckled. “No, not at all.”

  Cam took his time drying his hands. He figured Randall was around eighty, but sharp and vibrant. And he obviously hadn’t followed Cam into the bathroom to inquire about Cam’s love life.

  Randall continued. “I was observing you during this last lecture. Unless I am an even worse poker player than my friends tell me I am, my guess is you are not a subscriber to the reptilian alien theory?”

  Cam shook his head. “I’m pretty open-minded—”

  Randall interrupted. “Which is a fine thing to be. I have never observed anyone’s brain falling out because of it,” he smiled.

  Cam laughed. “As I was saying, I could even be convinced aliens landed here. But reptilian aliens breeding with humans and creating a ruling class? Sorry.”

  Randall nodded. “Quite.” He flushed the urinal and turned to face Cam; one bushy eyebrow lifted toward the ceiling. “As everyone knows, it was a race of alien giants, not reptiles, who bred with our women.”

  “I’m sorry, giants?”

  “Are you not a Bible scholar, Mr. Thorne?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “What’s that old expression? Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man whereas fable tells us about a million men. That’s what the Bible is, you see, a fable. But it tells the history of mankind.”

  “But what does this have to do with giants?”

  “Genesis, chapter six, verse four.” He cleared his throat and spoke in a deep, sonorous manner, apparently in an attempt to be more God-like, the effect somewhat mitigated by the fact he was standing with his zipper down in front of a urinal. “There were giants on the earth in those days; the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.”

  Cam replayed the words in his mind. “Wait, does that say the sons of God mated with human females to produce giants?”

  “That is precisely what it says. You have heard of the term ‘fallen angels,’ no doubt. This is what the term is referring to. Angels, or sons of God, who came from the sky to breed with human women.”

  “But we’re talking about angels. Earlier you said it was aliens.”

  Randall zipped his fly but seemed in no rush to end the conversation. “Indeed. The Bible calls them angels because they came from the sky. I believe it is just as likely they were aliens.” He lifted his chin. “And, since the offspring of these aliens were giants, it seems to me that the aliens must have been oversized as well.”

  Cam nodded. He supposed giant aliens were as believable as angels.

  Randall continued. “So, as I said, rather than alien reptiles breeding with our womenfolk, as Monsieur Autier would have us believe, I think it is more likely that the blood of alien giants courses through our veins. In fact, that is precisely what ancient Sumerian tablets describe.” He smiled and raised himself up on his toes, his white hair bouncing with him. “Unfortunately, the giant gene appears to be a recessive one.”

  Cam laughed. He liked people who could make fun of themselves.

  Randall finally moved away from the urinal and washed his hands. “As strange as this last tale was, I fear you are going to need to totally suspend your disbelief for what I would like to tell you next. If you will indulge me, that is.”

  Cam checked his watch. Why not? He had been listening to kooks and conspiracy theorists all weekend. And Randall at least seemed likeable. “I have ten minutes before my lecture.”

  They found a pair of easy chairs in the hotel lobby. “I am going to give you the abbreviated version,” Randall said, “because the full version would take hours.” His eyes had turned hard. “Are you familiar with Project MK-Ultra?”

  Cam shrugged. “No.”

  “Very well. You allotted me ten minutes, and I intend to get my money’s worth.” For a man his size, Randall spoke with a remarkably deep voice. “MK-Ultra began after World War II. It was a secret government program that drugged and brainwashed American citizens—students, refugees, convicts, residents of mental hospitals, even soldiers. The program used Americans as experimental guinea pigs, but the ultimate goal was to establish methodologies to brainwash and control the minds of foreign leaders. Many people now know about the program—there were a number of Congressional hearings in the 1980s where the details were revealed.” Randall paused. “But what the general public does not know is that Project MK-Ultra continues even today. We are more subtle in our methodologies—we have come to learn that influencing behavior is a more realistic goal than turning our enemies into sock puppets. But the result is the same.”

  “It continues?”

  “That is what I just said.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Randall sat forward. “I know this because I have spent my entire adult life working for the CIA, most of the time on MK-Ultra.” He stared at Cam before pulling a sheaf of papers from the briefcase at his feet. “You may read all about the program here.” He extended the papers to Cam. “This is a full transcript of the Congressional hearings from the 1980s. The hearings were secret, and most of the testimony was sealed. But here is the testimony in its entirety; just please do not let anyone catch you with it. It will give you an idea of what kind of misguided programs our government pursued. And still pursues.”

  Cam stood and checked his watch as he accepted the papers. He needed to get into the hall to give his lecture. “Why are you giving this stuff to me?”

  Randall waited until Cam raised his eyes. “Because the program is targeting you, Mr. Thorne.”

  “Me? Why?” He was tempted to grab the man’s shoulder and shake the answer from him. What in the world could they want with him?

  Randall shrugged and smiled. “If I knew that, I would not have wasted my time today listening to some idiot prattle on about alien reptiles. All I know is that the Agency intends to brainwash you.” He stood and, with a surprising bounce in his stride, ambled toward the lobby door. After three steps he stopped and turned. “In fact, I believe they have already begun.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A week had passed since the conference and Cam’s conversation with Randall Sid. Cam barely remembered giving his lecture that night. It must have gone okay because a number of people came up afterward to chat and ask questions. But his mind was then—and had continued to be since—focused on Randall Sid’s warning. Was it possible the CIA had already begun to brainwash him? He didn’t know how to answer that question—it seemed to him that, by definition, people who were brainwashed weren’t aware of it; otherwise they would take steps to prevent it. Had they been putting something in his water? Whispering in his ear when he was asleep? Drugging his food? Hypnotizing him?

  During his lecture he had glanced out to see if Randall had doubled back to listen, but nothing. Randall claimed to be CIA, or at least ex-CIA, so Cam supposed that one of the possibilities was that the little man still worked for the government. In which case he may have been lying to Cam about the brainwash stuff. But to what end?

  After the lecture Cam was supposed to have stuck around for a dinner-time panel discussion on a topic related to the reptilian alien presentation: Apparently every U.S. President, including Barack Obama, could trace his lineage directly back to the British royal family. This tied in tangentially to the fact that a high percentage of U.S. Presidents and signatories to the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons. Most of the conference attendees viewed these facts as evidence that a secret cabal of power-brokers controlled and handpicked the leaders of Europe and North America. Normally Cam would have enjoyed the debate. But he had had enough. He had spent the day listening to people play strange games of connect-the-dots with history, and his head hurt. So he had slipped out a side door. If anyo
ne asked, he would have said he had been brainwashed into leaving early.

  He and Amanda had stayed up late the night he returned from the conference, batting back and forth the possibility of Cam being brainwashed or otherwise targeted for mind control. In the end they decided to take some precautions—they began to drink only bottled water; Cam made an appointment with a new doctor and underwent a full physical and body scan; and they hired a security expert to sweep their home, cars and cell phones for listening and tracking devices. These precautions uncovered nothing. “As a last resort,” Cam announced, “I’m not going to watch any more Rocky and Bullwinkle with Astarte. I’m convinced those guys are putting strange thoughts into my head.”

  “Miss your cartoons? Not bloody likely,” Amanda had laughed. And she was probably right. The addition of Astarte to their home had given Cam the chance to rediscover many of the cartoon characters of his youth; he had spent six months in bed with a fractured back as a fifth-grader and for long stretches his only companions were the animated characters on the old UHF television channels. Lately he and Astarte had taken to prancing around the living room reciting a poem from Wordsworth, taught to them by Bullwinkle the Moose. A host of golden daffodils….

  Cam did forego enough cartoon time to read through the materials Randall had given him, alternately fascinated and outraged at both the arrogance and callousness of Project MK-Ultra. Even the name sounded like something out of a James Bond movie. The letters ‘MK’ denoted the CIA division in charge of developing secret weapons and covert tools—some testimony indicated it derived from the German spelling of ‘mind control’—while the word ‘Ultra’ signified the most secret of all CIA classifications. Under the operation the CIA conducted mind-altering experiments on American and Canadian citizens, many of whom suffered long-term physical and psychological damage. Shockingly, some of the test subjects even committed suicide.

  The list of those experimented upon by the CIA—through the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as heroin and LSD, electric shock treatment, neural stimulation, sexual abuse, and/or physical torture—read like headlines from a supermarket tabloid:

  The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was given high doses of hallucinogenic drugs while a student at Harvard;

  Sirhan Sirhan was subject to mind control and may have been brainwashed into shooting Robert Kennedy;

  Boston gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was tortured, drugged and perhaps subjected to electric shock during his incarceration at Alcatraz; and

  A number of women claimed to have been brainwashed and used as sex slaves for Bob Hope and other Hollywood celebrities.

  Perhaps most disturbing of all was the revelation that the CIA employed associates of the barbaric doctor Josef Mengele, the Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ from Auschwitz, as consultants in overseeing the MK-Ultra program and its experiments. Which would explain the Germanic ‘MK’ abbreviation for ‘mind control.’

  Officially, the program, which operated for decades after World War II, was finally shut down in the 1980s after a series of Congressional hearings detailing the abuses shocked the nation. But according to Randall Sid it continued even today.

  Late one night, after Astarte had gone to bed, Cam summarized the information for Amanda. “Are you sure this stuff is accurate?” she asked, curling up next to him on the living room couch, her thick blond locks tumbling onto his shoulder. “There’s a lot of so-called facts on the internet that are batty.”

  “This isn’t coming just from the internet. What I’ve been reading is sealed testimony from Congressional hearings in the 1980s. The info comes from the CIA itself. It’s incredible. In the sixties the CIA was worried about all the protests on college campuses.” He smiled. “You know, anti-war, civil rights, all sorts of deviant ideas. So what they did was develop a new strain of the pneumonia virus and purposely spread it on college campuses where demonstrations were planned just to keep the crowds down.”

  “Bloody lovely. Your tax dollars at work.”

  “It’s pretty sick. If you Google ‘Church Committee’ you can read some of the testimony; most of it has been declassified.” He shook his head. “But, to be fair, they said the women weren’t really sex slaves, just sort of like party girls.”

  “Oh, well that makes it perfectly acceptable.”

  He dropped the papers onto the coffee table. “Sure makes me proud to be an American. I mean, associates of Josef Mengele? Really? If Hitler had been alive would we have used him as a political consultant?”

  As the week went by, Cam did not hear from Randall. By Saturday the whole incident had moved to the back—or at least out of the forefront—of Cam’s mind as he spent an afternoon playing pond hockey with a bunch of college kids home on winter break on the lake behind his suburban Boston home. He had seen five of them shoveling a rink across the lake and figured they might welcome the opportunity to even the sides at three apiece. It didn’t hurt that he brought a wide shovel with him.

  Twice their age and not as skilled, Cam hoped merely to hold his own. Two-and-a-half hours and a handful of bruises later they squared off to play a final game. Coasting forward to within five feet of his opponent, Cam swung his stick as if to pass the puck. But he whiffed, his stick passing just over the rubber disk. His opponent saw the gaffe and bolted forward, ready to pounce on the puck and move in for the winning goal. But Cam had subtly positioned his skate behind the puck and, as his opponent rumbled toward him, Cam soccer-kicked the disk forward between the tall man’s splayed legs. Stepping around him, Cam took three quick strides toward the empty goal. An easy shot. But out of the corner of his eye he saw a teammate move with him—he slid the puck across and watched his teammate guide it between the boots. Game over.

  The opposing player skated past and tapped Cam with his stick on the shin. “Nice move.” He smiled. “Not bad for an old man.”

  “Old, but not yet dead,” Cam said.

  “One more game?”

  Cam smiled. “Sorry. Gotta get to the early bird special.”

  Drenched in sweat, he returned to find Amanda building a bonfire on their beach; a few houses down, he could see Astarte and a few friends building a snow fort in a neighbor’s backyard. Venus, their fawn-colored Labrador Retriever, skidded across the ice to greet him.

  “Venus spent the whole time watching you and whining. Can’t you teach her to play?”

  Cam smiled. “She takes the puck and runs off with it.”

  “Not much of a retriever then, is she?” Amanda stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “If you want to take a shower, I’ll open a bottle of wine,” she said, crinkling her nose.

  “Nothing like the smell of sweaty hockey gloves,” he grinned. “My mom used to make me leave my equipment in the garage.”

  “I’m surprised the car started afterward.”

  Twenty minutes later he rejoined Amanda and Venus on the beach. The sun had just set. “Giants,” Amanda said, peering over her wine glass at him, the flames flickering in her blue-green eyes.

  Again with the giants? He tossed a snow-crusted log onto the fire. “Okay, giants. I’m guessing when they were dirty they smelled even worse than hockey players.” The crackle and hiss competed with the sounds of a still-active game being played across the lake. A winter moon bathed the frozen lake in a bluish hue.

  “Not possible,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But we need to research them. They’re in the Bible.”

  “Yes, apparently the offspring of angels or aliens or something mated with human woman.” He recounted what Randall told him. “In that Noah movie, aren’t the giants made of stone?”

  “The stone part is from the Sumerian creation narrative, called the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’ which most scholars believe is the basis for the early Bible stories recounting the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Flood. In the Bible, of course, the giants are human, not stone.”

  Cam smiled. “I like the stone giants better.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m certain most boys would. Stone or hum
an, giants appear in dozens of Biblical passages and also in the Sumerian writings.”

  “So what happened to them?”

  “The Bible says Goliath was the last of them. But what’s fascinating is that they apparently lived in North America also. I’ve been doing some reading—there are dozens of newspaper articles documenting your early pioneers finding giants’ bones. Many of them here in Massachusetts. And many accounts describe the giants as having a double row of teeth.”

  “Must have made it tough to floss.”

  She threw a handful of snow at him. “Seriously, it seems like almost every time a farmer plowed a field he stumbled upon a giant’s bones.” She leaned back, gazed at the evening stars and sighed. They sat in silence for a few seconds, each with their thoughts, until she said: “He turns not back who is bound to a star.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  She repeated, slowly, “He turns not back who is bound to a star.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Leonardo Da Vinci.” She sighed again. “It resonates with me.” Hugging her knees to her chest, she waited until his eyes met hers. “I feel like we are fated to do this, Cam. To study America’s hidden history. As if it is our destiny or something.”

  “Fated to studying giants?”

  “Not just giants. All of American history. So much of it is … flawed.”

  “And British history is all correct?”

  “Of course not—our history is as buggered as yours. But I live here now. And this is what we do. This is the star to which we are bound.” Together they had unearthed and interpreted ancient artifacts which revealed a fascinating, secret history of North America; their most important research indicated Columbus had arrived centuries late to the North American exploration party.