It wasn’t that the women weren’t cooperative. By and large, they wanted to know as much as the investigators what took place in that vast underground railyard. But try as they might, they couldn’t remember. Not a glimpse, not a hint, not a word of what took place remained. Their minds had been swept clean of every detail.
It was incredible. Even supposed flying saucer victims were troubled by partial memories or weird dreams. Not so with the “Chicago 91” as they were dubbed by the media. Drugs and hypnosis proved equally ineffective. They just could not remember. It was uncanny. It almost seemed… supernatural.
In any case, none of the women suffered for their ordeal. They were given a standing ovation by the Chicago City Council, received special letters of thanks from the mayor, and even got a call from the President of the United States. Several of their group, chosen by a random lottery, appeared on Oprah. And several enterprising local firms produced a full line of novelty T-shirts, caps and buttons featuring witty sayings about the women or their ordeal.
Despite the lack of facts, all three major TV networks announced immediate plans to film a made-for-TV movie about the disappearance. Hollywood insiders confirmed that each production featured a different explanation—ranging from visitors from another planet, to a top-secret Army experiment with nerve gas, to a fiendish scheme by a well-known Arab potentate whose dream of revenge against America was foiled by a secret government task force. Needless to say, none of the explanations came close to matching the truth behind the kidnappings.
A second story, pushed back to the center of the newspapers and the second half of the local evening newscasts, concerned a major scandal breaking at Chicago’s largest engineering college. A British exchange student, Simon Fellows, had uncovered shocking evidence that the school security director was also the mastermind behind a campus illicit drug ring.
Using his position to monitor and threaten any potential rivals to his gang, Benny Anderson had been selling dope on campus for nearly four years. When a local street gang recently made a move on the security chief’s turf, Anderson had diverted blame by accusing an innocent mathematics graduate teaching assistant of his crime.
Refusing to believe his professor guilty as charged, Fellows spent his free time trying to learn who benefited the most from the allegations. Surprisingly, the trail led right to Anderson, an outspoken foe of illegal drugs. Investigating further, the exchange student discovered the security chief needed the money to support his extremely expensive sexual escapades. Evidently sensing something amiss, Benny Anderson fled campus a step ahead of the police officers coming to arrest him. Though the security chief was still at large and described as “armed and extremely dangerous,” his capture was expected at any moment.
Jack Collins, absolved of all guilt, returned to campus from hiding to collect his possessions from storage. Leaving school to begin work for a consulting firm, he was especially concerned over the whereabouts of his collection of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. Assisting Collins was a stunning young woman, Megan Ambrose, one of the principals of his new employer. Various descriptions of her invariably relied on the terms “elfin” or “pixieish.” Though the young couple refused to comment on anything but Collins’s recent ordeal, the frequent glances they exchanged left no doubts to their feelings for each other.
In a third story, totally unrelated to the other two, buried in the back of the papers and not even reported on the TV news, Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced that, in keeping with the new spirit of openness that had swept his nation, he was releasing the secret KGB files dealing with secret biological warfare experiments carried out in the late 1980’s. Most experts on Soviet affairs agreed that Yeltsin was merely reacting to documents leaked to the press a few days earlier and which could no longer be suppressed.
According to the secret papers, early in 1989, in St. Petersburg, more than sixty people died when an experimental airborne anthrax plague germ was released into the atmosphere. Authorities had succeeded in stopping the spread of the killer disease only through massive efforts of the army and secret police. Briefly noted at the end of the story was that the developer of the plague, Dr. Sergei Karsnov, had vanished shortly afterward. Presumably, he had been executed by the KGB, though no report of his death could be found in the agency’s records.
Reading different stories in Illinois and California, a master magician and ancient demigod both nodded in satisfaction.