‘It’s all here,’ he said, ‘and the agents responsible are still alive.’
Lopez and Ethan exchanged a glance.
‘This is it,’ Lopez said. ‘This is hard evidence.’
Jarvis smiled, clearly enjoying himself as he pulled from his pocket another piece of paper, this one sealed in a protective sheet of clear plastic.
‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘I managed to obtain this with the major’s help. This is a list of names found by the CIA in 1947.’
Ethan’s eyes widened as he looked at the yellowing sheet of typed paper entrapped in the plastic sheath.
‘What kind of list?’ Lopez asked.
Jarvis held the sheet of paper up.
‘It turns out that this sheet of paper was the catalyst for the start of MK-ULTRA’s covert mind-control programs and the CIA’s research into paranormal phenomena. It’s extremely old, close to a century, and it concerns a series of events that occurred during the First World War. These names are those of young soldiers who died in their thousands during the Battle of the Somme, and who appeared thousands of miles away as crisis-apparitions to their families at the moments of their deaths.’
Jarvis looked at Ethan and Lopez directly.
‘This document represents the first recorded evidence of life after death.’
11
‘What’s a crisis-apparition?’ Lopez asked.
Major Greene looked uncomfortable, leaning back in his chair as though to distance himself from the conversation. Jarvis took his cue.
‘It’s a sort of ghost,’ Jarvis replied. ‘They’ve turned up throughout history when people have died, usually appearing to close family or loved ones as an apparently solid embodiment at the moment of death, which then fades away.’
‘What the hell would the CIA be doing with a piece of paper like that?’ Ethan asked. ‘It belongs in a museum.’
Jarvis laid the delicate sheet down on the table as he spoke.
‘It turns out that when the CIA started MK-ULTRA, they weren’t just looking for strategically placed military personnel who were susceptible to things like hypnosis and such like. They were actively seeking out evidence of families who had a strong history of what we would call paranormal activity. The idea seems that they felt that anybody who might inherit a strong propensity for paranormal events would also be an ideal candidate for experiments probing things that MK-ULTRA was designed to look into, like remote-viewing.’
‘What’s remote-viewing?’ Lopez asked.
‘A failed surveillance technique,’ Major Greene replied. ‘The CIA started Project Stargate in the early 1970s and it ran until 1995, investigating the ability of people who claimed to be able to view places and objects thousands of miles away just by mentally focusing on them.’
‘But it failed,’ Ethan said.
‘The project was deemed a failure,’ Jarvis replied for the major, ‘but not because the technique did not work. Individuals were able to view Russian missile silos and even objects in space. It’s recorded in documents that have since become part of the public domain that one man identified that the planet Uranus had faint rings long before passing space probes were able to prove it.’
‘So what went wrong?’ Lopez asked.
‘The intelligence received was reliable,’ Greene replied, ‘but the translation of that intelligence by the viewers was highly unpredictable. One remote-viewer gave an extremely detailed account of what was believed to be a missile silo being built in Russia, making drawings and such-like. The CIA devoted millions of dollars into physical surveillance of the site, until they realized that it was in fact a power station. The viewer felt that he was looking at large missiles; in fact, they were power conduits and ventilation shafts. That mistake revealed the flaw in using psychically adept civilians to visualize uniquely complex locations — they just couldn’t be relied upon to accurately decipher what they were seeing.’
‘So how does this tie in with us?’ Ethan pressed.
Jarvis gestured to the list of names.
‘All of these families independently reported experiencing crisis-apparitions during the First World War,’ he replied. ‘The CIA used this list and tracked down the families in the 1950s, targeting them as potentially viable subjects for experiments like Stargate and MK-ULTRA. This is the source document, the real-world evidence that set them on their course. It’s likely that any family on this list may have descendants that were either hired by or experimented on by MK-ULTRA.’
Ethan carefully lifted the list off the table and scanned down the names. All of them were written in a flowing yet precise script. Given the time that the document was written and the location of most of the fighting in the First World War, it wasn’t surprising that many of the names were British and French.
‘Did we have troops fighting in the First World War?’ Lopez asked.
‘We did,’ Major Greene confirmed. ‘American Expeditionary Forces fought alongside British and French troops in the last year of the war.’
‘However,’ Jarvis cautioned, ‘we can’t use nationality to refine our search. Families have moved around, marriages have confused the lineage of inherited names. We could just as likely pursue an American on this list and end up with a descendant who has lived in Norway all their lives. A century has passed since the Great War.’
Ethan sat back for a long moment.
‘So these crisis-apparitions,’ he said, thinking out loud, ‘are used as a marker to identify individuals or families susceptible to paranormal events. Then what? They haul them in and start some kind of weird brain reprogramming?’
‘The MK-ULTRA and Stargate programs were many and varied,’ Jarvis explained, ‘covering every possible facet of extrasensory perception and mental manipulation, depending on what part of the program was being experimented on. Most of the cerebral programming was via hypnosis and forms of electroshock therapy, rumored to have been designed to create these unwitting assassins. Certainly, the actions of otherwise entirely sane and patriotic individuals suggests that they were under some kind of influence, whether by drugs or therapy.’
‘You think that Joanna was a part of this, that she underwent some kind of programming?’ Ethan asked outright. ‘You think that because it worked on her father, the CIA might have assumed that it would work on her?’
‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis said nodding. ‘She could even have been placed back into the population as a sleeper agent herself, primed to cause who-knows-what chaos when activated. But it’s not for that reason that I’ve brought you here.’
Ethan instinctively looked across to Major Greene, who spoke quietly.
‘My work with the CIA continued right up to my retirement, two years ago,’ Greene said. ‘As well as commanding an infantry battalion, I would often be asked to act as oversight for covert operations with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, a paramilitary outfit that…’
‘… supports the CIA,’ Lopez finished the sentence for him. ‘We know all about those guys. Bumped into some of them in Idaho a few months back.’
Greene looked at Jarvis in surprise, who nodded.
‘Ethan and Lopez got into this whole mess when they were tracking down evidence of some kind of monster up in the forests of central Idaho. Turns out that the CIA’s work in MK-ULTRA had extended well beyond anything we could have imagined. They barely got out of there with their lives.’
Greene looked across at Ethan and Lopez, and continued. ‘Then you’ll know that the STS are elite troops, highly specialized in both conventional and urban combat. You might also like to know that a small unit was inserted into Palestine five years ago, with a briefing to maintain surveillance on a pair of journalists who had been stirring up trouble in South America and who had recently arrived in Gaza City.’