With her hand holding his, she looked at the house and wondered what waited inside. Facing Owens, she studied his unique eyes, the same evil-looking eyes that had once intimidated her, the eyes she now trusted, and the eyes that now trusted her. She answered his readiness question by tightening her grip on his hand. Words seemed trivial to her at this point. The man had spent two years studying every facet of her life. He knew the answer before he had posed the question.
Linda Skyles stood under a portico that marked the entrance to her golf course villa, glaring hatefully at the two strangers in dark clothes marching up her driveway.
“Hello, Mrs. Skyles,” Owens said.
Linda nodded. She had never seen the man before and unless he offered to introduce himself she wouldn’t ask his name. Linda knew little about her husband’s work other than its rigorous security. Ben had taught her to keep a low profile and structure her life around his demanding job. The compensation for her sacrifices was a discriminative lifestyle, but those rewards were losing their advantage, making her life less tolerable. Her husband’s work sometimes kept him away for days and weeks at a time. She had begun viewing their golf course community as a type of prison; they couldn’t travel more than fifty miles from home without filing a report. Excursions out of state required permission, and trips outside the country were not worth the bureaucratic hassles.
“How’s he doing?” Owens asked.
She started to cry. “He’s not making any sense.” Her swollen eyes suggested it wasn’t the first time that evening she gave into her frustration.
Owens placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing by calling the hotline. We’re going to take care of your husband. Is anyone else in the house?”
“No,” she wept.
“I can’t have you around while we talk to your husband. Why don’t you go to the country club and relax with a glass of wine?”
Her house was the one place Linda didn’t feel the shadow of Big Brother, and now they were kicking her out. “Are you sure having a drink is not against your stupid rules?” she blurted out through tears and a runny nose.
“You won’t be breaking any rules, but if you were, I think I could make an exception under the circumstances.”
Linda looked disgusted. She led them through the front door and retrieved her purse from a nearby table. “You’d better make him better,” she ordered. “Or I’ll go public. I’ll show what the government has done to my husband.”
“Linnn-da,” Owens replied in a condescending tone while narrowing his penetrating eyes. “Don’t make idle threats. I came here as a friend. You don’t want to know me any other way.”
“Lock up when you leave, asshole,” were her parting words.
Kayla stayed a step behind Owens as they eased through a southwestern interior accented with knick-knacks from mail order catalog binges. Kayla thought the decor clashed with the Mediterranean exterior, but chalked it up to nouveau riche naiveté.
They stopped outside double doors leading to the master bedroom. Not a peep came from the other side. The silence blanketed the situation with an eeriness that made Kayla question what she was doing there. Three years ago she practiced law, then she handled legal documents for the CIA, and now she was tiptoeing through a house with an agent the likes of which she thought only existed in the movies. His words in the car gave her the impression that she barely understood what this job entailed. Thinking about what was through the bedroom doors made her dizzy with trepidation.
“You look a little scared,” Owens whispered before placing his hand on a brass doorknob. “Don’t be afraid of anything you see. It’s not supernatural; I can explain it later.” He twisted the knob and gave the door a push.
Skyles glanced up from the edge of a king size bed where he had been sitting for two hours staring at the floor. He looked confused, lost. Perspiration around his armpits and chest had darkened his light blue shirt.
“Hello, Ben.”
Skyles stared back, a blank stare, catatonic.
“Do you remember me, Ben?”
“Not at the moment,” he mumbled.
“What’s that mean, Ben? Not at the moment?”
“It means what it means.” His speech was clear, but slow. “Sometimes I know things. Lots of things. Other times, I don’t know crap. Right now, for instance … I don’t know nothing.” Skyles dropped his head to a slumped position, his body physically and emotionally drained.
“That’s why we’re here. We’re going to help you.”
Skyles writhed his head back in a painful contortion. Dropping his mouth he bellowed a stifled, “Ahhhhh-”
“Get the silver attaché from the back of the Suburban,” Owens instructed Kayla. Pulling a bench over from a makeup table, he sat facing Skyles. “Relax, Ben. I’m here to help.”
Moments later, Kayla returned with the attaché. Owens retrieved a Dixie cup from the bathroom, then opened the case. Its bottom half housed an instrument panel with buttons, knobs and digital displays. From a compartment in the upper half, he pulled a vial of liquid and poured the contents into the cup. “Drink this,” he said.
In the forties, the military and CIA began conducting mind control experiments that studied and tested every facet of the brain. For thirty years the CIA oversaw MKULTRA, a classified study that experimented with psychotropic drugs (mental stimulants). Other experiments tested hypnosis, sleep states, the subconscious mind, and psychic or remote viewing. By the late eighties, an effective procedure had been developed that allowed control of information within one’s mind. Certain information could be segmented from the normal memory, much like computer files could be saved to a floppy disk instead of the hard disk. The technology allowed for an unprecedented level of control over individuals, information and programs.
Skyles worked in an advanced hypnotic state that made him oblivious to the information he handled when he was away from work. Several factors combined to make the process work, including large gamma wave transceivers that emitted intense 425-megahertz radio signals throughout the underground compound below Papoose Valley, where Skyles typically worked, and enhanced subconscious waves in his brain. Portable transceivers allowed the process to be enacted in remote locations.
Owens turned on a small transceiver housed in the attaché. The 425-megahertz signal combined with the drugs to push Skyles into a limbo state between his conscious and subconscious. A state with no memory.
Next, Owens strapped a band around Skyles’ head and pasted electrodes to his scalp. A cord ran from the band to the case and allowed the equipment to send extreme low frequency (ELFs) signals to his brain. The ELFs mimicked the low frequencies found in brainwaves, causing them to be mistaken as the brain’s own signals in a process Owens knew to be called bioelectric entrainment. The ELFs served as instructions that guided Skyles to a controlled subconscious state.
Kayla was no longer afraid of what might happen to her in this house, but she was afraid of what was happening in the house. Is this mind control? she wondered. There’s no way I took a job controlling people’s minds — I’ll end up in jail.