Either way, I needed help accessing the CIA’s operations records, and that’s not something they share with outsiders, not unless there’s a congressional hearing involved, and even then, I wouldn’t bank on it. I had to find a way into their files, and I didn’t have much in terms of where to start looking, not beyond the Devon link and the other thing Corliss had mentioned: that Corrigan had been involved with MK-ULTRA “back in the day,” as he’d put it. I knew a bit about that program already, of course-we all did. But after Mexico, I knew a hell of a lot more about it, and what I discovered pissed me off even more.
MK-ULTRA was the code name of a secret, and highly illegal, CIA program that started in the early 1950s. It was all about mind control. The thinking was, the commies were doing it to our POWs, Manchurian Candidate-style, so we should be doing it too. Thing is, we didn’t have a lot of Soviet or Chinese POWs locked up anywhere close to Langley, so the good doctors at the Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence decided they’d experiment on the next best thing: American and Canadian volunteers. Except that these folks didn’t volunteer. They were just civilians and soldiers, a bunch of unsuspecting government employees, mentally ill patients, and hapless grunts-with a few hookers and johns thrown in-who had no idea about what was really being done to them.
In some cases, the brainiacs who were running the show just told doctors and nurses who were administering the treatments that the sleep manipulation, sensory deprivation, drugs, electroshocks, lobotomies, brain implants, and other experimental therapies that were taking place in rooms with cuddly names like “the grid box” and “the zombie room” would help their test subjects get better.
Several of those unwitting patients ended up committing suicide.
I’m guessing the pillars of the medical community who ran these experiments must have skipped class the day the Hippocratic Oath was being explained. Or maybe they were too starstruck with the Nazi scientists who’d been recruited after the war to kick-start the whole program to ask too many questions.
The enemy of my enemy-maybe that was one way they justified it to themselves. But whatever. It’s all history. At least, I thought it was. Until I realized a lot of these Mengeles of the mind were still around, for the simple reason that none of them had ever been arrested for what they’d done.
Not one.
And there were a lot of them.
MK-ULTRA involved more than a hundred and fifty covert programs that were run in dozens of universities and other institutions across the country. In many cases, the researchers doing the dirty work weren’t aware of who they were really working for.
And if that wasn’t enough of a murky swamp for me to be trawling in, what complicated things even more was that all the MK-ULTRA files were destroyed a long time ago, long before digital trails and WikiLeaks made it pretty hard to permanently erase anything. Back in 1973, when CIA director Richard Helms ordered all those files destroyed, it was actually possible to do that. A stash of files did manage to survive, though-for the banal reason that they had been filed in the wrong place. They’d been recently declassified, and I’d spent a lot of time going through them. None of them, though, made any mention of my elusive scumbag.
And speaking of scumbags, it was looking more and more like Gallo’s order for me to lay off wouldn’t be too hard to follow, given that I was running out of veins to tap. Short of breaking into the CIA’s server room and hacking into their database while hanging from the ceiling in a sleek black catsuit à la Tom Cruise, there was only one other route I could think of, but it wasn’t a wise one to follow, not by any stretch. If you wanted to be a real nitpicker, you could also point out that it was highly illegal. It was an idea that had come to me one night a couple of weeks earlier, late, fueled by a few beers, in a moment when I was consumed by an anger that I couldn’t shake off easily, the one that bubbled up whenever I thought about what they’d done.
Staring into the park and the steady flow of civilians wandering through their mundane and safe days, I suddenly found myself contemplating it again, wondering if I really had any choice in the matter, wondering if I already knew I’d be doing it and, perversely, starting to find some enjoyment in imagining how it would play out and what I would get out of it. And that was when my phone buzzed and snapped me out of my cunning if highly ill-advised scheming.
My guardian angel turned out to be my partner, Nick Aparo, wondering where I was and telling me we had our marching orders. We were to drive out to Queens, pronto. Someone had taken a bungee jump out of a sixth-story window in Astoria. Without bothering with a bungee cord.
I tossed my wrapper into a garbage can and headed back to the office.
I could use the distraction.
3
So how’d it go with Gallo?”
Aparo was behind the wheel. We were in his white Dodge Charger, lights strobing and siren wailing, rushing up the FDR on our way to the Midtown Tunnel.
“He’s a prince,” I said, just staring ahead.
Aparo shrugged. “So how long are you going to keep this up?”
“Seriously?” I snapped back. “You too?”
“Hey, come on, buddy,” he protested. “You know I’m with you on this. All the way. But you’ve got to admit, we’ve kind of run out of bullets on this one.”
“There’s always a way.”
“Sure there is. It’s like me and the thirty-six double-D’s in my spinning class.”
“Hang on, you’re doing spinning now?”
He tapped his belly. “I’m down nine pounds in two weeks, amigo. The ladies no likee the blubber.”
Nothing like a fresh divorce to make a guy get back into shape. “And you just discovered that?”
“My point was, this chick,” he continued, “I’m sure she’d rather be kidnapped and sold into slavery off the coast of Sudan than spend a night with me. But does that mean I’m going to give up trying? Of course not. There’s always a way. But then again, we both know how low I’m willing to stoop and how much I’m ready to humiliate myself in my hopeless quest for booty. The question for you, my friend, is: how far are you willing to go to get it done?”
I was asking myself the very same thing.
We soon hit Astoria and our destination was, predictably, a bit of a zoo. Despite how blasé one would expect New Yorkers to be given everything the city’s seen, a public death like that still managed to attract a standing-room-only crowd.
The scene in question was a six-story brick prewar building on a treelined cross-street just off Thirty-first Street. The area had been cordoned off, causing some traffic mayhem, with irate drivers honking their horns and hurling disappointingly unimaginative abuse at one another. Aparo managed to cut through the mess with the assistance of blips from his siren and some deft maneuvering before parking down the block. We made our way past a scattering of media vans and patrol cars and badged through the taped perimeter to get to the first point of interest, the spot where our victim had met his demise. It was on the sidewalk right outside the building, which had a delicately detailed facade that was zigzagged by fire escapes and further defaced by a scattering of air-conditioning units that dotted some of its windows.