Day 50 (The DMT Series Book 2) (17 page)

He sat down at his desk and tapped his fingers on the arm of his office chair. The leather creaked when he shifted his position. The entire office had that distinct smell of
new car
, and he wondered how much the agency had spent decking it out. Probably a small fortune. A small fortune he could have put to better use somewhere else. But in the big picture it was peanuts anyway. MKULTRA was an expensive organisation to run, very expensive. It wasn’t like he could fly economy, and talent didn’t exactly come cheap. The investment the agency made in its recruits had a payback time of at least eight to ten years. And now he had just lost another one. Killed by Adam and Cameron. The undercover agent who was supposed to look after Dr Drecker hadn’t been among the best ones, there was an obvious reason he had been used as a babysitter. But still, another agent down. That was two in the last month.

James Carter had only hours earlier been notified that the body of Agent fowler had been found in a shallow grave in Mexico. The preliminary autopsy read he had been killed by a snake bite.
A God damn snake bite! How was that even possible?

The Mexican Federales’ internal reports, which MKULTRA had intercepted, revealed that there were hardly any clues in the case. Agent Fowler had been found next to a small cabin, which it appeared he had rented using a fake name. The cabin had been wiped clean of prints and at present there were no suspects.

No suspects
. Hah. James Carter let out a laugh.

Adam and Cameron had killed his best agent, just as Cody had killed Moses three years back. The gloves had been off for some time now, but there was still room to up the game. It was time to put on the knuckle crushers, to stop tiptoeing around in the fear of setting off an international relations crisis with Mexico. Adam and Cameron were back in the US, and the US was MKULTRA’s domain.

Carter would draw on the capabilities of all the agencies - the FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the DEA and the NSA - when he now increased the intensity in the hunt for Adam and Cameron.

No one fucked with James Carter, and got away with it.

No one fucked with America and got away with it.

45

“Who is he?” Adam asked. “Who is hunting us?”

“His name is James Carter. He is the director of MKULTRA, a secret agency within the CIA.”

“Yes, we already know about MKULTRA. But who is this James Carter, and what does he want?”

“James Carter is a bit of a mystery. He didn’t visit me on a regular basis. He would just randomly show up. When he did, he would spend maybe half a day sitting next to my bed. After a few visits I figured out why he came. His visits always seemed to occur sometime after I had managed to show some improvement. If I moved a finger or forced a teardrop out of my eyes, Carter would eventually show up. So I started to do exactly that. I would muster all my strength in an attempt to move something like an eyelid, anything really. And sometimes I succeeded. Regular as clockwork Carter would show up soon after. I believe James Carter is a very lonely man. I actually believe he enjoyed sitting there in the hospital with me. Sometimes he wouldn’t say a word for hours. He would just sit there. But I could hear him working on his laptop. Other times he would make phone calls – to Senators and other men of power in Washington. I remember some of their names. And occasionally he would talk to me. Those were the best times, those were the moments I craved. Maybe because he thought I couldn’t hear anything he used me as a confession board. I’m sure I’ve heard many secrets not meant for my ears. He also mentioned my son. James Carter appears to be convinced Cody and Cameron are dangerous. He appears to be convinced they represent the end of humanity, and that he is the last line of defence for our species. All we need to do is to convince him that Cody and Cameron are harmless, that they have no interest in destroying humanity.”

“It’s a bit too late for that,” Adam said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been out for a while. In the meantime things have changed. The world has declared a war on psychedelics, and Codyism has grown into a small powerhouse of a religion. The general view in the public is that your son, Cody, is now a terrorist. We believe one of MKULTRA’s rogue agents blew up the Washington Memorial Hospital, and made it look like Codyist extremists were responsible.”

“Oh, my God. Were there any casualties?”

“More than eighty dead.”

Dr Drecker closed his eyes and dragged his fingers and palms across his face. “If that’s true, then I agree with you. If it has come to this then nothing will change Carter’s views.”

“Did he ever mention the Washington Memorial Hospital in any of the phone calls you listened in on?” Cameron asked.

Dr Drecker shook his head. “No. He never mentioned it. I would have remembered that.”

Adam took a deep breath, and looked straight at Dr Drecker. “You said you now understand that you took a wrong approach in looking at the DMT problem. What do you mean by that?”

Dr Drecker smiled. “Believe it or not, I think I was meant to end up in that hospital. Lying in a bed for almost a year without the ability to talk or move my body. The second week I was there one of the nurses started reading to me. She read a little bit every night thereafter, every night until you came and rescued me. And that’s when I understood.”

“Understood what?” Cameron asked.

“That I had been approaching the DMT problem in an entirely wrong way.”

“Which book did the nurse read for you?” Hugo asked.

“She read The Old Testament, she read the Hebrew Bible to me,” Dr Drecker replied.

46

Two men were standing guard outside the entrance door of the bunker, machine guns in hand. Together with his most loyal lieutenants Alejandro was putting the final touches on the list of people to be executed. He couldn’t afford to risk anyone rising up against him. Even though the rumours about his resurrection had spread throughout the compound like wildfire, there would always be those whose loyalty still lay with Cody. Alejandro had studied the subject of mass movements for almost a decade now. The definitive work on the subject matter had been written by Eric Hoffer in the 1950s. Hoffer was a longshoreman who interestingly enough had acquired his vast understanding of the human mind through his rough life as a wanderer, not through traditional university studies. Most successful dictators throughout history also seemed to have had this uncanny ability to intuitively understand which followers to attract in their relentless pursuit to topple existing regimes and religions. It was however the German, Joseph Goebbels, Alejandro felt closest to. Goebbels had, as Alejandro, not been the leader, but the man in the background who orchestrated everything for Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. He had been the puppet master who reigned in the shadows. Unlike Joseph Goebbels, however, Alejandro had decided to step out of the shadows. He had decided to take the front stage, and he was certain good old Joseph would be proud of what he was planning to do – his small coup d’état.

Whereas most existing religions had no real focus - they just spread their gospel in the naïve hope that someone would listen to their amateurish message - Alejandro had assembled a professional organisation, an organisation designed to attract the exact people who were most likely to join a mass movement –
the true followers
. And he was about to launch a major push to target them directly on social media and through other new technological innovations. Codyism was the religion of the future.

“OK. I think that should be sufficient. Seven names should be sufficient.”

“And how do we go about this, Master Alejandro?”

“Just make them disappear. And make sure that their remains will never be found. We have chapters around the world. If the local police ever decide to investigate any of their disappearances we can always claim they are living in an overseas chapter. The only thing we need to ensure is that no one ever finds a shred of evidence they have been executed.”

“Very well, Master Alejandro. I will make sure the chosen ones will meet their destiny,” the lieutenant said, before rising from the table.

When the lieutenant had left the room, Alejandro addressed the two remaining persons around the table. “When I died, I communicated directly with God. He revealed to me that Cody is a False Prophet. This is the reason we have to destroy him.”

“If Cody is a False Prophet, doesn’t that mean the Holy Book is also false?”

Alejandro shook his head, rising from his chair. “No. The Holy book is truly God’s Word.” Alejandro walked around the table and didn’t’ stop until he stood right behind the lieutenant who had questioned him. Alejandro could almost feel the smell of fear emanating from the lieutenant’s body’s orifices as he leant closer towards his ear. “Cody never spoke to God. He couldn’t have. No man can ever see God and live to tell the tale.”

“But you did,” the lieutenant replied.

Alejandro shook his head. “No. I died, only then did I meet God. God chose to bring me back to life to tell the world what I had seen. He resurrected me to spread his word.”

The lieutenants both lowered their heads, in prayer. They had all heard the story of how Alejandro had risen from the dead, how he three days after having been locked inside the freezer had awoken. How he had walked out of the freezer like nothing had happened.

But something had happened. A miracle had happened. Alejandro’s hair had been frozen solid, his naked body had been covered by a thin layer of frost, and he had acquired a new shine in his eyes. One thing was for sure though; all the followers in camp agreed on that, the Alejandro who had appeared from the freezer had not been the same as he who had entered. There was almost something holy about him, the way his eyes sparkled in the light, the way he moved with grace. He didn’t move as a simple mortal anymore.

He was truly special.

People in camp still had doubts whether Cody had been a false prophet or not, though. Many of Cody’s followers had after all seen him heal people and perform miracles with their own eyes. No mortal man could do that.

It didn’t matter though. Everyone in camp agreed on one thing.

There was no doubt whatsoever. Alejandro was most certainly a True Prophet.

He was the real deal.

He was the Messiah returned.

47

Dr Drecker placed the Bible on the wooden table in front of them. He had found a copy in the nightstand of the hotel room.

“What’s the Bible got to do with this?” Adam asked. He was visibly concerned Dr Drecker had seen the light in the hospital. Some of his army friends had done the same after being hurt in combat. It was probably easier to deal with life without legs if you believed you had lost them for a reason. The truth though, the hard and unfair truth, was that a moment of bad luck, a moment of not paying one hundred percent attention, had resulted in their life-changing injury. But that fact was too hard to swallow for most people. It was easier to believe everything happened for a reason, that everything was part of a big plan.

Perhaps Dr Drecker had seen the light? Lying paralysed in a hospital bed, listening to someone preaching the Bible’s word, couldn’t have been easy.

“I’m not some born-again Christian,” Dr Drecker spat out, almost as if he had read Adam’s mind.

“I didn’t say you were,” Adam replied.

“You didn’t have to. I can see it in your eyes. That’s what you’re thinking.”

Adam shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m a scientist, Adam. I’ve devoted my entire life to reason. I’m probably a bigger atheist than Richard Dawkins, God Damnit.”

“Yet, you believed your own son was a Prophet.”

Dr Drecker laughed. “Good point. But I found my way back to evolution in that damn hospital bed. And then I found my way back to my childhood religion.”

“Christianity?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. I’m still agnostic. What I found was an explanation for a lot of the things that happened to the DMT patients at MKULTRA.”

“How so?”

“Think about it: DMT is produced naturally in all humans, and the levels are elevated only if we experience extreme stress. When the nurse read me passages from the Old Testament I recognised many of the experiences Dr Kovacks’ patients had talked about. I always assumed they were hallucinating or talked about hidden realms of reality, parallel universes and the secrets of dark matter. Now I realise they were just prophesying.”

“Prophesying?”

“Yes, they were prophesying.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” said Hugo.

“I’ve been asking myself the question over and over: Why is DMT allowed to cross over the blood brain barrier? No other substances are allowed to do that. The only reasonable explanation is that we need small levels of DMT in the brain to be able to perceive reality, to be conscious. I initially thought DMT allowed humans to peer into different worlds, to get a glimpse of another reality. Instead this is it. This is all there is.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is all there is. An increased level of DMT in our body, however, allows us to view this world in a different light. Moses, Elijah, all the prophets in the Old Testament, they all had their prophecies when they were at crossroads in their lives. They usually described it as a whirlwind coming over them. They are literally describing Dr Kovacks’ DMT sessions, they are describing the experiences of MKULTRA’s death row prisoners.”

“But the death row prisoners died and resurrected. Moses and the other prophets didn’t do that as far as I remember.”

“No, but Jesus did. He died on the cross, crucified. Imagine the stress on a body being crucified. Maybe the DMT levels rose to exactly Phi? Maybe that is why he rose from the dead, exactly three days after dying, just as the death row prisoners.”

“But what does this mean?”

“Don’t you see? All humans have a gene that naturally synthesizes DMT in our bodies. What Dr Kovacks did with his DMT trials was to artificially increase the level of DMT in his test subjects, and this resulted in a new perception of reality. When he injected the exact level of Phi though, something very different happened. Those people changed. They died and resurrected, they stopped aging or acquired the ability to heal others, and they had visions, visions of a world to come. It is a scientific fact that having faith is good for our species, it increases our odds of survival, and thus it is one of the qualities evolution has cultivated. I believe that increasing the DMT level to exactly Phi turned on the DMT-synthesizing gene in the death row prisoners. And if it can be turned on – it can be turned off.”