Forty-Eight X (20 page)

A plan of action was agreed upon. Admit that Americans were involved and successful in a fight against terrorism. Deny any American soldier involved in the attack was captured. Reiterate that America did not negotiate with terrorists, succumb to their threats, or pay ransoms. And deny any atrocities.

“And,” the president would jokingly say later at a press conference, “there are no cannibals among our soldiers.” And that was the truth. Cannibalism was defined as eating your own kind. McGraw’s chimps ate humans, not other chimps.

“I’ll have the Office of Reconciliation handle this,” his chief-of-staff declared. The president nodded his assent.

In the last several decades, the government had become adept at manipulating the press. They became magicians in controlling the dispersal of information and with it public opinion and interests. Truth no longer mattered. Reality could be altered, and history could be rewritten.

In the nineteenth century, it was actually the press that rewrote history and manipulated America into its wars. They demonized the American Indian and ignored an American genocide. At the end of the century, William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers ignited the Spanish-American War by riling up public opinion against Spanish colonialism and creating a war theme—“Remember the Maine.” It was the beginning of America’s own colonialism. The press held hands with the government as it pursued its interests in World Wars I and II. It was only in the 1960s that an independent investigative American press actually began to hold the government to task for its actions and deceptions—Vietnam, Watergate, American-instigated insurgencies in Latin America. The end of the press’ successful onslaught against government excesses came perhaps during Ronald Reagan’s tenure. The “Great Communicator” was almost undone by Iran-Contra when the press tried to hold the government and the president to task for “trading arms for hostages.” Like many government machinations, it was a shrewd plan that went awry. The United States sold arms to Iran for the release of Middle East hostages and funneled the money to unpopular right-wing Latin America governments to suppress native Communist insurgencies.

Unfortunately, the policy resulted in barbaric tortures and mass executions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Argentina and propelled a radical Iranian theocracy into power. United States government policy was “the end justifies the means.” The elite reasoned that in a world with limited resources and billions of under-educated, underfed, indigenous people, there was no instant solution to their suffering. American society could not survive by actually living up to humanistic slogans. Slogans were meant for politicians to pacify an electorate and for theologians, pundits, and editorial writers to provide “feel good” emotions to their listeners.

Reagan’s great legacy following the debacle of Iran-Contra was not only ending the cold war and defeating Communism, it was the Office of Reconciliation. Hardly anyone had ever heard of it. It was buried in the Department of Commerce, one of many offices in the Federal Department of Consumer Information. While some of the staff of the Office of Reconciliation busied themselves with providing information to the public about mundane topics like the differences between natural or genetically modified corn, most were involved in the ever more important task of targeting the government’s “message.” The department had many directors over the years, but the folks working there jokingly referred to each new boss as Goebbels, as in “I’ve got to meet Goebbels to push my project.” They named the director’s office after Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s director of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. Since Reagan, the White House had used the Office of Reconciliation to turn the Washington and national press corps into tabloid media. They didn’t manipulate information. Their job—and they did it exceedingly well—was to move the media and the public’s attention to other interests. They tamed the national press by pushing them to pursue sexier subjects or scandals. Sometimes they failed. They couldn’t help William Jefferson Clinton or divert the media from his sexual indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky. The story was just far too alluring. But most of the time their efforts were astonishingly successful. Just hours before the story of the Philippine massacre was published, Internet sites around the world began to receive reliable gossip about a Washington congressman involved in child pornography, a Russian oligarch given U.S. asylum after being indicted for manipulating Russian oil prices that favored American corporations—and someone would discover Jimmy Hoffa’s body. More titillating stories would go out and the Office of Reconciliation would allow the chips to fall where they may. Whatever story the American media chose to run with was fine—just as long as they were diverted from another, in this case one that involved the Lemuria Project.

There were some, however, who could not be diverted from interest in the stories of massacres in the Philippines—
Aman
, Israeli military intelligence. The details of the encounter in the southern Philippines were too similar to the slayings in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Pakistan. The brutally successful outcomes were also noteworthy. If this was the Americans and they had a new tactic and new weapons—even if they were two thousand years old—Israel wanted to know about them, and perhaps, if necessary, emulate them.

I
t was a Google day. Maggie Wagner and Nate Stumpf sat alongside each other in her father’s home, munched on chips and sipped diet Coke, and said barely a word as they searched the Internet for anything meaningful connecting the words
LEMURIA
and
BIOT
. She was sure that
Biot
was also a valid clue in the search about the truth of her father’s death. She had looked closer at the few documents he had left behind. And there was one mention of
Biot
. It was apparently somewhere he had been before and someplace he intended to go to again.

LEMURIA
seemed a dead end. All that ever turned up were stories of a mythological “lost” civilization. And nothing connected the two words together.

BIOT
, however, turned up some interesting possibilities.

“Was your father ever in France?” Stumpf queried. Biot was a medieval picturesque village in the French Riviera.

“No,” Maggie was quick to respond. “He had no interest in medieval French villages. He went to Paris once on his way to Stockholm for his prize. But that’s it.”

“Jean-Baptiste Biot. He was a nineteenth-century French physicist.” Stumpf was reading off the Web. Not a lead.

Biot
was a Dutch pharmaceutical company. But they didn’t do any high-tech research. They made generic drugs.

Biot
was an acronym for British Indian Ocean Territories. They both searched the online world maps to find the place. “Why would my father fly ten thousand miles to a dot in the middle of the Indian Ocean? It’d take him a week to get there and back.” That didn’t seem a likely lead either.

But
BIOT was
also the name of a yearly symposium on biotech research that attracted researchers from around the world. Maggie had never attended, but several of her professors had been guest lecturers on genetics at BIOT conferences in years past. And her father had spoken there in 2005. The next BIOT was being held in three days in Oregon. She called the director of the conference. Had her father been scheduled to speak there? He had not. But he had been expected to attend.

Maggie turned to Stumpf and quickly hated herself for asking. “Do you ski?”

N
ate Stumpf had never been to the Pacific Northwest. He traveled often between LA and San Francisco and occasionally to Las Vegas. But other than that, he hadn’t been much of anywhere. He thought he might have visited Seattle once when he was a young child visiting a great-aunt. But he wasn’t sure. His parents were long dead. Both had died in a car accident shortly after he finished high school. He was an only child, and there was no extended family with whom to reminisce. So, he came into the habit of making up childhood memories, unsure if he was pulling them from repressed memory or imagination. He didn’t know, they might be valid—or not. As years went by, the habit continued and his life’s story became an amalgam of reality and fiction. After a while, not even he could tell them apart. It would be easy to label Nate Stumpf as just a pretentious asshole, but he was more complex than that. Sure, he would regale folks with stories of all the women he fucked and big shots he had “taken down,” with most of those stories having been well-cooked in a brain often stewed in tequila, but he did work in the seamy side of Hollywood and Frisco and, even for a fellow who was missing good looks and charm, there were plenty of opportunities for there to be an inkling of truth to his tales. Even if his life was mostly a lie, being with Nate Stumpf was an experience. He looked at once insane and wise, sad and joyful. He was a fellow whom you could hardly stop looking at and desperately wanted to avoid looking at. And Maggie Wagner had him as her partner.

Portland, Oregon, was a short two-hour flight from Los Angeles. Nate and Maggie rented a car at an agency conveniently located just across the street from the terminal. They drove along Route 26, southeast from Portland through evergreen forests and pastoral villages with peculiar names like Zigzag and Rhododendron. The BIOT conference was being held at Timberline Lodge, a ski chalet hotel at the base of Oregon’s highest peak, Mount Hood. The stone and timber hotel was built by Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration, the WPA, during the Depression. It was intended to be a grand ski lodge then and was still. Although it was already late September, snow was still on the slopes.

They drove up a tortuous mountain road to their destination, and as soon as the hotel came into view mid-mountain, Nate remembered the place.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “They’ve got night skiing, but the place can get really spooky at night.”

He had melded his recollection of the Timberline resort brochures he had read with subconscious images of blood seeping from its walls and Jack Nicholson’s maniacal and fearsome smile. The memory flashed through him because Timberline Lodge was the exterior setting for Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film
The Shining
. Stumpf had never been to Timberline before, but now it was his new reality.

The conference was scheduled to begin in the evening over wine and cheese in the hotel’s main lobby. After check-in, Maggie and Stumpf settled into adjacent rooms and then met for lunch. The plan they hatched was simple. They would confront guests at the conference—particularly those who had known Julius Wagner—with questions about Lemuria and see whose interest sparked. In the meantime, just to be polite, Maggie asked Nate if he wanted to ski together.

“Nah, I sprained my ankle a couple of weeks ago jumping over a hedge on an investigation. It’s been actin’ up. I’m gonna take a rain check though. Hey, snow check, I mean.”

Stumpf stumbled over his words, trying to be charming and witty and succeeding at neither. In fact, he didn’t ski at all. He didn’t know why he made up that story, but now that he had, he would have to feign a limp for a day to make himself appear honest. He limped alongside her as she rented skis. She wore one of those Gore-Tex stretchy outfits that accentuated her beautiful round derriere. Nate Stumpf was an “ass man.”

When they met later that evening, her face was ruddy from a day on the slopes and the sun had brought out some childhood freckles. Nate couldn’t help but notice that she was even more attractive without makeup. He had put a stone in his shoe to give his limp a little more authenticity. The conference was being held in the resort’s great room—a hexagonal area that surrounded a grand ninety-eight-foot-tall chimney with six individually blazing fireplaces.

“We’ll circle in opposite directions,” he instructed her.

Their plan was to interrogate guests about Lemuria. If anyone seemed interested at all, they would compare notes when they met after completing the circle and then consider pursuing the “marks” together.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this Lemuria business soon enough,” he smiled reassuringly. “I’m an expert at rattling cages.”

Stumpf had a few drinks and nibbled on hors d’oeuvres as he circled. He’d insinuate himself in the midst of a group and listen intently for a minute before making his inquiry. He understood very little of the conversations between these scientific types and hoped they wouldn’t suspect him of only having a junior college education.

“Anybody here working on the Lemuria Project?” he would ask offhandedly. “I hear they’re running with a lot of interesting stuff. We should talk.”

No one showed a glimmer of enlightenment. He knew they were talking about him as he moved on from one group to another.
Buncha nerds
, he thought. He shoved his hands in his pockets and, curling his fingers into fists, thought how in “less civilized” society he would get his point across.

When he finally met up with Maggie again, he found her with an entirely different demeanor. She beamed at him with more teeth than he had ever seen in his life. She took hold of his hand and sat him down next to her on a two-seat couch in front of a roaring fireplace.

“I got nothing. But more are registering tomorrow. I thought tonight we’d just take a break,” she said, taking his arm and squeezing. She stared into the flickering orange, red, and blue of the great fireplace for a quiet moment and then turned to look Stumpf deep in the eyes. Her mouth seemed to be edging closer to his.

Stumpf knew what he thought was happening wasn’t happening. It wasn’t true. He was just imagining her newfound interest in him. He knew he’d get bitch slapped if he leaned in closer. But he did, and he kissed her. And rather than a sudden sting on his face, he felt her tongue explore his.