Carnival of Shadows (49 page)

“And the second reason?” Travis asked.

“The second reason is that they cannot kill me, Agent Travis. Even if Hoover was given
carte blanche
to make me disappear by those to whom he defers, he still would not do it. He would not issue that order.”

“Why not?”

Doyle smiled sardonically. It was obvious he was not going to answer the question.

Travis held Doyle’s gaze, but Doyle was implacable.

“And the third?”

“That reason I cannot give you, Agent Travis. If you knew that, then yes, I
really
would have to kill you.”

“You know, this is the organization to which I have devoted my life for the better part of a decade,” Travis said, “and before that I was in the army—not for long, granted, but still I was there. I believed I was doing the right thing, and I am fighting with this like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I know you are, Agent Travis.”

“Do you? Do you really know what I am going through, Mr. Doyle?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t believe you do, but I am not going to argue with you,” Travis said.

“I know everything, Agent Travis. I know everything there is to know about how this all started, about who is behind it, about why they are really doing it, and what their intentions are.”

“You have yet to explain
how
you know all of this, Mr. Doyle. You have yet to give me any real evidence that what you are saying is actually true. How do I know that you are not as corrupt and deceitful as those that you are accusing?”

“You don’t know, Agent Travis. The only thing I am trying to do is appeal to your fundamental awareness of truth. As for how I know these things, well, I saw it for what it was, I saw where it was going, and I chose to leave it behind.”

Travis frowned.

“It’s not hard to understand,” Doyle said. “You know a little of my history, a little of my background. I came here to America for a very simple reason. It was an escape route, my way out of everything that had happened during the war. But the US authorities knew who I was, and they knew of my reputation, and thus began a lengthy courtship to which I finally succumbed. Let us say that the carnival continued for a number of years without me, the years between early 1950 and the latter months of 1953, and during those three years, my beautiful Valeria saw very little of me.”

“Where were you? What were you doing?”

“He was causing untold amounts of trouble,” Valeria said as she came down the steps from the caravan. “And now, just to change the mood, we are going to eat.”

Travis sat forward. “Seriously,” he said, “what were you doing?”

“Later,” Doyle replied. He reached out and grabbed the edge of Valeria’s skirt. He pulled her close, and without rising from his chair, he put his hand around her waist. “Valeria has made breakfast. We eat, we have some more coffee, and then we talk again.”

“Are you not already bored with war stories, Agent Travis?” Valeria asked.

“God, no! This is unbelievable. I want to know everything.”

“Everything?” she asked. “Maybe when you know everything, you will wish that you had never asked.”

“How could you say that? You have to know everything. You can’t just ignore the truth.”

“I would agree, but there is always a penalty for knowing the truth.”

“A penalty?”

“A sacrifice to be made, let us say. There is always a sacrifice that has to be made.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” Travis asked.

“Look at us,” Valeria said. “We live in caravans; we are on the run; we never settle down; we cannot raise a child.”

“But you are free,” Travis said. “That much at least.”

“Free?” she asked. “To be free one has to be free
from
something, Agent Travis. Are we free to do what we wish? Are we free to speak our minds, express our opinions, follow our own political and religious ideals? No, I don’t believe we are. But, regardless, we are free to eat breakfast, no?”

Doyle laughed and got up. “Come on, Travis,” he said. “Even the freedom fighters of the world have to stop for bacon and pancakes.”

45

“They appealed to the better angels of my nature,” Doyle said. “They got to me by talking about ideals that I really believed in. I was not young and naive. I was not the hot-headed firebrand I had been at thirty. I wasn’t even the committed reactionary and resistance fighter I had been in my thirties and forties. The war was over. I was out of Europe. I had made it back into America, and I was with Valeria.”

Doyle reached out and took her hand. He squeezed it affectionately, and she smiled. The three of them were seated around the small table in the caravan, and the meal Valeria had prepared was laid out before them. It was only as he took a seat that Travis realized how hungry he actually was.

“I was fifty-something,” Doyle went on. “I was emotionally stable, of sound mind and body, and they came to me and they told me their story. They seduced me. They knew how to get me. They treated me as more than equal, as someone important. Maybe they appealed to my ego…” Doyle seemed thoughtful for a moment, and then he shook his head. “No, it can’t have been that, as I don’t believe I have an ego.”

There was silence for a moment, and then Valeria started laughing.

Doyle laughed too.

“The first man without an ego,” Valeria said. “Of course, yes. Edgar Doyle has no ego at all.”

“So that’s what they did,” Doyle went on. “They spoke to me about the need to understand what people were really capable of, about the power of the mind, about human endurance and tolerance. They said they were organizing studies to learn as much as they could and that the motive behind it was purely defensive.”

“And the enemy was?”

“The Russians, of course. The Communists. Hell, even Churchill said that the allies should’ve just kept on going right into Moscow. He was the one who coined the term ‘iron curtain.’ He saw the division of East and West Berlin, and he realized that this would become the frontline in an entirely different kind of war. The American intelligence community told me that they needed as many people like me as they could find, not only for my wartime experience, but for what I could do…” Doyle paused, and then he added, “For what they believed I could do, you see? They imagined me to be something I was not. They imagined that I had stepped through some sort of looking glass, and I could see right into the hearts and minds of men. They wanted to know if such a faculty was innate, if it was inherent in all people and if there was something that could be done to rehabilitate such a faculty. They had teams of doctors, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, specialists in Freudian psychoanalytic techniques, everything from hypnotists to brain surgeons, and between us we were charged with the task of not only understanding the real parameters of the brain and mind, but also ways and means by which such parameters could be exaggerated, extended, increased.”

“All of this under the auspices of the CIA?” Travis asked.

Doyle shrugged. “The CIA, the FBI, the ABC, or the XYZ, it didn’t matter who was behind it. It was just a US intelligence-managed, government-funded operation.” Doyle looked at Travis unerringly, and once again there was the sly and knowing smile on his lips. “Now any offshoot or exploratory division or department that ventures into territory such as this falls under the bureaucratic umbrella of Unit X.”

“Unit X,” Travis said, “is the name of the department I work for in Kansas City.”

“I know, Agent Travis. I told you already that I know exactly and precisely who you work for. I am not unfamiliar with some of the other cast members in this particular performance. Unit X is a generic term. It covers everything they don’t want people asking questions about.”

“I’ve been in Kansas for five years,” Travis explained. “I was told that it was a new thing, an experimental division, and we’ve been involved in interviewing convicted killers, sociopaths, terrorists, whoever else we’re directed to interview, all with a view to better understanding the rationale and motivations of such people.”

“Hell of a shame you haven’t been able to interview Hoover and Dulles, eh?” Valeria said.

“Well, Unit X is a great deal older than just five years, my friend,” Doyle said. “Even the things I was involved in were part of Unit X, and that was in 1950.”

“And it was never a defensive program?” Travis asked.

“Oh, very far from it,” Doyle replied. “It was very much an offensive action. They were on the attack. They wanted to develop interrogative techniques, techniques with which a man’s loyalty and political adherence could be manipulated and altered. They wanted mind control, the ability to send people crazy. They wanted to build the perfect assassin. Literally, they wanted to be able to take a Russian agent, turn him, send him back in, have him kill a political figure, and then put the gun in his own mouth and pull the trigger. That’s what they wanted, and everything we were doing, every project and experiment and trial we undertook, was designed to achieve that end. They even began work on what they called remote viewing, the ability to divorce the spiritual awareness of an individual from the body and then have that spiritual awareness be somewhere else, not only aware of that other location, but able to report back what was seen and heard. In essence, the perfect eavesdropping system.”

Doyle paused to refill his coffee cup.

“And so it continues. Even as we speak, a program has been established in Canada under the control of a Scottish psychiatrist called Donald Cameron. He is working on something called ‘psychic driving,’ designed to wipe out memory and reprogram the way in which a human being thinks and feels. Cameron, ironically, was a member of the Nuremberg Medical Tribunal, publicly condemning the techniques that had been employed by individuals such as Mengele in Auschwitz.”

Travis sat in silence. He was now no longer shocked, and that seemed to be the worst consequence of this seemingly endless litany of damning revelations. He was being given a view of the world from the side of the stage, and from this vantage point he could see behind the scenes, behind the curtain, and the reality of what he was seeing repulsed and horrified him.

“And you were right there at the start of this,” Travis said.

“I was.”

“And you got out.”

“I got out.”

“And they want you back?”

“Whether they want me back or not is beside the point, Agent Travis. Your Mr. Hoover feels that he owns me. Once you are involved in any aspect of such operations, he believes that your life is his for the taking. The federal authorities can always call on you, can always make demands of you, however unreasonable, and only by stepping out of that loop completely can you preserve some sense of identity.” Doyle waved his hand out toward the collection of caravans and tents. “Hence, I live like a gypsy under an assumed name, and I keep moving, I keep running, and even then there is no guarantee that they won’t finally get me.”

“And my presence here—”

“Is just another step toward better understanding my intentions, perhaps securing a murder charge against me, even accomplice to murder along with everyone else here, and then they have us over a barrel. It becomes a choice of fulfilling their wishes or seeing Valeria, Gabor, Akiko, even the Bellancas extradited. That is what they have planned, I am sure.”

“And Edgar Doyle isn’t even your real name.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What is your name?”

Doyle smiled and wagged his finger at Travis. “If I told you that—”

“You’d have to kill me, right?”

“Right.”

“And Chester Greene was in this program?”

“He was.”

“And Oscar Haynes?”

Doyle nodded just once.

“But not Gabor?”

“I don’t want to talk about specific people,” Doyle said. “There is no real reason for you to know, and the less that you know, the less you can be asked to compromise.”

“I hate myself for being so ignorant, so naive, so trusting.”

“It’s not necessary to feel that way, and it won’t serve any purpose. You can’t go back and undo the events themselves, only the effect they’ve had on you. The past is gone; the present’s here; the future’s unknown. Some people will never see. Simply put, they’re afraid to look. Some people look, yet when they find something that threatens the status quo, they run away and pretend that they saw nothing. Others—like you, like me perhaps—didn’t know they were looking, but when they see the truth, they recognize it for what it is. It’s never comfortable, in all honesty, but I believe that ignorance is worse.”

“Yes,” Travis said. “I think ignorance is worse.”

“It has been a tough journey for you,” Doyle said. “And in such a short time.”

“But I am still alive,” Travis said. “Unlike Varga, eh?”

“He must have become a liability,” Doyle ventured. “Maybe he could serve no further purpose. Maybe he found out something he shouldn’t have. I don’t know. And so his body became a useful prop for infiltrating this little community once again. Even in death, he could be employed for something covert. And then, if some evidence could be manufactured to make me responsible for his death, then maybe I could be blackmailed into silence, into cooperation, into… well, whatever they have in mind.”

“And that’s what they want of me,” Travis said. “To drive back to Kansas with a report that confirms that not only is this a federal case, and thus deserving of the Bureau’s attentions, but also that you can be charged with homicide.”

“And Valeria, Oscar, Chester, Gabor, any one of them could be labeled as accomplices. The Carnival Diablo is done and over with, I am in custody, and then those that they wish to exploit will be given the choice… cooperation, or stay in prison for the rest of our lives. The only thing I know for sure is that their intentions are not good.”

“I see that now,” Travis said. “It still makes no sense why they don’t just kill you. They could kill all of you. They could cover it up without any difficulty at all. It seems they have done worse, and they’ve done it many times.”

“I have my shield,” Doyle said, and touched the small blue forget-me-not on his lapel.

“So what does that—” Travis started

Doyle raised his hand. “You have to make a choice, Agent Travis.”

Travis smiled wearily, and yet there was an element of defiance in his tone. “My name is Michael,” he said, “and the choice has already been made. I have spent my life afraid. Afraid to upset people, afraid to disagree, afraid even to have a relationship. I was even terrified at the prospect of having children in case I carried some strain of psychopathic intent from my father. I don’t see that I can go on doing this, not now that I understand what has been happening, and yet my immediate concerns are not for my own self-preservation, but yours.”

“We are survivors,” Doyle said. “I figured you would’ve guessed that by now. I think you should consider your own welfare the priority now.”

“But, as you said, surviving is not freedom, and in order to be free, you have to be free from something. I cannot even comprehend how it would be to live under such a shadow of threat and oppression.”

“Well, all of us live under the same shadow, Michael. The only difference between myself and Sheriff Rourke, for example, is that I know it and he doesn’t. People are not really afraid until they see the monster, and often having seen the monster they convince themselves it was nothing more than imagination.”

“I think I have to stop waiting for the monster to find me.”

“Whatever you choose, Michael, whatever you choose.”

“I need time to think,” Travis said. “I am going back to the hotel. I just need a little time to think.”

Travis got up from the table. He walked to the door, and as he opened it, he looked back at Edgar Doyle and Valeria Mironescu.

No one spoke. For once, it seemed that all that needed saying had already been said.