They drove in silence until they reached the northernmost edge of Jefferson County, but Stan still hadn’t called back with the information they needed. Marcus decided to fill up the Yukon, and if Stan hadn’t called by the time they pulled from the pump, he’d make a call of his own.
He pulled the Yukon up to the third pump of four at a small red and white Citgo station with a separate car wash in back. He hadn’t caught the name of the town, but the gas station appeared to be the hub of village commerce.
Stamping his feet and blowing on his hands to combat the chill in the air, he watched the numbers on the pump tick past the sixty-dollar mark. Then his phone rang.
“What did you find, Stan? We’re flying blind up here.”
“Okay, I’ve learned quite a bit about our new friend Conlan. Full name Anthony Mason Conlan.”
“Wait. His first name is Anthony?”
“Does that mean something to you?”
“Yeah, it does. It means that Vasques’s dad has been a step ahead of us this whole time. After he died, she found a note on his desk that referred to Anthony C. He must have been onto something.”
“If he knew about Conlan, then he definitely was. This dude is an A-number-1 nutball. When he was a boy, a doctor tried to diagnose him with a mild form of schizophrenia, but Conlan’s rich daddy wouldn’t hear of it. So the kid grows up and joins the military. He became a lieutenant in the army and volunteered for some experiments conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was codenamed Project Kaleidoscope. They were dosing the grunts with LSD, synthetic marijuana, and two dozen other psychoactive drugs. All to develop chemical weapons that could incapacitate enemy soldiers. Very illegal.”
Marcus said, “Sounds a lot like the MK-ULTRA project the CIA had going.”
“Yeah, right along the same lines. But in 1981, a study was conducted that claimed the participants of the experiments suffered no long-term effects. Conlan wasn’t involved in the study because he had dropped off the grid by then.”
“There has to be more to it than that.”
“I’m getting there, boss. You gotta let me roll it all out for you nice and sweet. So, anyway, I dug deeper into the actual classified journals of the head researcher. A dude by the name of Dr. Ted Uhrig. And Dr. Teddy had a lot to say about our man Conlan. Apparently, during the experiments, the nutball freaked out and claimed to have been receiving messages from the devil himself. So fast forward a few years, and Conlan had started his first cult at his father’s plantation in Georgia. Then daddy kicks the bucket—under suspicious circumstances—and leaves a small fortune to his only son who has now started to go by the name of The Prophet.”
A man in a beat-up Chevy truck pulled up behind Marcus at the pump and honked his horn. Marcus replied with a form of sign language that he had learned at a young age back in Brooklyn. It involved liberal use of the middle finger.
“Where’s Conlan now?” he said into the phone.
“Completely off the grid. If he’s alive, then he must be using a false identity.”
“Okay, keep looking. What about the location of the compound?”
“I found several landowners named Bowman or Beaman in Jefferson County, but I cross-referenced topography and the time period. Came up with one old guy named Otis. Which sounds like a dog’s name to me, or maybe a cow’s, but I suppose it was probably more common back in the day. Anyway, you got lucky. The old man still lives there. I’m texting you the address and directions.”