Ghost Station Part 10
FUBAR
1 Amy
8AM EST
August 15, 1946
Morehead City Hospital
Morehead City, NC, USA
The first part of Amy Brand's life lasted four years; she had no memory of it.
If she could have remembered it, she would have remembered a lively little girl, who was not much different to the girl she became.
At the age of four she got the injection.
She was still a normal, lively little girl, nothing much in the way she acted changed. The wreck that had broken both her legs did not seem to have any lasting trauma.
But if there had been a way to record what was going on in her brain—there wasn't—maybe abnormal activity would have been picked up.
Then, again, possibly it would have never been noticed. But something unnatural was growing there.
The little voice.
This wasn't noticeable to her parents, and went unnoticed by everyone else. And even though she thought it was completely normal to have someone, or something, talking directly into her head, she was still aware enough to not go around advertising it.
Not always, but occasionally, perceptive kids understand when things just aren't normal.
Maybe the voice told her to keep its existence a secret.
No one will ever know, because she certainly could not remember. And when she became aware of the voice, she was afraid of it.
When I exposed Richard Hardy, it was for injecting unsuspecting patients with a mixture of LSD, morphine, and a litany of other drugs. He had this insane idea that he had created an elixir allowing a person to control the minds of anyone who had ingested LSD.
It was delusional, and every one of the recipients of this concoction had died.
At least, that's what I thought.
One survived. One.
Amy Brand.
I had no knowledge of her at the time. No idea Hardy was targeting a four-year-old girl.
The drug itself had been made in a lab right here in the United States. Before Nazi biological weapons scientist Kurt Blome went to trial in Nuremberg, our side had acquired some of his chemical creations, bringing them from his secret lab in Germany.
His cooperation with our scientists, ensured he would eventually be acquitted, even being employed by the CIA to work on MK-ULTRA.
In summary, we worked with a Nazi scientist to fine tune an already dangerous synthetic drug that would find its greatest success once injected into Amy Brand, while she slept in a hospital bed when she was four-years-old.
Later, when asked why Amy had been targeted, Hardy was unable to give an answer.
Guaranteed, if he had known how it would impact him, there is no way he would have ever snuck into her room with the syringe.
2 Amy
10AM EST
June 24, 1961
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
Being a captive since the age of sixteen had placed limitations on Amy's ability to discern the correct timing to make her break from Dr. Hardy. What she did understand was that she could manipulate Nurse Brenda and with Galina there was a chance to get away.
There were problems, many of them. The most pressing was the little voice in her head was back, and that was after a long absence.
The voice didn't like, nor did it trust, Galina. And there was a secret conversation going on inside of Amy.
She's a spy. She will hurt you.
Why?
Simple. She's jealous because the doctor likes you more than her.
I don't believe you.
Suit yourself. Don't come crying to me when she gets you hurt.
Part of Amy, something deep inside, understood the little voice had never been her friend. Friends don't let friends stay a prisoner for so long. Friends help friends, something the little voice had never done for her.
Friends don't make friends kill innocent people.
The little voice was loud, getting louder, threatening to drown out that part of her that could still tell right from wrong.
Amy wondered what that would be like. Would she stop feeling guilty for making those men commit suicide? She had made one of them shoot his entire family, and the little voice had been pleased.
At least for the time being, there was enough humanity left in Amy to understand how wrong that had been.
Oh, you're thinking about the stupid security guard again. He was nothing. NOTHING. Think about your mother and father. That guard and his family had to go to save your family. Stop being so ungrateful.
There was still enough of something left in her to want to silence that little voice forever.
Because the little voice was growing bigger and bigger. Soon it would be uncontrollable.
3 Tommy
11AM EST
June 24, 1961
Rm 118
Holiday Inn, Georgetown, USA
After breakfast with Andy, Tommy Davidson began to feel ill. He walked, or rather, stumbled the half block to his hotel. At first, he was convinced the hangover was simply rebounding, but he wasn’t stupid. Especially once his vision started to blur.
Men like him always had to worry about being poisoned; and that’s what had happened. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he knew the signs. And even though he couldn’t be certain what he had taken, he was confident it was potassium cyanide.
There was the headache, a solid case of dizziness, and his heart was beating like an out-of-control jackhammer.
Cellular suffocation was taking place, giving him maybe twenty minutes before massive confusion and weakness rendered him unable to help himself. He had one hour to counter the poison, or he was going to be dead.
Not today.
He ignored the stares from people milling about in the lobby as he literally fell into the elevator. Getting to his room was the only way to live.
“Second floor,” he said to the attendant, who was a young man, around nineteen or twenty. And he was the type who lived to do a job. “Are you okay, sir?”
“I’m fine, just press the button. Please.”
Breathing was starting to be difficult. He gulped as much air as possible.
“Sir, I can get a doctor.”
“Do I look like I need a doctor?”
“Well, yes, sir. You do.”
“I don’t. I just need to get something from my room for my asthma.”
Tommy jammed two fingers down his throat, making himself vomit on the floor. That wasn’t going to fully do the trick of saving him, but it might have gotten enough of the cyanide out of his system to give the stuff he had in his room a fair chance of keeping him alive until he could get proper help.
Public hospitals and hotel doctors were out of the question.
The now very concerned attendant was moving in to help Tommy. “I’m happy to assist.”
For God’s sake. Why did I get a chatty person?
Tommy yanked out his wallet, pulling a few twenties out, stuffing them into the attendant’s hand. “It’s yours if you simply shut up and forget you ever saw me.”
The doors opened, and Tommy ran out and down the hall, pulling out his key along the way. It took a couple of tries, but he was able to fit the key into the lock and get the door to his room open.
Black spots were forming in front of his eyes as he got inside the room. It was getting near the point of no return, as he felt his legs trying to give way.
Crawl if you have to.
Hovering over his suitcase, he spent a terrifying couple of seconds as he momentarily forgot what he was doing. Snapping back, he opened it and started throwing out clothes until he got to the bottom, where his fingers struck a plastic bag.
He yanked it out and ripped it open, almost spilling the contents onto the floor. In an act of dexterity he did not believe he currently possessed, Tommy guided the bag’s opening to his face and forced the contents down his throat. Then he crawled over to the nightstand, where he pulled the phone down. It landed on his head, but he didn’t care.
Getting an outside line, he dialed a number from memory, thanking God he was in a city where he was guaranteed a response.
As the voice on the other end answered, he cut it off. “Contact 219 Bravo 89, Capital City Hotel. Room 205. URGENT.”
He had just relayed the following information to a clerk who manned a phone twenty-four hours a day:
Agent Davidson
Potassium Cyanide
Ingested Amyl Nitrite Pearls
Come right now
Meanwhile, in a secret K-Street apartment less than a quarter mile away, Andy was feeling unwell himself. He put it down to a bad meal and having to subject himself to sleaze like Davidson; inferiors often made him ill, which was one of the reasons he liked to avoid contact with them.
Switching on the radio, and kicking off his shoes, he settled onto the living room sofa. The sound of a jazz station filled the room.
First, there was ringing in his ears; then, he wasn’t hearing a thing. Within minutes, Andy had grown too weak to move.
Simply because he had more field experience, Tommy had figured out the potassium cyanide first. He would survive.
Andy would not, dying with the belief he had a bad case of food poisoning.
4 Hardy
12 Noon EST
June 24, 1961
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
Dr. Richard Hardy sat in his office, ruminating on his next move. Whenever he executed the next step in any plan, indecision gripped him. Was he making the right move? Was it the right time?
The phone on his desk rang. He didn’t bother with a greeting as he put the receiver to his ear.
“It’s done,” a quiet voice hissed. The clanging of dishes being shuffled echoed in the background.
“Both of them?”
“Yes, I witnessed both of them.”
Then the line went dead.
This was the news he had been waiting to hear.
Once again, Hardy owed the Nazi Kurt Blome a debt. This time for developing a version of potassium cyanide without any of the normal almond odor.
With Andy and Tommy Davidson out of the way, Hardy had more room to operate. Now, he needed to eliminate whoever was helping Cross. That would bury any trail back to him.
5 Galina
12:15PM EST
June 24, 1961
Bedroom
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
Galina and Amy sat next to each other in the room they shared. Amy was starting to worry about Galina. She, who claimed her mind was starting to break apart, told Galina she could no longer keep track of what she was doing.
Just that morning, the doctor had made her make a man pour something into food and a glass of orange juice in a restaurant. Instinctively, she knew it was a bad thing to do. Really bad.
But she did what the doctor asked, like she did everything else; because he still dangled the lives of her parents in front of her.
“Do you know whether your parents are still alive?”
“He shows me photos his friends take of them.”
“They could be old. You said it yourself, ‘He lies.’”
“I know.”
The conversation was cut off. This was nothing new to Amy. When she was done, it was like a phone being hung up.
Amy sat there, internalizing something.
For the first time in days, she spoke out loud, almost shocking Galina with the break in their protocol. “It has to stop.”
In a flash, Amy was off the bed, and banging on the door.
“Let me out. I need to speak to him.”
Brenda, who was always around, opened the door. “What’s going on in here?”
“The doctor. I need to talk to him now.”
“That’s impossible... “
Brenda went silent as Amy blasted her with a mental message Galina did not hear. What Amy told the nurse did the trick.
Amy’s face went ashen, like the surface of the moon.
“Come with me,” Brenda said. The two of them left together, not bothering to close the door behind them.
6 Amy
12:20PM EST
June 24, 1961
Hardy's office
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
The two women had not knocked before entering the office.
“Get out,” Hardy said, as he sat behind his desk writing in a notebook. “You know better than... “
Brenda spoke in a singsong voice. “Amy needs to talk to you.”
“Maybe later, I’m busy.”
Brenda marched across the floor and grabbed the same letter opener Amy had used years earlier against the prostitute. Before the doctor could react, the tip of the blade was against his jugular.
“Put it down now,” he said. Brenda stared at him with glassy eyes. The doctor turned to Amy, the sharp tip pressing against his skin. “Make her stop.”
“Are my parents alive?”
“Of course they are.”
“Prove it.”
“Amy, this is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Your parents live or die based on what I tell my people. They are fine.”
He glared. She shook her head.
“Brenda, get the number and call my home. NOW.”
The one thing Amy had not counted on was the doctor having a gun. A gun was always within reach due to his paranoia.
He must have had the drawer open. His hand must have been in that drawer.
Before Brenda could make another move, a shot went off. Traveling through the wood of the desk considerably slowed the bullet’s velocity, but it was still enough to penetrate. Still deadly. The sound shocked Amy, who momentarily lost her connection with Brenda.
The first bullet didn’t kill Brenda. And the second one probably didn’t either. But the third and fourth put her on the floor.
Moments later, she had bled out. The doctor stood menacingly, aiming the pistol at Amy.
“Look what you’ve made me do,” the doctor screamed at Amy. “She looked after you for years. And you killed her.”
The little voice joined in. “It was glorious, wasn’t it?”
7 Galina
12:22PM EST
June 24, 1961
Hardy's office
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
With the door open, Galina had been able to hear the conversation, along with the subsequent gunshots. All of this tempted her to run.
Where would she go? Could she leave Amy?
Shouting broke her thoughts.
“Galina, get in here now.”
Knowing she would be staying, she walked into the hall and found the doctor’s office. The scene wasn’t as gruesome as she had expected. Growing up in postwar Berlin had prepared her for the sight of death.
Rarely in her experience, though, had she ever come across the corpse of someone who deserved to die. Galina wasn’t shocked, nor bothered, at all.
“Help her clean up this mess,” Hardy said to Galina. Still waving the gun around, he looked like a madman.
“You want us to remove a body?” Galina asked. “To where?”
“No. I have someone for that. Get some towels and clean up some of this blood. I’m going out to find help.”
He turned to leave, quietly putting on his jacket. “And Amy, I am going to think very hard about killing one of your parents.”
8 Hardy
12:30PM EST
June 24, 1961
Sidewalk
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
Richard Hardy was not nearly as composed as he had tried to appear back in the house. Heart racing.
He actually hated violence. Things were getting out of hand. And the girl was more dangerous than he ever imagined. He wondered how long she had been controlling Brenda.
Setting fire to the locked house crossed his mind.
Stop it. Just stop.
He needed to remember that he had eliminated Davidson and the mysterious Andy—who Hardy suspected of being Drew Ward, a shadowy legend in the CIA.
Get these girls under control, and the prize is yours.
Fighting for his breath, he started to bring his heartbeat under control.
If he had known Tommy Davidson had survived the poison, Hardy might have closed his eyes and stepped out into the traffic.
Instead, he stood nearly catatonic, only becoming aware of the trouble he was in when a hood was pulled over his head. By then, it was too late to fight back, as he was thrown into what he assumed was the trunk of a car.
9 Galina
12:10PM EST
June 24, 1961
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
When the door opened, Galina assumed the people were there to remove the body, so she didn't react. She and Amy had not been wiping up the blood running from Brenda's body.
They had been talking quietly, not using telepathic communication.
It was clear Amy was tired, worn out from her years of being manipulated.
The men who entered the house were not dressed like a cleaning crew. They wore suits and ignored the dead woman on the floor.
"Let's go," one of the men said. They all looked the same to Galina.
"Where is the doctor?" she asked.
"He is no longer running things."
10 Amy
12:25PM EST
June 24, 1961
15 Mott Street Chinatown, NYC, USA
It was like a nightmare playing out all over again. She was being abducted again. She was being led outside; it was the first time since she had arrived three years earlier. The world outside was alien, beyond anything her small-town imagination could have conjured up.
There were people everywhere. Many of them were Chinese—she had never seen them in pictures. There were also many Americans.
Cars were everywhere.
Her plan had failed miserably. And she was far too traumatized to run; where would she run?
Galina walked beside her on the sidewalk. There was a black car with one of the men waiting for them. He opened the back door.
“In you go.”
“Where are you taking us?” Galina asked. Her voice was weak, because she was just as traumatized as Amy.
“Get in the car.”
The girls did as they were told, both climbing into the backseat.
The man who had walked them out got into the front passenger seat as the driver cranked the engine. “How’s the doctor?”
“Sleeping soundly. The tranquilizer will keep him out for another hour or so.” The driver eased out into traffic.
“Ladies, we’ll be there soon.”
The radio played softly as they sped away.
11 Don
12:30PM EST
Greenwich Village Safehouse, NYC, NY, USA
Finding Hardy had not been complicated. The doctor was a creature of habit and had returned to within a few blocks of the scene of his original crimes. The men he had recruited were loyal to him only, and unknown to Tommy Davidson.
Davidson had been right about Hardy. He was the key to controlling the girl, and that information was what Don planned to extract before eliminating him.
By the time Tommy Davidson realized what was going on, the girls would be in Moscow. From what he was being told, something big was happening in Berlin; something that would be a permanent protection from the West. Don had no idea what that might be, but he knew the entirety of the Soviet Union was cutting itself off from the rest of the world.
He intended to be where he needed to be before that happened.
12 Viktor
6 PM Local Time
June 24, 1961
Keflavik, Iceland
I didn’t realize it, but Viktor Brenner was using nearly the same travel route I had used six days earlier to get to the States. For him, it was far more complicated, because the trip required him to drop off the face of the Earth. He had expected to be burned at anytime, making his true identity known to the DDR.
He couldn’t trust contacts in our government; he had no idea who was out to get him.
So, he shaved the mustache, dyed his hair, grabbed a fake identification, and used his connections at Cherry Point to get to relative safety.
With any luck, he planned to team up with me in an effort to stop the Soviets from getting the girls. Along the way, he hoped to get his life back.
He also had a pipe dream of killing Richard Hardy, but he realized that to do that meant getting in the back of a long line.
13 Ghosts
1941
Ocracoke Island, NC, USA
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche
“No one ever died from staring into the abyss. Believing what it tells you will kill you every time. Be the monster or die by his hands. ― Unknown
I was always going to be the monster I was fighting. In many ways, I had always been. My childhood was spent on Ocracoke Island, about 90 miles from where the Wright Brothers had the first successful flight. My island may well have been a thousand miles away. There were no bridges in those days connecting Hatteras to Nags Head, but it would not have mattered much.
No bridge would ever connect Ocracoke to Hatteras. Even today, the only way on or off is by boat.
On this desolate, windswept barrier island, I watched my father go to work every day as a proud member of the United States Coast Guard. His post at Cedar Hammock was, literally, the gateway to the graveyard of the Atlantic. It was nothing to be walking down the beach after a storm and finding the wreckage of a boat or ship that had been broken to bits in the violent surf.
Once I asked him why he continued to go out into the surf when the visibility was zero and there was always an even chance that he would go from rescuer to victim. His reply had been simple and stark. “Son, I just can’t turn it off.”
During the war, our coastline was given another name—Torpedo Alley. German U-boats were responsible for around four hundred ships going down—most of them merchant vessels. Five thousand civilians would be killed.
My father was one of them.
We all grew used to hearing the muffled boom and seeing the flashes of light out on the horizon as another ship got torpedoed.
There was no fanfare on the evening of January 1, 1941, as U-Boat 123, captained by the famed Reinhard Hardegen, prowled right off our coast. That evening, he would sink one of the eleven ships he reported during this raid.
When our family sat down to dinner, none of us knew it would be the last one with him.
They called my father around eight that night. A ship had sent a distress signal after getting hit.
My father went to get them. The weather turned bad.
It took a couple of days for the weather to die down, and for a proper search operation to launch. They eventually found his body. My mother and I played our roles, attending the funeral, me vowing to be the man of the house.
But something had changed in me. A switch had been flipped. Someone was going to pay for what they did to me and my family. I was still just thirteen, and helpless to do anything.
Three years later, the rage had not subsided.
One night, I wrote a letter to my mother explaining in no uncertain terms that I would get vengeance for our family. The Germans would pay. Then instead of walking to school, I caught the ferry to Hatteras Island. It took a couple of days hitchhiking, but at the ripe old age of sixteen I walked into a recruiting station in Raleigh and told them I was 18.
They didn’t ask many questions, and I didn’t offer any real answers. The stolen birth certificate I presented did all the talking for me.
I was the same as my father. The world needed saving, and I had a role to play. When I left, I was a nobody. Eight years later, I was a highly educated spy.
I’ll never go so far as to say what I did was fair to either of them. It would be two years before I saw them again, and in that time I learned a bunch of valuable lessons. One being that you sometimes had to hurt everyone around you to help them. The other: a lowly private, was no way to get ahead. Education was going to be needed if I hoped to do my part.
It is a fact that by the time I finished basic training, my commitment to saving the world burned hotter than it ever had.
It was something I couldn’t turn off.
And it was something that was about to get turned up to its highest setting.
----
Surely, I was on the right side of the equation, but I soon found not much separated it from the wrong side.
14 Tommy
2PM EST
June 27, 1961
George Washington Medical Hospital
Foggy Bottom 901 23rd Street Washington, DC, USA
Tommy opened his eyes, not sure where he was; not even sure what had happened to him. His head felt infected, and breathing hurt.
“This is what happens when you nearly die from a lethal dose of cyanide.”
The voice was coming from across the room.
He was still too weak to sit up, but he understood he was in a hospital room. “Don, is that you?”
“Listen carefully. Don has the girls, and he has the doctor.”
“Good.”
“Not good. Don is working for the Soviets. You’ve been... we’ve all been fooled.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You have one chance left to make this right. Find them all. Work with whomever you need to work with. The Russians cannot get them.”
“What. Huh? Who are you?”
The door closed softly, and there was silence.
Twelve days had passed since Galina had tried to defect, only to be abducted by Richard Hardy. In that time, everything I had expected to happen had not.
At term popularized during the war came to mind.
FUBAR.
...........................