Upon A Pale Horse

TWENTY-THREE The World According To Sam

“I want to do a day’s surveillance, Jeffrey.” Jakes’ voice was flat over the pay phone, and Jeffrey could practically see the man’s face scowling as he spoke the words Jeffrey had been hoping not to hear.

“Why? I thought you said she was clean.”

“I don’t want to go off half-cocked. You need to trust me on this. When are you going to see her again?”

“Tonight. It’s Friday. She’ll spend the night at my place, and then take off tomorrow morning. I’m going to pick up the car at your office, remember?”

“Yeah. It’s already parked on the street. I drove it in today, filled it with gas, checked the tires. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have someone meet you at the office, and I’ll tail her from your place.”

“Is this really necessary?”

“Yes.” The single word had the finality of a jail door slamming shut, and Jeffrey swallowed hard at Jakes’ tone.

“Fine. She’ll be leaving at around nine a.m.” Jeffrey gave him the address. “You have her license number. Red Alfa convertible.”

“I know the car.”

“Can’t you tell me anything more?”

“Not until I have more information. Look, you hired me to do a job. Let me do it. I’ll get you a full report by Monday, okay?”

Jeffrey felt panicky, but bit it back. This wasn’t going anything like he’d expected after the preliminary report the day before.

“Okay. Do what you have to do. Just be certain. That’s all I ask.”

“That’s what you’re paying me for.”

The line went dead, and Jeffrey found himself staring at the phone in frustrated puzzlement. Jakes’ voice had given nothing away, and he’d refused to even hint at why he wanted to do the physical surveillance. Perhaps it was a gambit to get another day’s wages? Which, of course, Jeffrey would be happy to pay, especially when relieved to hear that she’d passed with flying colors. If so, it was a good strategy, and the man knew his human nature. There was no way Jeffrey could refuse to have absolute confirmation. He absently wondered whether he was being scammed, and then banished the thought. Jakes hadn’t struck him as shifty or artificial. And Jeffrey considered himself a good judge of human nature, even if he was now questioning the woman he was in love with.

The realization that he was in love stopped him.

But it didn’t surprise him. They’d only been together for a few weeks, but they had a powerful chemistry, and he was sure Monica felt the same way — which made it all the more critical for him to be certain about her. There was too much on the line for them both. If he made it out the other end of the nightmare he was involved in, he needed to know she would be there for him, and that what they had was something honest, not an artifice.

Jakes probably sensed all that. Which made his tactic a very smart one, if somewhat underhanded.

Whatever. Jeffrey would play along. It was only money, and he would gladly pay another grand or two to hear the truth, which in his heart he was already convinced of.

Saturday was there before he knew it, and when he parted from Monica it was bittersweet, for reasons only he understood. Once she was gone, he quickly got ready to hit the road. Fifteen minutes after she left he was behind the wheel of his car, driving to the moving company’s storage facility where he’d leave the BMW and grab a cab. He’d checked with them and confirmed that they would be open until eight that evening, and he could get access to his storage compartment all day.

Jeffrey parked in the lot and made his way into the cavernous building, pausing to use the bathroom and confirm the hours again with the sleepy desk clerk before slipping back out on the street. Looking around to ensure he was alone, he walked to the main boulevard to flag down a taxi, his cell phone in the car where he’d forgotten it again so he couldn’t be easily tracked. Luck was with him, and after a few tries a cab pulled to a stop. Jeffrey gave the driver Jakes’ office address and sat back, his thoughts on Monica.

As the car approached the office, he forced his focus back to the job at hand — his drive south to Roanoke and then into the wilds to see if his quarry was still living at the last known address on record, outside a small town called Boones Mill. Part of him hoped so, while another dreaded the meeting because of what it might uncover.

At the office, a desultory, unshaved young man sporting a Marlins baseball cap and a burgundy hoodie stood smoking by the entry. When Jeffrey approached him he looked up with a skeptical expression.

“You Rutherford?” he asked, making it sound like a slight.

“That’s me. Got the car?”

The man flicked the butt into the gutter and nodded, then walked down the block to where a black sedan hulked, its clear coat and much of its paint eaten away, looking every one of its at least fifteen hard years, the Keith Richards of cars.

The sullen man held out a key dangling from a chrome fob with a keyless entry remote and a Tecate bottle opener. “You got the money?”

Jeffrey exchanged the cash for the keys and took another appraising look at the dubious wreck, wondering if it would make it out of the city limits, much less hundreds of miles into rural Virginia. “I’ll be back by eight or so. Maybe earlier. Where should I leave the keys?”

“Drop them through the building mail slot with a note about where you parked it. I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to steal it.”

“Yeah. It’s got that going for it.”

The driver’s side door opened with a creak, and Jeffrey was assailed by a musty odor of mold mixed with stale cigarettes and vomit. He lowered all four windows before twisting the ignition, and the engine sputtered to life with a belch of white smoke. His host grinned crookedly and shook his head, and then turned with a wave and made his way down the street.

Jeffrey put the transmission into gear, two warning lights on the dashboard vying for his attention as he gave the car gas. To his surprise, it sprang forward with unexpected agility, and his concern about the vehicle’s reliability eased a few notches. After driving his BMW it felt as sluggish as a riding mower, but all he had to do was recall his Honda to readjust his attitude.

And of course, it had the benefit of not being bugged or tracked.

Hard to put that on the sales literature, but it was a feature that Jeffrey was grateful for.

He felt even more comfortable about his new steed once on the freeway headed southwest through rolling farmland, the car purring along at sixty-five, and he turned on the radio and tuned in a talk radio station where a right-wing commentator was lambasting the administration for some real or imagined offense. He quickly tired of the man’s strident rhetoric and angry delivery and scanned the dial until coming to a classic rock station where ZZ Top was burning up the frets.

Four hours later, he stopped at a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Roanoke and got a shake and a hamburger crafted from hormonally augmented mystery meat. He sat outside at a white molded plastic table, enjoying the blustery mid-afternoon as he consumed his questionable meal. By his figuring, he was forty-five minutes away from the professor’s last known address, so he should have plenty of time to discover whatever there was to learn — assuming the man was still alive and living there.

The hamlet of Boones Mill was little more than a dusting of homes nestled among rolling hills, with a string of industrial buildings and stores fronting along the highway, and it was so unassuming that Jeffrey almost missed the turn north on Boones Mill Road, a two-lane ribbon of dark asphalt winding through the trees. He stomped on the brakes and the car pulled hard left as he twisted the wheel, and he silently prayed that the tires were in better shape than the rest of the sedan.

He kept his speed down, looking for any signs that might guide him to his destination — a tiny tributary called Wild Goose Lane. According to the map he’d memorized, it would be about five miles from the turnoff, but the odometer was broken, so his carefully crafted plan was already in jeopardy. Another problem was that the three small roads he’d passed had no markings, and if that held true it would be easy to miss.

Jeffrey slowed even further as he crept toward a sign announcing highway 689 on the right. He closed his eyes for a second and envisioned the map, and saw that his target was four small lanes further north — maybe a mile, at most. Shutting the radio off with a stab of his thumb, he peered at the passing roads and pulled off at the fourth one. A medium-sized two-story house sat fifty yards from the road on the left side, and he rolled by it on a single lane of pavement as he motored to the professor’s address — the only home on the cul-de-sac.

A bend curved into the trees, and when he reached the dead end he was confronted with a rusting iron gate held in place with a padlocked chain, barring further progress. He stopped the car and shut off the engine, squinting at a structure in the distance, obscured by a grove of mature trees. A glance at the No Trespassing sign gave him pause, but then he summoned up his resolve and squeezed around the right fence post, a gap in the barbed wire just large enough to accommodate him if he was careful.

Dried twigs crackled underfoot as he trod along the two tire ruts that passed for a drive, and as he neared the ponderous trees he could see a small, simple single-story house in dire need of a coat of paint, its desiccated faded brown wooden shingles peeking through a peeling veneer of mottled white. He was thirty yards from the building when a woman’s voice called out to him from a separate building to its left, likely a garage.

“Stop right there.”

Jeffrey squinted at the shadows around the building and saw the double barrels of a shotgun pointed in his direction, held by a young blond woman. She looked to be a few years younger than Jeffrey and wore jeans and a brown sweater, and even having a firearm trained on him couldn’t keep him from noticing that she had an unconventional beauty to her slightly asymmetrical features, the perfect complement to an unruly head of long, thick hair. He raised his hands over his head and stopped walking.

“I’m sorry. I tried calling, but the number’s disconnected.”

“I guess you can’t read too well, or did you miss the bright yellow sign at the gate?” she asked, the weapon steady in her hand.

“I saw it. But I really need to find out if Professor Samuel Norton lives here, and I didn’t see any other way of doing it.”

The shotgun was unwavering. “Who wants to know?”

“Jeffrey Rutherford. I’m an attorney.”

“You’d think an attorney would realize that trespassing on property in rural Virginia can get you shot. What do you want?” she asked, and then a male voice called out from the front doorway of the house.

“Kaycee! That’s no way to treat a guest, even an uninvited one. Mr. Rutherford, please accept my apologies for my granddaughter’s protective impulses. It’s nothing personal, I assure you.”

The speaker emerged from the entryway, a tall man with a full head of almost white hair, his body thin to the point of fragility, his chocolate corduroy trousers and denim shirt hanging off a bony frame. Kaycee appeared uncertain, and then grudgingly lowered the weapon. Jeffrey took several tentative steps towards him, closing some of the distance, and the old man waved impatiently.

“Come on then. Rutherford, eh? Have you got any identification with you?”

“Of course. Driver’s license, credit cards…”

“Let’s see the license,” the man said, gesturing for Jeffrey to hand it over. Jeffrey reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet, slid a laminated card out, and continued to walk to where the man stood.

“Kaycee. Would you do the honors? I don’t have my reading glasses.”

She paced to where they stood and took the license, gun now pointed at the ground, and stared intently at his name and photo before handing it back to him.

“Says Jeffrey Rutherford. San Francisco.”

“I’m looking for Professor Samuel Norton. I’ve come a long way and need to talk to him.”

The man nodded and slowly stepped forward. “You can call me Sam. We’re not big on formalities out here. Kaycee, do you think you could make us a pitcher of that wonderful iced tea you spoil me with?” the professor asked, shaking Jeffrey’s hand with a surprisingly firm grip, his eyes clear in spite of his advanced years.

“Sure, Grandpa. It’ll only be a few minutes,” she said, and then moved past him into the house.

“So you want to talk to me. Here I am. Have a seat and let’s talk,” Sam said, motioning to a pair of weathered wooden chairs on the porch. Jeffrey did as instructed and took the straight-backed one, reasoning that the rocking chair was probably the old man’s.

“I can probably guess, but what brings you out here into God’s country?” Sam asked, his eyes studying Jeffrey’s profile as they both looked out at the Taurus, which seemed a mile away from there.

“My brother.”

The professor nodded. “As I suspected. You look somewhat like him. How is he?”

“He’s dead. Killed in the plane crash a couple of weeks ago out of New York,” Jeffrey said tonelessly. “He left me a note with your name on it. Said to speak to you. So here I am.”

Sam looked visibly shaken, his face ashen, a slight tremor in his hands, which he folded and unfolded nervously. “Good God. I’m sorry. He was such a nice fellow. I know that’s inadequate…”

“It’s appreciated. But frankly, I’m puzzled as to why he was so insistent that I meet with you.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are. It’s a puzzling story. And ugly, even if ancient history.”

“I think you should know that in the note, he predicted his death. He left it in case he died. Only a week or so before the plane explosion.”

They were interrupted by Kaycee, who emerged from the dark interior with a pitcher and two glasses on a rectangular wooden tray. She set it on the small table between the chairs and took Jeffrey’s measure, her frank assessment disconcerting for its intensity. Jeffrey tried to avoid staring back, but it was impossible, and he was again struck by the flash of intelligence in her eyes and her undeniable presence, the lucky recipient of every fortunate gene Jeffrey could imagine.

“Do you need anything else?” she asked Sam, eyes still on Jeffrey.

“No, thank you, sweetheart. I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. We’re just going to shoot the breeze for a while.”

She seemed reluctant to leave, but then turned and bounced down the two wooden steps and returned to the garage.

“Kaycee is a miracle, a true gift. She’s been out helping me for the last few months. I fell and hurt my knee pretty badly, and she dropped everything to come tend to me. Like her mother, God rest her soul, in that regard. She’d do anything for you, and never complain.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Seems like there’s a lot of that going on. Now where was I?”

“You were going to tell me why my brother was so insistent I speak with you.”

“Yes. Well, the best way is to start at the beginning, I suppose, as I did with your brother. The beginning in this case is forty years ago, around 1973. It was the end of an era, of the peace and love period of the sixties, with all the turbulence of the Vietnam War winding down and the disco era about to begin. I was a young professor, thirty-six, at Georgetown, happy with my life, married, with a beautiful little girl — Kaycee’s mother — eight years old at the time. Anyway, that year a wave of cattle mutilations began in Kansas, and later Nebraska, spreading to New Mexico. To make a long story short, I became interested in them due to what I viewed as an incredibly gullible press parroting all sorts of absurd stories, about alien spaceships or cults, and later, black helicopters. Skepticism came naturally to me, and I’d spent much of my career examining popular delusions and debunking them as a sideline — things like claims of psychic power, telekinesis, spoon bending, that sort of thing.”

Sam reached for the pitcher, and Jeffrey beat him to it. He poured them both glasses of tea and handed one to the professor. Sam took a long appreciative swig and then set it down on the table, his eyes staring at a distant point known only to him.

“The cattle mutilations, or more accurately, the livestock mutilations, were like waving a red cape in front of a bull for me. I was zealous about proving that reason triumphed over pseudo-science and superstition, and this was the biggest example of snake oil I’d ever seen. Over the course of three or four years, I became somewhat of a minor authority on the topic, and even went so far as to fly out to some of the locations and do experiments with cattle that had died of natural causes, capturing their decomposition over the course of several days to show that there were perfectly natural explanations for what had developed into a media frenzy.”

“So you were the James Randi of the cow world.”

“Sort of. But a funny thing happened as I spent more time researching the incidents. Most were pure hokum, incoherent reactions to deaths revealing no nefarious explanations. But there were some that didn’t fit my model. That were, in fact, unexplainable based on all available data. I called those the outliers, because while ninety percent could be debunked, ten percent couldn’t, and in fact appeared to be something other than what logic predicted. Then, when I began looking into patterns, I noticed that my outliers all had certain similarities — namely that those incidents were closely linked with the nocturnal helicopter reports, and that they all were in clusters grouped in relatively close proximity to suspected or actual military installations.”

“The army was mutilating livestock?” Jeffrey asked in disbelief.

“I know. That was my reaction. Why would the military be killing cows, seemingly at random? And only at night? Look, you have to understand where I was coming from. I set out to disprove the whack-job theories, and after two years of it I started sounding like the nut cases. But that’s what the facts were telling me. That a percentage, albeit a small one, of the slaughter was deliberate, and most likely being carried out by the government. Once I got comfortable with that idea, I parked it, and addressed the question of why — because simply speculating that it was happening was really no better than the tin foil hat crowd. I also began to suspect that some of the crazy ideas floating around might have been planted with the media to further obfuscate the true facts. Stuff like the alien experimentation. Of course, there were plenty of zealous loons willing to go along for that ride, but it just all seemed too… coordinated.”

Sam appeared to falter at the thought, sputtering to a halt as old men sometimes did, and he took another quick sip of his drink, savoring the tea as it coated his throat with its subtle honey and lemon infusion. Jeffrey didn’t prod him, waiting for the account to continue at its own pace.

“I eventually developed a comprehensive hypothesis that explained all aspects of the mutilations, discarding those accounts that were clearly natural deaths or predator kills, and focusing on the unexplainable ones. In seventy-six, I published my findings, expecting there to be a public outcry. Instead, it went unnoticed, and in four months I was out of a job for some trumped up reasons — a co-ed who claimed I’d sexually harassed her. Back then I was too naïve to understand what was happening, but in the passing years, it became obvious when I couldn’t get a job anywhere else, even though the girl’s inventions were eventually disproved: I’d stepped on the wrong toes, and dared to posit an explanation that was dangerous to the powers that be — an explanation that was probably the truth, if an incomplete one.”

Jeffrey leaned toward him. “Which was?”

“That the government was conducting experiments on livestock, presumably for its biological weapon program, in spite of assurances that it was doing no such thing. Remember that bio-weapons had been reclassified as weapons of mass destruction, with the U.S. leading the charge to ban them entirely. I believe that even as it talked out of one side of its mouth, it was carrying out a large-scale testing program. Because of the political climate and the anti-war movement, it couldn’t very well have thousands of head of cattle and whatnot penned for experiment.”

“Why not? Surely the government’s capable of keeping a secret that involved bovines?”

“The answer is ominous. It wanted the animals it was experimenting with to be out in the general population. I proposed two possible reasons — to mislead Congress or our adversaries so that it would appear that we had no active testing going on; or perhaps worse, because it wanted to test contagious agents and monitor how they spread in an uncontrolled setting. My guess is that one of those, or perhaps both, were on the money, because you’ve never seen a paper buried as quickly… and a life ruined. Even now, in the age of the internet, you won’t find any mention of my paper. At one point an acquaintance uploaded it to his website, and the site was hacked and everything on the servers wiped clean. Needless to say that freaked him out sufficiently to where he lost his interest in fostering controversy. So it’s as though the theory never existed. Revisionist history of the finest order.”

“I… Professor, with all due respect, there are protections against that sort of abuse of power. Legal remedies. And the idea that the media would just go dark on something newsworthy… I mean, that was around Watergate, it was a new era of transparency.”

“Bullshit, young man. And please. The name’s Sam. I haven’t held the title of Professor for almost four decades.”

Jeffrey waited for Sam to make his point.

“You think the media isn’t controlled one hundred percent by special interests that dictate to its owners what story gets told and what doesn’t? Don’t be childish. Even today, it’s the way of the world. Most people are uninformed, which the media relies on, and when there are those who point out that it’s all lies, it just pretends that nobody believes the accuser and that they never said anything. How do you think the public stays in the dark? The media doesn’t report the truth.”

Sam cleared his throat to continue.

“A great example would be the war on drugs. Did you know that most of the politicians who are the staunchest opponents of marijuana legalization own financial interests in companies that directly benefit from it remaining illegal? Drug testing companies, private prison operators, you name it, they own it. And yet you never hear about that from our media. Or how about when Bush and his gang were assuring the world that there were nuclear weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? A bald-faced lie, but the media went along in lockstep. Son, I could go on all day. But hopefully you take my point. The media is nothing more than a propaganda machine for those in power — the rich, the connected, the friends of the handful of men who own the companies that operate the largest networks and papers. And it’s always been like that. Trust me, in the early seventies it was the same.” Sam paused, catching his breath, his outrage evident.

“I wasn’t born yet in the seventies, but I don’t disagree about the situation now.”

“So you get it? Governments don’t like admitting to their populations that they’re a bunch of crooks, so the politicians close ranks and their media parrots the party line, and the truth gets buried. That’s the world we live in. I doubt you’ve read one true thing in your entire life if it was in the paper. And TV is even worse.”

“Back to the cows. Do you have anything to support your theory?” Jeffrey asked, wanting to steer the subject away from tangents.

“I had, and it went missing when I lost my job. Just disappeared. Of course the university claimed that it was all an administrative SNAFU and that it would be found in time, but that, like so many other promises, was never fulfilled. Years of careful research confiscated, literally overnight, and a career in ruins — all because I took on the wrong people. After I exhausted my savings I found work where I could, and became a pretty fair carpenter, which is honest labor and a real craft, unlike moving integers around in cyber-space or teaching propaganda to students in order to advance in the pecking order. I now live in harmony with nature, nobody bothers me, and the outside world can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. My job isn’t to save it.”

“Back to your hypothesis… Not that I’m uninterested in how crooked the media is, but my brother thought you had a key piece of information I needed to know—”

“Then you now know it,” Sam interrupted. “The military was experimenting on livestock in the early seventies to advance its biological weapons program, in secret, while denying everything and planting red herrings in the press to keep it quiet. I believe they were injecting animals with something ugly, and I mean really ugly, and then going back and pulling organ and blood samples for analysis. If you look at a significant number of the suspect animals I isolated, they had a remarkable incidence of bovine leukemia and unexplainable levels of chemicals that aren’t naturally occurring. I speculated that the government was testing viral agents that could be used to infect humans, using cows as hosts. Within weeks of proposing that, I was being accused, baselessly, I might add, of sexual misconduct, and shortly thereafter had been effectively blacklisted from academia.”

Sam ran out of steam and shook his head. “That was my claim to fame, and I proved it, and it cost me everything. And nothing about it was ever covered by any news agency. So don’t expect anything out of the media. The media is a prostitute, diseased and crooked under its glossy exterior, and it went along with the lies, as it has with most of the big ones during your lifetime. And it worked. To this day, God help us all, it worked.”