The Stickmen (8 page)

“Be careful with that leg-press machine,”
Garrett chided. “You might hurt yourself.”

“Inside.”

Garrett was shoved into an opulent foyer, a
nice chandelier hanging overhead. Then a white-haired butler
speechlessly pointed to a door on the right. Just then Morran
pulled Garret aside and whispered: “The Yankee Stadium flap was
dis-foe leaked to the press. It was a joint job by CIA and contract
killers with the Utica Mafia. Hoffa’s body was cremated in a slag
furnace at Sparrow’s Point.”

“Can I interview you on that?” Garrett
asked. “I’ll make ya famous.”

Morran betrayed the slightest of smiles.
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Garrett.” Then he opened the side door.
“Someone want to talk to you.”

Garrett stepped into large, makeshift
intensive-care unit; the door clicked shut behind him. At once he
was breathing antiseptic scents and listening to monitors beep. And
he didn’t have any idea what to think about the completely bald,
withered old man lying in the railed convalescent bed that
comprised the center of the room. His eyes were sunken pits; an
oxygen line ran into his nose.

Who the hell is he?

The old man, in spite of his ailments,
smiled, and that’s when the shocking recognition flashed.

Garrett glared. “If it isn’t the ever
amiable General Norton T. Swenson. And that chuckhead outside said
it was an
admirer.
”

“I am an admirer, Harlan—” Swenson’s voice
sounded ten or twenty years younger than his emaciated
appearance—”I always have been, you just never realized that. In
fact, I’ve been perusing your work.”

A crabbed hand bid a high table by the bed;
a pile of magazine lay atop it.
Cover-up! The Psi-Com Journal,
The MUFON Informer, Apocalypse Countdown, The Vince Foster
Newsletter,
all of which Garrett had written articles for. He
curiously eyed Swenson.

“I don’t know what this is all about but…
You’ve…looked better.”

“There’s an old saying in the Air Force,”
Swenson cheerily replied. “‘The Gravy Train always comes to an
end.’”

“But, what—”

“‘A large-cell metastasis of the right lung
with keratinizing adenocarcinoma,’ to quote my doctor. Good old
fashioned lung cancer.”

Garrett felt a grim shiver. Sure, he hated
Swenson, but now, seeing him on what clearly must be his dead-bed,
made him feel lousy. “I wouldn’t even wish that on a two-faced,
back-stabbing government cover-up trilateral commission creep like
you.”

Swenson waved a nonchalant hand. “There is
no trilateral commission, Harlan, but I guess you’re right about
the rest.”

“So you’ve been reading my stuff, huh?
Why?”

“You’re actually not a half-bad writer,
Harlan. You pose convincing arguments. Too much zeal, though, in
your style. It kicks your credibility right out the window.”

“Like you kicked my
career
out the
window?”

The old man’s eyes leveled. “I especially
enjoyed the article you wrote about me several years ago. In
the…what was it?”

Garrett began to simmer. “
Constitution
Times.
Funny how you could’ve read an article that never got
printed. The publisher’s entire warehouse burned down the day
before the issue was going to ship. Somehow I always knew you were
behind that one.”

“The things we must do sometimes,” Swenson
related, “to protect the public trust.”

Garrett released a vile laugh. “Gimme a
break! You’ve been pissing on the public trust since the day you
joined up.”

“That’s a matter of interpretation,
Harlan.”

Before Garrett could launch more objections,
a uniformed SP stuck his head in the room. He paused sternly,
looking around to see that everything’s all right. Then he ducked
back out and shut the door.

“You under house arrest—I hope? Why all the
SPs?”

“Someone broke into my house last night,”
Swenson said, “a real pro black bag job. Cross-wired my burglar
alarm. Fortunately I have an armed security guard in the house at
all times, compliments of the good old AFSS. He chased the intruder
off. But this was no typical burglar, Harlan. It was a man come to
kill me.”

“I’d never believe that a swell guy like you
has enemies.”

“This…burglar was looking for something,
Harlan. It’s my good fortune that it wasn’t here. It’s never been
here.”

Garrett wasn’t impressed. “I don’t give a
crap that someone broke in here. It looks like school’s gonna be
out for you real soon, so now’s the chance to clear your
conscience, I mean, if you have one. Why did you kick me out of the
Air Force? Why did you ruin my life?”

Swenson gave an amused snort through his air
tube. “I’ve hardly ruined your life, Harlan, and as for dismissing
you from the Air Force Data Processing Command, you
know
why
I did that.”

“Yeah, I tapped into a batch of files that
verified the defense department was secretly testing a genetically
manufactured flavivirus in Gambia. Hundreds of villagers died.”

Swenson drew on a pained pause, his old eyes
peering at Garrett. “Forget about that, Harlan. I’m not responsible
for every indiscretion ever perpetrated by the cells within our
government.”

“
Indiscretion?
” Garrett replied,
aghast. “
That’s
what you call it? Murdering hundreds of
people to test a weapon?”

“Sometimes evil must be battled with more of
the same,” Swenson contended. “Because of those tests we now have a
cure for a series of viral strains that the Chinese have been
processing for a decade. What’s more important, Harlan? The
security of the U.S. population or a few hundred villagers living
in the stone age?”

Garrett seethed. “I ought to pull all those
fuckin’ tubes right out of you, you old bastard.”

“Feel free to, but…please wait until after
I’ve said what I brought you to hear. It’s something I’m sure
you’ll be quite interested in.” Now Swenson coughed, his face
clenching in pain. “I know what you’ve been up to, Harlan. There’s
always been someone like you down the line. I trust the date April
18th, 1962, has some meaning to you?”

“Sure,” Garrett thought after only a
second’s thought. “The Nellis Crash in Nevada. NORAD tracked a UFO
skimming across the continent. People thought it was
extraterrestrial until the radar scans and NASA telemetric surveys
revealed it to be a bolidic meteor fragment.”

“Do you believe it?”

What a question.
“I think so. A
couple of years ago I saw the Moon Dust documents on it, and I saw
the NASA charts. Is there any reason why I
shouldn’t
believe
it?”

“Yes, Harlan. Because
I
was the one
who manufactured the charts. The NASA telemetric charts and the
NORAD radar scans were phony.”

Mouth suddenly agape, Garrett stared back at
the old man.

“Harlan? Did you hear me?”

“I must be hallucinating. Are you
admitting
that the military has perpetrated disinformation
in order to discredit UFO reports?”

“Yes.”

Garrett walked inanely around the room,
talking with his hands. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling
me that
you
generated
phony
documents to indicate
that the Nellis impact was a meteor fragment?”

“Yes,” Swenson repeated.

“Which means what you’re
really
telling me is that it
wasn’t
a meteor fragment. It was
really
a—”

“A vehicle of extraterrestrial manufacture,”
Swenson clarified. “Yes. I’m admitting that. I ought to know,
Harlan. I was at the crash site. There was this high bluff
overlooking the impact perimeter.” Swenson’s eyes seemed to
momentarily drift back. “It was…spectacular.”

Though Garrett’s heart began to quicken, his
expression dimmed.
Holy ever- living shit. This guy’s verifying
that—

“Let’s use MJ-12 as an example, shall we?”
Swenson went on. “The mythical contingency team that was so
seriously debunked by phony documentation that even the most
zealous UFO crackpots don’t believe it existed.
I
was the
one who did the debunking.
I
provided the
documents that were eventually found to be fraudulent by experts
such as yourself. If you want to know the whole of it, I ran
disinformation for the Air Force, for more than a three dozen
sightings and crashes.”

Garrett could only continue to gape.

“I would use men like you, Harlan—men who
knew
the truth and were desperately trying to prove it—by
providing the very documents which you and your ilk would
thoroughly investigate and eventually prove to be false. It’s
always worked very well.”

Finally, Garrett found his mouth again.
“Fine. I know all about disinformation. But why am I here?”

Swenson looked as though the answer were
obvious. “Because you’re the most credible UFO researcher in the
country, probably the world.”

Garrett nearly hacked up his lunch. The
compliment—from Swenson, of all people—hit him in the face like a
two-by-four. “Thanks…I think.”

“Why do you think I didn’t put you in prison
in 92?”

Garrett paused to contemplate. “So you could
continue to use me to generate your own disinformation?”

“Exactly. But now, because of your
knowledge, and your…expertise, well—
that’s
why I’ve brought
you here, today. You see, Harlan, and this may sound absurd but…I
need your help.”

Garrett guttered a humorless laugh.
You
need
my
help? Right. Like Kennedy needs another
trip to Dallas.”

Swenson leaned over with some difficulty,
picked up a tiny envelope—like a stamp envelope—off the high table,
and held it protectively in his liver-spotted hand. “Four things,
Harlan. And no questions. Deal?”

“I’d be smarter making a deal with Lucifer,
but—” Garrett squinted, chewed his lip. “Why not?”

“Run the name Jack H. Urslig.”

“Why?”

Swenson held up a warning finger. “No
questions. Also, dig up whatever you can on a man named Sanders; if
you have trouble, run the designation QJ/WYN.”

“Sounds like a CIA crypt.”

“No, Sanders isn’t with the Company. He’s
the man who broke into my house last night. It’ll take some
hacking, but check the old Army CIC files. Let’s just say that the
Air Force and the CIA are not the only government branches who are
hell-bent on the suppression of truth from the populace. Just
remember, though, that CIC files all officially stop in 1979—”

“Yeah, I know,” Garrett said. “Jimmy Carter
insisted the Corp be abolished, so the Army discreetly reassigned
them under cover into the Defense Investigations Service.”

“Correct. You’re a knowledgeable man,
Harlan.”

“Of
course
I am,” Garrett came back.
“But listen to what you’re asking me to do. CIC files, Army
Counter-Intelligence Corp? And DIS? Come on. Even
I
can’t
break the passwords on databanks in that league. The best hackers
in the world can’t even get near that stuff.”

Swenson looked back with pursed lips; then
his brow rose. “Don’t let something as trivial as a
password…
hamper
you, Harlan. Do you receive my meaning?”

“Uh, well—”

“And let me also remind you of a little
Greek Mythology.”

“Wha—”

“They say that if you fly too close to the
sun, the heat will melt the wax that holds the feathers in your
wings.”

Now another mental two-by-four hit Garrett
right in the head. His eyes shot open and his mouth drooped.
Am
I having serious auditory hallucinations, or did Swenson just do
what I think he did?

“Thirdly,” the dying general continued,
“about a week ago, someone infiltrated the Edgewood Arsenal. You’ve
heard of it?”

The confusion—and the shock—still swirled in
Garrett’s mind. After a moment, he answered: “Yeah, it’s near the
Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Never got any press at all
until the sexual harassment thing. They store old bombs and
ordnance that’s out of date. Also a lot of binary biological
weapons that are scheduled to be destroyed as part of the latest
CBN treaty with Russia.”

“Yes, but there are also some
other
things stored there, and someone broke in there last week and
stole…one of those things.” Swenson’s gaze locked into Garrett’s.
“An ADM, Harlan.”

“I take it you’re not referring to the
Arthur Daniel Midland Corporation.”

“Atomic Demolition Munition. It’s a
low-yield, defensive nuclear device, and its theft is what set
everything else about the Nellis crash into motion. Check it out.
There’s a lot about Edgewood you don’t know; there’s plenty that
even
I
don’t know. I’ve never been there myself, but I can
tell you, somewhere on that 20,000-acre military reservation,
there’s also an old AIC facility.”

“Well, there’s an acronym I
do
know,”
Garrett acknowledged. “A.I.C. Air Force Aerial Intelligence
Command—
your
command.”

“A long time ago—yes. As an MJ-12 member, I
ran the AIC from 1959 to 1980.”

Garrett was still having a hard time
managing all this shock and information. “All right, I follow you
so far. But you said
four.
Four
things you were going
to tell me.”

Swenson, his hands shaking, finally passed
the minuscule wax-paper envelope to Garrett.

“I take it this isn’t the 1851 George
Washington X stamp?”

“Inside that envelope, Harlan, is a key to a
storage garage in Annapolis. U-STORE, it’s called. It’s registered
under a counterfeit name that will withstand all federal scrutiny.
In other words, if you tell anyone that
I
gave you this key,
you won’t be believed.”

Garrett cocked his shoulder. “No problem
there. I have a knack for people
not
believing me.”