Gabriel pulled out the red leather chair behind his wood desk. Then he paused, frowned, and looked around. It took a moment before I realized he was looking for a second chair.

“Lydia must have taken it out,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t see clients in here. I’ll pull one in from the meeting room.”

As he left, I looked around. He didn’t meet clients here? It was certainly impressive enough, and I’d presumed that was the point.

When he rolled in a chair, I said, “You said we’re researching Lydia’s former employer. She worked for the CIA?”

“For twenty years. Secretary to the Chicago field office special agent in charge.”

In thinking Gabriel would hire a pretty young thing, I’d committed an unacceptable misjudgment of character. Would he really waste a decent salary on eye candy? Not when he could hire someone with ten times the experience for the same rate.

“You sent her home,” I said. “I’m guessing that means we’re about to use access she’s given you, and you don’t want her to be culpable, should it ever be discovered.”

He popped open his laptop. “Not quite. Lydia no longer has access, and even if she did, I doubt she’d betray her previous employer by providing it. She has, however, shown me a few alternate routes to obtain information.”

“Back doors?”

He nodded. “Anything Evans did before Peter’s death would be at least twenty-two years old. That means it’s unlikely to be classified. However, given that my simple background checks did not reveal precisely what he’d worked on, I’m presuming it’s something that the CIA would prefer not to post in easily accessible locations.”

“Unclassified, but only if you know where to find it.”

“Correct.”

Gabriel typed and navigated too fast for me to ever replicate his path, but he let me sit there, watching, which surprised me. Hell, after our spat over Desiree, I was surprised he hadn’t called it a day and done this on his own. Likewise, he could have insisted I take that lunch break while he visited the Saints’s clubhouse.

I could take this as a sign that our partnership had progressed to the point of actual trust. What’s that old joke? “A friend helps you move; a real friend helps you move a body.” We weren’t friends; I knew that. But helping someone hide a body does take a relationship to a whole new level. Maybe it was trust. Or as close as we could get.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Dr. Will Evans had indeed worked for the CIA. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t on his résumé, either. Gabriel said that wasn’t unusual. While his position didn’t seem to have been classified, the CIA didn’t exactly publish its employee lists.

At first, Gabriel wasn’t able to get much more than confirmation that his name appeared on old records. Evans had been young, just out of grad school, and he’d worked on various projects as a psychologist.

“What did the CIA use psychologists for in the sixties?” I asked. “Things like post-traumatic stress? Or was the party line still ‘suck it up and deal’?”

Gabriel didn’t answer, just typed in a few search terms. When the results came in, he frowned. He clicked on one. Skimmed it. Frowned deeper.

The angle of his laptop was off just enough that I could see the screen, but couldn’t read much.

“Got something?” I said.

“Mind control.”

“What?”

He turned the laptop my way. “They did use psychologists and psychiatrists for therapy, but during the Cold War, they employed more of them for experimentation. Drugs, behavior modification, and mind control.”

I read the article. “The Manchurian Candidate? Seriously?”

His frown grew.

“Not a movie buff?” I typed search terms into another browser window. “Huh, it was a book, too. From the fifties. The movie and the book were about a Korean War vet who was brainwashed into becoming the perfect assassin. He’d be ‘activated’ by seeing the queen of diamonds card. He’d kill someone and forget all about it. Complete fiction. I mean, obviously, right? But not according to that.”

I pointed at the other browser window, then scrolled through the Wikipedia entry for The Manchurian Candidate. At the bottom, I found a link for Project MKULTRA. I clicked it. I read it.

Another window. Another search, this time pulling up academic references and the proceedings of a joint Senate Select Intelligence and Human Resources committees hearing from the seventies, exposing and detailing MKULTRA.

“Holy shit,” I muttered. “Could Evans have been involved . . . ?”

Gabriel took the laptop back and typed. Typed some more. Read and frowned. Typed. Read. Turned the laptop toward me.

There it was, on one of the pages he’d accessed through his back door. Just one reference linking Evans and MKULTRA, but it was enough. We backed up from there and spent the next hour researching the project.

MKULTRA was a code name. It didn’t mean anything—it was just an umbrella term for a wide array of CIA mind control projects starting in the fifties.

We got a few bonus history lessons from our research, the kind of thing they don’t cover in class. When the U.S. stepped onto the world stage during WWII, the intelligence community realized its intelligence programs were pathetic compared to those of the British. They set about trying to rectify that.

Most of those early projects were more amusing than frightening. That changed after the war, when the CIA realized the potential of psychology to produce the ideal soldier and assassin, and to provide foolproof methods of extracting information from enemy spies. Thus began a decade of experimentation with drugs—particularly LSD—and extreme psychiatric measures like electroshock therapy, sleep therapy, and sensory deprivation.

We could complain about government interference today, but compared to what I read, we’d come a long way. Shrinks subjecting psych patients to treatments that erased their memories permanently. Agents slipping drugs into drinks at bars, inviting people back to parties and spraying LSD in the air. Nothing said it better than a quote I found from George White, an OSS officer heavily involved in the experiments: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”