A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [129]
Eccentric, indeed.
The stairs finally ended at a surprisingly large circular room with three dark passageways extending off of it like the spokes of a wheel. Hanging on the walls of the room, secured there by metal spikes driven into the stone, were implements of torture and pain—whips, batons, wood rattans, shackles, and chains. The space kindled memories of his cell in the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
“What is this place?” Griff asked.
“Believe it or not, it used to be a wine cellar. Then I transformed it into what many of my acolytes call the center of all things.”
“Is this where you beat people?”
“It was aversion therapy, reserved for only the hard-core addicts and alcoholics—the ones who had failed at everything else, including AA. Whatever you might have heard, I had many, many successes.”
“Okay. Is this where you conducted your—aversion therapy?”
“Not here.”
Bartholomew flicked a wall-mounted switch that illuminated the passageway directly in front of them. A string of tiny colored Christmas lights on a long cord hooked into the ceiling lit the way.
Bizarre … macabre … alarming … disgusting …
Griff searched his vocabulary for the most apt description, and found all of them wanting.
Bartholomew ducked to pass underneath an archway, and motioned for Griff to follow. The vapor of their breathing now hung in the chilly air, and the musty odor was more overpowering the further in they traveled—the smell of fear … and of death. Griff shuddered. Ventilation was minimal. Beneath his parka, he had begun to perspire.
The corridor opened into a square room—an antechamber of some sort. There were stone alcoves built into three of the room’s walls. Each alcove had a wooden door with a small, barred window in the upper center.
“I conducted my mission work here,” Bartholomew said. “Sometimes, I kept my brothers and sisters here for days without food. Sometimes, if necessary, I would beat them. The key was to weaken their wills.”
The terrible irony of the man’s statement hit home with force. Griff reflected grimly on the day he first met with Sylvia Chen at her office at Columbia University, and on his decision to move to New York to work with her on the microbe she was developing. The key is to weaken their wills. It seemed possible she had said those exact words.
“Your brothers and sisters?” he asked Bartholomew, now.
“Those who came to me for salvation.”
“Your prisoners, you mean.”
“They could leave any time. The doors weren’t locked. They asked for this treatment only after they failed at AA and many other programs.”
Griff ran his fingertips over one of the doors and tried to imagine what it had been like for Bartholomew’s tragic sisters and brothers.
“How do you explain these locks?” he asked.
Bartholomew looked remorseful.
“I added the locks at Sylvia Chen’s insistence,” he said.
“Explain.”
“She came to me with an offer. She had researched me well, and she knew about my arrest and my ensuing financial troubles. She offered me a way to get back on my feet and continue to help people at the same time.”
“So she paid you?”
Griff vaguely remembered a visit to Kalvesta a few years before from a bureaucrat with one of the government accounting offices. He wondered now if Chen had juggled her books to cover this black site operation. He also wondered if the president was in any way involved.
“She paid for everything,” Bartholomew confirmed. “The equipment that was brought in. Everything.”
“What equipment?”
“There were airlocks and partitions and showers and all sorts of things that I didn’t understand.”
“She wore a biocontainment suit when she worked down here?”
“If such a suit is what I think it is, she wore one all the time.”
“And the people she worked on—your clients?”
“They were