Chapter 16: The Program’s Terrible Truth

A few minutes before 5 p.m., the doorbell rang at the twins’ house.

“That must be Tom,” Cynthia called. “I’ll get it! ... hi, Tom, OH!” she exclaimed as Tom handed her a bouquet of flowers. “How pretty!”

“I felt I had to bring a little spring to your home to try to get rid of this morning’s unpleasantness,” Tom remarked as Cynthia kissed him.

“Thank you, this is so nice. Come meet my mom,” she said, pulling Tom with her to the kitchen. “Mom, this is Tom Emerson; he’s the guy who helped us chase down the kidnappers.”

Sarah came over to him and grasped his hands. “I’m honored to meet you, son...”

Cynthia showed Sarah the flowers and took out a vase for them.

“How lovely, Tom, thank you ... and I also want to thank you so much for what you did for our family.”

“Thanks, Mrs Denison, but all I did was to...”

Roger interrupted, “Tom, please don’t be so modest. If you hadn’t followed me like you did, it wouldn’t have turned out so good. You did much more than just follow me.”

Ayame chimed in, “Yes, Tom, and I’m grateful to you too, so you’re outnumbered ... Is that the right word?” she asked Roger.

“Exactly right, sweetie.”

Meanwhile, Sgt Denison had just arrived home and came up to Tom.

“Good evening, young man,” he said. “Good to see you again, and under much nicer circumstances. Welcome to our home.”

“Thanks, sir, and I appreciate your invite.”

Sgt Denison continued, “I’ve seen you swim on my son’s team, right? Thought you looked familiar. Do you think the team can repeat winning States this year?”

“Got a shot at it, sir, but our top freestyler graduated last year and he was one of the best swimmers in the state. This’ll be a tougher year.”

“I see ... well, just buckle down and give it your best shot. Say, Sarah, kids, I don’t want to put a damper on this evening’s festivities by reminding you about what happened this morning, but Sgt Raymers—he’s the chief NCO in the investigations unit—wanted to tell me what they found out about the kidnappers. He’s supposed to come over at about 6:30 to talk to me but he said you can hear this too if you want.”

“Yes, I want,” Roger said, and everyone else chimed in to agree.

As they were eating, Sarah asked Tom about his family.

“Well, I’m sort of a military kid,” Tom began. “My dad was a Navy pilot but was killed when I was 11 years old...”

“Oh, sorry...” people around the table said.

“ ... thanks, it was during one of those Mideastern wars. His aircraft was hit. We were so close and I really miss him terribly. Anyway, my mom is an engineer at the nuclear power plant and she married a man who works there. My step-dad is the security director there; he was an Army colonel who got wounded in action; he retired after he was hurt and eventually got his job here. He’s a really cool guy; my family does lots of things together.”

“Man, I didn’t know your story,” Roger said. “That’s why you’re just like a whole lot of other military family kids I’ve known—even how you are with others, a real team player. It’s why the kids on the team look up to you.”

“Oh, c’mon, Rog, you’re gettin’ carried away,” Tom objected.

Sgt Denison broke in, “Tom, this morning I noticed how you behaved out there with my kids and Ayame. You were disciplined and thoughtful, very mature. So I’m not surprised to hear of your family background. Anyway, what are your educational plans after high school? Following your father in the Navy?”

“No sir, my mother, actually. I want to be an engineer—industrial or mechanical, I think.”

Soon the conversation turned to other topics and the meal was finished. Roger and Cynthia volunteered to clean up from dinner and the others went to the den. Not long after the twins rejoined the rest of the group, Master Sergeant Raymers arrived and Stuart introduced him.

“Hello, sir, oh—I remember you from this morning, right? You were there pretty quickly, I think,” Cynthia exclaimed.

“Very observant, Miss. Yes, I was on North Base when I heard the call and not far away. So the base is involved in the investigation because of a number of factors. First, the kidnapping took place on federal property; next, so many of the families involved have a Marine member and third, most live on base. Usually we’re not involved in civil matters but this situation is kind of unique and potentially dangerous since the federal government seems involved in some way because of this Program thing. But we also have to observe the ‘Posse Comitatus’ Act—you know what that is? Most people don’t. It’s from 1878 and says that the Army and, by extension, the Air Force, since it split off from the Army, cannot be used as a police force to enforce domestic law. The Marines aren’t mentioned in the law but Navy regulations exist that have the same effect.

“Anyway, our MPs are also sworn law enforcement personnel in addition to being military, so we sometimes help the civil authorities in limited ways, and on this occasion, we were asked to assist by the state police. Miss Ayame remembered that her kidnappers had entered an address in their vehicle’s nav system. So a team was designated to go to that address, six MPs, together with state police and a Riverside County sheriff’s team, and a member of the Riverside prosecutor’s office; he had gotten an emergency search warrant.

“We arrived at the site at about 12:40 p.m. It was a building in a suburban office park, a free-standing building with no outside identification. There were three black sedans in the parking area with virtually opaque rear windows, government plates, identical to the vehicles used by the kidnappers and those men who attempted to abduct the other high-school children. We posted men around the building and then entered. And what we found was incredibly disturbing.

“The outer door was locked. We decided to ring the doorbell rather than break in, but that was a tough decision to make and we lucked out. A woman answered the door for the uniformed state police trooper who was the only visible person to her, but when she opened the door, we secured it and the woman and rushed in to secure the other rooms. There wasn’t any armed opposition, thankfully; we didn’t know what to expect since some of the kidnappers had been armed—two of the others we arrested at the school were carrying.

“We eventually tallied twelve rooms set up like sleeping rooms with two beds each but the windows were blocked off and the doors could be locked from the outside. Another room looked like a doctor’s office with an exam table and medical supplies. Some offices. But the disturbing part was in one larger room, set up like a kind of little gym, we found four blindfolded and naked teens, three girls and a boy; their arms were strapped to their chairs’ arms and their legs were restrained too. They had headphones on them and some kind of hypnotic tape was playing.”

The Denison family and Tom gasped at hearing this and Sgt Denison uttered a cry of outrage, smacking his fist into his palm.

“There were two men in the room watching the children; when we rushed in they tried to resist but they were restrained and arrested. In another room that was set up like a classroom, we found a naked boy and girl; the girl was being forced to take the boy’s penis into her mouth by a man standing behind her, holding her head and trying to push her face into his groin. That man was also arrested.”

Ayame put her face in her hands and began crying. Roger whispered to her, “Want to leave?”

“NO!” she insisted. “Need to hear!”

Raymers went on, “In all cases, the children seemed only partially aware of what was going on; they moved lethargically but did react when they saw us—with a kind of wary relief. We had an ambulance on standby and one of our team had called them in; they had brought a physician with them in case of injuries.

“This is what we learned from records we found and from questioning the people we took into custody, one of whom was actually a psychologist. The place was run by a contractor to what we learned was the district office of the federal Program—the ‘Office of Social Awareness’—and it was set up to do a kind of training for students who refused to participate in their schools’ Program. The doctor who examined the children found that they had been lightly drugged using drugs like amobarbital, scopolamine, and sodium thiopental. Those drugs were found in the exam room.

“The children would be kept naked day and night, made to listen to subliminal suggestion tapes like we observed in that room, and put through sessions of mutual masturbation while being kept very lightly sedated. The drugs that were used are commonly believed to work as ‘truth’ drugs but in reality they simply reduce inhibitions and make the subject more amenable to suggestion. Apparently the objective of the treatment was to break down the children’s resistance to the Program.”

The group sat there silently, stunned by what they were hearing.

“I don’t have to tell you that all of this is highly illegal on many levels—violates a whole slew of laws, and is morally reprehensible as well. What the civil authorities are trying to determine now is who in the federal chain of this agency arranged that contract and who knew what was being done with the children who were kidnapped. Also where their instructions for which children to kidnap came from would be useful to know. Our base’s involvement with the brainwashing part of the case is ending since that’s an entirely a civil matter now; we’re still involved with the kidnapping, though.

“It appears that the law that set up the Program allows officials to ‘detain’ the minor children who don’t cooperate. But clearly the law never anticipated how far these perverts would go in detaining children and basically using them as guinea pigs for brainwashing. It boggles the mind how far they went. And to use a professional—a psychologist!—in such a way. I think those people will have long prison sentences to look forward to.”

Sgt Denison asked, “What about the others that were stopped at the school? What happened with them?”

“Oh yes. We turned them over to the civilian authorities to be charged with attempted kidnapping. There were four student names that the kidnapping group was given, Miss Ayame’s name and three others. Two of the other kidnappers went to one room for a boy on their list but he wasn’t present. Then they went for another student and took her out of the class. The second two pulled the third, another girl, out of her classroom. But the MP patrol saw one of the girls struggling as she was taken out of the building so they called for backup and intervened. That’s how we captured those first two teams.

“The two girls needed to be transported to the hospital. One fought so hard—she actually kicked a kidnapper in the groin—he punched her in the face, so she needed treatment. The other girl was throwing up; they weren’t sure if she had been hit in the abdomen, so they took her for observation.”

“Oh my god,” Sarah groaned. “How awful ... You know how they are now?”

“A little better now. The girl who was punched has a nasty bruise on her cheek but she’ll be okay, physically anyway. The other girl was in shock and they gave her light sedation. I heard they’ll keep her overnight but she wasn’t physically injured.”

“Thank God for that,” Sgt Denison exhaled. “I’m so glad that Ayame escaped that torture, as did the other two. Do you think the perverts set up other operations like that elsewhere?”

“No way of knowing yet. The classroom teachers were given an official letter authorizing the children to be removed from class and an envelope to go to the school office. We checked; the envelopes contained a letter from the Program office to be read to the kidnapped children’s parents...”

Sarah interrupted, “Yes, the school secretary read me a letter like that.”

“ ... so state law enforcement is going to each school running the Program to see who had gotten such letters. They hope to learn more that way.”

Roger looked at Ayame. “No one asked you if you heard those creeps say anything to each other about what they were doing. Did they talk to each other?”

“I didn’t hear too much. Only heard about navigation when they got into car. There was wall with window between front and back, Roger.”

“Say,” Roger said, “what about their cars? I heard they were motor pool. Was there any info about them?”

“Only that they were being used by the contractor under that name, son. But that’s another lead that’s being checked.”

Stuart broke in. “And that office—it was open like you could just walk in and see everything that was going on? When you got in, those rooms where the kids were being held were in the open?”

“Ah, no. The outer office looked like a bookkeeping office setup; nothing suspicious. But there was a security door behind a closet door in the room that led into what we called ‘the dungeon,’” Raymers commented. “Fortunately it was open so the woman didn’t have a chance to warn the others. They must have been waiting for the kidnappers to arrive.”

“Oh, wow ... And I guess that no one’s talking, either the kidnappers or the people at that office,” Cynthia commented.

“Not much. The people we arrested at the office site gave us a little information at first but then refused to say anything more.” He laughed. “I suggested that we loosen them up a bit; give them the same treatment as the kids using their own drugs—give ‘em a taste of their own medicine. See how their drugs work on them. But the prosecutor nixed that idea real quick. Real shame he didn’t go for it. They’re also going to question Mr Cirota, he probably has essential information.”

“Yeah, Cirota,” Roger snarled. “I warned him that if anything happened to Ayame, I’d cut off his balls...”

“Roger!” Sarah exclaimed. “You could really get into trouble making threats like that!”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I apologized to Davis later for what I said. I told him what I did with Cirota. And you know, Cirota didn’t complain about my putting him in a judo hold when I threatened him, I was surprised that he let that slide.”

Cynthia looked at Roger. “Say, I’ll bet he didn’t because he thought that if he tried to discipline you for that, it might interfere with the kidnappings they planned. He probably didn’t want anyone looking closer at how he added Ayame to the Program list. But you told Cirota that if you didn’t nail him, the Marines would, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Man, was I so damned mad! Then I was ashamed about how badly I lost my temper.”

Raymers raised his hand to stop their conversation and everyone turned to look at him.

“We Marines have this covered, son. The abductions were from federal property, remember? The school’s on base land, so the Marines are very involved. Also the law in this state says that if a death occurs when a felony is committed, no matter who dies—whether a perp or victim—then those involved as conspirators can be charged with murder—it’s known as the felony-murder rule. And if Cirota provided those names, it’s very possible he could be charged as a co-conspirator to the felonies of kidnapping and intended sexual assault. I’m sorry that the people who were torturing those kids likely won’t be able to be implicated in this kidnapping, but they face very long prison terms anyway. And since this was a felony committed on federal property, be sure that the JA office will be very involved in the prosecutions. So you’ll get your wish; we’re going to nail Cirota if he’s responsible—so don’t take punishing him into your own hands, okay, son?”