“And if Wilson ran the show, he would be able to identify some of the sleepers she hadn’t uncovered. In theory, at least. It’s just human nature to assume that he’s followed some of their careers over the years, if not many of them—to proudly watch the fruit of his labors pay off. Especially since he lost his children.”
“Let’s not get too Freudian,” said Berg. “But yeah, your analysis tracks, and Helen clearly felt the same way. You know what’s really sick? Beyond the whole concept of Camp Stalin in the Ozarks?”
Devin laughed. “Nothing can surprise me at this point.”
“The seventy-three couples Helen identified had one hundred and forty-six children,” said Berg.
“One hundred and nine,” said Devin.
“Thirty-seven of them died in accidents between 1980 and 1989. Kids between the ages of six and seventeen. Most of them drownings on one of the four lakes along the Missouri-Arkansas border. Ozark country.”
“That’s actuarially impossible,” said Devin, the implication of this statistic hitting him like a dirty family secret. “Holy shit. They killed those kids.”
“Culled for security reasons,” said Berg, raising an eyebrow. “Questionable loyalty. Maybe the kid defended Stalin a little too fiercely in history class. One too many slips about their family’s summer-vacation itinerary. Could be anything.”
“Liabilities to the program,” said Devin, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Looks like the same thing happens to the parents. The original sleepers. Most of them seem to expire right around seventy years of age,” said Berg. “Some even earlier. The fewer loose ends the better.”
“The whole thing is monstrous on so many levels,” said Devin.
“That unusually high number of drownings is what convinced Helen to travel the country and conduct interviews in the first place. She’d obviously spent a lot of time watching Wilson and waiting. My guess is the Iron Dome disaster got her thinking about all of the private sector sleepers she hadn’t been able to identify, and the damage they could do,” said Berg.
It made sense. Five hundred thirty-two killed in Haifa when the Tamir missiles that were launched to intercept the largest concentrated rocket attack fired from Lebanon in ten years mostly failed to hit their assigned targets. The Israelis acknowledged that luck alone prevented a direct hit to one of the refineries that could have resulted in a severely lethal chemical leak.
“It probably triggered the kidnapping,” said Berg. “Grabbing Wilson was the only practical move left for your mother, and a pretty good one.”
“And now that Wilson’s dead?” asked Devin.
“We’re forced to consider a less practical solution, but one that might work just the same. Your mother’s plan, the Wilson gambit, as I like to call it, only needed to produce a single name to work. A sleeper at one of the companies that had recently imploded. She could run the background checks on the families and put together a dossier for the FBI, complete with her executive summary. They’d have no choice but to do their due diligence and check out the name.
“And when they did, they’d find that Mr. and Mrs. Sleeper—the parents of the software engineer investigated by their very own organization for their role in the failed Tamir missiles or by the National Transportation Safety Board for their quality-control work on the supposedly fixed 737 MAX flight-control system—had materialized out of thin air in the early 1970s. Just like the seventy-three other couples she’d passed along to them in her file.
“Now she’s getting somewhere. If Helen could get more names out of Donald Wilson, even better. They wouldn’t even have to be employees from one of the companies we discussed a little earlier. The Bureau would investigate the parents’ background and discover that they arrived on the same spaceship that dropped the rest of the couples in various places around the country in the seventies. Case closed for Helen, but not for the FBI. Not by a long shot.”
Devin couldn’t help feeling skeptical of Berg’s rosy scenario. “They probably would have shipped her off to Guantanamo Bay and thrown her in isolation for the rest of her life, after reaching some kind of agreement with the Russians to pretend the whole thing never happened. Everyone avoids the embarrassment.”
“I wish I could say that would never happen, but I’ve seen both governments pretend something potentially more catastrophic didn’t happen,” said Berg. “Which is why we need to approach this differently. I’d like to locate the camp. My guess is that it has remained completely off the grid from inception to closing, which would serve to bolster the overall credibility of the conspiracy theory. You don’t open a summer camp for a few hundred families and keep it hidden for no reason. Physical evidence of this secret camp—combined with the overall pattern that Helen discovered and the thirty-seven deaths occurring on the nearby lakes—might be enough to pique the FBI’s interest. Should be enough. I know someone at the FBI who will hear me out, but I have to bring her something tangible.”