Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

the West Village. The next time he visited, he saw that she had responded by carving his initials right beside hers, and drawn a heart around them both. He had closed the restaurant down that night, drinking bottled beer and thinking of Ana until they kicked him out. Yet meeting in person was too dangerous, and ever since that balmy spring evening in Central Park, the memory of which felt so close in time and yet so very long ago, he had not laid eyes on her again.

Ana had always praised his devotion to his ideals. But in the end, it was she who had sacrificed her heart—and her entire life—for the cause.

With a snarl, needing an outlet for his heartbreak and frustration, he thought of the man who had started it all by sending Ana to seduce him. He should have killed Hans in that parrilla long ago.

Now the whereabouts of the German American were a mystery. Some years back, Dr. Corwin had discovered that Hans’s true mission inside the US government had been to shepherd Project MKUltra, the CIA’s top-secret mind-control program. Driven by fears of brainwashing by the Soviets and the Chinese, the CIA had conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments to improve interrogation techniques and increase the resistance to torture of US prisoners. All sorts of radical hallucinogens and mental persuasion techniques were explored. Hypnosis. Electroshock. Sensory deprivation. Verbal and sexual abuse. The program got out of hand, even performing tests on unwitting US and Canadian citizens, until it was shuttered in 1973. A public outcry ensured it would never be revived.

Except it did live on, by another name and through a far more radical initiative.

Society sources had revealed that, under the secret directive of Hans and a psychiatrist named Waylan Taylor—Dr. Corwin had gaped when he heard this—the US government had developed a new program to plunge even farther down the rabbit hole of the mind. Telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing, and precognition were among the vast array of ESP and psychic phenomena explored in sanctioned government research.

Behind closed doors, the government called it Project Stargate. Dr. Corwin assumed Hans and Waylan had siphoned off the best research for the Ascendants and ventured even farther afield in their private labs. But that was in the past. Waylan had returned to Asheville, and Hans had left the CIA before dropping off the Society’s radar altogether. Not even Ana knew his whereabouts.

Enough. Don’t let thoughts of that barbarian ruin things. Ana has risked her life to throw the Ascendants off the trail, and you’ve both worked decades for this moment.

With a deep breath, prepared for anything and everything, Dr. Corwin gripped the cane at his side, felt the comforting heft of the handgun tucked beneath his fur-lined bomber jacket, and knocked on the front door.

Long moments later, he heard slow footsteps approaching from inside the house, followed by the click of a dead bolt and the swoosh of a sliding chain lock. The wooden door cracked ajar.

A fragile voice spoke from behind the opening. “Si?”

Dr. Corwin replied in Spanish. “Good afternoon. My name is James Corwin, and I’m a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University in New York. Are you . . . are you Ettore Majorana?”

In the ensuing pause, Dr. Corwin kept one hand near his cane, ready to jam the door if needed, and his other near his pistol, unsure how Ettore—if it was truly him—would react.

After a wait that felt like eternity itself, the voice behind the door spoke again. “Have you come to kill me?”

Dr. Corwin almost laughed. “Good Christ, no.”

“Are you with the Leap Year Society?”

It was Dr. Corwin’s turn to hesitate. “Yes, Ettore. I am.”

“And not the Ascendants.”

“Never.”

The door eased open, revealing a bespectacled old man in wrinkled blue slacks, a wool sweater, and a pair of beige penny loafers that looked out of place in Ushuaia. Despite the heat pouring out of the wood-burning stove in the room behind him, a green scarf was wrapped tightly around the man’s neck. Above the scarf, peering owlishly at Dr. Corwin, was the face of Ettore Majorana, more than eighty years old but undeniably the same man.

“I always knew someone would come,” Ettore said quietly. “I just didn’t know who.”

“No one else knows I’m here. Not even the Society. Of this I swear.”

A harsh, rattling cough bent Ettore double. When he regained control, he ushered Dr. Corwin inside and closed the door. “It doesn’t matter anymore. My time on Earth is drawing to a close.”

What a strange choice of words, Dr Corwin thought. As if his time somewhere else was about to begin.

“Would you care for tea?” Ettore asked. “Coffee?”

“Coffee would be lovely. If it’s not too much trouble.”

As Ettore shuffled through a swinging door into the kitchen, Dr. Corwin sat in a cloth armchair across from the fire and opted not to take off his jacket, keeping his gun close at hand. Despite all the precautions he had taken, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Hans was about to burst through the door.

While the kettle boiled, Dr. Corwin observed the room. To his left was an old sofa with a stain on the center cushion. Across from him, tucked into the corner near the wood-burning stove, was another armchair with an afghan draped across the top. Bare log walls. Scuff marks on the battered wood floors. The only other items in the room were a bookshelf by the door and a messy pile of magazines and journals on a coffee table beside the armchair.

Unable to help himself, he rose to inspect the contents of the bookshelf, surprised by the titles. Expecting old textbooks, he instead found religious tomes from across a wide spectrum of faiths, a philosophy collection, world histories, and a range of pseudoscientific titles, from J. B. Rhine’s research into ESP to radical theories of consciousness to accounts of near-death experiences. There were books on the world of dreams, purgatory, advanced meditation techniques, and speculation from leading scientists on the possibility