Chapter Thirteen: The File That Shouldn't Exist
Felicia sat at the edge of her motel bed, the hum of the old air conditioner rattling through the silence. Her hands trembled as she scrolled through the document on her cracked laptop screen. It was a file she never should have seen—one that, according to every rule of government secrecy, should have been locked away forever. Yet here it was, a digital ghost from the deepest vaults of the CIA, its very existence a riddle.
The file's metadata was as chilling as its contents. It was a CIA record, part of the infamous CREST collection, stamped with a FOIA release code and a string of numbers that seemed to pulse with hidden meaning. The document's creation date—November 11, 2016—stood in eerie contrast to its publication date, April 6, 1968. It was as if the file had been traveling through time, slipping through cracks in the system, waiting for someone like her to find it.
Felicia read the summary again, her mind racing. The document described the security room at the National Archives, where the Warren Commission records on President Kennedy's assassination were kept. Most of the files had been released to the public, but 25 boxes—ten feet, 25,000 pages—remained sealed. Only three people knew the combination to the vault. Only those with the highest clearance could enter. Among the titles of these secret documents, one leapt out at her:
A report by CIA director Richard M. Helms on "Soviet Brainwashing Techniques."
She felt the blood drain from her face. It was all there—MK Ultra, mind control, Soviet brainwashing, the very programs her tormentor had hinted at, the same technology she believed had been used on her and, now, on the world stage. This was the kind of evidence that could topple governments, shatter public trust, rewrite history.
But why her? Why did the President himself want this file? Why was a man with the highest clearance in the world unable to access it, while she—Felicia Ann Hook, a woman erased and hunted—had stumbled across it? The question gnawed at her, refusing to let go.
She remembered the first time she'd heard her tormentor gloat about his clearance. "There are things even the President can't see," he'd whispered through the static in her head. "But I can. I know every secret, every shadow. And so do you, Felicia. That's why you're so important."
She tried to recall every interaction, every clue. Why was this man so obsessed with her? What did he want? Was she a loose end—a witness to something she wasn't meant to see? Or was she a pawn, a piece in a larger game she couldn't yet understand?
Felicia's mind raced back to Meta Street, to the years before her life had been shattered. Had someone in her family been involved? Was her grandmother's death truly natural, or was it a silencing? She remembered the strange visitors, the coded letters, the way her military records had been doctored and hidden. She thought of the bull ring, the videotape, the way her memories had been fractured and rewritten.
She returned to the file, reading every word. The document described not only the physical evidence of the Kennedy assassination, but also the psychological war that had raged behind the scenes—brainwashing, defection, KGB manipulation, the CIA's own dark arts. She saw her own story reflected in the margins:
A report on Soviet brainwashing techniques—the same methods used to torment her.
A memo on Lee Harvey Oswald's access to classified information—the same kind of access her tormentor boasted about.
A CIA report on Oswald's activities in Mexico—the kind of covert movement she'd been forced into, her own identity spun and scattered across the country.
Felicia realized, with a cold certainty, that she was more than a victim. She was a key. The President's interest in the file meant she was at the center of something vast and dangerous—something that reached back decades, to the very heart of American power.
But what was her tormentor's goal? Was he trying to cover up the truth, or to expose it? Was he using her as bait, or as leverage? The questions piled up, each more urgent than the last.
She thought of the President, a man surrounded by walls of secrecy, unable to access the very files that might save him. She imagined what would happen if the truth came out—if the world learned that the same techniques used on Oswald had been perfected and deployed in the present day, that the machinery of mind control and manipulation was still alive, hidden in plain sight.
Felicia knew she had to find out more. She needed to know why she was important, why this man was obsessed with her, what secret she carried that made her worth more than any file in the National Archives. She needed to find the missing pieces—her past, her family, the connection to the Kennedy file, the reason her life had been rewritten and erased.
She closed her laptop and stared out the window, the city lights blurring into a river of gold. Somewhere out there, her tormentor watched and waited. Somewhere, the President wondered about the file he could not touch. And somewhere, in the darkness, the truth waited to be found.
Felicia whispered to herself, a promise and a warning:
"I am the evidence. I am the key. And I will find out why."