The Cleaner

The dusty box, wrapped in brittle brown paper and tied with string, long-hidden under the floorboards of the house was mysterious enough, but inside was pile of hundred dollar bills and a well-stuffed envelope. Written across the front of the envelope were the words "If you found this, you're a dead man. Read this to know why."

I thought after 30 years that it would be okay. They would have stopped watching me and I could stop pretending that I didn't know their secret. But because you found this, you have to assume that they are watching you like they watched me and watched everyone I ever came in contact with.

If they think you know their secret, they will send someone after you, just like they sent me to kill the man who told me. If they think you know, even if you don’t, then they will hunt you down.

But you can’t avoid being suspicious unless you know. You have to understand what to avoid and the only way to do that is to read what I tell you.

In 1967, I was a marine. I had problems that would be forgotten in exchange for a special service to our country. I was the low man on a four-man task force. We had to raid a particular farm house in Missouri, eliminate the occupants, confirm their identities, and cover all evidence.

Our machine guns made quick work of the people in the farmhouse. A few dozen rounds, popping like firecrackers. Even if someone heard them so far from town, so soon after the fourth of July, it would have been ignored.

We were ordered to kill everyone there. A baby began to cry, but one of my team went into the back room. A couple more firecracker pops and it too was silent.

With a few silent flashes documenting the completion of our task, we carried the bodies to the pickup truck. The whole family.

The other men melted away into the darkness of the fields beyond the house, but I had been assigned to dispose of the bodies. I pulled a tarp over the lifeless pile and drove the pickup truck slowly down the dirt road.

By the time the I got to the end of the road and turned onto the paved street, flames were coming out of the roof of the house.

I drove for half an hour, then pulled into a dark service station. As instructed, there were two oil drums behind the building, empty, tops opened and waiting next to the full drums of used oil.

I turned out the lights and pulled back the tarp.

A set of ice blue eyes stared back at me.

A thin voice, the voice of a man straining to draw air into lungs clogged with blood, a voice of a man who should have been dead for the last thirty minutes spoke. “You need to know,” the voice said.

“Look,” I said, “I have to do this. I hate it but it’s important to our country.”

“When you get done,” the man said, “they will watch you. If they think you know what I know, they’ll kill you the same way they are having you kill me.”

“Then I should kill you now.”

“And not know what to avoid? Not know when your next harmless comment or the next book you check out of the library will get you killed? I did this for twenty years... what you’re doing now... and I know that most of the people I killed weren’t involved in the game and didn’t know why they were being killed.” He coughed, choked, and seemed to blank out. Finally, his breathing came back. “If you don’t know what I will tell you, you’ll be killed just for making a phone call to the wrong city.”

“And I let you live?”

“No, you’ve already killed me. But don’t let the bastards win. As long as someone knows their secret, they won’t have won yet.”

“All right,” I said. “But I have a time table.”

“You better meet the time table or they’ll suspect that we had this talk.”

“Talk fast...”

“I was a cleaner. No the kind who cleans clothes, but the kind that cleans up messes our covert services leave behind. I cleaned up witnesses. I eliminated evidence. I even cleaned up the participants when they knew too much.

“I did the work for the CIA ever since Korea. Usually it was picking up after people who did stuff that was necessary, but not very elegant. Some stuff I didn’t understand, and for the most part I didn’t want to understand.

“They would split the work around so that no one person could piece the story together. But his last job was different. I got a list of places and people to clean. There’s no way that I couldn’t avoid figuring it out.

“Especially since it was November of ‘63. Any fool would have figured it out, even if I was given just a tiny piece to clean I couldn’t have avoided knowing what it involved. As I went took care of the list, one at a time, I came to the realization that my bosses knew that too. That as soon as I finished the work, I would be on some other cleaner’s list.

“I thought that I could get a weapon if I knew. Threaten to release evidence if I die unexpectedly.

“Up until that point, I had never listened to the people or looked at the evidence, but this time I listened and looked. I pocketed stuff I was supposed to destroy.

“At the treasury department, I replaced copies of the black budget with a sanitized version that had no mention of archeological research in French-Indo-China. From the navy I removed files on a PT Boat and its crew. I killed a treasury department clerk with a hit-and-run, two navy officers with a mugging. I burned up two anthropologists in their university building along with whatever they had been working on.

“As part of the same list, I pushed a Texas woman in front of a bus. From the newspapers later I found out she was connected because she owned a camera and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The film I retrieved from the photo lab before it was developed. I had it developed and it didn’t show anything at all interesting.

“I killed John Connelly’s secretary with a slip in the bath tub, replaced a copy of the budget in his office with the doctored one, and made sure that there were no other copies around. I raided the house the naval officers shared and took out diaries and phone lists.

“Two Dallas police officers died in the line of duty, shot at night, apparently by radicals. Bad brakes took out a scientist and his wife, but all his lab had were some notebooks about biological chemicals and proteins. His lab assistant took a dive from a bridge out of grief.

“A gun shop owner was killed in a robbery. A couple of college girls disappeared without a trace. Three businessmen were overcome by food poisoning. And a guy in a jail cell was given heart failure with digitalis.

“I tapped four people who I knew from the company, one of which was the guy who gave me the list. The one who gave me the list realized what was happening and talked, hoping that it would be his revenge to make me suspect. Of course the I already knew that I was suspect, so it didn’t make a difference. All the company man had to say was “I knew it. The shit hits the fan and the suits want to cover up. They’re burying me and they’ll bury you. And all I did, damnit was put one little bullet on a stretcher. Just think of how deep they will bury you.”

“I was supposed to deliver the scientist’s notebooks in person but instead I mailed a letter bomb.

“I hoped I was free, and I ran as fast as I could. It’s been four years. Took you four years to find me and kill me.

“So I’m killing you because you killed the guys who plotted to kill Kennedy?”

“No, you dumb fuck. Can’t you see? They screwed up. They were supposed to kill Connelly, but hit Kennedy. Connelly saw something in the covert activities budget that looked odd. He had buddies left over from when he was secretary of the navy who sent a PT boat to check it out. Something happened. The company closed down the research station and cleaned up everyone involved in it. Including Connelly. But they even screwed that up.

"The idiots killed the president. Just to keep a secret.

"And I killed them to keep the secret.

"And now you are going to kill me to keep the secret. And if you're not incredibly careful, they'll kill you because they'll think that you talked to me.

"Or worse, that you have the evidence."

But he wouldn’t tell me where the evidence is. Said that they’d be more afraid if they never found it. It's well hidden, but eventually it will be found and released to the public.

I put the bodies in the drums, drove the pickup to a particular junk yard, and got a bus back to my debriefing.

They've watched me for 30 years.

I never went back to Missouri. I never rented a video about the Kennedy assassination. I watched every word I spoke.

And they watched me. I found listening devices in my home. A tracker in my truck. I saw the same people following me, off and on, for years.

And now that I'm gone and you own my house, they'll keep an eye on you too.

Talk to the wrong person, say the wrong words, drive down the wrong road and you're a dead man.

They will watch you for thirty years, if they don’t suspect you first and put you on a cleaner’s list. You tell anyone you die. And anyone you tell will die. It’s poison. Even after thirty years it’s poison.

Good luck.