Several people sent messages encouraging me to keep looking for a link that connected Dr. Stone to Major Keene… and after two days of digging through the library archives, this is the only thing that has turned up. I’m assuming this is what they wanted me to find:

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So Major Keene is not only the hero of the Houston incident, but a distinguished scientist. I’ve never even heard of the virus discussed in this article, but apparently it’s important in the scientific world, and the source of a bitter dispute between Keene and Stone. But I was reluctant to post this, because even if it does show that there’s a history between the two of them, I have no idea what this has to do with Piedmont. Are Stone and Keene both involved, somehow?

I’m getting more and more worried that I’ve been wasting time following dead ends. I don’t see how knowing any of this is going to help me figure out what happened in Piedmont, or what happened to my family.

Well, I just got finished talking to Lance Stone. With some convincing from those of you who friended him on Facebook, he agreed to IM for a few minutes this evening.

He didn’t have a lot to say, but he did confirm that his father is not on a family vacation, as his automated message indicates. I’ve copied the transcript of the conversation here so that the rest of you can see what he said for yourselves.

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So Stone didn’t go on vacation. He did, however, get into a car with some official-sounding types, and his son hasn’t heard from him since…

I don’t know where this stuff is coming from, but I woke up this morning to find that three of you had sent me another classified document. This one’s a little harder to make sense of than the transcript I received earlier this week:

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It’s a leaked military doc, highly confidential. Some of the words are coded/covered up, but it looks like an internal report about some thwarted bioterrorism attack that took place near Houston a couple years ago.

Whatever happened, it sounds like this would have turned into a catastrophic event if it weren’t for “Major W. Keene.” (Another name that means nothing to me.) What I can’t figure out is how this relates to Piedmont. Did something get into the water?

Well, Nash has definitely been tracking Mancheck. And from the looks of it, he was (or is) close to proving something major. I’m guessing that’s what Stone was alluding to when he mentioned Nash in the congressional transcript… but I can’t quite figure out what kept Nash from getting the evidence he needed to go public with his story.

Apparently Nash spoke with a handful of soldiers about war-related illnesses… so maybe he and Stone had spoken at some point about Stone’s theories regarding Mancheck and chemical exposure after that bombing in 1993?

Either way, I don’t quite see how any of this relates to Piedmont. But I’m definitely siding with Stone and Nash: Mancheck’s not turning out to be the most inspiring figure. From what I’ve learned of him, it seems like indecent and immoral are his specialties.

I have no clue how, but a few of you already managed to figure out the login information to access Nash’s private files. I haven’t had time to take a close look at what’s there yet, but I wanted to let the rest of you know the password. Maybe you’ll be able to make sense of the files, or see something I’m missing?

http://www.jacknash.net/private

Login: jacknash
Password: mancheck

From what I can tell so far, it looks like Stone’s passing comment in the Congressional transcript was correct: Nash was attempting to gather evidence about Mancheck’s motives and actions during Desert Storm.