Extraordinary Powers (24 page)

For the next hour or so he ran me through a battery of tests, designed to ascertain how sensitive my “gift” was, how strong the emotions accompanying the thoughts had to be, how close the person had to be, and so on.

At the end he ventured an explanation.

“As you have already speculated,” Dr. Mehta said, “the magnetizing effect of the MRI on your brain produced this peculiar result.” He lighted a Camel straight. His ashtray was a tacky souvenir from a place called Wall Drug in South Dakota.

He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which seemed to enable him to think deeply.

“I don’t know much about you, just that you’re some kind of lawyer, and that you used to be with the Agency. I’d rather not know more than that anyway. As for me, I’m the chief of CIA’s psychiatric division.”

“Psych tests, debriefings, and all that?”

“Basically. I’m sure my staff ran tests on you before they sent you to the Farm, before sending you wherever they sent you, and at the end of your term of duty. Your file’s been pulled, so I couldn’t know anything more about you than I do even if I wanted. Which I don’t.” Another cloud of smoke, and then he continued: “But if you expect me to enlighten you about your ability to read minds, I’m sorry to disappoint you. When Toby Thompson came to me a few years back, I thought he’d taken leave of his senses.”

I smiled.

“I frankly am not one of those who believed in human extrasensory perception. Not that there’s anything inherently ludicrous about it.

There’s quite a body of evidence to suggest that certain animal species possess the ability to communicate that way, whether you’re talking about dolphins or dogs. But I’ve never seen any evidence beyond highly unreliable anecdotal reports that suggest that we humans can do it.”

“I assume you’ve changed your mind now,” I said.

He laughed. “Thoughts take place throughout the human brain, in the hippocampus and the frontal-lobe cortex and the neocortex. A colleague of mine, Robert Galambos, has theorized that thinking is ” by the glial cells, not the neurons. You’ve heard about Broca’s brain?”

I told him I’d only heard the term, but didn’t know what it meant.

“The French surgeon Pierre-Paul Broca discovered an area of the human brain where language is produced, an area in the left frontal lobe.

Broca’s area is the seat of the speech mechanism. Another place, known as Wernicke’s area, is where we recognize and process speech. That’s in the left temporal and parietal lobes. I’m postulating that when one of these two areas, probably Wernicke’s, was subtly altered somewhat by the powerful magnetism of the magnetic resonance imager, the neurons realigned. And that enables you to ” output, low frequency radio waves, from others’ Broca areas. We’ve long known that the human brain puts out these electrical signals. What you’re doing, I suspect, is simply receiving those signals.

You know how sometimes we can ” ourselves think, as if in our own spoken voice?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Well, I’d theorize that at some point in the formation of such thoughts there’s concurrent activity in the speech centers. And it’s at that point that the electrical signals are generated. All right. So. Then two recent scientific findings set us to thinking, as it were.

“One was a study published in Science magazine two years or so ago, done by a team at Johns Hopkins that discovered they could actually produce a computer image of the thinking process of the brain. They hooked up electrodes to a monkey’s brain, and used computer graphics to track the electrical activity in the motor cortex—that area of the brain that controls motor activity. So that in the instant before a rhesus monkey performed an action, they could see on the computer screen, a thousandth of a second in advance, the electrical activity in the monkey’s brain.

Amazing! We could actually see the brain thinking!

“And then, a couple of geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology discovered that the human brain contains something like seven billion microscopic magnetic crystals. In effect, bar magnets made of magnetite crystals, an iron mineral. They were wondering whether there was a link between cancer and electromagnetic fields, though there’s no evidence yet that the magnetic crystals have anything to do with cancer.

But my colleagues and I thought: what if we could use the magnetic resonance imager to somehow alter those little magnets in the human brain—to align them? Now, you’re a patent attorney, so I assume you keep up with technological developments.”

“As a rule, yes.”

“Early in 1993, a stunning breakthrough was announced, almost simultaneously, by the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Graz University of Technology in Austria. Using various techniques of bio cybernetics the collection of the electrical impulses put out by the brain by means of electroencephalography, human beings could actually control specially configured computers simply by thinking a command! By using their minds they could move a cursor around on a computer screen, even type letters.

Well, that was it. At that point we knew it was possible.”

“So why can’t you induce this in everyone?”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” he said. “It may have to do with the way your Wernicke’s area is situated. Perhaps with the number, or density, of the neuronal cells there. Whatever it is about you that gives you an eidetic memory. To be honest, I have no idea. This is only sheerest speculation. But for whatever reason, for whatever confluence of reasons, it happened to you. Which makes you quite valuable indeed.”

“Valuable,” I said, “to whom?” But he had already turned and left the room.

TWENTY-NINE.

“I’m really quite satisfied,” Toby Thompson said, and indeed, he was visibly pleased with himself. I sat in an antiseptic, brightly lit white interrogation room, watching Toby in an adjoining room through a large, thick pane of glass. The glass was smudged with fingerprints, and the room was so bright that it was easy to forget it was eight in the morning and I’d been up all night. The room was situated in an underground level of the same unlovely 1960s-vintage office building.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Why the glass barrier? Why aren’t you jamming the room with ELF like you did at the safe house?”

Toby smiled almost wistfully. “Oh, we are. Better not to take chances.

I don’t much trust technology. Do you?”

But I was in no mood for banter, having been through more than an hour of Dr. Mehta’s testing. “If I’d managed to escape … ” I began.

“We’d have stopped at nothing to find you, Ben. You’re much too valuable. Actually, our psychological profile of you indicated, unequivocally, that you would attempt an escape. So I’m not altogether surprised. You have to remember, Ben, that with your retirement from the Agency, you no longer have the colony odor.”

“The colony odor?”

“Entomology. Ants. You remember my interest in ants.”

Toby had in fact studied to become an entomologist before World War II moved him very far afield, to military intelligence, the OSS, and later the CIA. But he’d kept up his interest in ants, reading voraciously in the professional journals, staying in contact with an old friend of his from Harvard, E.O. Wilson, who was one of the world’s great scholars of ants. Just about the only use for ants Toby had managed to find in his life, however, was in metaphors.

“I certainly do, Toby. The colony odor?”

“When one ant greets another, she runs her antennae over the other’s body. If the other is an intruder from another species, she will be attacked. But if she’s from the same species, and just, say, a different colony, she will be accepted. Yet she’ll be offered less food until she acquires the same odor—the same pheromone—that the others in the colony have. Then she’s one of them.”

“So, am I from a different colony?” I asked impatiently.

“Have you ever seen an ant offer its food? It’s very intimate, very touching. The attack is of course very unpleasant. One, or born , dies.”

I ran my fingers over the brown fake-woodgrainformica topped conference table at which I had been placed. “All right,” I said. “Now, tell me this: Who came after me the other night?”

“In Boston?”

“Correct. And ‘ don’t know’ isn’t satisfactory.”

“But accurate. We really don’t know. We do know that there’s been a leak—”

“Goddamnit, Toby,” I exploded. “We have to level with each other.”

He raised his voice to a shout, which surprised me. “I am leveling with you, Ben! As I told you, since my accident in Paris, I have been in charge of this project. They call it the Oracle Project—you know how the Covert-Op boys are so damned attached to their melodramatic code names—from the original Latin oraculum, from or are to speak. The mind speaks, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“The Oracle Project is the Manhattan Project of telepathy expensive, intensive, ultrasecret, and considered a hopeless cause by just about everyone who knows of its existence. Since the Dutch gentleman’s several months of ESP to be precise, 133 days, before he committed suicide we have gone through more than eight thousand experimental subjects.”

“Eight thousand?” I exclaimed.

“The vast majority of these individuals, of course, knew only that they were undergoing medical experiments, for which they were reimbursed handsomely. Of all of them, two subjects emerged with some small manifestation of ESP, but the ability faded after a day or two. With you

“It’s two days, and nothing has changed.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

“But what the hell is this for? The Cold War is over, Toby, the damned ” “Ah,” he said. “Precisely wrong. Yes, the world has changed, but it’s just as dangerous a place. The Russian threat is still there, waiting for another coup d’etat or a total crash of the system, the way Weimar Germany was lying in wait for a Hitler to restore its ruined empire. The Middle East remains a caldron. Terrorism is rampant we’re entering the age of terrorism like we’ve never seen before. We need to cultivate this ability you now have desperately. We need agents who can divine intentions. There will always be Saddam Husseins or Muarnmar Qadhafis or whoever the hell else.”

“So tell me this: Why the gunfire in Boston? The Oracle Project has been under way for what? five years?”

“Approximately.”

“And suddenly people are shooting at me. There’s an urgency, obvipusly.

Some people want something very badly, and very quickly. It makes no sense.”

Toby signed, touched his fingers to the glass separating us. “There’s no more Soviet threat,” he said slowly. “Thank God. But now we’re facing a much more difficult, more diffuse threat: hundreds of thousands of unemployed East Bloc spies watchers, wet workers a real nasty bunch, many of them.”

‘^That’s not an explanation,” I replied. “Those are assets. Who the hell do they work for? And whyt’

“Damn it,” Toby thundered. “Who do you think took out Edmund Moore?”

I stared at him. Toby’s eyes were wide, frightened, teary. “You tell me,” I said very quietly. “Who killed him?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, the public version is that he swallowed the barrel of his gun, a 1957 Agency-issue Smith & Wesson Model 39.”

“And?”

“The Model 39 is chambered for the 9mm Parabellum, right? It’s the first 9mm made by an American manufacturer.”

“What the hell are you getting at?”

“The bullet that penetrated Ed Moore’s brain came from the special 9mm x 18 cartridge. The cartridge used in the 9mm Makarov pistol. Follow me?” “Soviet,” I said. “Vintage late 1950s. Or—”

“Or East German. The cartridge was manufactured for the Pistole M. East German. I don’t think Ed Moore would have used ammunition issued by the East German secret police in his old Agency pistol. Do you?”

“But the god damned Stasi doesn’t exist anymore, Toby!”

“East Germany doesn’t exist. The Stasi doesn’t exist. But Stasi assets exist. And someone is hiring them. Someone is using them. We need you, Ben.” “Yes,” I said, raising my voice. “Obviously. But to do what, dammit?”

He went through his ritual of extracting a pack of Rothmans, tapping it against the side of his wheelchair until one protruded, lighting it, then speaking fuzzily through the smoke.

“We want you to locate the last head of the KGB.”

“Vladimir Orlov.”

He nodded.

“But surely you know his location? With all the Agency’s resources … ?”

“We know only that he’s somewhere in northern Italy. Tuscany. That’s it.”

“How the hell do you know that?” “I never divulge sources and methods,” he said with a crooked smile.

“Actually, Orlov is a sick man. He’s been seeing a cardiologist in Rome.

That much we know. He’s seen this fellow for years, since he first visited Rome in the late 1970s. This doctor treats a number of world leaders, with great discretion. Orlov trusts him.

“Also, we know that after his consultations with this cardiologist, he is driven back to some undisclosed location in Tuscany.

His drivers so far have been admirably skilled at shaking the tail.”

“So do a black-bag job.”

“On the Italian cardiologist? We tried his office in Rome. No success; he must keep the files on Orlov well hidden.”

“And if I find Orlov?”

“You’re Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law. Married to Hal’s daughter. It’s not entirely implausible for you to have business with him. He will be suspicious, but you can work it. Once you’re in his presence, we want you to find out everything about whatever it was that he and Hal Sinclair discussed. Everything. Did Hal really steal a fortune? What did Orlov have to do with it? You speak Russian, and with your ”—”

“He doesn’t have to say a word.”

“In one fell swoop you may be able to locate the missing fortune and clear Hal Sinclair’s name. Now, it’s entirely possible that what you learn about Hal will not please you.”

“Unlikely.”

“No, Ben. You do not want to believe that Harrison Sinclair was a crook, nor does Alex Truslow, nor do I. But prepare yourself for the possibility that this is what you’ll discover, repugnant though it may be. This assignment will not be without risks.”