Second Sight (13 page)

Troy Weir approached the mirror above the marble bathroom sink and studied his face in the bright light. He smoothed his eyebrows, plucked a stray hair, and brushed back his bangs with a trace of alcohol-free gel on his fingertips. Then he straightened the knot of his pearl silk tie and gave himself a nod of approval.

An hour later he parked his Porsche on Chestnut Street and took a corner stool at Christian’s bar. The hostess gave him a smile as he walked by her podium and when he looked back she was still checking him out behind an armful of menus.

He ordered a Ketel One on the rocks and scanned the two-story room. Tables were occupied on both levels, the air filled with hundreds of voices, glassware clinking, silverware clattering, the harsh sound of busboys stacking plates. The dinner crowd would soon leave the room to night prowlers, and the mating dance would begin. A few were already planted at the immense bar in their preferred stools, some advantage gained by facing the ladies’ room door or a mirror that doubled the view, or maybe it was just what they considered their lucky seat. Two
very young women in short dresses giggled over lime margaritas. Another, a brunette some ten years older, was using her reflection in a martini shaker to get her bangs to lie right.

A man in his forties was looking up the skirts of ladies climbing the stairwell to the balcony tables. The bartender was juggling glasses while watching his own reflection in the mirror.

Troy stabbed an olive and thought about Sherry Moore. He’d seen her picture before he arrived at the neurology department yesterday afternoon. It was grainy and admittedly not a good one, a journalist’s photo of her getting into a car outside Nazareth Hospital the day she was released. Still, he wouldn’t have picked her out of the masses in the waiting room. She looked nothing at all like her picture. Nothing at all like what he’d expected. In fact, if the clerk at the Neurology Department hadn’t called out her name at just the right moment, he might have walked back out thinking she had failed to show or that he had somehow missed her.

Not that he’d missed her. You couldn’t miss Sherry Moore. He simply hadn’t made the connection. He’d remembered thinking at the time that she must be a sales representative for some pharmaceutical company. Who knew better than Troy how sexed up the pharmaceutical sales rep business was? I mean, you didn’t just send any old fuddy-duddy with a briefcase to attempt to interrupt a doctor’s busy schedule. That took a very special and highly motivated individual. A very sexy individual.

The vodka felt warm on his throat. There was energy in the crowded room. He wondered if Sherry Moore had ever been to Christian’s before. Perhaps he could bring her here and make her do tricks for him some night. That would be different. That would be fun.

If she ever had appeared to be blind, there was no longer a clue of it. In fact, she looked stunning in that waiting room with her earphones parting tangles of long chestnut hair. Composed, assured. It was impossible to tell if she was listening to NPR or
Black Eyed Peas.

And once he saw her it changed everything. He wondered what he could do to move her. To make her look at him twice. Oh, sure, he could have turned the equipment on and had her doing cartwheels in front of the Lombard-South subway train, but this wasn’t some trollop from Jamborees or Vespers or the Pennypack Club. Not some snot-nosed law student from Boston College who thought he could extort money from the Defense Department’s number one psychological warfare contractor.

Sherry Moore deserved so much better. She deserved his personal attention and he intended that she should not be disappointed.

He’d been reading about Sherry Moore ever since his encounter. He had downloaded every piece of material he could find on Moore and devoured it in six long early-morning hours. She had never been married and had no children. She had not been able to see since the age of five, when she was found abandoned on the steps of Nazareth Hospital in an ice storm. She suffered retrograde amnesia in addition to loss of sight. She was unable to recall the events prior to her head injury at age five.

Sherry Moore had been written about in every major newspaper. She had the confidence of at least one state attorney general and half a dozen law enforcement entities. She had surfaced in hundreds of investigations, from missing persons to missing wills, treasure hunting, historical research, and archaeology. And now, after thirty-two years, she could see.

“Is this seat taken?” A woman with dyed red hair was at his shoulder, perfectly positioned to afford him an eye-level view of one barely covered breast.

He shook his head. “Be my guest.”

She smiled slyly and removed her sweater. The man at the opposite side of the bar suddenly found posture and began fumbling with the cuffs of his sleeves. The bartender flipped two bottles, catching one behind his back.

He’d read there’d been a life-changing incident for Sherry Moore, something about a case in Wildwood, New Jersey, that sparked a suicidal spiral into depression. One of the articles suggested there was more to Sherry’s relationship with one of the detectives in Wildwood than met the eye. The article went on to quote her as saying that a favorite memory of the detective was when he surprised her on her birthday at an aquarium in Camden and the staff let her feed and pet the dolphins. Of course, there were always exposés and insinuations by overly enthusiastic journalists. Anyone could make an affair out of anything said, but there was no indication in recent print that Sherry was carrying on a relationship now. No boyfriends showed up at the hospital when she miraculously regained her sight. No girlfriends came to see her, if that was how she was inclined. That would have made news, for sure.

By all appearances she was single and had no one to share her newfound miracle with.

He wanted to see how she would react to him. How she felt after suddenly being able to see after thirty years. One would expect her to be overwhelmed, of course, and animated, curious about everything. She might also be scared of eye contact with the faces that had so long eluded her. He knew she had seen his face at the neurological department at Nazareth. He knew it would register with her again, but it would take more than a wink to get Sherry Moore’s attention.

Two more men sat at the bar. The redhead to his right was whispering into a cell phone. The margarita girls had spun backward on their stools and were talking to two boys with U.S. Naval Academy sweaters. A group of four women, young, late twenties, took a high-top table twenty feet away. They were all stunning, a collage of bare legs and shoulders. One of them smiled at him and then quickly looked away.

But it was a table behind theirs that drew his attention, a family of three—father, wife, and toddler. They were money for
sure. Oatmeal-colored sweaters lay across their shoulders. Her diamond was the size of a cocktail olive. All pretty and proper and pristine they were.

She was thirty-something and blond. Hair pulled back in a short ponytail. The kind you might see behind a black riding helmet in the Lancaster Rolex Classic each August. Her face was perfect without makeup. She wore a lemon-colored blouse buttoned to the neck, khaki slacks, and practical leather moccasins. She was drinking Perrier and he iced tea. They were indulging the child, he imagined, putting into service their parental obligations before handing off the infant to a nanny for bedtime stories and another week of freedom.

There were shopping bags piled at her feet. They would have an apartment in the city, he guessed. Either that or they would be staying at the Rittenhouse. Most likely a driver was waiting for them outside. The time was only 8 p.m. On Saturday night the stores were open until 10 p.m. She could say she forgot something. She could catch a taxi back to the apartment or hotel later. “Oh please, while we’re here in the city,” she might say. He wouldn’t want the headache of an argument.

“Crowded, huh?” The redhead leaned close.

“It’s springtime. Everyone’s getting out of the house.”

“Cat,” she said, offering him a small hand.

“Cat?” He took it.

“Short for Cathy.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling. “Will you hold my seat while I go to the men’s room, Cat?” He stood and abruptly walked away.

MIRA was no bigger than—and actually quite looked like—an oversized pen. It was developed and paid for by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a small but financially powerful arm of the Department of Defense and National Security Agency. DARPA’s grant money was derived from a budget so black that knowledge of MIRA’s existence was limited to DOD’s
upper echelon, NSA, CIA, and its creators at Case and Kimble. No more than seven people in Case and Kimble, including Troy and his stepfather, were familiar with its capabilities, and only Troy or his stepfather could remove it from the laboratory. It was as secret as anything got to be in the twenty-first century.

Troy made his way to the second-floor balcony, found a wooden beam to lean against, and feigned a cell phone call, pretending to be writing as he aimed the pen until the blond woman’s face appeared on the phone’s screen. Then he pressed a preset code.

Things had changed a lot since 1950, when his stepfather bombarded his first test subject with low-frequency radio waves. Like the stimoceiver of an earlier day, the objective was to stimulate primitive areas of the brain, to program the desire to kill or even die.

Nearly sixty years later, the technology had changed more than dramatically. Electromagnetic energy could be used to draw upon the target’s own short- and long-term memories. Subtle suggestions based on models of emotional signatures mapped on computer-enhanced EEGs were now stored in databases and later used to trigger similar emotions in other human beings, suggestions as precise as the desire to cheat on a husband or as subtle as the desire to sleep with the next man a woman saw wearing a pearl-colored tie. All he needed to do was to send the blonde a packet of brain waves.

It had been years since pilots had been given the capability to eye their targets and mentally release their payloads. Now it was possible to bond any number of minds together.

The blonde reached up and touched her ear, wiped away a spot of perspiration. She picked up her ice water and drank from it. Then she pulled the sweater from her shoulders and leaned over and said something to her husband.

He nodded.

She began to look around the room, first at the other din
ers, but then she swiveled to check out the bar, settled a moment on the man at one end, and wrestled herself out of her seat and marched toward the ladies’ room.

Troy smiled and put the MIRA back in his jacket, walked down the steps and back to his seat at the bar. And waited.

A few minutes later the blonde emerged. She had pulled the band from her ponytail and brushed her hair across her shoulders.

Back at the table she drank more water and squirmed in her seat, throwing glances over her shoulder toward the bar until at last she met Troy’s eyes and he smiled.

The waiter brought their check. The busboy began to remove their plates. She put a hand on her husband’s arm and leaned close to speak.

The man listened to her a moment and shook his head, pointing at the child. He made a gesture with both hands—
What am I supposed to do
? Then she said something else, but it only irritated him more and he stood and threw bills on the check. Without another word, he gathered the packages and made his way to the door with the stroller.

The blond woman just sat there. She unrolled an unused set of silverware and began to blot the sweat from her cheeks and forehead. She looked unnatural, her shoulders rigid; she was clearly uncomfortable, but then slowly she turned her neck until her eyes caught Troy’s at the bar and she held his gaze a long moment. The connection was palpable.

“Yes,” Troy whispered. The dance had begun.

“Excuse me?” The redhead in the stool next to him turned completely around until the toes of her heels were rubbing against his shoes.

“I was just thinking out loud.” He pointed at his shirt pocket. “Forgot an important call.”

He took out his phone and turned away from her again and the redhead made a face, took her drink, and marched to the end
of the bar to talk to someone else.

He opened the cell phone and the blonde’s face was back on the screen, bangs and perfectly cropped ponytail the way he remembered from when he’d photographed her fifteen minutes before. He liked her like that. Without all the makeup and flesh sticking out. Not like these bar sluts, but superior looking. He wanted to see her that way again. And then he wanted to watch her disassemble before his eyes.

The first successful intracerebral radio stimulation was attributable to a Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado in the 1950s, he knew. Delgado, as impatient as Troy’s stepfather, quickly grew tired of working on cats and monkeys and moved his stimoceiver into mental institutions to work on patients.

The stimoceiver, unlike today’s MIRA, was invasive and required implants to be placed in the brain. Once the patient was ready, he or she was bombarded by radio waves, stimulating the amygdala and hippocampus and producing a wide variety of emotions and effects, some pleasant and some not so pleasant.

MIRA was to the stimoceiver what the space shuttle was to the Wright Brothers’ plane. Troy had read everything there was to know on the subject of mind control. He understood that the key to manipulating another person’s thoughts was not by subliminal suggestion. It was by giving them a preordained set of instructions from electroencephalograms of test subjects having the identical thought that was to be reproduced. If X was thinking about a white-haired woman wearing a mink hat and, upon seeing one, pushed her in front of an approaching train, the EEG blueprint of that thought imprinted into another person—with a boost from an on-site medium such as himself—would produce the identical result. Catalogue a few million scenarios of EEGs from test subjects and you had an arsenal of impersonal weapons that would never leave a trace.

MIRA was the brainchild of Ed Case. Troy knew that it could only have been developed through years of trials on human
guinea pigs—there were no substitutes for brains when it came to humans; you couldn’t ask rats and guinea pigs to commit murder—and he sensed a great opportunity when his stepfather chose him to liaise Case and Kimble’s multibillion-dollar defense contract with the Defense Special Projects team of the National Security Agency.