Second Sight (14 page)

The blond woman was calling the waiter back to the table. They came to some agreement and he pointed to the bar. Then she returned to the ladies’ room.

This was the moment, Troy knew. The redhead seated next to him earlier was still talking to a woman at the end of the bar, but her Nissan key fob and lipstick case lay next to a used cocktail napkin. He gathered them quickly and nested them behind the rack of glasses at the service bar to his left. Then he cleaned the bar with a linen handkerchief and placed his own glass upon it.

The door to the ladies’ room opened; he saw her in triplicate, reflected in mirrors dividing the coatroom, bar, and dining room. The redhead was still talking, hands all over the place, strategically arching her back to thrust her breasts out for anyone who cared to see them.

The blonde was coming toward him now, slowly, eyes fixed on the bartender as she passed a dozen seats. She feigned noticing the open stool next to Troy, and he deftly removed the drink before she could see it.

“Taken?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Just opened.”

The blonde slid in next to him, trying to look more interested in getting the bartender’s attention than in him.

The last time Troy had done this was at Seneca’s on Market Street, just before the Christmas holidays. MIRA wasn’t something you just stuck in your pocket and walked out of Case and Kimble’s most secure laboratory with. Removing it required a password and key card that only he and his stepfather possessed. But, owner or not, DARPA and the NSA wanted to be certain
their device never fell into enemy hands. The system required that both men be present and both passwords used, to prevent either one of them from being kidnapped and forced to release the MIRA unwillingly. But Troy knew more about his stepfather than the old man could ever have imagined. Troy knew the one secret that Edward Case believed was his and his alone.

In 1949, as the Allies turned Hungary over to the communists and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences became a socialist academy, the famous communist physicist Nicolao Somogyi begged young Case to help obtain a green card for his only daughter, Syuzanna. Four months later Case married sixteen-year-old Syuzanna Somogyi of Budapest. The marriage was then annulled in Ashland, New Hampshire, in 1950.

Troy Weir knew it because his mother found the parched original of the marriage certificate in the fireplace ashes of the Case family home in the Catskill Mountains on January 22, 1952, when she dated and placed it in a photo album sleeve. When Troy was twenty-two and she was on her deathbed, she told him where to locate the document. With Edward Case, one could never underestimate the value of holding a trump card. Case’s marriage to a communist in 1950 would surely jeopardize his lasting legacy to democracy. Not to mention that America was still talking about the traitor scientists from the Manhattan Project who along with Klaus Fuchs sold A-bomb technology to the Soviet Reds in 1945.

The password
somogyi
opened all of Ed Case’s locked doors. Even his numerical key codes had been formed from the alphabetical equivalents of
somogyi.
Case thought the secret was his and his alone.

It wasn’t something you could do every day. Security still printed a readout of who came and went from the lab, and Troy was most certainly on it. But Troy was the director of the lab, and unless his stepfather was specifically looking, there was no one to know any different.

He had had quite the night with the woman at Seneca’s. The
famous sports club had been crowded that holiday weekend. Jean Stark, a sideline announcer for one of the nation’s largest sports channels, was having dinner with five of the National Football League’s Hall of Famers in town for Sunday’s Eagles halftime show. Suddenly she saw Troy standing by the door at the opposite end of the room. He still had MIRA in his hand and her face on the screen when she walked up to him and gave him her phone number. Six hours later she was found—drunk and naked, stumbling through the eighth-floor halls of an upscale city hotel—by a tabloid reporter who had been tipped about Stark’s having an orgy in her room with the Hall of Famers.

Her picture made the headlines. The tabloid somehow got a copy of a credit card receipt signed by Stark to purchase the room and a cell phone photo of women’s clothing scattered around an unmade bed. The hallway outside the room was filled with empty liquor bottles.

The former players vehemently denied having sex with Stark in the room, but the damage was already done. Stark was off the network before Sunday’s kickoff.

“Do you know what time it is?” the blond woman asked nervously.

“Early,” Troy said. “Hopefully it’s early.” He chuckled, raising his sleeve, and he told her it was a quarter to nine.

“Thank you.” She tried to smile.

“In town for the weekend?”

She looked at him and found she couldn’t stop. She nodded, her blue eyes locked innocently on his.

“Excuse me!”

Troy looked over his shoulder and found the redhead who had been sitting next to him earlier. The spell was broken momentarily as the blonde turned and looked at her, and for a moment he saw fear in her eyes. Fear that she would lose him?

“I don’t suppose you remember what happened to my keys.” The redhead reached roughly over the blonde’s shoulder and
moved a glass to look around the rail.

“I think the bartender put them over there,” Troy said innocently, pointing toward the rack of clean glasses to his left.

“Yeah, right, and screw you too.” The redhead pushed her way between Troy and the service bar and retrieved her things. “Real classy,” she said, and walked away.

“People.” Troy shook his head.

The blonde looked at him again. Looked as if he were some long-lost thing she had just found.

“Troy,” he said, reaching for and taking her hand.

She nodded, hand limp, every bit his. “Courtney,” she said.

“Courtney. What a beautiful name.” He looked at her hand and turned it over and rubbed his thumb over the tan lines where a wedding ring had been.

“You’re married,” he said, enjoying the game.

She covered the hand as the bartender arrived to take her order.

“Martini,” she said. “Vodka.”

She drank it fast and ordered another. She looked like she wanted to bolt for the door, but she wasn’t moving and Troy knew it.

After the second martini, she turned toward him. Her eyes looked glazed.

“Take me somewhere,” she said earnestly. “Please.”

Troy looked into her eyes and smiled.

“Pretty please works on me.” His face was now deadly serious.

“Pretty please,” she said sincerely.

“Don’t forget those words,” he told her. “You’ll need them later.”

The debasing of Courtney Logan took most of eight hours.

He first had her fix her ponytail in the restroom and wipe
the lipstick from her face. He had her button her shirt to the neck and put her wedding ring back on. Then he had pretended to forget his wallet, had her pay the tab for both of their drinks with her credit card.

He unzipped his pants in the cab and had her perform fellatio on the way to a dive bar in Camden, New Jersey. At the bar, he had her raise her shirt and show her breasts to a dozen patrons with cell phone cameras.

She begged him to take her to a hotel, and he did—her credit card again. They had sex and then he told her he wanted to watch her perform on other men and he sent her to the hotel bar and she brought back two more before the night was over. He took dozens of pictures of her from the closet, close-ups of her face, and then he dropped her penniless and without her phone on a dark street corner at 4 a.m. And e-mailed her husband a hyperlink.

Sherry was on the phone when Brigham came through the door. He was carrying a leather folio and dropped his jacket on a chair on the way to the dining room. She waved and held up a finger to her ear.

“Yes, I’ll hold, thank you,” she said.

Brigham heard her plop into the leather recliner by the secretary.

“Dr. Salix, that was quick, thank you.”

Sherry listened as Brigham walked to the window. A public utility truck was parked on the far side of the hedge, its yellow strobe light reflecting off the second-story windows of a distant neighbor’s house. The sound of a chain saw rose and fell; a tree had come down on some power lines overnight.

“How can that be? Surely someone from Veterans Affairs would have had to have examined him in fifty-some years! The army would at least have sent someone from personnel to see him in all that time. They were paying out the money?”

She was on her feet again and pacing the floor.

“No records. You’re telling me there are no records. That is unbelievable,” she said.

Brigham walked into the dining room and took a seat at the table.

“I know you know and I’m sorry. So where is the body now?”

“All right, but do me one more favor. See that he is not cremated. Can you promise me that, Dr. Salix?”

She waited for his response.

“Heck, I don’t know,” she answered. “A day, two days, a week, give me a week. Can you do that?”

A moment later she nodded. “Thanks, Doctor,” Sherry said, pushing the End button on the receiver.

“Maybe I’m overreacting,” she said, as much to herself as to Brigham. She dropped the phone and grabbed a mug of coffee from the top of an antique secretary, spilling some on the hardwood floor on her way to the dining room.

“Maybe I’m complicating things. Maybe it’s not all that sinister. Maybe it’s just some stupid chain of coincidences.” She slammed the mug down, spilling more coffee on the table.

Brigham was dumping the contents of his cracked leather folio across the table.

“What did you see that day, Sherry?”

“I don’t know,” she said tiredly, pulling out a chair and falling back into it. “You mean about Monahan, right?”

He nodded.

“I was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. There was a gun in front of me, a revolver; small frame; two-, maybe two-and-a-half-inch barrel. Blue steel, wooden grips, it looked like one of Detective Payne’s backup guns, the Colt .38 Special. There was a metal box at the other end of the table facing me. It had switches on it and a dial. The dial was white with a black needle. There were cones facing out toward the corners of the room; they were covered in black fabric. The room was white—the walls, the ceiling, all white. There was a man at the door watch
ing me, looking in at me through a glass window. I remember he was wearing a hat and smoking a pipe.”

She closed her eyes and seemed to be drifting.

“Go on.”

“My skin was burning at the wrist; the top of the table was warm to the touch. I remember I looked at the man at the door and called for him to open it, but he just kept on smoking.”

Sherry squinted, eyes moving right and left; the corner of her mouth twitched.

“Tell me about the box,” Brigham said. “What was the needle doing?”

She looked perplexed for a moment, then concentrated.

“It was moving, bouncing, sort of, up to number five and back. When the needle rested it was low to the left.” She nodded, trying to recall it all. “It was numbered five through thirty in increments of five. There were grooves on top of the box, air vents maybe, like it had a fan. Maybe it generated some kind of heat from inside.”

“Tubes,” Brigham said.

“Tubes?”

“Glass vacuum tubes. They preceded transistors and they used to get hot as hell. What else?”

“I felt like the fabric over the cones was vibrating. As if I should be hearing music or something, and yet the room was silent.”

She lifted her arm suddenly and looked at a spot behind her wrist. “His arm touched a bolt or rivet or something on the arm of the chair, and the metal burned a spot on his forearm.

“I looked at the man at the door once more, then I heard a voice telling me to pick up the gun. I remember trying to watch the man, but my eyes were torn away, torn back to the table and the gun. I remember looking across it, trying to focus on the white dial, on the numbers, but the voice was in my head and it kept repeating itself. ‘Pick up the gun. Pick up the gun.’”

“Was the man at the door speaking?”

She shook her head no. “It was definitely in my head. I couldn’t close my eyes, and I remember concentrating on that white dial, not the gun.” Her voice was slightly elevated. “I studied everything about it—tiny digits too small to read, the tip of the needle was fashioned into an arrow, there were words—but then my concentration broke, my eyes went back to that gun. I remember thinking there were people dying, bombs going off, dead bodies piled in a truck. A woman’s head exploded on a dirt roadway. I pulled my eyes back to the dial, but my hand was moving toward the gun and I picked it up and blood was running down my wrist as I put it to my head.”

“Blood?”

“From…” She hesitated. “It was coming from my nose. I was having a nosebleed.”

“Tell me about the people dying.”

Sherry closed her eyes and tried to remember. She stood and paced the dining room and at last she left for the kitchen and returned with another mug of coffee. “They were in the room with me,” she said, raising the coffee to her lips. “They were over my left shoulder.”

“You could actually see them? Physically see them?” Brigham asked.

She shook her head. “On the wall.”

“A movie, then.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but always the same one, it played over and over; they were always there to see and sometimes I couldn’t look away from them.”

“Okay, so then what happened?”

Sherry drank another sip of coffee. “I picked up the gun and put it to my temple and pulled the trigger.”

“That’s it? That’s all you remember?”

“That’s it,” she said. Her eyes were wet with tears.

She took a deep breath, picked up her mug, and set it back down. “Maybe he was crazy, huh? I mean, what kind of a last memory is that?”

“He didn’t die from the gunshot to his head. We know that much, Sherry, so this was something else. Betsy said they found him at the bottom of a cliff. He jumped or fell or was pushed. Whatever you saw in that room must have preceded his escape. Maybe by minutes or hours or days, we cannot know.”

“But how is that possible, Mr. Brigham? How can someone just omit the last dozen hours or so of their life? How could I not see him escaping, running through the trees, lying at the bottom of the rocks when he was found? How could I not remember something about the next fifty-eight years before he died?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Brigham said. “But I’ve collected some things and I have a theory.”

He took a seat across from her. Pushed one of his documents toward her. “This is a birth certificate. It says Thomas J. Monahan, born October twenty-seventh, 1932, Ahoskie, North Carolina, to Roy and Elizabeth Monahan.”

“How did you find him?” she asked, astonished.

“Friends,” Brigham said obliquely.

“Who was he?”

“Well, whoever else he was, he joined the army as a teenager and was shipped to Korea in 1950, Seventh Division, Thirty-second Infantry. He was there within weeks of the Battle of Incheon.”

“Why doesn’t the army know about him and claim him?”

“Because he died in Korea. A letter was hand-delivered to his parents December twenty-seventh, 1950. It says he was killed in action on Hill 105, twenty-five miles west of Seoul. There is a copy in his jacket in Washington.”

“So why do you think it’s the same Monahan?”

“The letter in his file wasn’t signed by the CO of the Seventh
Division. I checked. It came from a General Henry Keith attached to the office of the secretary of defense.”

“That’s unusual.”

“That’s unheard of.”

“Still, it’s possible?”

Brigham snorted. “The secretary of defense was also a retired general in 1950. George Marshall, chief of staff of the Army until 1945. Guess who Alpha Company reported to in 1950? The secretary of defense.”

“All right, but then how did Monahan end up in New York when he was supposed to have died in Korea?”

“My guess is that the Defense Department pulled him off the front lines at Seoul and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. It would hardly have been noticed in the confusion of battle. Divisions and battalions were always getting mixed up on the front lines.”

“You think he was offered a trip back home?”

“To act as a guinea pig in military experiments.”

“Experiments?”

“Let’s just say it happened. And I’m telling you right here and now that I know that it happened. In the U.S., in Norway, in England, certainly in every communist state in the world, everywhere.”

“And that would be an easy choice for a soldier? To leave his buddies and return to the States to become a lab rat?”

Brigham nodded. “From where he was sitting in Korea it would have been a very easy choice.”

“But why go to all the trouble of bringing back volunteers from Korea? Weren’t there hundreds of recruits stateside who would have been happy not to ship out in the first place?”

“Because if they came back from a war zone, the Department of Defense could plausibly deny putting their hands on them. Change a single line on a battle order and who is to say Monahan didn’t get killed or go missing in action in Korea? We
lost seven thousand boys in Korea and I’m not talking about men killed in action. We actually lost and then left them behind.”

Sherry finished her coffee. “Which would be of great advantage should something happen to one of their guinea pigs,” she said. She looked at Brigham a long moment. “You know, I’m surprised I’m hearing this from you of all people. You’ve had nothing but respect for the military for as long as I have known you.”

Brigham scratched at a thumbnail. “I still do. It was a very strange time in history, Sherry. It would still be wrong to judge anyone’s decision in isolation.”

“You can’t believe what you describe was right!”

“And you can’t appreciate how naïve we were in 1950.” He leaned back and sighed. “No, I don’t believe in using humans as guinea pigs, but I can empathize with the decision makers at the time. I know how little we understood about the science and physics we were employing in the field. Just sixty years before World War Two, Indians were slinging arrows at Wounded Knee. Suddenly we’ve split the atom and can obliterate whole cities. You’ve got to put yourself in the moment. We didn’t grow up with laptops and calculators in our book bags. Hell, we didn’t have ballpoint pens until 1945. Suddenly, in one generation, we’d gone from the Stone Age to the hydrogen bomb. Suddenly, after four billion years, man had figured out how to destroy life on earth. And it wasn’t that it was suddenly just plausible, Sherry. We cope with that knowledge ourselves and we cope with it every day. It was the speed with which it came upon us, and Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union were all racing to devise the next superweapon, all threatening to rule the world.”

Brigham shrugged. “The practice of soldier volunteers went back to World War One, perhaps to the beginning of history. We didn’t have time to run test trials on mice when the enemy was spraying mustard gas in our faces. Soldiers had to test the worthiness of their own gas masks, containment suits, malaria pills, venereal vaccines.”

“Without their knowledge?”

“Usually with their knowledge. People really used to volunteer, even when we told them that we couldn’t warn them of the actual risks. We didn’t know the risks ourselves.”

“And this is what Alpha Company was doing in the Catskills.”

“All I can say is that Monahan, whoever he was, spent the better part of his life in an asylum next to an army base that the government still considers classified. Draw your own conclusions.”

“What would they have been doing there when he was twenty years old? I mean, what kind of research would have been conducted at the time?”

“I can’t emphasize it enough. The world was a ticking time bomb back then. Stalin wanted all of Europe and he spent every penny of the Soviet economy eclipsing what the Americans did in Japan. Based on what you’ve told me of his memories, I’d say they were subjecting him to radiation and radio or microwaves. Radar was brand-new technology in World War Two. One of the questions not known at the time was what would happen if different frequencies and strengths of radio waves were concentrated on human beings for any length of time. Hitler’s scientists had a device called the rheotron, essentially an X-ray generator with a concave cathode they aimed at aircraft trying to destroy them. The Japanese made significant improvements by testing it on animals, proving it lethal by disrupting neurological systems. The Soviets’ intention for the technology was twofold. Khrushchev, who would become the next Soviet premier, said publicly on television that the Soviets had developed a weapon capable of wiping out all life on earth. We know they wanted the death ray, but we also knew they were attempting to put voices in the enemy’s head. The CIA was near frantic in the 1950s over a device the Soviets called the LIDA Machine. A spy in Moscow claimed there were pictures of an auditorium full of people who had been
rendered unconscious by it. We know that Soviet interrogators in Korea used it during the war to interrogate U.S. prisoners by beaming microwaves at them with metal plates fixed against the sides of their heads. The soldiers that had been through the experience said it put them in a dreamlike state in which they had no control over answers they gave to certain questions. Suddenly we were pouring millions into mind-control research under the code name Pandora’s Box.”

Sherry looked at the documents. “And we wanted the machine.”

Brigham nodded. “Goddamn right we wanted the machine.”

“You think they scrambled Monahan’s brain?”

“I think it’s possible.” Brigham thumbed through the documents on the table, pulled one toward him, and raised his chin to deploy his reading glasses.