The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (2 page)

The agents who popped the door did three things: They stepped in, they sucked in their shock when they saw the boy, then they forced themselves to do the work they were trained to do.

They sent the emergency medical team that was waiting outside away, and called for a collection crew from the D.C. Medical Examiner's Office.

There was an immediate response from the Joint Operations Center: “Nix that. Get all nonessentials out of that corridor and nobody comes in.”

Outside, somebody—a fireman—began vomiting from the reek of blood, which with the door open now filled the hall.

“Get 'em out,” Jim Allendale said over his shoulder. He had been in the Secret Service for twelve years, White House detail for four. With him was Elizabeth Cruze, also twelve years in, five in the White House.

“What are you looking at,” the chief crisis officer asked over the secure phone.

“Albert Doxy was beheaded, sir. His head is on his desk.”

The response was a cry, instantly choked off.

Nobody at the scene had ever encountered anything like this. Not a single person involved had ever seen a severed head. There had never been a murder in the White House, nor any violence that came close to this, not even an accident.

The firemen were escorted out, along with the White House uniforms. This was Secret Service officers only, and the fewer the better. From long experience, they all understood that, while their first job was to control this crime scene, a close second was to keep the president's options open, and that meant slamming the lid down hard and fast.

They worked silently, carefully, almost robotically, each member of each team trying to avoid vomiting, fainting, or doing anything except the best job they could.

The forensics team photographed the scene, with special attention to the neck, its severing incision so neat that, now that the blood had drained, it looked like the work of a surgeon or a skilled anatomist.

It would later be determined that the cut had been done with a blade less than a centimeter wide, and that would remain a mystery to all now working in this room, because none of them had a security clearance high enough to know the probable source of such a remarkable tool—or, in this case, weapon.

At Secret Service Headquarters on Murray Drive, something close to a riot was unfolding. But it was a controlled riot, as agents moved quickly to do what they could to contain the threat.

The first order of business was to locate and identify the perpetrator. As the White House corridors are all covered by surveillance cameras, this should not have been difficult.

But it was. The only person seen to have entered Doxy's office was Doxy himself. His movements were traced back to a point when he had been picked up returning to the White House on foot, which in and of itself was highly unusual.

He'd left empty-handed, but come back with a file.

The surveillance system was ultrahigh-resolution, precisely so that details like type could be read, and this file was from the National Security Council Historical Record. The tongue of the folder said,
NSC
13220-543
CL
14. It was not a standard designator, and the agent placed on the detail determined within minutes that it was either highly classified or a fake.

The Greenes remained under guard at 716 Jackson Place. Chief of Staff Matthew Finch was the only outsider with them when Bill finally accepted the fact that he had to call Bob Doxy despite having no explanation for what had happened to young Al.

First he made another call to the director of the Secret Service, Simon Forde. “Sim, is there anything I can tell Bob Doxy? Anything at all?”

“Mr. President, we have moved the body to cold storage.”

“That wasn't my question.”

“He died due to criminal activity and his body will be returned to the family as soon as possible.”

“Where is it?”

“Sir, at the moment it's in the meat locker.”

“Our meat locker? The White House meat locker?”

“Yes sir, I'm sorry. We'll move it as soon as possible.”

“I want to ask about sanitation here. And legality. Don't we have legal obligations?”

“It's in a sealed body bag.”

“That's not something I can tell him! I want information I can use. What in hell happened? Tell me exactly.”

“Mr. President, he was—”

“Yes, he was beheaded. But that's damn well classified, you hear me? National security. That gets leaked—well, it can't. Flat out cannot.”

There was a silence. It extended.

“All right, Sim, do your work.” He hung up. “Lorna, what do I do? What do I say to him?”

“You're the president, you figure it out.”

Cissy said, “Just tell him. What else is there?”

“So I call and go, ‘Hiya, Bob! Al got his head cut off in his office.' Is that your suggestion?”

“Come on, Dad! You tell him what you have to tell him. Al's been killed, it's a national security matter, he died in service to his country; you can't say more.”

“And the public is going to be told it was an accident,” Lorna added.

“Then in a few days I pick up the
Post
and read that he was beheaded by an outraged lover or some damn thing like that.”

“He didn't have any lovers,” Cissy said.

“You can guarantee this?”

“Dad, I can't guarantee anything. Nobody can. But he was arrogant and fat and oily and not social. His thing was, he was brilliant.”

Lorna said, “An accident. Fell downstairs, whatever.”

The president, from his seat at the end of the long mahogany dining table, looked at each of them. “So what in hell really did happen to him?”

Nobody spoke.

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

Lorna looked down into her lap. Matthew Finch took out his phone and began texting. Cissy got up and left the table.

“Where are you going?”

She stopped. She turned back. The pain in her was so great that it was like being burned alive from within. “Daddy,” she said, “if you must know, I am going to the bathroom.”

 

CHAPTER TWO

TEHRAN WAS
choked with dust, the Alborz Mountains invisible from the city center, but just visible from the campus of the College of Aburaihan in the northern suburbs.

The college was devoted to the study of agriculture. Animal genetics, biotechnology, even silkworm husbandry were taught here. For this reason, foreign intelligence agencies left it alone. The worrisome ones—the CIA, MI6, the French DGSE, Mossad—were nowhere in evidence, which was why the brain biology faculty had been relocated here.

Dr. Ibrahim Josefi did not teach about silkworms or cattle genetics. Unfortunately for him, Western intelligence had recently identified him as an important nuclear engineer who was probably working outside the treaty. They would on this day kill him for that. The identification had happen for two reasons. The first was the new car the regime had awarded him. Such things were watched. A genetics researcher did not merit a priceless reward like that. So it was presumed that he was a nuclear engineer who had been hidden away in an obscure institution because his work was secret.

He knew nothing about nuclear weapons. He taught something far more sinister, which was the poetry of the mind: how to manipulate moods and change ideas, and how to gain control over the seat of consciousness. His work was against Moslem belief, but it was also useful to the Islamic Republic, so it was not only tolerated, but lavishly rewarded—to his cost, as would shortly become apparent.

He looked out across the small lecture hall. Only half of its seats were filled by this extremely important group of attendees. There were guards on all the doors. The hall itself had been swept for surveillance devices just minutes before he was to begin this critical talk.

One group of attendees were skilled police officers and organizational experts, the men who would one day soon govern the West, what might be left of it. The others were medical personnel who would manage the mind control program that was going to place the Islamic Republic and the Persian nation where it belonged: at the center of the world.

To wet his parched throat, Ibrahim took a sip of water. Meanwhile, a satellite overhead watched his car. In four different safe houses, four men waited, preparing, cleaning their guns, watching their encrypted cell phones for instructions.

Ibrahim began the speech of a lifetime—in fact, the last speech of his lifetime.

“We have learned how to control the human being by controlling his consciousness. Understand, please, what a mind is—nothing more than the dance of electrons among the neurons, refereed, if you will, by the chemical bath that surrounds them and modulates their behavior. To an extent, it's possible to change the mind chemically. Introduce a tranquilizer, the subject becomes more calm. A stimulant does the opposite. There are many quite powerful drugs, with profound effects.”

Some of these people used such drugs every day. Davood Ghorbani of the Revolutionary Guard, for example, was an interrogator with a great mastery of the mind-altering pharmacopoeia.

“But drugs have their definite limitations. They can alter the way the brain functions, but they cannot add an idea to a man's mind.” He paused. He spoke what he believed were the two most important words ever uttered by a human being. Lowering his voice, leaning into the microphone, he said, “We can.”

Again, he paused. He looked out across his audience. They were rapt, sitting forward, eager.

“It isn't a matter of whispering thoughts into the mind, not precisely that, but rather to make it appear to the target that the fulfillment of our policy and his own wishes are the same thing.” He took a couple of breaths, then continued. “We have discovered that by altering the electrical currents in a certain part of the brain called the claustrum, we can change thought, and very profoundly.”

He did not speak of the true origin of the knowledge, and certainly not of the fact that the Americans had gotten it first and were also developing it, or that it involved the implantation of magnetically sensitive microchips into the brain. But how far along were the U.S. experts? Could they be ready to implant the Iranian leadership?

He had just received word that an example of an American implant was on its way to Tehran right now, removed from the head of a White House flunky by a master espionage agent.

The great difficulty was that Iran's new and very secret ally was reluctant to simply give them the technology. The reason for this was unclear, but then again, so was almost everything about this strange ally.

He completed his explanation of how the devices worked. It wasn't only that tiny pulses were delivered to the claustrum, but that they were programmed in complex patterns that would entrain the neurons in such a way that the subject would react to outside signals as if they were his own thoughts.

“So, in conclusion, I think that you can see the great power of this technology. It is the future of the Persian people and of our republic, and it is also the future of the world.”

It was time to ask for questions, always an uneasy moment. Some of the people here were connected to very high levels of the leadership, even the Supreme Leader, and it was never entirely clear where questions might be coming from or what they might actually mean. He smiled, and requested them.

At once, hands were raised. Ghorbani was first.

Politely, he came to his feet.

“How can the changing of one mind lead to the changing of the world?”

Of course, it was
the
question. He had wondered himself, until the explanation of just what to do had come from the hidden ally. Not even these people, among the highest of the high, knew of it—only he himself, the Supreme Leader, and Mohammed Wahidi of MISIRI—the acronym for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence—and he knew only the outlines, not the details of how it would be executed.

He took a breath. “We have made a thorough study of both the American and Russian land-based missile systems. Both are fully operational, and both have significant safeguards against accidental or unapproved firing of the missiles.”

Ghorbani frowned. “I don't understand. Why does this matter?”

“If the great powers engaged in a nuclear exchange, they would no longer be great powers.”

The silence was absolute.

“Let me show you a tape.” He turned on his projector. The test subject, a prisoner of the revolution, lay strapped to a table. A neurosurgeon masked in white inserted a long silver probe into an opening that had been drilled in his skull.

“This is an electromagnetic pulser. It works like an implant, but obviously it's more crude. The tape was made last year, before we had implantable devices. Like an implant, this device can deliver very slight streams of electrons to different areas of the brain. In this case, it is going to deliver to the claustrum a very specific pulse that will cause the subject to believe something that he knows for certain to be true is not true.”

He was also the neurosurgeon on the film. He watched himself say, “Ali, can you hear me?”

The prisoner responded in the affirmative.

He said to his audience, “On the film I will shortly apply current to the claustrum. First, I will use another instrument, a sonic hammer, to knock him out.” He chuckled. “It is a very gentle hammer. It turns out that there are sounds that can induce unconsciousness. Really, more than that—they can turn off the claustrum. To the subject, it is as if time itself ceases to exist.”

Ali didn't close his eyes, but they began to stare fixedly. On the film, Ibrahim said, “Ali?” There was no response. “Ali!” Nothing. He took a needle and slid it into the subject's cheek. There was no reaction.

“He is not asleep. Instead, his entire self—all he knows of himself—has been turned off. He is completely unaware. Except for the claustrum, though, his brain is fully functional. Now, watch what happens.”