Take No Prisoners (41 page)

Bonus Story #2

Q

The security guard recognized my face but he knew his job. He laboriously checked my ID, then asked me to step out of the limo so he could frisk me and make me give his machines my thumb-print and a retinal scan. Only then would he allow me through the gate. He politely told me that my driver and my bodyguards were not permitted admission – which, of course, we'd already known – and directed them to a low building about a hundred yards outside the compound where, he assured them, they could enjoy refreshments, entertainment and restrooms.

He walked with me up to the main entrance, his hand never very far from the gun at his waist.

"Good to see you're vigilant," I said, in the same way I might have commented on the weather.

He smiled formally but said nothing.

At the doorway I had to submit to a second retinal scan before he finally ushered me into a coolly lit reception area. Soft music played in the background, and I stiffened when I recognized what it was. They must have smuggled in the CD.

Paying no attention to my reaction, the guard dumped onto the receptionist's desk the few items of mine he'd confiscated while frisking me: nail clippers, a blank tape cassette, a tube of lipstick someone had given me as a hint and which I'd never used but still carried around anyway, a comb. Mostly I wasn't sure why he'd decided they were threats to security.

"Dr Prestrantra," said the young receptionist. "It's good to meet you, ma'am. Dr Heatherton will be with you in a moment."

"I'm a few minutes early," I said to him.

I'd hardly had time to wonder why the hell I was apologizing to a receptionist when a door at the back of the room opened and an unshaven man came walking across the shiny stone floor towards me, a hand outstretched. Blue jeans, a Bon Jovi T-shirt, long dreadlocked hair.

"Dr Prestrantra?"

"Cello." My dad had liked the instrument. A good thing, I've always thought, that he didn't like the sousaphone instead.

"Cello, hi. Tim Heatherton. Good to meet you."

We shook hands.

"Coffee? Tea?"

"I'm awash. A restroom would be welcome."

"Of course. Charles, could you?"

The receptionist escorted me down a corridor to a ladies' room, waited outside the door, then led me back again. Dr Heatherton – Tim – was still waiting where we'd left him.

He grinned. "Social niceties, or should I just get straight on with it?"

"Up to you. I have the rest of the afternoon free. I need to be back in DC by eight, though."

"Flying from La Guardia?"

"Yes."

"We have three, four hours then. Should be long enough if we start now. Come on back into my lair."

He led me back through the door he'd come in by and then along a corridor that was largely featureless except for the doors that regularly studded its length. Its walls were painted in one of those colours so tastefully muted you can never afterwards remember what it was.

We made small talk.

"I had a very great admiration for your predecessor," he said mildly.

"So did I."

"Alex did his best under difficult circumstances."

"These are difficult times."

The informal code phrases had been exchanged. We were people of like mind.

Tim gave a relaxed sigh.

"And you plan to carry on in the same way that he did?"

"I do."

"Good. So I can speak freely?"

"Of course. I've made no comment about the fact you people are playing a Mylene Farmer CD in reception, have I?"

He shrugged, then disregarded my comment.

"I nearly wept," he said, "when I heard the bomb had taken out Alex as well. I mean, every silver cloud has a dark and ominous lining, sort of thing." He looked at me sidelong, checking that I'd really meant it when I'd said he could speak freely.

I nodded reassurance. "I know what you mean."

He stopped at a door that looked just like all the others. "In here," he said, opening it on a crowded office. Books and papers everywhere. You could tell where his desk was because one of the mountains of chaos was bigger than the others.

He cleared a chair, gestured for me to sit on it.

"Who did it?" he said, seating himself behind the desk-mountain. "Planted the bomb?"

"You've read the newspapers, seen the tv."

"They all say it was foreign terrorists. Probably al-Quaida. Plausible, I guess, but I don't buy it."

"It's safer for you that you do," I said earnestly. "Is this place bugged?"

He gave a low chuckle. "It's about the only place in the country I'm completely certain isn't," he said. "Did Alex tell you much about our work here?"

The question was a test, I sensed. I gave it a straightforward answer.

"Absolutely nothing. After his death, my personal computer received an encrypted e-mail from him. I got our best hackers onto it, but none of them could get into it – could even get started. A few days later, I remembered something he said maybe six months ago ..."

Tim Heatherton raised a hand as if to fend me off. "Don't tell me what the something was."

"I wasn't going to. You might be certain this place is clean of bugs, but I'm not. Homeland Security's sneakier than you think."

"Strange times," he said reflectively, gazing at the picture of him and his family on the wall opposite him, "when we've come to regard the CIA as the torchbearers of liberty."

~

Alex Bransvuld had been my mentor at the CIA, and my immediate predecessor as its Deputy Director of Operations. He'd been appointed under a previous Administration; the incoming President – and, more importantly, his Veep – had wanted to replace him as DDO, but Alex had decided not to go gently into that good night and had pointed out, with the evidence to back it up, that no one, not even the Prez and the Veep in their immediately preceding years, was immune from the attentions of the security services. The newcomers didn't like the situation, but there wasn't a great deal they could do about it.

In a way it was astonishing that Alex had ever been appointed at all to lead an organization whose operations were, for the vast majority, necessarily covert, for he was in personal life a great democrat, a great upholder of rights such as freedom of speech and openness. All the greater the chagrin for him that he found a significant amount of his and the CIA's efforts had to be put into safeguarding the life of the Prez, a man whom he loathed and despised – the man responsible for the creation of legally punishable thought-crimes, the construction of "education camps" all across the land, the further impoverishment and criminalization of the poorest in society, and much more besides. The man who seemed to be heading confidently towards a fourth term of office thanks to the increasingly obvious manipulation of computer-recorded votes.

But Alex had done it for one good reason.

Beside the Veep, the Prez was a moderate.

And Alex had still been doing his job right up until the moment that a bomb had exploded inside Air Force One, in which he'd been travelling with the Prez and the Secretary for Defense.

Within the CIA we knew exactly who had been responsible for that bomb: the order had issued from the man who'd started moving his desk-toys into the Oval Office almost before Air Force One had taken off for its final flight. But there was no immediate way we could imagine ever being able to prove this in a court of law, or even being permitted to bring it to such a court. In the era of independent-minded judges it might have been possible; not today.

I'd inherited Alex's mantle just days before my visit to Tim Heatherton at his Center for Neuronic Research – obviously an uninformative title, for security reasons – and, like Alex, I was talking tough and supportive in public while following my own agenda in private, and within certain high-level echelons of the CIA.

Once I'd succeeded in decrypting Alex's final communiqué, much of which concerned fairly standard stuff, I discovered at the bottom of it a final enigmatic instruction:

Cello – Center for Neuronic Research, Dr T. Heatherton. This is perhaps your most important call of all. Don't do anything of significance until you've seen him.

That was why I was here in Tim Heatherton's office. I was speaking to him with a reasonable degree of freedom because I had with me, despite the frisking, the means to terminate him permanently, should that prove necessary.

~

"I've no wish to be rude," I said, "but you said we should pitch straight in. Could we put an end to the 'social niceties', as you called them?"

He gathered himself. "Sure. Sorry – sure. I don't often get the chance just to, you know, talk."

"Understood."

He let out another of those long sighs. The office had no windows; in their place, there was on the wall behind him a picture almost large enough to be described as a mural and showing a beach that could have been somewhere in the Caribbean – certainly somewhere a long way away from rural New Jersey.

"How much did Alex tell you about our work?"

"Nothing." After a moment's hesitation I told him the story of the brief note at the end of the encrypted e-mail. "And we have nothing on file about the Center, either," I added.

"When we started working for you people we were called ScanFast," he said. "Ring a bell?"

"Yes." I knew the name, anyway. All I could remember was that it was one of many companies we'd quietly hired to explore technologies which might be of use to intelligence-gathering. Like most of the others, its researches had proved fruitless, and so after a while the contract had been cancelled. The only reason I'd recalled it at all was because of the mid-word capitalization: ScanFast. So very Spielberg
, I'd thought at the time.

I explained.

"Yeah," he said, smiling like a schoolboy, "it was a dumbass name, all right. That wasn't the reason it was changed, though. What we were doing was ..."

And slowly, as he spoke, it all began to come back to me.

ScanFast had developed a technique of analysing the activities of the electrical pathways in the brain. ("Think of it as a series of very rapid CAT scans, about a thousand per second," said Tim.) After an induction period with any particular individual, rather like the induction period required when you first install new voice-recognition software on a personal puter, ScanFast could derive a fairly accurate representation of what that individual was actually thinking. ("In fact," said Tim, "very accurate, but with Alex's agreement we began to play down the level of our achievements a bit.")

The CIA had been interested, of course, because of the counter-terrorism possibilities. Most terrorists are fanatics, willing not only to die for their cause but even to suffer the extremes of pain before doing so. So, when you capture a terrorist suspect, standard interrogation techniques often produce no results; you have no way of discovering until later, if at all, whether the person who died without telling you anything useful was lying, keeping mum, or even in fact innocent of any involvement.

But if you could read their thoughts ...

"It turned out to be of almost zero value in that respect," said Tim with a shrug. "The problem is – was – that conscious thoughts, the ones at the forefront of the mind, produce a signal so very much stronger than the background thoughts that they effectively blot them out entirely. It's like trying to hear a whisper in the front row of a hard-rock concert. The whisper's there, all right – the sound doesn't just vanish – but there's no way of making it out in the midst of the cacophony."

Another of those schoolboy grins.

"I'm a Bach man, myself," he said. "Anyway, it's not difficult for terrorists – or anyone else, for that matter – to train themselves to focus their concentration on something quite different from the objects of interest. So precise information about someone's latest lay, or whatever, would come through loud and clear, but nothing about where the hostages were being kept. We soon found ScanFast was far less effective than traditional babble-drugs – which were also a lot cheaper."

"And that's when we pulled the plug on your contract?"

"That's when you seemed to pull the plug," he corrected. "In fact what happened was that ScanFast disappeared and the grandly named Center for Neuronic Research popped up in its place."

"A blue-sky company, as they say?"

"A blue-sky name," he said firmly. "A very real company. Small, of course. We cut the staff right down to half a dozen, including the pretty dork in Reception – I mean, Charles, our esteemed receptionist."

I grimaced at him.

Tim laughed. "He's gay, anyway, in case you were feeling tempted."

"I'm a nun," I said shortly.

"A waste," he murmured. There was nothing objectionable about the comment; his tone turned it into a courtesy.

"Thank you."

"I'm not sure," he went on, "quite why Alex kept us going. The research we were doing was exciting stuff, all right, but it didn't have any obvious military or intelligence applications. Later on it was different, of course."

My ears pricked up.

"Later on," he said with a nod that was only half at me, "we were engaged to investigate the possibility of precognitive dreaming. And, later still, Alex was essentially paying us to keep our mouths shut."

~

Beneath the Center there was a very extensive basement – perhaps three times the area of the building's ground floor. Head-high screens divided it up into twenty or thirty cubicles, like a large open-plan office. Each of them, however, contained not a desk and chair but what I eventually worked out was a sleeping pallet with, perched above it, an agglomeration of machinery that looked like a cross between a beauty salon hair-dryer and a praying mantis. The room's walls and the walls of the cubicles were covered in blood-red carpeting material, the floor in a red so dark it was almost black; even though Tim had switched on banks of overhead fluorescent lighting, the illumination was strangely muted, like the uncertainty in the eyes of a timid guy who wonders if he's been invited to the party by mistake.

"What we did when we were ScanFast wasn't entirely fruitless, of course," Tim said as we rode down in the elevator. "It's thanks to our ScanFast work that there's been such a dramatic improvement in the treatment of coma patients, for example – now that we know they're still fully mentally active. And we have a far better understanding of the functionings of sociopaths. Who knows? One day we may be able to cure that ... ailment."