The Syndrome (50 page)

“So you could impose amnesia,” Adrienne suggested.

“Exactly. More tea?”

It was all so civilized, McBride thought. This charming and matter-of-fact old man, serving tea in his ascetic little house. Under the circumstances, it was hard to hate him for the damage that he’d done, hard to conjure the horrors that he’d contrived. Hard, but not impossible. McBride could feel the anger rising, a primitive ruckus in the back of his mind. The bulls. The cats. The ochre room. The virtual Jeff Duran. He’d like to smack this syrupy son of a bitch—let him know what the sound of one-hand-clapping was really like. Instead, he said, “Let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

Don’t tempt me.
“Hypothetically—how would you put someone together? The whole package?”

The old man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. After a moment, he asked: “Based on what I’ve read in the open literature?”

“Of course,” McBride replied.

Shapiro thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’d give the subject an EEG—get a record of his
brainwaves under different stumuli. With that, and a PET scan, you could put together a map of the subject’s brain—its emotive and intellectual centers.”

“Then what?” Adrienne asked.

“Well, once you had
that
information, you could encrypt a set of audiograms that would target those centers, delivering them on the back of ELF transmissions—”

“Elf?” Adrienne asked.

“It’s an acronym for Extremely Low Frequency radio waves. That’s what I was talking about before: the four to seven megahertz band.”

“And so, if you did all that, what would happen?” Adrienne asked.

“Well,” Shapiro replied, “you’d change the landscape of the brain.”

“What does
that
mean?” McBride asked.

“Just what I said: you’d bring about some very specific—but temporary—changes in the physical structure of the brain.”

“And that would accomplish … what?”

“Depends on the audiograms,” Shapiro told them. “But amnesia might be one result.”

“Total amnesia?” McBride asked.

Shapiro shrugged. “You might remember how to speak Italian, but you wouldn’t remember how you’d learned it—or if you’d ever been to Italy.”

“Would you remember who you were?” McBride asked.

Shapiro looked at McBride. “That would depend.”

“On what?”

“On what the programmer was trying to achieve. Once the subject was prepped, and his memory blocked, he’d probably have a neurophonic prosthesis implanted.”

“A ‘prosthesis,’” Adrienne repeated.

Shapiro uncurled a forefinger in the direction of the snapshot that was lying on the table. “One of those. If you were to look at the object in that photograph under a microscope, my
guess is you’d find it contains insulated electrodes that receive and process audiograms on particular frequencies. The prosthesis would allow the transmissions to bypass the inner ear—the cochlea and eighth cranial nerve—delivering the messages directly to the brain.”

McBride thought about it. “So it would be like hearing voices,” he suggested.

“It would be like hearing God,” Shapiro corrected. “But the implant is just a part of the process. The programmer would have other tools …”

“Like what?”

“Hypnosis … sensory deprivation …”

“And how would
that
work?” Adrienne asked.

Shapiro pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and replied. “Well, the subject could be given hypnotic suggestions, preparing him for the experience he’s about to have. Then we’d lower him into a blackout tank filled with saltwater that’s been heated to the same temperature as his body—around 98 degrees. It’s a very strange experience—like floating in space.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Of course,” Shapiro replied. “I’ve tried everything.” He paused, and then went on. “After an hour or so in the tank, it’s impossible to say where your skin ends and the water begins. You just … dissolve.” He nodded at the cup in front of Adrienne. “Like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. And when that happens, the subject becomes … malleable.”

McBride listened in fascinated disbelief, while Adrienne stared at the former spook, imagining her sister floating in the blackout tank.

“After a protracted period—”

“What’s ‘protracted’?” McBride demanded.

“A day. A week. A month,” Shapiro told him. “The point is that, after a while, the subject’s identity begins to disintegrate. It’s like a near death experience, with all the senses shutting down—or seeming to. You can imagine: once you’re
in the tank, there’s nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell, no sense of touch. No sense of time. If you think losing your mind is unsettling, try losing your body.” Shapiro paused, and a thin smile curled above his chin. “Even so, some people find the experience … enlightening.”

“And others?” Adrienne asked.

The old man shrugged. “Others don’t.”

McBride leaned forward:
“Then
what?”

Shapiro gave him a sidelong glance. “Then? Well, then you take it to the next level.”

“Which is what?”

“‘Intensification.’ Once the subject’s identity is broken down, he’s basically a tabula rasa. It’s a relatively simple matter to imprint whatever ‘memories’ you like.”

“How?” McBride asked.

“We’d create scenarios compatible with his psychological profile, and turn them into films. The subject would watch the films in tandem with a subliminal stream of audiograms.”

“Like in a theater,” Adrienne suggested.

Shapiro chuckled. “No,” he said, “it’s more engaging than that. He’d wear a special helmet, one that’s fitted with speakers and jacks. Audio in, audio out—that sort of thing. Then we’d plug him in and …”

“What?”

“Well, from the subject’s perspective, it’s like sitting six feet away from a sixty-two-inch television screen, watching 3-D images in binaural sound. It’s a very involving experience—and that’s just the conscious part of it all. Add hypnosis and drugs and … it’s a lot like shaping clay. Soft clay.”

“Drugs,” Adrienne said. She flashed on that little vial in Nikki’s computer:
Placebo #1.
“What kind of drugs?”

Shapiro made a face. “Pyschedelics of every description. We had a great deal of success with a drug from Ecuador called burrandaga. And with Ketamine—more commonly used as an animal tranquilizer. Both of them cause a sort of dissociative amnesia.”

“Ketamine,” Adrienne said. “Isn’t that one of the date rape drugs?”

“Precisely,” Shapiro said. “It would be very effective for that purpose for the same reason it was effective for our purposes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you wanted to ‘take advantage of someone,’ as we used to say, ketamine has the effect of disconnecting a person from her body. Whatever happens seems to be occurring in another dimension. And these events fail to take hold in the memory.”

“There’s a built-in amnesiac effect?”

“Precisely. Afterwards, the rape—or whatever—it’s as if it never happened. Subjects never remembered being in the tank, or the helmet, or being bombarded with ‘new memories.’”

“So you’d have this person in this helmet. And what would … what would the person be looking at?” McBride asked.

“Men in hoods,” Adrienne muttered. “Satanists.”

Shapiro gave her a peculiar look, then turned to answer McBride’s question. “It would depend.”

“On what?” McBride demanded.

“On what you wanted him to remember—and what you wanted him to forget.”

McBride sipped his tea, and found that it was cold. “How long would this take?” he asked.

Shapiro shook his head. “Hard to say. If you’re tweaking the subject’s identity, that’s one thing. If you’re building someone from the ground up—that’s quite another.”

“‘Tweaking the identity,’” Adrienne repeated, her voice heavy with a mix of wonder and incredulity.

“Right.” Shapiro rearranged his legs on the cushion. “I’m curious,” he said, shifting gears in the conversation. “What was your relationship with—” he turned toward McBride “—with this young woman’s sister?”

“I was her therapist,” McBride said.

“And she came to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“And, as it turned out, both of you had a prosthesis …?”

“Right.”

Shapiro frowned. “How can you be sure of that? Did she have a CAT scan or—”

“My sister was cremated,” Adrienne explained. “I found the implant in her ashes.”

The scientist blanched. “Christ,” he muttered. Then he changed the subject, or seemed to. “Tell me something,” he said, turning to McBride. “Did you leave your apartment often?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you were practicing as a therapist—did you get out much? Or did you stay at home?”

McBride’s shoulders rose and fell. “I guess I stayed pretty close to home.”

“I’ll bet,” Shapiro told him.

“Why?”

“Because I think it’s very likely that there was a monitoring site in your building. The apartment across the hall—”

“—or next door,” Adrienne suggested.

“Upstairs, or on the floor below … the point is: they’d have wanted a way to reinforce the signal. And one of the consequences would be that once you were out of range, you’d begin to feel uncomfortable—unless you were on medication. Were you taking medication?”

“No,” McBride said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I just watched television.” He cleared his throat. “But what you’re telling me is that people can be turned into puppets and zombies—”

“Automatons,” Adrienne interjected.

Shapiro nodded. “Colloquially speaking, yes.”

Adrienne looked away, tears in her eyes.

“So you could do whatever you wanted with them,”
McBride continued. “Make them laugh or cry, walk in front of a car—”

“—or give them a childhood that wasn’t their own,” Adrienne suggested.

Shapiro heaved a sigh. Turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Yeah.” He drew a sharp breath, reached out toward the flower arrangement and tapped his fingernail against the arching blade of grass. Exhaled. “Look,” he said, “I’m full of remorse for my part in this research. And I’m sorry if what I did has touched your lives. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You can help us understand,” Adrienne said.

“Can I?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I want to know who did this,” Adrienne told him.

Shapiro inclined his head. “Of course you do. But why? You say it’s because you want to ‘understand’—but I suspect it’s because you want revenge.”

“Look,” McBride said, “you can call it whatever you like, but …” He paused. A low-pressure front was moving through his head—at least, that’s what it felt like—and if he didn’t wait for it to pass, he’d go off like a flashbulb in Shapiro’s face. Because what he really wanted to do was take this born-again Buddhist, with his pared down life and his cute little cups of tea, and knock the hell out of him. Instead, he said, “I’m a wreck.”

“What!?” Shapiro was startled by the remark, and Adrienne, too, seemed taken aback.

“I’m sitting here with you in this very nice house, drinking tea,” McBride told him, “and I may seem fine. ‘No blood, no foul!’ Right? Wrong. I’m a walking
shipwreck
—no shit. Whoever did this … whoever did this took everything from me. My childhood. My parents. My
self.
I’ll never be the same. They took every memory I ever had, subverted every dream, and wasted I don’t know how many years of my life. Even now, when I try to think about it, it’s a blank. It’s all a
blank until
she
came through the door, yelling about how she was going to sue me.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “Which is just a way of saying: I’ve lost a couple of things … and I’m not talking about books and furniture and clothes.”

Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t suggesting—”

“What about my sister?” Adrienne asked. “What happened to her was worse than murder. They turned her inside out—made her kill someone—and drove her to suicide. What about
her
?”

Shapiro closed his eyes for several seconds, then opened them. “The point I was trying to make is that what you’re doing—”

“‘Doing’?” Adrienne repeated. “We’re not ‘doing’ anything—except asking questions.”

“Exactly,” Shapiro said. “And my point is: that could be a dangerous thing to do.”

The three of them were quiet for a moment. Finally, McBride said, “I want to stop whoever did this to me from doing it to anyone else.”

Shapiro nodded slowly. Turned to Adrienne. “You said your sister killed someone?”

Adrienne nodded. “An old man. In a wheelchair.” She paused. “And then she killed herself.”

Shapiro reached across the table for McBride’s medical file and, opening it, began to leaf slowly through its pages. After a while, he looked up and said, “I’d like to talk to your doctor … this man, Shaw.” Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. “Is that a problem?” Shapiro asked.

“I’m not sure,” Adrienne said, remembering Shaw’s tight little smile and the suggestion that she tell Shapiro she’d learned about him from watching a documentary.

Shapiro smiled, almost sheepishly. “I want to be sure that you are who you say you are—and that what you say happened, happened.”

“You’ve got the file,” Adrienne told him.

“‘The file,’” Shapiro repeated with a soft chuckle. “The
three of us are sitting here, talking about counterfeiting human beings—and you’re surprised that I should want to verify the contents of a manila folder?”

In the end, Adrienne couldn’t see how talking to Shapiro could harm Ray Shaw. And it would only take a minute. All Shapiro wanted was confirmation that they weren’t making the whole thing up.

Shapiro made the call from a cell-phone in the kitchen. They could hear him talking softly, but not well enough to understand what was being said. After a minute or two, he returned to the living room, and sat down beside them.

“So?” McBride asked. “What did he say?”

Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t able to reach him.”

“But—”

“I spoke with his wife …”

Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. Shapiro seemed strangely subdued. “And what did
she
say?” Adrienne asked.