by John Altman
“That’s right.”
“How do you fill your time? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Filling my time doesn’t seem to be a problem.”
“Do you have a family?”
Finney glanced at the man, who surely would have read his file and known about Lila. “No,” he answered shortly.
Warren drank more scotch and soda, and smoked his cigarette. He French-inhaled the smoke, rolling it from his mouth into his nose.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said presently. “I’m curious about why you’ve agreed to take part in this. I trust Noble’s judgment, of course. But you, Doctor, are something of an unknown.”
“I’m here as a favor to an old friend.”
“You mean Dr. Noble.”
“Of course.”
“I read a piece you published about ten years ago. It seemed to indicate a certain lack of warmth between you and the good doctor.”
Finney raised an eyebrow.
“In a psychiatric journal. You made a comment about funding …”
“Ah.”
“You implied that he had manufactured his results, over the years.”
“Not manufactured,” Finney corrected. “Perhaps he massaged them a bit.”
“So you consider him an old friend, although you’ve had some differences?”
“Show me old friends who haven’t had differences,” Finney said with a slight smile, “and I’ll wonder how old the friendship really is.”
Warren did not return the smile. “Does he share your … mixed feelings … about government work?”
Finney remembered Noble’s visit to his study, at the farm in Pennsylvania. I haven’t accepted a government contract in fifteen years, Louis. But the nightmares still come.
He shook his head. “You’d have to ask him that yourself.”
“Tomorrow we’ll pay a visit to the hospital. Maybe I’ll get my chance then. In the meantime, is there anything you’d like? I’m here to help.”
“If I think of anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
After a moment, Warren returned to the subject of his father. He spoke proudly of the man’s accomplishments—part of the CIA’s behavioral control program from its very origin. Thomas Warren, Senior, had worked alongside Stanley Lovell, conducting tests with Sodium Amytal, Benzedrine, and electroshock amnesia. If Warren felt any qualms about his father’s role in the program, he didn’t express them. Yet there was something guilty in his litany, Finney thought. He was all too eager to volunteer details of his father’s history.
Warren spoke for nearly ten minutes, drifting from one topic to another: his father’s experience with the agency, his hopes for the interrogation with Zattout, his own theories about aggressive questioning techniques. He asked Finney’s opinion on the effectiveness of the Page-Russell method, on the administration of psychedelics and microwaves.
“In my experience,” Finney said, “aggressive methods often are anti-productive. Better to win the man’s trust, if at all possible.”
Warren looked nonplussed. “Quinlan seems to agree with you.”
Joseph Quinlan was the man conducting the conversations with Zattout—a sallow-faced, tired-eyed agent of about forty-five. Over breakfast that morning Finney had caught a hint of liquor on Quinlan’s breath. One of the hazards of the job, he supposed.
“But we don’t have forever to get our results,” Warren went on. “There’s a lot of cooks in this kitchen, you know. FBI, INS, State, Customs, and Treasury … all breathing right down the back of my neck.”
A field sparrow was singing somewhere—a sweet, slurring note that rose into a trill. Finney looked off across the land, trying to find it. But the bird was nowhere to be seen.
“It seems to me as if Quinlan’s dragging his feet,” Warren said then. “Do you get that impression?”
Finney looked over. He thought he could read between the lines. Until now Zattout had given them information of only middling value. He had told them of a single sleeper cell unknown to them, in Pakistan, and given some generalities about al Qaeda’s recruitment and operational methods. If more substantive results were not secured in a timely fashion, then aggressive methods of interrogation—a fine euphemism—would be put into effect. In all likelihood, Quinlan had made it clear that he would not be involved with the implementation of such methods. And so Warren was looking to see how far Finney would go, if push came to shove.
“Quinlan’s on the right track,” he answered. “Gain the man’s trust; learn his strengths and his weaknesses. Make an investment of time and patience, and it will reward you.”
“You catch more flies with honey, eh?”
“Something like that.”
“What about the possibility we discussed before—that Zattout believes he is telling the truth, but has been programmed with these answers in advance?”
“Highly unlikely.”
“But possible?”
Finney shook his head. Iatrogenic creation of multiple personalities was a dramatic idea that, like psychedelics and microwaves, tended to appeal to agency royalists who lived in fear of missing a major advance. But the creation of multiple personalities through artificial means was a tricky business. With Susan Franklin they had not created a secondary personality; they had brought out one that already existed. They had taken a sick young woman and exploited her illness.
For a time, Multiple Personality Disorder had enjoyed a vogue among certain circles of psychiatry. They called it Disassociative Identity Disorder, or DID, hoping to shuck the connotations of science fiction and pulp literature. Believers in the disorder based their conclusions on inarguable fact. Children regularly expressed different sides of their personalities as “imaginary friends”; various manifestations were assigned names, patterns of behavior, sets of manners. But in reality all were facets of the same psyche, and as the child matured, the different personalities were absorbed and sublimated.
Sometimes roots of the personalities remained—particularly in pathological cases like Susan Franklin’s. And it was likely that any adult, including Ali Zattout, possessed shades that could be accented through clinical procedure. But unless Zattout was seriously predisposed to disassociative disorder—unless he truly was mentally ill—one would not be able to create separate personalities within him, no matter what methods were brought to bear.
“There aren’t any magic solutions,” Finney said. “The key to a successful interrogation is patience and flexibility.”
“Surely you can bring more to the table than that,” Warren said cordially. “You have some experience with hypnosis?”
“Zattout’s entire experience here is a form of hypnosis. Every time you become involved in a novel or a motion picture, Mr. Warren, you’ve put yourself into a hypnotic trance of sorts. The steps we take to promote a suggestible mindset will be considerably more subtle than a swinging watch.”
Warren smoked, looking off into the twilight. The quiet drew out around them, interrupted by the occasional sound of crickets.
Then Warren yawned, ground out his cigarette beneath his heel, and checked his watch. “Well,” he said. “Another soda?”
“I don’t think so. Thank you.”
They stood. “It’s been a pleasure,” Warren said. “Sleep well, Doctor. Good luck nipping that cold in the bud.”
Finney gave a tight nod. “Good night.”
They went into the house and climbed to the second floor. Finney let himself into his room, then crossed to the window. He stood there, looking out at nothing in particular, wishing he’d had a real drink after all.
He did not believe that the girl posed a threat.
He sat behind the wheel of the coupe, looking at a house a dozen feet away. The house was an unassuming A-frame on a block of similar houses. In the pink light of rising dawn he could make out a single car parked in the driveway, a tired-looking Ford Escort. A flowerpot sat on the A-frame’s windowsill; wind chimes tinkled on the porch. The fr
ont door needed a coat of paint. An ordinary house, belonging to an ordinary elderly widow.
The resident of number sixty-two Sycamore Drive was named Miriam Lane. According to his information, the woman had lived here for the past fourteen years. According to his information, her husband had died four years earlier. Miriam Lane lived alone.
Now, with his eyes never leaving the front porch of number sixty-two, he thought it again: The girl did not pose a threat.
She simply had a crush; she was only trying to catch his eye. And if she did suspect something, to whom would she report it? Her parents? And what would she report, exactly? Going for a drive in the night was not a crime.
Yet the thought distracted him. The girl had been snooping. His tunic had been in the bag, along with his equipment. She could not have found the secret compartment, he thought. But maybe she had seen enough. What had she made of it?
The front door was opening.
Miriam Lane wore a white uniform and carried a tote bag. As she moved to the Escort, he reached for the coupe’s ignition. The clock on the dash read 6:46 A.M. According to his source, the woman’s daily shift at the camp lasted from seven A.M. until four P.M. Today she would be late.
But she surprised him—driving quickly and confidently. When she reached the dirt road leading toward the Marine Corps guard, the clock on the dash read 6:57. Right on time, after all.
He watched as she took the turn; then he continued down the gravel road for another five minutes. He executed a K-turn, heading back to the highway. Thirty minutes later he was stepping into his room at the Sleepy Hollow motel, locking the door behind him.
His thoughts returned to the girl.
Perhaps she would find something else to command her attention. Children had short attention spans. He should leave well enough alone, and within a day she would distract herself with whatever it was that intrigued her besides snooping.
He spread the blueprints on the desk and put the girl from his mind. Focus, he thought.
Two fences protected the safe house.
The first was wood, ten feet tall, patrolled at three-hour intervals by men and dogs. The second, a quarter-mile farther on, was stone, eighteen feet high. In addition to barbed wire and searchlights, the stone wall featured two guard towers on each face, set equidistantly—eight in total. Each guard tower contained two marines and a sustained-fire Stoner M63 Al machine gun, range 2,000 meters, capable of firing seven hundred rounds per minute.
The forest between the fences contained photoelectric beams and microwave sensor motion detectors. The photo-electric beams would trigger an alarm if they were broken. The motion detectors would trigger an alarm if they detected a Doppler shift between 20 Hz and 120 Hz, the frequencies related to the movement of humans.
The fact that the sensors were tuned to humans did not necessarily mean they were impassable. To avoid nuisance alarms—caused by weather, vegetation, and wandering wildlife—the outdoor sensors could not be calibrated to their most responsive settings. Still, he would prefer to bypass them completely.
Both walls used vibration sensors, detecting physical intrusion—a man climbing over the tops—and sending an alarm to the primary guardhouse, located by the steel gate in the second wall.
Between the second wall and the safe house itself was a square mile of wooded ground, equipped with more photo-electric beams and microwave sensors. Motion-activated cameras were scattered throughout the forest, providing another level of redundancy. The beams, sensors, and cameras could be avoided by traveling on the paths—but that meant running into the guard patrols.
The space immediately surrounding the safe house enjoyed still more security. Every time a figure with body heat measuring between 8 and 14 microns stepped off the porch or out the French doors in back, passive infrared cameras switched on to follow it. Here also were more microwave sensors, mounted on trees and buried in the earth. And more guard patrols, staggered at three-hour intervals. The marines on patrol carried modified Tec 9 machine guns, and led Doberman pinschers on chain leashes that could set the dogs free with the flick of a toggle.
You can buy it, and I’ll pay you back, the girl had said. And then I won’t tell anyone about what I saw.…
What had she seen? Him sneaking away in the middle of the night. Nothing criminal.
See my earrings? They’re on the outside. It wouldn’t do a lot of good to have them on the inside, would it?
He leaned away from the desk. It had been a reference to his tunic, he understood suddenly—to the small steel objects sewn into the wrists.
He sighed.
He would need to find out what the girl knew, or thought she knew. But silencing her might be a mistake. It might attract attention.
He would do whatever was required. Nothing could be left to chance.
There was no need for haste. Haste, if he gave in to it, would be his undoing.
Patience, he thought.
After a moment, he leaned forward again and continued his study of the blueprints.
Zattout’s index finger moved to a pale, crescent-shaped scar on his right ear.
Finney reached for his notebook. Whenever Zattout felt annoyance, confusion, or fear—a strong negative emotion that he wished to conceal from his interrogator—his hand moved to scratch at that pale scar. In the language of confidence men, it was a tell.
Then he began to talk—covering ground that, according to the transcripts of his conversations with Quinlan, had been covered several times before. The interrogator, Finney thought, was seeking to solidify his dominance by making the prisoner jump through hoops. From a purely rational standpoint it made perfect sense, serving the double purpose of testing Zattout’s consistency and cementing Quinlan’s position of authority. But such tactics ran a risk of alienating the subject.
The heroin and opium, Zattout reported without inflection, were smuggled through Central Asia, Bulgaria, and Croatia, then hidden in mountain towns outside Macedonia. When an infusion of funding was required, al Qaeda operatives went to the hideouts and retrieved the drugs. From there they were passed to the Albanian mafia, to be channeled into Western Europe.…
Joseph Quinlan wore a maroon cardigan and silver-rimmed eyeglasses. Under the harsh light, his pale skin looked almost translucent. He pushed the glasses higher on his nose and interrupted: “This doesn’t quite jibe with the intelligence we’ve received from other quarters. The naval base on Diego Garcia. Among others.”
Zattout fingered the scar. “It’s the truth,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”
Quinlan turned a page of his file.
“I’d like to return to something else we’ve discussed before—if you don’t mind. The murder of Abdullah Azzam …”
Zattout, in a monotone, explained his previous statement. Abdullah Azzam had been al Qaeda’s spiritual leader back when the group had been called Maktab al Khidmat lil-Mujahidin al-Arab, or MAK. Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s mentor, had founded the group along with his protégé in Pakistan in 1984. The original purpose of al Qaeda, which means “the Base,” had been to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But by 1988, the organization had evolved. It had infiltrated and merged with other fundamentalist terrorist organizations around the world, in particular the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The purview had been expanded, from targeting Soviet forces—which by then were withdrawing from Afghanistan—to targeting Western infidels. A split had occurred between bin Laden and Azzam. The former had no compunction about targeting civilian non-combatants. The latter did. In 1988, a bomb killed Azzam in Peshawar, Pakistan, clearing the path for bin Laden to assume sole control of al Qaeda.
“You’ve mentioned shipping operations in the Romanian Black Sea. The ships, you say, change their flags as often as twice a day. The cargo vessels sail out of Constantsa with a Romanian crew. In Morocco, a new crew comes aboard. The ship assumes a new name and flag …”
In the back of Finney’s mind, a hectoring voice pointed out that he had not y
et found time to visit Noble in the hospital. Well, he would get to it soon enough. In the meantime there was work to be done here, starting with an analysis of the Wechsler IQ test that had been administered by Noble, which would shed light on the best way to proceed with Zattout.
Quinlan kept talking. As Zattout listened, a sudden nervous twitch made his right eyelid jump. Finney noted it. For over two weeks the prisoner had been confined to the cell; he had not seen sunlight, nor experienced any human contact besides his conversations with his interrogator. For years previous he had lived in hiding or on the run. A deterioration of composure therefore was not unexpected. As long as Quinlan didn’t push too hard, forcing the man to shut down …
The eyelid jumped again. The right leg began to jig up and down, nervously. Finney watched, taking it all in.
5
“Housekeeping,” Sonya Jacobs called.
She was reaching for the passkey when she became aware of a presence behind her. She turned to find herself facing Simon Christopher: his dark eyes sharper than usual, with an accusatory flash.
Then he raised his right hand, and Sonya saw that he held a liter of Stolichnaya vodka.
A tingle moved down her body, into the pit of her stomach. Why would the man give her a bottle of Stoli now, after he’d caught her snooping? Because he was doing something wrong, here at Sleepy Hollow. She had seen the contents of his bag—the folder, the passport, that odd black tunic with jewelry sewn into the sleeve. And now he was trying to buy her silence.
Her sister would have laughed, had Sonya voiced such a fancy out loud. But the excitement she felt when she allowed the idea free reign was delicious, almost irresistible. Why not believe the man was a terrorist? Who was to say he wasn’t?
He waggled the bottle. After looking around to make sure her mother wasn’t in the vicinity, she reached forward. “Thanks,” she said.
They stood facing each other. She could feel a blush rising in her cheeks. “Want to drink it with me?” she asked.
His head tilted a degree to the right.
“I’ll show you my secret place,” she went on brazenly. “You know—if you want. It’s beautiful. Right by the creek.”
