Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  “Have a safe trip. And let me know what kind of progress you make.”

  He washed down his half-chewed mouthful with a swig of coffee. “On?”

  She gave him a look from under raised eyebrows. “Tibet, of course.”

  “Oh, right.” He suddenly focused on his pancakes with rapt concentration, as though it were vital to national security that his next forkful be cut at an angle of precisely sixty degrees. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  Emily set down her fork. “It is on the agenda, right? You said you would make sure it was.”

  “I said I’d try. And I did, Em, I really did. But the committee leadership feels—and I can’t really argue with them—that with so much at stake, the time isn’t right for us to be poking our noses into such a sensitive issue.”

  “According to them, the time hasn’t been right for the past fifty years. When will they feel it’s right?”

  The honk of a car horn outside cut the discussion short. Rick stood up, took one last gulp of coffee, and grabbed his suitcase as Emily followed him to the door. He leaned over for a kiss, which Emily took on her cheek, along with a particle of scrambled egg. “Take care, Em. Love you.”

  All members of Congress, it had often been said, had surgery to remove their backbones as soon as they took office. While working on Rick’s campaign, she would have sworn he was different. And so he was. In his case, it was a series of keyhole operations, one vertebra at a time, so skillfully done that he never felt a thing.

  She watched him out of sight, went back to the table to finish her breakfast, and turned on the TV for company. But with the first headline she saw on CNN, the coffee in her mouth suddenly turned to liquid nitrogen, so cold it burned.

  ...

  As always, the first thing Fox did upon waking was to seat himself on a cushion in the corner of his room, light a stick of incense, and pick up a Buddhist rosary he had acquired in Kathmandu, a hundred and eight sandalwood beads. 108, the number of ways in which the world conspires to distract the seeker with illusions: Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations, real or imagined, times the past, present, and future, times the five senses plus the consciousness. The goal of meditation was to pierce through them, one by one, until only the Real was left.

  If only it were that easy. Meditation, like an overdue cleaning of a messy desk, had a way of revealing things that had long lay half-forgotten, and it was a constant struggle against the temptation to stop and take a closer look. In this case, the images that kept surfacing included many that he wished would stay buried.

  But when he finished his meditation, his knew what he had to do, as much as he dreaded it. He had an egg on rice and a cup of coffee, and when he judged it was a reasonable time, picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Adler here.”

  “Mr. Adler, this is Robin Fox.”

  “Ah, Fox. Good to hear from you. Have you made up your mind?”

  “Yes. I’ll do it. I’ll act as a consultant for you, in whatever way I’m able—with the understanding that my first duty is still to my teaching.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s one thing I ask in return. I’m sure you must have contacts in the Israeli intelligence services.”

  Adler paused. “Our office does, certainly.”

  “USPRI was planning to bring a Palestinian peace educator to the States, but she has unaccountably disappeared. If we have an empty chair on the panel because the Israelis grabbed her for no reason, it will be a huge embarrassment all around. So as a favor to USPRI, I’m sure you can go through some back channels and find out what happened to Leila Halabi.”

  There was another pause on the end of the line, then: “OK, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Fox thought he detected a slight rise in Adler’s voice stress, but he was willing to put it down to a patchy cell phone signal.

  “And for the time being, the first name I would suggest you look into is Venera Goridze, from the Republic of Georgia.”

  “Venera…”

  “Goridze.” He spelled it.

  Fox was mildly surprised that, even though Adler knew about the episode in Iraq, he was hearing this name for the first time. But on the other hand, it was typical. Intelligence agencies were notorious for stovepipe organization, each one pursuing its own goals, sharing no more with the others than absolutely necessary. He recalled excruciating hours in the interrogation booth, using every trick at his command to extract some vital piece of information, only to learn later that the CIA had been sitting on it all the while. And military intelligence, for its part, saw no reason to be any more forthcoming with the Agency. The joint task force where Adler served sounded like an attempt to break down these barriers, but the old ways died hard.

  “And just to confirm, the person we’re looking for is Leila Halabi. Last seen yesterday at the Rachel’s Tomb checkpoint, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Do you need me to spell her name for you, too?”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  “I’ll see you this afternoon, then.”

  He had barely disconnected the phone when it rang again.

  “Emily?”

  “Robin.” The tension in her voice as she said his name sent a chill through him. “Have you seen the news?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Thom.”

  Those two words were enough to stop all the clocks. But Emily’s voice went on: “They’re saying he was murdered.”

  “My God.” With a hand gone numb, Fox picked up the remote and switched on CNN.

  “…tour of Thom DiDio, humanist chaplain at Oberlin College, came to a tragic end this morning, when his publicist found him dead in his Washington hotel room. The Bible placed in the room by the Gideons was found on the body, with two verses highlighted. One was from the book of Leviticus, chapter 20, verse 13: ‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’ The other was Psalm 14, verse 1: ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.’ The incident has been reported to the Civil Rights Unit of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division as a hate crime.”

  A hole opened in Fox’s chest, sucking all the air out of his lungs. “Oh, Emily,” he said. “Oh, God, Emily, I’m sorry.”

  There was silence at the other end, except for muffled sobs. Fox’s gaze stayed on the screen, which now showed the portrait from Thom’s book jacket. The awed smile that said “Oh my cosmos, is this for real?” The eyes that radiated goodwill to all, the light inside them beckoning a bright future that now would never come. Who, Fox wondered, could look at that face and see anything to provoke a murder? Only someone who refused to see the face at all.

  “I hope you were wrong, Thom,” Fox said softly to an unseen presence. “I hope you’ve found there really is a Heaven.”

  ...

  Miraculously, Fox made it through the day’s classes without breaking down. When he went to USPRI headquarters and saw Emily, neither of them said a word. She simply stood, walked into his waiting arms, and laid her head on his shoulder as tears flowed from the eyes of both. As he held her, stroking her hair, only minimally conscious of the curious glances from the other staff members, he could almost feel the touch of another arm on his shoulder, as though Thom were there with him, doing his incorporeal best to comfort them.

  “He loved everyone,” she finally said. “I often felt he was a better Christian than I was. Who could do such a thing?”

  “Whoever it was,” Fox said, “I can’t believe they read the same Bible that we do.”

  An image of their last meeting with Thom came to Fox’s mind, and he asked: “Emily, do you remember the man standing by the door at the book signing? Did you get a look at him?”

  She shook her head. “Just a glimpse. I remember thinking that if they made another 007 movie, he could play the leading man. Tall, dark, handsome in a cold wa
y.”

  “Do you think you could help make a sketch of him, or pick him out of a line-up?”

  “I can try.” Emily closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and looked up to the ceiling. “Forgive me, Father.”

  “What for?”

  “You once told me something you had heard from a priest in Northern Ireland. How did it go? In the language of heaven…”

  “There is no word for ‘revenge,’” Fox finished for her.

  “I’m trying hard to remind myself of that.” She swallowed, and her gaze hardened. “At the same time, a part of me wants to see them nail the bastard who did this.”

  ...

  A desert in the heart of Washington.

  This was Fox’s impression of the J. Edgar Hoover building as he approached its stark facade, designed in the style known as “Brutalist”—a philosophy which he hoped applied only to the building and not to what went on inside. Row upon row of smoked-glass windows looked out over the city from walls the color of Iraqi sand. A ring of concrete planters surrounded the entire block, but while their twins across the street sported green domes, these held only dirt, cigarette butts, and a few brave blades of grass.

  A chill ran through him and his heart began to beat faster, a sensation that had been a constant companion in Iraq. He had to take a surreptitious glance down to reassure himself that he was still wearing a suit and not desert camouflage, before passing under the row of flags and through the “Business Appointments” entrance.

  He showed his identification to the police officer on duty, passed through a metal detector, signed at the escort desk for his badge, and passed through a turnstile to find Adler waiting to take him to his first briefing. Adler was representing the CIA on this case, so he would observe interrogations from the monitor room, but stay out of the interview room until they could determine the suspect’s nationality. If it turned out to be American, then the presence of a CIA agent at his interrogation would open a can of jurisdictional worms that a defense attorney would love.

  The room that served as their headquarters was windowless. The walls were covered with whiteboards, with a cluster of desks in the center, and a small conference table where two women in dark suits were waiting.

  Adler made the introductions. “Ladies, I’d like you to welcome Professor Robin Fox, who earned a Bronze Star for his work with military intelligence in Iraq. Robin, this is Estrella Kato, representing the FBI…”

  Kato was dark-skinned, with an Asian cast to her eyes, and black hair down to her collar. Fox took note of her name. Father Japanese, and mother Latina, or perhaps Filipina? She shook his hand, keeping her eyes on him the way a house cat might regard a new guest consenting for the moment to tolerate his presence, but reserving judgment about whether to make him truly welcome.

  “…and Malika Abramova, our linguist.” The next was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Slavic beauty. The days when she could have played the femme fatale in a James Bond film were a bit past her, but in her younger days, the CIA might have had to outbid Hollywood for her talents.

  “A pleasure,” she said, shaking his hand with a warmer smile than her colleague’s.

  Fox turned back to Adler. “Have you managed to get anything on him yet?”

  Adler shook his head. “Nothing, not even a name. For the time being, we’re calling him Harpo.”

  “Harpo?” Fox raised his eyebrows in mock alarm. “How many other Marx fans are there in the CIA?”

  “Very funny. When he was arrested, he only had a few dollars in his pocket, and the aerosol device in his backpack.”

  “What avenues are you pursuing?”

  “Two main possibilities that we can see. One, he’s a Jihad Joe—an American convert to Islam who went to a terrorist training camp somewhere overseas.”

  “Two?”

  “He could be Eastern European—most likely Chechen. A few years ago, we had intelligence that al-Qaeda made overtures to the Chechen mafia, offering them tons of high-grade Afghani heroin in exchange for expertise from the old Soviet WMD operations.”

  “Did anything come of that?”

  “Not as far as we could learn at the time. But maybe they were just waiting for the right moment.”

  Adler’s theory sounded frighteningly plausible, but there was still a piece missing.

  “If he’s an American citizen, then surely his data would have turned up a hit somewhere—driver’s license, passport, military records, or at least someone, somewhere, who recognized his picture. And if he came in from another country, then Customs and Border Patrol would have taken his photo and prints when he arrived, wouldn’t they?”

  “Unless he entered illegally.”

  “I suppose he’s been given his Miranda warning?”

  “Yes,” said Kato, “and also his Berghuis warning.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Berghuis v. Thompkins. That’s a Supreme Court decision that says that if you want to take the Fifth, you have to say so. You have to say, ‘I invoke my right of silence.’”

  “But he still hasn’t said a word.”

  “No.”

  “What do we know about the Reverend Hill? Any sense of what might have made him a target?”

  “Only that he has a big mouth,” she replied. “He’s made some very public comments that’ve made some very influential people very upset. Most recently, the leader of the Nation of Islam. What was it he said? Something like, ‘If our young people feel that they need to turn to some political fringe group dressed up in Muslim clothes to find a purpose in life, then we ministers of the true faith have failed them.’ ”

  “Impressive. One slap for NOI and one for his fellow Christian ministers, in a single sentence.”

  “You can see how this could cause an uproar within the black community. But as you’ve no doubt noticed, our subject is extremely white. And if they thought this was a domestic incident, they wouldn’t have called you in.”

  “They,” not “we.” She was disavowing any part in the decision to invite him.

  “How were you planning to introduce me?” Fox asked. This was the delicate part. In Iraq, whenever they brought a new person into an interrogation in progress, they used the Third-Party Introduction technique, ratcheting things up a notch by making the subject believe that the new arrival was someone with higher authority to determine incentives or punishments. But Fox had no authority at all.

  “We’ll say you’re from military intelligence,” said Adler. “It’s not a lie, and there’s no need to mention that you’re retired from the service. So, are you ready to meet Harpo?”

  “Ready as I can be.”

  “Give him hell.”

  Adler stayed behind as Kato and Malika led the way into the interview room. Fox followed behind them, trying not to betray any nervousness. The subject was supposed to be the nervous one, while the interrogator was the one who held all the cards, or at least needed to give that appearance. But first impressions were as important in a first interrogation as in a first date, and it was a long time since Fox had last been in either situation.

  They had the room set up right, Fox noted. “Harpo” sat in a chair that looked none too comfortable, with a small table by his side, and nothing between him and the interrogators’ chairs. Too often, interrogation rooms were set up with chairs on opposite sides of a table, which kept the interrogator from having a head-to-toe view of the subject, and could conceal important clues.

  Fox looked over the subject. His face was as it had appeared on CNN, except a little thinner: long, unkempt blond hair and pale white skin. His cold blue eyes stared fixedly at the line where the door met the floor. When Fox came in, they flicked up briefly, but stopped short of meeting his.

  Fox sat in one of the two chairs facing Harpo. Kato took the other, and Malika seated herself behind and to one side of the suspect, out of his field of view. The rule for interpreters in interrogations was that they should be heard and not seen.

  “Hello,” Fox
greeted him. When he made no response, Fox placed a hand over his heart with a slight bow. “Assalam aleikum.”

  This greeting usually helped to break the ice with subjects from anywhere in the Muslim world. But Harpo simply continued staring ahead, making no acknowledgment of his presence.

  “What would you like me to call you?”

  Malika interpreted the question into Russian, and then Chechen. Harpo remained silent and motionless.

  “Do you speak English?”

  No response, to either the question or Malika’s interpretation. Fox tried a few more of his own: “Parlez-vous franÇais? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Harpo showed no reaction to any.

  “Come on, we’ve been over this before,” Kato said. “Anyone who’s ever watched TV knows that when you’re arrested, you have the right to remain silent. The thing is, in order to claim it, you have to speak up. You have to say, ‘I invoke my right of silence.’”

  The prisoner gave no sign that he was aware of her existence.

  “I’m interested in your choice of weapons,” Fox said. “The Zagorsk virus. You really know your stuff. None of this off-the-rack anthrax or smallpox for you. No, it had to be a top-of-the-line designer virus. Tell me, how is Dr. Goridze doing these days?”

  He gave no sign that he recognized the name.

  “You’re good at playing dumb,” Fox said, “but I can tell that you’re really quite smart. Smart enough to understand that talking can only help you. You realize that these people aren’t trying to get a confession out of you. Nothing you can say will incriminate you any more than the evidence already has. We’ve established the who, what, when, where and how already. All we’re missing is the why. Don’t you want people to understand why?”

  Silence.

  “Are you angry about something the United States government has done?”

  Silence.

  “Are you angry with the Reverend Hill personally?”

  Silence.

  “Or do you have something against black people in general?”

  Silence.