Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  And then I spotted a reference to a 1980 article in the U.S. Army’s house journal. Military Review, on “the new mental battlefield.” It discussed the “great potential” of “the use of telepathic hypnosis” in warfare—psychic warfare, the article called it! There was a mention of Soviet “psychotronic” weapons—the use of parapsychology to sink U.S. nuclear submarines—and of the National Security Agency’s use of a psychic to crack codes.

  The book continued on to discuss a rumored “psychic task force” in the basement of the Pentagon, maintained under the highest of security and headed by an assistant chief of staff for intelligence.

  And then, on the next page, I came across a reference to a top secret CIA project involving the intelligence possibilities of extrasensory perception.

  The project, according to this account, was terminated in 1977 by the new Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner. At least, the author speculated, it was terminated officially. Very little was known about the project, the author said, except one name associated with it, obtained from a renegade CIA officer. It was the name of the project’s director.

  The name was Charles Rossi.

  * * *

  Deeply anxious now and disoriented, I needed to get some exercise, to clear my head and think rationally.

  For a couple of years now I have belonged to an athletic club on Boylston Street that I like mostly for its proximity both to work and to home. Its clientele is a real mix, lawyers and businessmen, salesmen and midlevel executives, real jocks, and so on; the gym facilities are top-notch. I could never prevail upon Molly to work out with me. She was of the opinion that we all have a finite number of heartbeats, and she didn’t want to waste hers on some Nautilus machine. And she called herself a physician.

  I changed out of my work clothes and into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and worked out on the rowing machine for twenty minutes, thinking all the while about what I had read at the library.

  In the strictest sense I was not reading the thoughts of others, I’d concluded. I was able to receive the low-frequency brain waves generated by one single part of the brain, the speech center in the cortex. In other words, I was hearing words and phrases as they were converted from abstract thoughts and ideas into words, as they were given form in speech, preparatory to their being uttered aloud. Apparently, if my theory was right, when certain thoughts occur to us with the right force or passion or emotion, we prearticulate them—ready them for speaking, even if we will never speak the words. And it is at those moments that the brain gives off signals perceptible to—well, to me.

  If only I knew more about how the brain functioned! But I could scarcely risk consulting a neurologist at this point: no one could be trusted, really, to keep my condition a secret.

  All of this was going through my mind as I got off the rowing machine, my gray T-shirt already stained dark with sweat, and got on the Stairmaster. This particular torture device requires you to pump up and down on a set of pedals while grasping on to a handlebar, all the while standing vertical, while a bright red computer display keeps track of your pain.

  On the next Stairmaster was a portly gentleman of about fifty in a light blue T-shirt and white shorts, spewing droplets of sweat onto the machine’s metal base, rivulets of perspiration running down his ears, nose, jaw, and brow. He was wearing wire-rim glasses that were fogged over. I had once talked to him at the club—I don’t remember what about—and I seemed to remember his name was Alan or Alvin or something, and that he was a vice president at a troubled Boston bank, the Beacon Guaranty Trust. Because of a history of lousy management added to the nation’s economic woes. Beacon was slowly going down the tubes. Alan or Alvin, as I recall, was a perennially depressed man, and who could blame him?

  Pumping away at the Stairmaster as he was, Al didn’t notice me. His eyes were hooded, his mouth half open, his breathing labored.

  It was not my intention, because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and mine alone, but I could not help hearing what I did.

  Catherine’s uncle, maybe?

  No. The SEC will get right on to that. Those bastards don’t miss a trick.

  That’s just as illegal as my selling my own stock.

  Gotta be a way.

  I couldn’t pick up everything he was saying. His thoughts came in and out, loud and then faint, clear and then indistinct, like a shortwave radio picking up some distant foreign station.

  But all that stuff about the SEC and illegality drew my attention right away. I tilted my head ever so slightly toward Al’s heaving, dripping body.

  The stock’s going to just goddamn rocket. How come I’m not allowed to buy stock in my own company? Doesn’t seem right. Wonder whether anyone else on the board of directors is thinking what I’m thinking. Of course they are. They’re all trying to figure out a way to get rich off this.

  This monologue was getting more and more interesting, and I strained to tune in without seeming too obvious about it. Al, lost in his greedy little thoughts, seemed oblivious of me.

  So let’s see. The announcement is made tomorrow, two o’clock P.M. Every financial analyst in the country, and hundreds of thousands of shareholders, see that poor beleaguered old Beacon Trust is now being acquired by the rock-solid Saxon Bancorp and everyone and their grandmother will be buying badly undervalued shares of Beacon. We’re going to go from eleven and a half to fifty or sixty in two days. Jesus. And I gotta sit on my hands? There’s gotta be a way. Maybe one of Catherine’s rich lady friends. Maybe her uncle can work something out that’s insulated from me enough—buy up Beacon tomorrow morning in someone else’s name—

  I found my heart beginning to thud rapidly. I had just learned what could be described only as the ultimate insider information. Beacon Trust was going to be acquired by Saxon. The deal was going to be announced tomorrow. Alan or Alvin was one of probably only a handful of insiders, executives, and attorneys who knew about the deal. The stock of Beacon would certainly shoot up, and anyone who had advance knowledge could become a rich man. Al was scheming out a way to get rich off it himself, if he could find a way that wouldn’t attract the hound dogs of the SEC. I doubted he’d be able to pull it off.

  But I could.

  Tomorrow I could, in a matter of hours, make a killing in shares of Beacon Trust that would make the disappearance of my half-million-dollar nest egg seem inconsequential.

  There was no way in the world anyone could connect me to Beacon Trust. My firm did no business with Beacon (we wouldn’t deign to). I would have to make a point of not even saying hello to Al: better we didn’t even exchange a word.

  What could the Securities and Exchange Commission possibly do? Bring me into a courtroom, facing a jury of my peers, and charge me with mind reading with intent to profit illegally? The chairman of the SEC would be locked up in a rubber room before they could even file the paperwork.

  I got off the Stairmaster, sweating profusely. I’d done a good three-quarters of an hour on the torture equipment without even realizing it.

  SIXTEEN

  Twenty minutes later or so, I heard a key turn in both front door locks, then heard Molly’s voice calling out, “Ben?”

  “You’re late,” I said, feigning irritation. “Tell me what’s more important—the life of an infant, or my supper?”

  I looked up, gave her a smile, and saw that she looked exhausted.

  “Hey,” I said, getting up to embrace her. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head slowly, wearily. “Tough day.”

  “Ah,” I said, “but now you’re home.” I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her, a good, long, extended kiss. I gave her bottom a squeeze and pressed myself hard against her.

  She slid her hands, cold and dry, down my back, under the elastic band of my shorts. “Mmm,” she said. Her breath was hot on the back of my neck.

  Now I slipped my hands under her blouse, up under the white cotton fabric of her bra, felt her warm, erect nipples, stroked.
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  “Mmmph,” she said.

  “Upstairs?” I asked.

  She moaned quietly, then gave a brief shiver.

  —the kitchen—I heard.

  I leaned toward her, still running my fingertips over her right breast, squeezing the thickened nipple.

  —do it in the kitchen. Standing up. Ah, right here—

  I got up, took her by the shoulders, and gently maneuvered her from the sitting room into the kitchen, then pushed her back against the burnished, scarred oak tabletop.

  Her thoughts. It was wrong, it was evil, it was shameful, but, carried away in my lust, I couldn’t stop myself—

  Oh, yes—

  She moaned softly as I pulled off her blouse.

  —my other breast. Don’t stop. Both breasts—

  Obediently, I caressed both her breasts with my palms, then bent my head down and sucked first one nipple, then the other.

  Don’t move—

  I continued to suck and lick, all the while pushing against her until she was lying flat on the table, safely clear of the bowls. I had never seen The Postman Always Rings Twice, but I remembered the iconography of it; hadn’t Lana Turner and John Garfield done it on the kitchen table, too?

  Now, still nuzzling her breasts, I pressed my erect member against her thigh, grinding slowly, and as I began to undo the drawstring of her sweatpants, I heard

  —No. Not yet.

  And, obeying her unspoken wishes, I turned my full attention to her breasts, dallying there longer than I otherwise might have.

  * * *

  We did in fact make love on the kitchen table, losing one cheap china bowl to the commotion, but neither one of us much noticed the crash. It was, I have to say, the most erotic, intense sex I had ever had. Molly had been so carried away, she had forgotten to insert her diaphragm. She came time after time, the tears flowing down her cheeks. Afterward we lay tangled in each other’s arms, wet with sweat and musky with the fluids and odors of lovemaking, on the couch in the sitting room next to the kitchen.

  Yet when it was over, I felt enormously guilty.

  They say that all human beings are sad after sex. I believe that it is only men who experience the postcoital blues. Molly looked at once blissful and disoriented, stroking my now-flaccid, reddened, drained penis.

  “You weren’t protected,” I said. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind about kids?”

  “No,” she said dreamily. “I’m not at the fertile part of my cycle right now. Not much of a risk. But that was great.”

  I felt increasingly guilty and predatory and generally evil. I had violated her in a fundamental way, I felt. By responding to her every unspoken desire, I had in a terrible sense manipulated her, engaged in a reprehensible dishonesty.

  I felt shitty.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was great.”

  * * *

  Our wedding was held on the grounds of a lovely old estate outside Boston. The day is still a blur. I remember bustling around, looking for my cummerbund and studs and a pair of half-decent black socks to wear.

  Shortly before the ceremony began, Hal Sinclair caught hold of my elbow. In his tuxedo he was even more distinguished-looking than when I first met him: his white hair glowed against his tanned, long, narrow, handsome face. He had a cleft chin, thin lips, laugh lines around the eyes and mouth.

  He seemed angry, but I quickly realized he was being stern, and I’d never seen him stern before.

  “You take care of my daughter,” he said.

  I looked at him, expecting him to crack a joke, but his mien was unrelievedly somber.

  “You hear me?”

  I said I did. Of course I will.

  “You take care of her.”

  And it suddenly hit me, like a punch to the solar plexus. Of course! My last wife had been killed. Hal would never, ever say it, but were it not for my failure to follow correct procedures, Laura would be alive. Were it not for my bungling.

  You killed your first wife, Ben, he seemed to be saying. Don’t kill your second one.

  My face flushed hotly. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But not my future father-in-law, not on the day of my wedding.

  I replied, as warmly as I could, “Don’t you worry about it, Hal. I will.”

  * * *

  “I’ve got a client, Mol,” I said later as we drank vodka and tonics at the kitchen table. “A normal, totally sane guy—”

  “What was he doing at Putnam & Stearns?” She took a sip from the icy glass. “Excellent. Lot of lime, the way I like it.”

  I chuckled. “So this client who seems totally on the level, asked me if I believed in the possibility of extrasensory perception.”

  “ESP.”

  “So this client insisted he can, in a way, pick up on the thoughts of others. Sort of ‘read’ them.”

  “Okay, Ben. What’s your point?”

  “So, he tried it on me, and I’m convinced. I guess, what I want to know is, do you accept the possibility?”

  “No. Yes. How the hell do I know? What are you getting at?”

  “You ever hear of such a thing?”

  “Sure. On The Twilight Zone, I think there might have been some episode like that. A kid in a Stephen King book, too. But listen, Ben—I—we need to talk.”

  “All right,” I said warily.

  “A guy accosted me at the hospital today.”

  “What guy?”

  “‘What guy?’” she echoed sardonically. “You know damned well what guy.”

  “Molly, what are you talking about?”

  “This afternoon. At the hospital. He said you told him where to find me.”

  I put down my drink. “What?”

  “You didn’t talk to him?”

  “I promise you, I have no idea what this is all about. Someone ‘accosted’ you?”

  “Not ‘accosted,’ I don’t mean that. There was this guy, you know, a guy sitting outside the NICU, in the waiting area, and I guess he’d sent in word for someone to get me. I didn’t recognize him. He had that sort of official look—the gray suit and the blue tie and all that.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Listen,” she said sharply. “Listen to me. He asked if I was Martha Sinclair, the daughter of Harrison Sinclair. I said yes, who was he? but he asked if he could talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said all right.”

  She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and continued. “He said he’d just talked to you, that he was a friend of my father’s. I assumed that meant he was an Agency employee, since he sort of had that look, and he wanted to talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said okay.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “He asked if I knew anything about an account my father had opened before his death. Something about an access code or something. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t talk to you, did he?” she said, failing to suppress a sob. “Ben, it’s a lie, it has to be.”

  “You didn’t get his name?”

  “I was in a state of shock! I could barely talk.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. Very light skin, almost an albino. Light blond hair. Strong-looking, but somehow, I don’t know, feminine. Epicene. He said he was doing security work for the Central Intelligence Agency,” she said in a small, thin voice. “He said they were investigating—what he called Dad’s ‘alleged embezzlement,’ and he wanted to know whether my father had left me any papers, gave me any information. Left any access codes. Anything.”

  “You told him they have their heads up their collective asses, didn’t you?”

  “I told him there was some horrible mistake, you know, what kind of proof did they have, all that. And the guy just said something like, I’ll be in touch again, but in the meantime, think very hard about anything your father might hav
e told you. And then he said—”

  Her voice cracked, and she covered her eyes with one cupped hand.

  “Go on, Molly.”

  “He said the embezzlement was, in all likelihood, connected to my father’s murder. He knew about the photo of—” She closed her eyes.

  “Go ahead.”

  “He said there was a lot of pressure from the Agency to make these allegations public, release them to the news media, and I said, but they couldn’t do that, it was a lie, you’d ruin his reputation. And he said, We’d hate to do that, Ms. Sinclair. All we want, he said, is your cooperation.”

  “Oh, my God,” I moaned.

  “Does this have anything to do with the Corporation, Ben? With whatever you’re doing for Alex Truslow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think it does.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Early the next morning—and it had to have been early, because Molly had not yet gotten up to go to work—I opened my eyes, looked around the room as I habitually do, and saw from the digital clock-radio that it was not even six o’clock.

  Molly was asleep next to me, curled into the fetal position, her hands clasped to her chest. I like looking at her asleep: I like the little-girl vulnerability and seeing her hair mussed up and her makeup off. She has the ability to sleep far more deeply than I. Sometimes I think she enjoys sleep more than sex. And indeed, she inevitably awakes in a buoyant mood, happy and refreshed, as if she’d just returned from a wonderful though brief vacation.

  Whereas I awake dyspeptic, dazed, grumpy. I got out of the bed, walked across the cold wooden floor, and went to the john, hoping the noise would wake her up. But she couldn’t be lured away from whatever she was dreaming. Then I approached her side of the bed, sat down on the edge of it, and leaned my head down toward hers.

  I was startled to “hear” something.

  It was nothing coherent, none of the brief snatches of ordered thought that I’d been able to pick up the day before.

  I heard bits and pieces of sounds almost musical, tonal, that didn’t sound like any language I’d ever heard. It was as if I were dialing a radio’s tuning knob in some foreign country. And then—a cluster of words that made perfect sense. Computer, I heard, and then something that sounded like fox and then, clearly a hospital dream now, monitor, and then, suddenly, Ben, and then more of the musical nonsense phrases.