Placebo

by Steven James

  “Synthetic telepathy.”

  Riah had never liked that term. It made what she was doing sound somehow paranormal when it was simply the development of a brain-computer interface. “What’s your connection with it? Again?” She purposely posed the question in a challenging way to gauge how Oriana would respond. Riah was struck by the fact that Cyrus had at some point vetted her, gotten her military clearance to be here tonight.

  Or did the twins do it?

  The undersecretary scoffed at her. “You have no idea what this project is about.”

  “Ma’am.” Daniel stepped forward, interrupting them. “Dr. Colette knows more about deep-brain stimulation of the Wernicke’s area than anyone. If we’re ever going to make this work with individuals, rather than just twins, she’ll be the one to figure out how.”

  Darren nodded. “My brother and I need her in on this project if we’re going to be able to move forward with it on the time frame we’ve discussed.”

  Williamson let out a small sigh of resignation. “Dr. Colette—”

  “Riah really is fine.”

  A set jaw. “Dr. Colette, you realize that the material on this video is absolutely confidential and you may not share what you see with anyone. It concerns matters of national security.”

  National security?

  She really had been vetted.

  “Well?”

  Riah had no idea who she might even be tempted to share the contents of the video with. “Of course.”

  The Undersecretary of Defense pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Before we move forward, I need you to sign these release forms.”

  “She’s been cleared,” Cyrus reiterated. “She wouldn’t be part of the project if she weren’t.”

  “It’s alright,” Riah told him, then quickly scanned the papers and signed them.

  The undersecretary collected the papers, filed them in her briefcase. “Alright. Let’s watch this video.”

  Cyrus gestured toward the hall and picked up his laptop. “It’ll be easier for everyone to see if we use the screen in the conference room.”

  The Footage

  Charlene, Xavier, and I find an empty exam room. Slip inside. Xavier closes the door behind us. “I made some calls. I have some of the best people out there working on Project Alpha and Star Gate.”

  “Good.”

  As he’s locking the door, my phone vibrates.

  A text.

  The link from Fionna.

  I click it.

  An image comes up: a room with plaster-covered walls, a ceiling fan, and a window overlooking a Middle Eastern city.

  The twins sat across the table from Riah and Undersecretary of Defense Williamson. Even though Riah knew that all the other people in the room were previously acquainted, she didn’t feel out of place. A lack of social anxiety was actually one of the perks for people with her condition.

  The sprawling oval conference table lay centered in the room. Cyrus tapped a button on a console on the table, and the lights dimmed to a preset for watching videos. Then he depressed another button, and a large screen lowered from the ceiling and covered the front wall.

  Williamson steepled her hands, leaned forward, asked Cyrus, “So have you seen it yet?”

  “Not yet. No.” He connected his laptop to the projector system.

  She faced the twins. “And you?”

  “No.”

  Riah didn’t wait for the question. “I haven’t seen it yet either. But I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Well. So am I.”

  The image from the laptop appeared on the projector screen. A room in Kabul.

  Cyrus tapped the space bar and the video began.

  The video begins.

  We watch as the camera pans across the room, revealing two bearded men in Middle Eastern clothes standing beside a table. They’re speaking rapidly in a language I don’t immediately recognize.

  “It’s Arabic,” Xavier announces.

  “How do you—” Charlene begins.

  “Shh.”

  One of the men steps aside, and I can see a table littered with wires, cell phones, detonators, a pile of nails, and several boxes of ball bearings. The audio on the recording is remarkably good, and I can hear the rush of traffic and the intermittent blaring of horns outside the window.

  The taller of the two men walks toward the window and tugs at the threadbare curtains. They don’t close all the way, however, and leave a gap nearly a foot wide, allowing for a narrow view of the building across the street.

  “The guy who’s filming this . . .” Xavier points to my phone’s screen. “He’s gotta be wearing a button camera like the one I gave you. Doesn’t look like his buddies know they’re being recorded.” He studies the video carefully, mumbles something about the grade of the C-4 on the table. “Oh yeah. That’s gonna leave a mark.”

  There are three suicide vests beside the explosives.

  A few more words in Arabic.

  I’m pretty sure I know how this is going to end, and I can feel a palpable rush of apprehension.

  You’re about to watch these people die.

  The man beside the table faces the person filming the scene and speaks to him. I have no idea what he’s saying, but I do make out the words “Allahu Akbar.” The person with the camera repeats the words, and the tenor of his voice confirms that he’s male. Then all three men echo the phrase again.

  The man closest to the table takes off his long-sleeved shirt and picks up the suicide vest.

  I think again of what Fionna told me earlier: there was a thwarted attack on a Kabul mosque, an unconfirmed number of terrorists were killed.

  The research Dr. Tanbyrn was working on before the fire was a joint project between the Pentagon and RixoTray Pharmaceuticals.

  RixoTray’s CEO, Dr. Cyrus Arlington, was in communication with Glenn Banner hours before the fire.

  Mind-to-mind research . . .

  Telepathy . . .

  The twins . . .

  If you can affect someone’s physiology, can you consciously change it?

  If you can alter someone’s heart rate, could you stop it?

  All the facts circle elusively around each other, and I try to find a way to fit them together.

  “Oh,” I whisper. “They’re going to kill him.”

  “What?” Charlene breathes.

  “Watch. The guy with the vest, they’re going to kill him.”

  The man slips the vest on, tightens some straps to secure it in place, then puts his loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt back on over the vest. It’s not noticeable beneath his shirt, and if I didn’t know he was wearing it, I never would have guessed that he was an armed suicide bomber.

  I can feel my chest tensing up.

  The taller man, the one nearest the window, peers past the ratty curtains for a moment, then joins his two cohorts in the middle of the room.

  I hear the words “Allahu Akbar” repeated again by the three men in the group.

  The man wearing the vest turns toward the window.

  And then.

  Explodes.

  For a fraction of a second you can see the blast, a blur of color and fabric flaring toward the camera lens overwhelmed by a deafening roar.

  And then there’s nothing but a blank, silent screen.

  Neither Charlene nor Xavier speaks.

  So I was wrong.

  They didn’t stop the guy’s heart.

  Manipulating matter? Telekinesis? They made the bomb explode?

  That seemed even more implausible.

  At last Charlene speaks: “Wow.”

  Xavier shakes his head. “How did they get this footage? The camera was destroyed, so this footage was obviously being transmitted to someone—and then that person sends it to the CEO of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms? Are you kidding me?”

  “I don’t think he intended to do that,” I tell them.

  “Who?”

  “The suicide bomber. It’s hard to tell,
but it didn’t look like he reached for the vest. Neither of the other guys touched the cell phones to detonate it. Also, he put his shirt back on right after putting on the vest. Why would he do that if he was just going to blow up his buddies right there in the room?”

  “You think it malfunctioned?”

  “No. And I don’t think he detonated it. I think somehow the twins did it for him.”

  Cyrus shut off the video and Riah waited for him to comment, for any of the four people she was with to speak.

  Finally, Williamson did. “So it works.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said quietly. “Apparently it does.”

  I expect Xavier to be on the same page with what I just said, to agree with me about the evil schemes of the federal government’s secret psychic research and black-ops assassination programs, but both he and Charlene seem skeptical. “Tanbyrn’s study concerned mind-to-mind communication,” he reminds me, “not telekinesis.”

  “As far as we know. But it could have something to do with quantum entanglement. Manipulating matter nonlocally. Remember? Like the nuclear reactor or the torpedo?” But even as I try to convince them, I begin to doubt it myself, and the more implausible the whole telekinesis angle seems. I sigh. “You’re right. I don’t know. We’d need more information to tell.”

  The link on my phone expires, and when I try to refresh it, I’m unsuccessful.

  I doubt Fionna would have severed the connection. Maybe someone at RixoTray did.

  Just in case the video comes back on, I leave the browser open, set down my phone, and ask to borrow Charlene’s. She’s more than happy to give it to me.

  I really have no idea how deep all this goes or who we can trust, but Abina is dead, Dr. Tanbyrn might die, the three people in the video are dead. RixoTray’s CEO is involved with this and has ties to the Pentagon as well as to the guy who carried those eleven photographs of corpses in his wallet. There’s no way all of this was simply a local law enforcement matter, and with the DoD’s involvement I don’t trust going to the federal government with what we know either.

  For a moment I consider contacting the media, but then the obvious fact hits me in the face—You film documentaries, Jevin. You are the media.

  I’m not about to just sit on the sidelines until more people start showing up dead.

  “Charlene, last night you told me about a researcher at RixoTray who was in charge of this program. What was her name again?”

  “Dr. Riah Colette.”

  I navigate to the internet browser on her phone.

  “Are you going to call her?”

  “No, I think we need to talk to her face-to-face.”

  I find what I’m looking for. Dial the number.

  “Then who are you calling?” Xavier asks.

  “I’m getting us a plane. We’re going to Philadelphia.”

  Family Ties

  Charlene looks at me curiously. “Philadelphia?”

  “Arlington is there. He’s connected with Banner, with the attempt on Tanbyrn’s—and our—lives. Colette is there. RixoTray’s headquarters is there. If we’re going to crack this open, we need to be there too.”

  “What about the police?” she asks me. “Or the FBI? Shouldn’t we just go to them?”

  Xavier shakes his head. He must’ve been thinking the same thing I was a minute ago. “And when they ask why we suspect that the CEO of one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world is involved in conspiracy to commit murder, I suppose we’ll just tell them that we hacked into his computer and phone records after getting the information off the body of the man Jevin killed.”

  That was an interesting way to put it.

  I’m still on hold, waiting for someone from the charter plane company to speak to me. “Right now we have ties between all these things but no proof. Until we know more, we’d be accused of making unfounded accusations.”

  “Which would be true,” Xavier points out.

  She considers that.

  “We do exposés, right?” I think of Abina again, of justice, of uncovering the truth. “Well, let’s expose something that really matters.”

  The charter service’s rep picks up, apologizes for the wait, and asks how she may be of assistance to me.

  So far no one had offered Riah an explanation.

  At last Cyrus typed on his keyboard and a photo appeared on the projector screen.

  Three people: a Middle Eastern woman in her late thirties standing beside a dark-skinned, attractive girl in her teens, and the bearded man who’d strapped on the suicide vest in the video. Riah was surprised that a fundamentalist Muslim suicide bomber would allow his wife and daughter to be photographed without their burkas’ veils covering their faces.

  Is it a fake?

  “Malik was married,” Cyrus explained. “He had a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter. If he’d backed out, not gone through with it, they would have been punished.”

  Riah had heard enough about the culture and beliefs of Islamic fundamentalist society to know that “punished” in this case probably meant publicly shamed, or quite possibly raped or even killed.

  “What do you mean if he’d backed out?”

  “This way,” Undersecretary of Defense Williamson said, not answering her question, “by all accounts it looks to the other members of his group that it was an accident.”

  “What does that mean: this way it looks like it was an accident?”

  “We let him do it.”

  Still no direct answers. “You let him do what? Detonate the vest?”

  Cyrus said, “Riah, your research, your work with the twins, helped save innocent lives, protected Malik’s wife and daughter from retribution had he failed to go through with his mission, and it helped eliminate a terrorist threat and take care of three members of an al-Qaeda cell.”

  “I research ways to decipher neural activity related to linguistic patterns. How did my research do any of that?”

  “Dr. Colette,” Daniel offered, “this man was planning to kill himself and possibly hundreds of innocent people at a mosque. People who had assembled to worship God.”

  “But you’re saying this wasn’t an accident? That somehow you let him do it. Does that mean you influenced him to do it?”

  “He was planning to do it already.”

  Riah wasn’t rattled by the fact that no one was giving her a straight answer, but she was becoming more and more curious about why that was the case. “You’re telling me that you somehow convinced this man to kill himself?” She looked at the twins. “But how?”

  It took Darren a long time to answer.

  “The circumstances concerning his death are one of the reasons we wanted you here. We need you to help us put them into context.”

  Okay, so that was finally an answer, but it was certainly not the one she’d expected.

  “How can I do that?”

  The twins rose almost in unison. Daniel said, “We’ll meet you tomorrow morning at 9:15 in the R&D facility, room 27B. We’ll explain everything then.”

  Based on the concern Cyrus and the twins had shown earlier for Dr. Tanbyrn’s condition, Riah had expected that the topic of the fire at the center in Oregon would come up again, but now it appeared that everyone was ready to leave. All of this was fascinating and intriguing to her. She agreed to meet with the twins in the morning, if only to find out what they were using her research for: “I’ll be there. I’ll see you at 9:15.”

  And that was that.

  They headed toward the door, Oriana mentioned to Cyrus that she would tell her oversight committee to extend the funding, and then she excused herself as well.

  The meeting had ended in the same shroud of questions that had pervaded it.

  Cyrus escorted Riah past Caitlyn Vaughn at the reception desk and down the elevator. “About last night, coming over to your apartment . . . the sleepover. Does the offer still stand?”

  Riah understood that his question was a test, a way of feeling out how needy she was, how depen
dent on him, and she decided to show him that she was not the dependent one in their relationship. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  She paused, then turned to him, looked deep into his eyes, and trailed her finger across his cheek. “Say hi to Helen tonight for me, will you? Tell that thoughtful wife of yours that coffee tomorrow afternoon sounds like a wonderful idea.”

  “She invited you out for coffee?”

  “Good night, Cyrus.”

  Then Riah left for her car.

  Let him chew on that for a while.

  If she’d been a person capable of feeling pleasure, she would have smiled. As it was, she tried one on to see how it felt, but it didn’t make her feel anything at all.

  I’m not really a fan of commercial airlines, and thankfully, my stage shows over the last decade have done well enough to give me the freedom to be able to bypass those long security lines and groping TSA employees.

  It didn’t take me long to book the charter plane.

  Both Xavier and Charlene know that money isn’t really an issue for me, so neither of them bats an eye when I tell them the price tag—just under six thousand dollars per hour. Plus landing fees, fuel, and overnight expenses. “It’s really not that bad, actually.”

  “What does that work out to per peanut?” Xavier asks.

  “Hors d’oeuvres,” I correct him. “And lobster bisque. Only the best for my friends.”

  Excusing myself from them for a minute, I find the restroom, then on my way back down the hall, I call Fionna to see if she recorded the video. “I did. I’ll get you a copy. Sorry I lost the connection to the laptop after it was finished. Someone on their cybersecurity team must have stumbled onto the breach. But don’t worry, I got out before anyone would’ve been able to find out who was there.”

  I tell her about our plans to go to Philadelphia.

  “How can you be sure that Dr. Colette will even be there?”

  Good point. “Um . . .”

  “Hang on a second.”

  Momentarily she gets back into their system and confirms that Dr. Colette’s schedule includes some meetings in the morning there in Philly.