The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2)

by Sean Chercover

  She returned with a tray and placed it on the coffee table.

  “You have a beautiful home,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She poured the coffee into two mugs and handed one across to him. “I never saw India until after med school. My mother came to America as a toddler. Her accent was as California as mine—she even spoke Hindi with an American accent. My father was grown, already a doctor when he emigrated, and her accent always amused him.”

  “Julia said your father’s name is Singh.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you end up Kara Kaur? I thought all Sikh women were given the name Kaur.”

  Kara Singh raised her coffee in a toasting gesture. “I’m impressed.”

  “I used to study religions a little,” he said.

  “Yes, my father was a Sikh, but I guess you’d call him a secular Sikh. He believed in the values of Sikhism while rejecting all theology. The common surname was an attempt by Sikhism to break the caste system, a proclamation that all are equal. But my father saw a contradiction: While Sikhs also claim to believe gender differences are transitory and see women as equal to men, they give their boys the name Singh, which means lion, and their girls the name Kaur, which means princess. My dad said he wanted me to be a lioness, not a princess. So I got to be a Singh. And he insisted on Kara—my mom’s surname—as a testament to her equality. The way he saw it, he wasn’t rejecting the values of Sikhism but following them more truly.”

  “Sounds like a remarkable man.”

  “He was. But he was also an angry man, angry about everything back home, the caste system, the low status of women, the political corruption, police brutality. He raised money from the California Sikh community, added some of his own, and sent it to people in India trying to achieve political reform, but he vowed not to return until things changed. And he never did.”

  “Was he upset with you for going?”

  “No, he understood my need to see the place that had made him so angry, see it for myself. Shortly after I became a surgeon I did some pro bono work in Kolkata, and I fell in love with the place. India is deeply troubled in many ways, but also a country of such exquisite beauty and culture. So many wonderful people enduring so much hardship.” She sipped her coffee and leaned back into the couch. “Like many places in the world, I guess. Anyway, I went back about once a year . . . until, you know. Until they took my medical license away.”

  “You sound appropriately bitter about it.”

  “Of course I’m bitter about it. Who wouldn’t be?” She caught herself, blew out a breath, and combed slender fingers through her hair. “Okay, sorry. I just, I don’t know how this is supposed to go. I’ve been diagnosed by my former peers as—well, they can’t agree, since I’m clearly not schizophrenic and don’t fit any other profiles. So they just say I’m borderline bipolar or depressive or delusional.” She looked at Daniel squarely. “But I’m not.” Her gaze dropped to her feet as she crossed her ankles. When she looked back, the intensity of her expression was a little unsettling. “I’m not. Not yet. But I know I’m headed in that direction, and I feel like Julia’s book is my last chance to stop them.”

  “You mean the CIA.”

  “I don’t know if it’s the CIA,” she said. “When I went public, I suggested it might be the CIA or the military or some group connected to them, maybe a private contractor, but the press just went with CIA because it sounds sensational and that’s all anyone remembers I said. Whoever it is, they’ve been trying to drive me insane for the last six years and if I don’t stop them, they’ll eventually succeed . . .”

  The speed of her speech increased the longer she talked. Not quite manic, Daniel decided, but well beyond simply agitated.

  “ . . . and now Julia says I have to talk to you before she’ll agree to tell my story, but it’s a catch-22 because if I tell you the truth, you’ll just think I’m crazy.”

  “Wait, slow down,” said Daniel. “Kara, I understand that telling your story has only brought you more grief, but here’s the thing: I bring a different perspective. Tim Trinity was my uncle.”

  She arched her left eyebrow at him. “Really?”

  “Really. I was with him for the last month of his life, and I saw things—”

  “I’m sorry if he was your uncle, but Trinity was a con artist.”

  “Without doubt,” said Daniel, “and one of the best. But what happened to him at the end was real.”

  Kara sighed, “I hope you didn’t come here to tell me God put the voices in my head. If that’s the case, you can just pack up your Watchtowers or whatever and leave.”

  “Not at all.” Daniel smiled. “Look, you’ll just have to take a leap of faith that I’m one of the good guys. Do you trust Julia?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Then trust that she didn’t send me here to hurt you.”

  Kara thought for a second, decided. “What the hell, I guess it’s once more unto the breach then.”

  She left for the kitchen, returned with a bottle of Cutty Sark, and poured about three ounces into her coffee, then put the bottle on the table between them. “I’d feel better talking about this if you’d drink with me,” she said, looking at the table, her voice very small.

  Daniel poured a little scotch into his own coffee. “Sure.”

  She sipped hers. “You think they could’ve been using that weapon on your uncle?”

  “Not a chance,” Daniel said. “Tim predicted the future. Last time I checked, the CIA had a pretty crappy track record in that regard. Seriously, he knew things that were impossible to know.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it.” She smiled at the irony. “I know, crazy lady thinks CIA is beaming voices into her head, you’d expect her to believe anything. But I’m a medical doctor, I believe in science. You need to understand, that is how I approached my own condition. I didn’t just jump at the idea that people were transmitting the voices into my head. I had every conceivable medical diagnostic test done, I allowed myself to be dissected by an army of psychiatrists, even submitted to their hypnosis quackery. Bottom line: I have no physical or neurological disease. And the shrinks can’t find a convenient label to pin on me, either.” She sipped some more coffee. “The most logically consistent explanation that fits the evidence is simply that someone is using that V2K weapon to torture me into madness.”

  Julia was right, this woman did seem incredibly rational. Almost hyper-rational.

  “Okay,” said Daniel, “I understand the weapon exists and it’s physically possible for someone to do what you’re saying. But why would they?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea. It makes no sense, and that’s the only factor pointing toward mental illness. I simply cannot imagine a rational motivation for anyone to do this to me—but then again, I can’t imagine a rational motivation for doing this to anybody. And yet the Pentagon built the hideous thing, so obviously there was a motivation.”

  “Fair point,” said Daniel.

  “I can only guess that maybe I’m an involuntary subject in some kind of experiment. They leave me alone when I’ve had too much to drink, so maybe they’re simply experimenting to find how long it takes for this weapon to drive a sober, intelligent woman insane.” She drank some more boozy coffee. “I know I’m grasping at straws, but again, based on the empirical evidence, it really is the most logical explanation. Of course, it’s more comfortable for people to say I’m nuts than it is for them to face the fact that their governments build weapons like this.”

  “It would be an uncomfortable fact to face,” said Daniel.

  “Not would be,” Kara said. “Is.”

  “Granted,” he said, because what else could he say? “But let’s focus for a minute on the experience itself. Tell me about the voices.”

  “There are three distinct voices, all men with American accents. But it’s only one at
a time, as if they’re taking shifts.”

  “How often?”

  “Four days a week on average, but it varies. A few times a year they leave me alone for a whole week, but there are also stretches when they harass me every day for as long as three weeks at a time. Usually starts in the late afternoon or evening, but sometimes they come in the morning. Once they start transmitting, they usually stay at it for three or four hours, but they also just pop in for a minute or two, no discernible timing pattern to those little visits. One thing is constant no matter the time or duration of their transmissions: Every time the voices come, my mouth fills with the taste of cinnamon. Not sweet like gum or candy, but almost astringent, like if you put a spoonful of powdered cinnamon on your tongue. It’s the weirdest thing, like when they start transmission it inadvertently triggers some taste receptors in my brain. And it’s always cinnamon.”

  “What sort of things do they say?”

  “Sometimes they call me by name, like, ‘Kara, pay attention,’ and then they start talking. It’s as if they’re reading books to me, excerpts from novels, history books, travel books, memoirs. It’s all over the place. I’ve Googled passages from my transcription journals, but I never get a match to anything online.”

  She drained the rest of her mug and rose from the couch. “Come. Let me show you.” Daniel followed her down the hallway to a door on the left. A small plaque on the door read:

  ROOM

  101

  Kara said, “I have to try and find humor in it where I can.” Her face darkened. “It gets pretty bleak sometimes.” She pushed the door open and forced the smile back into place as she swept the room with her arm. “Welcome to my nightmare.”

  It had been a small guest bedroom or home office. Now there was a daybed with a lap desk and beside it a small table with a digital voice recorder. “When I get too tired to write, I just dictate it here and write it out later over there.” There was a desk in the corner, and on it he saw a stained-glass lamp, a laptop computer, a pencil cup crammed with pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a Clairfontaine journal.

  And then Daniel noticed the bookshelves along the wall. Row upon row of notebooks just like the one on the desk.

  Over a hundred of them.

  It gets pretty bleak sometimes . . .

  “Somehow,” said Kara, taking a step toward the bookshelves, “my life has come to this.” Not self-pity, but an honest reflection of the reality she was living.

  Daniel faced her. “Jesus, Kara. I’m . . . I feel like I’m intruding on something very personal here.”

  Her jaw tightened. “You don’t understand. They took my daughter from me—my own child—and . . . three years, they won’t even allow me to petition for supervised visits until I prove to a judge I’m on antipsychotic drugs—drugs that turn me into a bloody zombie—and I will not go through life with a pharmacological lobotomy.” She let out a long breath. “And my parents both died believing their daughter had lost her mind.” Anger spent, she looked again at the bookshelves filled with identical journals, silently radiating pain and loss and despair.

  This woman had run out of tears a long time ago.

  Daniel said, “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “No.” Kara shook her head. “Sometimes . . . you know, once in a while, I wake up in the morning, and for a few seconds I just lie there and let myself believe the last six years were only a nightmare, that she’s in the kitchen eating cereal or packing her book bag for school . . . and for those few seconds life is almost tolerable. But then I have to lose her all over again. I should never do it, it isn’t worth the pain, but sometimes I’m weak. And I pay for it. So I won’t tell you her name. I just can’t go through that right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They stripped my entire life away, Daniel. And you think you’re intruding on something personal? I’ve got nothing personal left.” She gestured toward the bookshelves. “So go ahead, read my mind. I’m going to get a drink.” She walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind her.

  Daniel stepped forward. There was a label on each notebook’s spine indicating when it was written. He pulled one off the middle shelf, let it fall open in his hands. Kara’s handwriting was strong but, unlike most doctors’, legible. A feminine script, but written in a hurry, not filigreed. A word halfway down the page caught Daniel’s eye.

  Mandal. The town in Norway. He read the sentence surrounding it: It happened before in Mandal, where the revealed was once concealed, and the concealed shall be revealed.

  The same words a plague-infected soldier had said to Daniel in West Virginia just three days earlier. Exactly the same. And Daniel had landed on this particular page, in this particular journal, completely at random.

  He felt the floor drop out from under his feet, and a violent shudder ran through his body.

  Like the dream of falling that jerks you back from the edge of sleep.

  16: EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK

  In the video chat window on Daniel’s laptop screen, Ayo Onatade scrunched up her face. “Back up just a second. Yesterday you thought she was crazy, now you think she’s got AIT?”

  “Both could be true,” said Daniel. “They’re not mutually exclusive. Anyway, now that I’ve spoken with her, I don’t think she’s crazy. Regardless, there’s no denying what I saw in Kara’s journal—the voice in her head said exactly what Blankenship told me in West Virginia. I mean verbatim to the translation in the case file.”

  “You’ve got my attention. Extrapolate.”

  “Okay, if we try to explain it with the Pentagon’s mind-control gizmo—and we don’t even know if that thing is actually in use anywhere—then sure, they could’ve transmitted the same sentence to both her and Blankenship on two different continents. But that means two teams in the field, a lot of manpower. And while Blankenship is a plausible target—he worked for Dillman—why some random doctor in London? Also, Kara really is self-medicating with alcohol, the voices don’t come when she’s drunk. They’d have to maintain constant close surveillance to know when she’s drinking—a huge allocation of resources.”

  “When you put it that way,” Ayo conceded, “AIT starts to look more likely.”

  “It does. For a while, my uncle kept the voices at bay with cocaine. Maybe for Kara alcohol has a similar effect. And finally, there’s just the weirdness quotient.”

  “Do tell.”

  He recited the long coincidence chain that had led him to Claridge’s Fumoir Bar, with Julia, looking at Dillman’s name in a heavily redacted Pentagon project file from 1985. “And then last night I picked one of a hundred journals off the shelf at random, let it fall open in my hands, and it opened right to the page with the very sentence Blankenship said.”

  Ayo said, “I’ll admit, that would qualify as weird.”

  “I know coincidences happen billions of times a day and people are hardwired to read meaning into them, but this is a hell of a long chain.”

  Like the universe is trying to tell us something.

  “Okay,” said Ayo, “but she is not to be read in.”

  “She’ll have questions.”

  “So tell her a story. You’re just a business consultant trying to solve the Trinity Phenomenon in his spare time. Tim was family, so you’re driven—it’s a personal quest. You can sell that easily enough. For God’s sake, Daniel, we had you on radar for five years, actively scouting you eight months before we even learned your uncle had AIT.”

  “Your point is?”

  “My point, darling, is that you’re a chip off the old grifter’s block. There’s a lot of Tim Trinity in you, you just don’t see it. Lying is what we do in this business. We lie so we don’t have to kill as often and so we don’t get killed as often, so just be glad you’re good at it.”

  “How often to you expect me to get killed?” said Daniel.

  “Smartas
s,” said Ayo. “Now go use that silver tongue Trinity bequeathed you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And please remember, Dr. Singh is a potential asset, not a potential paramour.” Daniel started to speak, but she cut him off. “Don’t bother. There’s a tone in your voice every time you say her name.”

  “A tone?”

  “A definite tone.” Ayo pushed her glasses up her nose. “I’m serious, the woman is a train wreck. Don’t get emotionally entangled.”

  “You’re imagining things,” said Daniel. “Singh’s story is sad and I feel for her, but there’s nothing to worry about here, I’m fine.”

  “Like I said, be glad you’re good at it. I almost believed you.”

  17: DOWNPRESSOR MAN

  Barbados

  Conrad Winter sat back in the blue leather lounge of the air-conditioned stretch limousine, watching the palm trees outside. North of Grantley Adams Airport, where fields of sugarcane once swayed in the salty breeze, fields of houses now stood—some painted bright shades of pink, blue, yellow, green, others still under construction, gray cinder-block structures with plastic sheets billowing where windows would soon reflect the Caribbean sun. But the new development fit in well enough, and the character of the island seemed essentially unchanged.

  As they left the parish of Christ Church and climbed into the hills of St. Michael, the scenery became more familiar. Older wooden chattel houses nestled beside rum shops painted red with signs advertising Banks beer and Cockspur rum, open-air fruit stands bustling with activity . . . Four older men playing dominoes at a folding card table by the side of the road, their cabs parked at the taxi stand nearby . . . Neatly uniformed children squealing and chattering as they dashed out of school . . . An enterprising Rasta calling to passing cars from beside a wooden cart loaded with coconuts . . . A Chefette restaurant where business was booming.