The President's Henchman

by Joseph Flynn

  “Tell you what, kiddo,” McGill said. “Let’s start with something more traditional: karate, taekwondo, or something like that. You learn the discipline and the technique for a couple of years, then if you still want to learn Dark Alley, I’ll teach you.”

  “Promise?”

  McGill nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” She leaned in and gave him a peck on the lips. “So how’s your case in Washington? That woman with the creepy guy on the phone.”

  Now he surprised Abbie; he told her he’d been fired.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  He told her that, too. Which made her frown.

  “She said it was all a dream? Or you think she’s trying to play a trick on Patti?”

  “Yes and maybe,” McGill answered.

  “But you don’t know which one.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Abbie said.

  “Which part?”

  “That it was a dream. Who ever heard of a dream that was so scary you’d go to the police about it?”

  McGill was no longer a cop, but obviously his daughter still thought of him that way. He hadn’t told Abbie about the green thong, but he suspected she’d be equally skeptical on that point.

  “What about the idea that she might try to play a trick on Patti?” he asked.

  “Maybe. But has she ever done anything like that before?”

  “No, but she works for someone who has.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “What isn’t?” McGill asked.

  “Thinking she’s like someone else. That’s …”

  “Guilt by association?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dad, you know what’d really be bad?”

  “What?”

  “What if someone made the woman fire you, but she’s still in trouble? Who’d help her then?” Abbie gasped as her train of thought stopped at an unpleasant station.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “I … I’d rather not say.”

  “Abbie.”

  Now she hugged him.

  “I was thinking — and I know it wasn’t your fault — but this could be like when you had to stop helping Mr. Grant. Look what happened to him.”

  “Yeah,” McGill said, hugging Abbie back. “Just look.”

  Chana Lochlan sat staring at the video loop playing on the television in her darkened home office. The view never changed. It was an endless stretch of interstate highway seen in the depths of night from behind a steering wheel. Low beams illuminated lane-divider stripes. One after another. After another. After another …

  A soft ceaseless rush of wind blew past.

  Chana sat unmoving, eyes glazed.

  In a corner of the room, beyond the glow of the TV, Damon Todd watched Chana carefully. Her breathing was shallow but regular. Otherwise, not a muscle in her body moved. He gave her another couple of minutes. He wanted to be absolutely sure she was in a K-hole.

  Ketamine hydrochloride had originally been created as a human anesthetic and belonged to a class of drugs known as dissociative anesthetics. Its current legitimate uses were for general anesthesia for children, people in poor health, and animals.

  Its street name was Special K. Definitely not endorsed by the Kellogg’s people.

  In small doses, usually snorted, Special K produced a mild dreamy feeling similar to the effect of inhaling nitrous oxide. Users felt as if they were floating slightly outside their bodies. Numbness in the extremities was also common.

  Higher doses often produced hallucinogenic effects and could cause the user to feel very far removed from his or her body. It was known as going into a K-hole and was likened to a near-death experience. It left the user all but paralyzed. Temporarily.

  Todd had injected Chana with a large dose. He’d done it after he’d put her into a hypnotic state. The injection site was the lingual surface of the gingiva between her first and second upper left molars. A spot likely to be found only by a dentist. And in a day or two the wound would be healed. Gone.

  “My dear,” Todd asked, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was soft, childlike.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Sleepy.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll let you rest soon. But now I need to know something.”

  “What?”

  “Have you been troubled lately?”

  “Yes.” Chana’s voice became fearful.

  “Don’t worry, my sweet girl,” Todd told her.

  “I try to be good. I try to be perfect.”

  Todd wanted to reach out to her, hold and comfort her, but now was not the time.

  “And you are, as perfect as any of us can be.”

  “Not as perfect as you.”

  Todd had to repress a bitter laugh.

  “I’m going to ask you to look at yourself now,” he said. “There’s a very special mirror in front of you. You look at it and you can see all your troubles. They’re stuck on you like the name tags you’d wear to a convention: ‘Hi, I’m…’ Only these name tags list your problems. Can you see them, my dear?”

  “Yes,” Chana said.

  “Look at the first trouble tag you can see. What does it say?”

  “‘Too old.’ I’m getting too old.”

  The very idea took Todd by surprise. Chana was beautiful. In the prime of life.

  “Too old for what?” he asked.

  A snarl entered her voice. “My job. My stupid fucking job.”

  “What’s wrong with your job? Is someone giving you trouble?”

  “The job is what’s wrong. I’m the most fucking fabulous face on TV. What the hell kind of job is that? Who can live up to that? I want to write, goddamnit!”

  He hadn’t heard her express that ambition before. “Who’s stopping you from writing?”

  “Everybody. My job is to look great and read what they tell me as if I’m offering my own thoughts. My own words. But that’s not what I think. That’s not me!”

  Hadn’t taken long to get to the crux of the matter: the question of identity.

  “And who are you?” he asked.

  “Nanette Lochlan.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, everyone knows me as Chana, but that’s not who I really am. I’m Nanette. Nanette’s perfect.”

  “But is Nanette who you want to be?”

  Her face twisted in pain. She was unable to answer.

  “Do you see any more trouble tags?” Todd asked. “Anyone you can name?”

  “You,” she snapped.

  She might as well have slapped Todd. It was all he could do to maintain control.

  “You’re going to rest now,” he said. “You’re falling, falling, falling asleep. As you fall, each of the tags you had on you, all of your troubles, they’re falling away, too.”

  He clicked off the television. The room became completely dark.

  “When you wake up,” his disembodied voice said, “you will be free from your concerns. You will be rested and refreshed. But your subconscious will continue its debate: Who do you want to be, Nanette, Chana, or someone entirely new? Sleep well, my dear.”

  Finishing the session with that endearment was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d saved this woman’s life, re-created her in the image she’d wanted, made her famous and affluent. All he’d asked in return was her gratitude. Her love. Occasionally, her body.

  Yet she’d said he was one of the problems in her life.

  How dare she?

  He recognized his self-pity and repressed it with contempt.

  He would not be weak. Never be weak again. He left Chana’s house. There was no place he could work out at that hour. No place to shred his muscles against the stubborn resistance of heavy weights. A battle perfectly symbolic of his struggle against a mindless world.

  He’d have to run. Run until his legs burned and his lungs were on fire.

  Or he found another outlet for his rage.<
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  Chapter 17

  Sunday

  Sweetie attended 8:00 a.m. Mass at St. Al’s on North Capitol at Eye Street near North Capitol. Most parishioners attended the ten o’clock Gospel Choir Mass, but Sweetie preferred to worship more simply. Just her, a priest, and the Lord would have been fine. She received Holy Communion and felt as close to a state of grace as she could imagine.

  That was why, after returning home, she didn’t pop her landlord one when he said, “Hey, great legs!”

  Sweetie was sitting on Putnam Shady’s front steps, tying the laces of her running shoes, getting ready to run the Mall. The lawyer was strolling up the sidewalk carrying a copy of the Washington Post and a paper bag from a place called Lox o’ Luck. He was dressed in the kind of sweat clothes in which people never worked up a sweat. He wasn’t badly out of shape but for a relatively young guy his gut was getting soft. He seated himself next to Sweetie.

  “Care for a schmeer?” he asked, opening the bag and tilting it toward Sweetie. “Grab a bagel; there’re plastic knives for the cream cheese.”

  “Not before I run.”

  “After then. Just ring the bell.” He started to get up.

  “What kind of law do you do?” Sweetie asked.

  “What kind of law do you need?” Shady asked, sitting down again.

  “Not me. A friend.”

  “Okay, your friend.”

  “He needs someone who can chew the backside off a senator who might be in the mood to give him some trouble.”

  Shady recalled the references Sweetie had given him: the president and her husband. He’d thought it was a joke, and not a bad one. After all, what could you do, call the White House and ask for the president? Explain that you wanted to get her take on somebody looking to move into your basement apartment.

  But then he remembered Ms. Sweeney’s telling him she was a private investigator — and so, famously, was James J. McGill. The inference was easy.

  “You really work with the president’s husband?”

  “Lying is a sin,” Sweetie told him.

  “Yeah, and we’re all sinners.”

  “Me somewhat less than others.”

  He looked at her legs again. “Sorry to hear that.” When she gave him a frown, he hurried on. “I advocate for the high-tech industry.”

  “You’re a lobbyist.”

  “Uh-huh. But I know a bulldog litigator or two. Is this for Mr. McGill?”

  “No names for now,” Sweetie said.

  “Okay. I can still refer someone. Like I said, just ring the bell.”

  Shady got up and took his keys out, started up the steps.

  Sweetie finished tying her shoes and got to her feet, ready to start her run. Before she did, she looked up at Shady. He had his key in the front door but hadn’t gone in. He was staring at her legs once more. His imagination working overtime. Her state of grace receded.

  “Keep it up, you could be in trouble.”

  The lawyer raised his eyes. “How do you feel about spanking?”

  “Some people need it.”

  Shady grinned. As if that was exactly what he had hoped to hear.

  Damon Todd decided he had to kill James J. McGill.

  He hadn’t been able to find anyone else to absorb his anger all night long. Not even after he’d offered himself as a target in high-crime areas. It was ridiculous. Washington had a harrowing reputation for inner-city crime, but he hadn’t been able to find a jaywalker, much less a felon.

  He ascribed the problem to himself. He looked like someone you didn’t fuck with: obviously strong and visibly pissed off. That fool on the Georgetown campus had to have been blinded by the fact that he’d held a gun. But the more alert predators, they knew. They’d chosen to find easier pickings.

  Which left Todd so frustrated he wanted to howl at the moon. Only the sky was overcast that night. That was when it came to him that there was a specific person he had to kill. McGill.

  That overprivileged prick wasn’t going to go away. Perhaps it had been a miscalculation on Todd’s part to have Chana offer McGill money. A former cop, McGill had to see the $20,000 as a bribe. Whether the bribe was too big or too small, Todd couldn’t say.

  Maybe the amount was irrelevant. The son of a bitch might be a do-gooder. An honest former cop. What were the odds? With his rotten luck, too damn good. If Chana didn’t go to see McGill, he’d come to her. And Todd wouldn’t be able to give Chana the intense therapy she needed if he had to keep looking over his shoulder for the meddlesome McGill.

  Todd had spent most of the night jogging around. Not nearly enough exertion for him. So he decided to run the Mall until he was exhausted. He entered the area from New Jersey Avenue, SE. He skirted the Capitol complex and ran north to Constitution Avenue and turned left. His path would carry him just south of the White House. There’d be no getting at McGill there. But the note McGill had sent to Chana’s house gave his business address on P Street. That was a location that would bear looking into … as would the woman running toward him.

  To his eye, she looked exactly like the blonde in that old TV commercial for Apple computers. The takeoff on Orwell’s 1984. The one where the woman in track clothes smashes the giant image of Big Brother with a sledgehammer. Talk about his kind of woman.

  He gave her a polite nod as she approached, thinking if she smiled, he’d turn around and run with her. He should have known better. The look she gave him, it made him think she was a cop. If he tried the slightest move … hell, maybe she had a hammer on her.

  Well, there were two other women in D.C. besides Chana Lochlan who would take him in. In fact, he was staying with one of them, a publicist for local sports heroes. She’d been happy to see him. Love him. Welcome him into her bed. True, she was one of his subjects. Acting on implanted suggestions to hold him dear. But there was nothing like a sure thing.

  It’d been twenty years since Damon Todd had sex with a woman he hadn’t hypnotized first.

  “So is this guy Svengali or what?” the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency asked Daryl Cheveyo.

  The field officer had shepherded Damon Todd’s proposal through several layers of bureaucratic review. Now he was speaking to the CIA’s number two man in the DD’s office.

  “There’s nothing B-movie about this, sir,” Cheveyo answered. “It’s not legal or even ethical, but from what we’ve read and seen, it works. And it could have at least one important application for us.”

  “Run it by me again,” the deputy director said.

  The man wasn’t inattentive; he was bone tired. The Agency was very busy trying to figure out what was going on down in Cuba. Lots of people were sleeping in their offices, but not for very long at any one time.

  “The medical term is dissociative identity disorder, DID,” Cheveyo began. “It used to be called multiple personality disorder.”

  “Sybil,” the deputy director said. “Sorry. Don’t mean to be flip. I have a tendency to crack wise when I’m groggy. Please continue.”

  “Yes, sir. As a mental process, dissociation spans a broad spectrum. Most of us experience it in a mild way every day. We daydream; we lose ourselves in a movie; we get absorbed by a book. In doing these things we become detached from the world around us. The reasons for such commonplace dissociation are mundane.”

  “You’re bored listening to some numbnuts give a windy speech, you space out,” the deputy director said.

  Cheveyo smiled. “Exactly. At the serious end of the continuum, if you’re a small child being abused in some horrific way, your mind might find a more dramatic way to ease the pain. Repeated dissociation can lead to the creation of one or more alternate personalities to carry the load. Someone tougher. Or indifferent. Or even deserving of suffering.”

  “That’s predominantly where this problem originates, abused kids?”

  The deputy director had pictures of three grandchildren on his credenza.

  “Yes, sir. Current estimates are that 99 percent of all
people with DID suffered repeated severe abuse — physical, sexual, or emotional — before the age of nine. When it is physically impossible to escape such torture, a child often turns to the last avenue of retreat: He goes away in his mind. He hides from reality in order to endure it.”

  “Miserable bastards,” the deputy director muttered.

  The abusive adults, Cheveyo understood him to mean. Most of whom had been abused themselves. But there was no time to get into that.

  “As a means of defense,” Cheveyo went on, “dissociation is highly effective. So much so that dissociative escape can become a conditioned reflex. A practiced child may use it automatically anytime he feels threatened, whether the threat is real or not.”

  The deputy director sighed and rubbed his tired face.

  “Please tell me we’re not dealing with someone who has abused children.”

  “No, sir. My concern is that Dr. Todd may have suffered emotional trauma himself. His personality doesn’t seem entirely integrated and cohesive, at least from casual observation.”

  “But he still has something to offer that may interest us?”

  “Yes, sir. Standard practice in treating DID sufferers is to use therapeutic counseling, medication, hypnotherapy, and other adjunctive therapies to bring the patient back to his root, or true, personality. This regimen has a good success rate.”

  “But that’s not what Todd does?”

  “No, sir. Dr. Todd has reasoned that the root personality had to be essentially flawed, weak if nothing else, not to have physically escaped the untenable living conditions. So he has created a program of what he calls ‘crafted personalities.’”

  “He’s playing God? Deciding who or what people should be?”

  “No, sir. He endeavors to elicit from his subjects the kind of person each of them would most like to be … Then he helps them to become those people.”

  The deputy director raised his eyebrows. “And he’s succeeded in doing that?”

  “So he claims. He says a number of his unidentified subjects have reached positions of some significance.”

  “If they’re unidentified, they could also be fictional. He could claim to have created half the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, couldn’t he?”