Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “It’s springtime. Everyone’s getting out of the house.”

  “Cat,” she said, offering him a small hand.

  “Cat?” He took it.

  “Short for Cathy.”

  “Of course,” he said, smiling. “Will you hold my seat while I go to the men’s room, Cat?” He stood and abruptly walked away.

  MIRA was no bigger than—and actually quite looked like—an oversized pen. It was developed and paid for by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a small but financially powerful arm of the Department of Defense and National Security Agency. DARPA’s grant money was derived from a budget so black that knowledge of MIRA’s existence was limited to DOD’s upper echelon, NSA, CIA, and its creators at Case and Kimble. No more than seven people in Case and Kimble, including Troy and his stepfather, were familiar with its capabilities, and only Troy or his stepfather could remove it from the laboratory. It was as secret as anything got to be in the twenty-first century.

  Troy made his way to the second-floor balcony, found a wooden beam to lean against, and feigned a cell phone call, pretending to be writing as he aimed the pen until the blond woman’s face appeared on the phone’s screen. Then he pressed a preset code.

  Things had changed a lot since 1950, when his stepfather bombarded his first test subject with low-frequency radio waves. Like the stimoceiver of an earlier day, the objective was to stimulate primitive areas of the brain, to program the desire to kill or even die.

  Nearly sixty years later, the technology had changed more than dramatically. Electromagnetic energy could be used to draw upon the target’s own short- and long-term memories. Subtle suggestions based on models of emotional signatures mapped on computer-enhanced EEGs were now stored in databases and later used to trigger similar emotions in other human beings, suggestions as precise as the desire to cheat on a husband or as subtle as the desire to sleep with the next man a woman saw wearing a pearl-colored tie. All he needed to do was to send the blonde a packet of brain waves.

  It had been years since pilots had been given the capability to eye their targets and mentally release their payloads. Now it was possible to bond any number of minds together.

  The blonde reached up and touched her ear, wiped away a spot of perspiration. She picked up her ice water and drank from it. Then she pulled the sweater from her shoulders and leaned over and said something to her husband.

  He nodded.

  She began to look around the room, first at the other diners, but then she swiveled to check out the bar, settled a moment on the man at one end, and wrestled herself out of her seat and marched toward the ladies’ room.

  Troy smiled and put the MIRA back in his jacket, walked down the steps and back to his seat at the bar. And waited.

  A few minutes later the blonde emerged. She had pulled the band from her ponytail and brushed her hair across her shoulders.

  Back at the table she drank more water and squirmed in her seat, throwing glances over her shoulder toward the bar until at last she met Troy’s eyes and he smiled.

  The waiter brought their check. The busboy began to remove their plates. She put a hand on her husband’s arm and leaned close to speak.

  The man listened to her a moment and shook his head, pointing at the child. He made a gesture with both hands—What am I supposed to do? Then she said something else, but it only irritated him more and he stood and threw bills on the check. Without another word, he gathered the packages and made his way to the door with the stroller.

  The blond woman just sat there. She unrolled an unused set of silverware and began to blot the sweat from her cheeks and forehead. She looked unnatural, her shoulders rigid; she was clearly uncomfortable, but then slowly she turned her neck until her eyes caught Troy’s at the bar and she held his gaze a long moment. The connection was palpable.

  “Yes,” Troy whispered. The dance had begun.

  “Excuse me?” The redhead in the stool next to him turned completely around until the toes of her heels were rubbing against his shoes.

  “I was just thinking out loud.” He pointed at his shirt pocket. “Forgot an important call.”

  He took out his phone and turned away from her again and the redhead made a face, took her drink, and marched to the end of the bar to talk to someone else.

  He opened the cell phone and the blonde’s face was back on the screen, bangs and perfectly cropped ponytail the way he remembered from when he’d photographed her fifteen minutes before. He liked her like that. Without all the makeup and flesh sticking out. Not like these bar sluts, but superior looking. He wanted to see her that way again. And then he wanted to watch her disassemble before his eyes.

  The first successful intracerebral radio stimulation was attributable to a Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado in the 1950s, he knew. Delgado, as impatient as Troy’s stepfather, quickly grew tired of working on cats and monkeys and moved his stimoceiver into mental institutions to work on patients.

  The stimoceiver, unlike today’s MIRA, was invasive and required implants to be placed in the brain. Once the patient was ready, he or she was bombarded by radio waves, stimulating the amygdala and hippocampus and producing a wide variety of emotions and effects, some pleasant and some not so pleasant.

  MIRA was to the stimoceiver what the space shuttle was to the Wright Brothers’ plane. Troy had read everything there was to know on the subject of mind control. He understood that the key to manipulating another person’s thoughts was not by subliminal suggestion. It was by giving them a preordained set of instructions from electroencephalograms of test subjects having the identical thought that was to be reproduced. If X was thinking about a white-haired woman wearing a mink hat and, upon seeing one, pushed her in front of an approaching train, the EEG blueprint of that thought imprinted into another person—with a boost from an on-site medium such as himself—would produce the identical result. Catalogue a few million scenarios of EEGs from test subjects and you had an arsenal of impersonal weapons that would never leave a trace.

  MIRA was the brainchild of Ed Case. Troy knew that it could only have been developed through years of trials on human guinea pigs—there were no substitutes for brains when it came to humans; you couldn’t ask rats and guinea pigs to commit murder—and he sensed a great opportunity when his stepfather chose him to liaise Case and Kimble’s multibillion-dollar defense contract with the Defense Special Projects team of the National Security Agency.

  The blond woman was calling the waiter back to the table. They came to some agreement and he pointed to the bar. Then she returned to the ladies’ room.

  This was the moment, Troy knew. The redhead seated next to him earlier was still talking to a woman at the end of the bar, but her Nissan key fob and lipstick case lay next to a used cocktail napkin. He gathered them quickly and nested them behind the rack of glasses at the service bar to his left. Then he cleaned the bar with a linen handkerchief and placed his own glass upon it.

  The door to the ladies’ room opened; he saw her in triplicate, reflected in mirrors dividing the coatroom, bar, and dining room. The redhead was still talking, hands all over the place, strategically arching her back to thrust her breasts out for anyone who cared to see them.

  The blonde was coming toward him now, slowly, eyes fixed on the bartender as she passed a dozen seats. She feigned noticing the open stool next to Troy, and he deftly removed the drink before she could see it.

  “Taken?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Just opened.”

  The blonde slid in next to him, trying to look more interested in getting the bartender’s attention than in him.

  The last time Troy had done this was at Seneca’s on Market Street, just before the Christmas holidays. MIRA wasn’t something you just stuck in your pocket and walked out of Case and Kimble’s most secure laboratory with. Removing it required a password and key card that only he and his stepfather possessed. But, owner or not, DARPA and the NSA wanted to be certain their device never fell in
to enemy hands. The system required that both men be present and both passwords used, to prevent either one of them from being kidnapped and forced to release the MIRA unwillingly. But Troy knew more about his stepfather than the old man could ever have imagined. Troy knew the one secret that Edward Case believed was his and his alone.

  In 1949, as the Allies turned Hungary over to the communists and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences became a socialist academy, the famous communist physicist Nicolao Somogyi begged young Case to help obtain a green card for his only daughter, Syuzanna. Four months later Case married sixteen-year-old Syuzanna Somogyi of Budapest. The marriage was then annulled in Ashland, New Hampshire, in 1950.

  Troy Weir knew it because his mother found the parched original of the marriage certificate in the fireplace ashes of the Case family home in the Catskill Mountains on January 22, 1952, when she dated and placed it in a photo album sleeve. When Troy was twenty-two and she was on her deathbed, she told him where to locate the document. With Edward Case, one could never underestimate the value of holding a trump card. Case’s marriage to a communist in 1950 would surely jeopardize his lasting legacy to democracy. Not to mention that America was still talking about the traitor scientists from the Manhattan Project who along with Klaus Fuchs sold A-bomb technology to the Soviet Reds in 1945.

  The password somogyi opened all of Ed Case’s locked doors. Even his numerical key codes had been formed from the alphabetical equivalents of somogyi. Case thought the secret was his and his alone.

  It wasn’t something you could do every day. Security still printed a readout of who came and went from the lab, and Troy was most certainly on it. But Troy was the director of the lab, and unless his stepfather was specifically looking, there was no one to know any different.

  He had had quite the night with the woman at Seneca’s. The famous sports club had been crowded that holiday weekend. Jean Stark, a sideline announcer for one of the nation’s largest sports channels, was having dinner with five of the National Football League’s Hall of Famers in town for Sunday’s Eagles halftime show. Suddenly she saw Troy standing by the door at the opposite end of the room. He still had MIRA in his hand and her face on the screen when she walked up to him and gave him her phone number. Six hours later she was found—drunk and naked, stumbling through the eighth-floor halls of an upscale city hotel—by a tabloid reporter who had been tipped about Stark’s having an orgy in her room with the Hall of Famers.

  Her picture made the headlines. The tabloid somehow got a copy of a credit card receipt signed by Stark to purchase the room and a cell phone photo of women’s clothing scattered around an unmade bed. The hallway outside the room was filled with empty liquor bottles.

  The former players vehemently denied having sex with Stark in the room, but the damage was already done. Stark was off the network before Sunday’s kickoff.

  “Do you know what time it is?” the blond woman asked nervously.

  “Early,” Troy said. “Hopefully it’s early.” He chuckled, raising his sleeve, and he told her it was a quarter to nine.

  “Thank you.” She tried to smile.

  “In town for the weekend?”

  She looked at him and found she couldn’t stop. She nodded, her blue eyes locked innocently on his.

  “Excuse me!”

  Troy looked over his shoulder and found the redhead who had been sitting next to him earlier. The spell was broken momentarily as the blonde turned and looked at her, and for a moment he saw fear in her eyes. Fear that she would lose him?

  “I don’t suppose you remember what happened to my keys.” The redhead reached roughly over the blonde’s shoulder and moved a glass to look around the rail.

  “I think the bartender put them over there,” Troy said innocently, pointing toward the rack of clean glasses to his left.

  “Yeah, right, and screw you too.” The redhead pushed her way between Troy and the service bar and retrieved her things. “Real classy,” she said, and walked away.

  “People.” Troy shook his head.

  The blonde looked at him again. Looked as if he were some long-lost thing she had just found.

  “Troy,” he said, reaching for and taking her hand.

  She nodded, hand limp, every bit his. “Courtney,” she said.

  “Courtney. What a beautiful name.” He looked at her hand and turned it over and rubbed his thumb over the tan lines where a wedding ring had been.

  “You’re married,” he said, enjoying the game.

  She covered the hand as the bartender arrived to take her order.

  “Martini,” she said. “Vodka.”

  She drank it fast and ordered another. She looked like she wanted to bolt for the door, but she wasn’t moving and Troy knew it.

  After the second martini, she turned toward him. Her eyes looked glazed.

  “Take me somewhere,” she said earnestly. “Please.”

  Troy looked into her eyes and smiled.

  “Pretty please works on me.” His face was now deadly serious.

  “Pretty please,” she said sincerely.

  “Don’t forget those words,” he told her. “You’ll need them later.”

  The debasing of Courtney Logan took most of eight hours.

  He first had her fix her ponytail in the restroom and wipe the lipstick from her face. He had her button her shirt to the neck and put her wedding ring back on. Then he had pretended to forget his wallet, had her pay the tab for both of their drinks with her credit card.

  He unzipped his pants in the cab and had her perform fellatio on the way to a dive bar in Camden, New Jersey. At the bar, he had her raise her shirt and show her breasts to a dozen patrons with cell phone cameras.

  She begged him to take her to a hotel, and he did—her credit card again. They had sex and then he told her he wanted to watch her perform on other men and he sent her to the hotel bar and she brought back two more before the night was over. He took dozens of pictures of her from the closet, close-ups of her face, and then he dropped her penniless and without her phone on a dark street corner at 4 a.m. And e-mailed her husband a hyperlink.

  16

  Sherry was on the phone when Brigham came through the door. He was carrying a leather folio and dropped his jacket on a chair on the way to the dining room. She waved and held up a finger to her ear.

  “Yes, I’ll hold, thank you,” she said.

  Brigham heard her plop into the leather recliner by the secretary.

  “Dr. Salix, that was quick, thank you.”

  Sherry listened as Brigham walked to the window. A public utility truck was parked on the far side of the hedge, its yellow strobe light reflecting off the second-story windows of a distant neighbor’s house. The sound of a chain saw rose and fell; a tree had come down on some power lines overnight.

  “How can that be? Surely someone from Veterans Affairs would have had to have examined him in fifty-some years! The army would at least have sent someone from personnel to see him in all that time. They were paying out the money?”

  She was on her feet again and pacing the floor.

  “No records. You’re telling me there are no records. That is unbelievable,” she said.

  Brigham walked into the dining room and took a seat at the table.

  “I know you know and I’m sorry. So where is the body now?”

  “All right, but do me one more favor. See that he is not cremated. Can you promise me that, Dr. Salix?”

  She waited for his response.

  “Heck, I don’t know,” she answered. “A day, two days, a week, give me a week. Can you do that?”

  A moment later she nodded. “Thanks, Doctor,” Sherry said, pushing the End button on the receiver.

  “Maybe I’m overreacting,” she said, as much to herself as to Brigham. She dropped the phone and grabbed a mug of coffee from the top of an antique secretary, spilling some on the hardwood floor on her way to the dining room.

  “Maybe I’m complicating things. Maybe it’s not all t
hat sinister. Maybe it’s just some stupid chain of coincidences.” She slammed the mug down, spilling more coffee on the table.

  Brigham was dumping the contents of his cracked leather folio across the table.

  “What did you see that day, Sherry?”

  “I don’t know,” she said tiredly, pulling out a chair and falling back into it. “You mean about Monahan, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. There was a gun in front of me, a revolver; small frame; two-, maybe two-and-a-half-inch barrel. Blue steel, wooden grips, it looked like one of Detective Payne’s backup guns, the Colt .38 Special. There was a metal box at the other end of the table facing me. It had switches on it and a dial. The dial was white with a black needle. There were cones facing out toward the corners of the room; they were covered in black fabric. The room was white—the walls, the ceiling, all white. There was a man at the door watching me, looking in at me through a glass window. I remember he was wearing a hat and smoking a pipe.”

  She closed her eyes and seemed to be drifting.

  “Go on.”

  “My skin was burning at the wrist; the top of the table was warm to the touch. I remember I looked at the man at the door and called for him to open it, but he just kept on smoking.”

  Sherry squinted, eyes moving right and left; the corner of her mouth twitched.

  “Tell me about the box,” Brigham said. “What was the needle doing?”

  She looked perplexed for a moment, then concentrated.

  “It was moving, bouncing, sort of, up to number five and back. When the needle rested it was low to the left.” She nodded, trying to recall it all. “It was numbered five through thirty in increments of five. There were grooves on top of the box, air vents maybe, like it had a fan. Maybe it generated some kind of heat from inside.”

  “Tubes,” Brigham said.

  “Tubes?”

  “Glass vacuum tubes. They preceded transistors and they used to get hot as hell. What else?”

  “I felt like the fabric over the cones was vibrating. As if I should be hearing music or something, and yet the room was silent.”