Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  She lifted her arm suddenly and looked at a spot behind her wrist. “His arm touched a bolt or rivet or something on the arm of the chair, and the metal burned a spot on his forearm.

  “I looked at the man at the door once more, then I heard a voice telling me to pick up the gun. I remember trying to watch the man, but my eyes were torn away, torn back to the table and the gun. I remember looking across it, trying to focus on the white dial, on the numbers, but the voice was in my head and it kept repeating itself. ‘Pick up the gun. Pick up the gun.’”

  “Was the man at the door speaking?”

  She shook her head no. “It was definitely in my head. I couldn’t close my eyes, and I remember concentrating on that white dial, not the gun.” Her voice was slightly elevated. “I studied everything about it—tiny digits too small to read, the tip of the needle was fashioned into an arrow, there were words—but then my concentration broke, my eyes went back to that gun. I remember thinking there were people dying, bombs going off, dead bodies piled in a truck. A woman’s head exploded on a dirt roadway. I pulled my eyes back to the dial, but my hand was moving toward the gun and I picked it up and blood was running down my wrist as I put it to my head.”

  “Blood?”

  “From…” She hesitated. “It was coming from my nose. I was having a nosebleed.”

  “Tell me about the people dying.”

  Sherry closed her eyes and tried to remember. She stood and paced the dining room and at last she left for the kitchen and returned with another mug of coffee. “They were in the room with me,” she said, raising the coffee to her lips. “They were over my left shoulder.”

  “You could actually see them? Physically see them?” Brigham asked.

  She shook her head. “On the wall.”

  “A movie, then.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but always the same one, it played over and over; they were always there to see and sometimes I couldn’t look away from them.”

  “Okay, so then what happened?”

  Sherry drank another sip of coffee. “I picked up the gun and put it to my temple and pulled the trigger.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you remember?”

  “That’s it,” she said. Her eyes were wet with tears.

  She took a deep breath, picked up her mug, and set it back down. “Maybe he was crazy, huh? I mean, what kind of a last memory is that?”

  “He didn’t die from the gunshot to his head. We know that much, Sherry, so this was something else. Betsy said they found him at the bottom of a cliff. He jumped or fell or was pushed. Whatever you saw in that room must have preceded his escape. Maybe by minutes or hours or days, we cannot know.”

  “But how is that possible, Mr. Brigham? How can someone just omit the last dozen hours or so of their life? How could I not see him escaping, running through the trees, lying at the bottom of the rocks when he was found? How could I not remember something about the next fifty-eight years before he died?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Brigham said. “But I’ve collected some things and I have a theory.”

  He took a seat across from her. Pushed one of his documents toward her. “This is a birth certificate. It says Thomas J. Monahan, born October twenty-seventh, 1932, Ahoskie, North Carolina, to Roy and Elizabeth Monahan.”

  “How did you find him?” she asked, astonished.

  “Friends,” Brigham said obliquely.

  “Who was he?”

  “Well, whoever else he was, he joined the army as a teenager and was shipped to Korea in 1950, Seventh Division, Thirty-second Infantry. He was there within weeks of the Battle of Incheon.”

  “Why doesn’t the army know about him and claim him?”

  “Because he died in Korea. A letter was hand-delivered to his parents December twenty-seventh, 1950. It says he was killed in action on Hill 105, twenty-five miles west of Seoul. There is a copy in his jacket in Washington.”

  “So why do you think it’s the same Monahan?”

  “The letter in his file wasn’t signed by the CO of the Seventh Division. I checked. It came from a General Henry Keith attached to the office of the secretary of defense.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “That’s unheard of.”

  “Still, it’s possible?”

  Brigham snorted. “The secretary of defense was also a retired general in 1950. George Marshall, chief of staff of the Army until 1945. Guess who Alpha Company reported to in 1950? The secretary of defense.”

  “All right, but then how did Monahan end up in New York when he was supposed to have died in Korea?”

  “My guess is that the Defense Department pulled him off the front lines at Seoul and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. It would hardly have been noticed in the confusion of battle. Divisions and battalions were always getting mixed up on the front lines.”

  “You think he was offered a trip back home?”

  “To act as a guinea pig in military experiments.”

  “Experiments?”

  “Let’s just say it happened. And I’m telling you right here and now that I know that it happened. In the U.S., in Norway, in England, certainly in every communist state in the world, everywhere.”

  “And that would be an easy choice for a soldier? To leave his buddies and return to the States to become a lab rat?”

  Brigham nodded. “From where he was sitting in Korea it would have been a very easy choice.”

  “But why go to all the trouble of bringing back volunteers from Korea? Weren’t there hundreds of recruits stateside who would have been happy not to ship out in the first place?”

  “Because if they came back from a war zone, the Department of Defense could plausibly deny putting their hands on them. Change a single line on a battle order and who is to say Monahan didn’t get killed or go missing in action in Korea? We lost seven thousand boys in Korea and I’m not talking about men killed in action. We actually lost and then left them behind.”

  Sherry finished her coffee. “Which would be of great advantage should something happen to one of their guinea pigs,” she said. She looked at Brigham a long moment. “You know, I’m surprised I’m hearing this from you of all people. You’ve had nothing but respect for the military for as long as I have known you.”

  Brigham scratched at a thumbnail. “I still do. It was a very strange time in history, Sherry. It would still be wrong to judge anyone’s decision in isolation.”

  “You can’t believe what you describe was right!”

  “And you can’t appreciate how naïve we were in 1950.” He leaned back and sighed. “No, I don’t believe in using humans as guinea pigs, but I can empathize with the decision makers at the time. I know how little we understood about the science and physics we were employing in the field. Just sixty years before World War Two, Indians were slinging arrows at Wounded Knee. Suddenly we’ve split the atom and can obliterate whole cities. You’ve got to put yourself in the moment. We didn’t grow up with laptops and calculators in our book bags. Hell, we didn’t have ballpoint pens until 1945. Suddenly, in one generation, we’d gone from the Stone Age to the hydrogen bomb. Suddenly, after four billion years, man had figured out how to destroy life on earth. And it wasn’t that it was suddenly just plausible, Sherry. We cope with that knowledge ourselves and we cope with it every day. It was the speed with which it came upon us, and Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union were all racing to devise the next superweapon, all threatening to rule the world.”

  Brigham shrugged. “The practice of soldier volunteers went back to World War One, perhaps to the beginning of history. We didn’t have time to run test trials on mice when the enemy was spraying mustard gas in our faces. Soldiers had to test the worthiness of their own gas masks, containment suits, malaria pills, venereal vaccines.”

  “Without their knowledge?”

  “Usually with their knowledge. People really used to volunteer, even when we told them that we couldn’t warn them of the actual risks. We didn’t
know the risks ourselves.”

  “And this is what Alpha Company was doing in the Catskills.”

  “All I can say is that Monahan, whoever he was, spent the better part of his life in an asylum next to an army base that the government still considers classified. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “What would they have been doing there when he was twenty years old? I mean, what kind of research would have been conducted at the time?”

  “I can’t emphasize it enough. The world was a ticking time bomb back then. Stalin wanted all of Europe and he spent every penny of the Soviet economy eclipsing what the Americans did in Japan. Based on what you’ve told me of his memories, I’d say they were subjecting him to radiation and radio or microwaves. Radar was brand-new technology in World War Two. One of the questions not known at the time was what would happen if different frequencies and strengths of radio waves were concentrated on human beings for any length of time. Hitler’s scientists had a device called the rheotron, essentially an X-ray generator with a concave cathode they aimed at aircraft trying to destroy them. The Japanese made significant improvements by testing it on animals, proving it lethal by disrupting neurological systems. The Soviets’ intention for the technology was twofold. Khrushchev, who would become the next Soviet premier, said publicly on television that the Soviets had developed a weapon capable of wiping out all life on earth. We know they wanted the death ray, but we also knew they were attempting to put voices in the enemy’s head. The CIA was near frantic in the 1950s over a device the Soviets called the LIDA Machine. A spy in Moscow claimed there were pictures of an auditorium full of people who had been rendered unconscious by it. We know that Soviet interrogators in Korea used it during the war to interrogate U.S. prisoners by beaming microwaves at them with metal plates fixed against the sides of their heads. The soldiers that had been through the experience said it put them in a dreamlike state in which they had no control over answers they gave to certain questions. Suddenly we were pouring millions into mind-control research under the code name Pandora’s Box.”

  Sherry looked at the documents. “And we wanted the machine.”

  Brigham nodded. “Goddamn right we wanted the machine.”

  “You think they scrambled Monahan’s brain?”

  “I think it’s possible.” Brigham thumbed through the documents on the table, pulled one toward him, and raised his chin to deploy his reading glasses.

  “The tests were using extremely low frequency ranges. ELF waves, they call them. They can be felt but not heard.”

  “Felt. You mean physically felt?”

  “Physically and emotionally. First there’s a marked rise in body temperature, then nausea, nosebleeds, maybe disorientation, and consciousness of a presence before the voices begin. Sound familiar?”

  Brigham leaned back in his chair and threw a leg over the end of the table. “The Soviets were putting political and war prisoners on television to confess to crimes against the state. They looked for all the world like zombies to us. Their speech was mechanical, their enunciation emotionless, reflexive. The conclusion was that the Russian scientists had perfected psychoacoustic technology to beam messages directly to the brain.”

  “Is that a possibility? I mean even today?”

  “Are you asking me as your friend or as a former admiral of the navy?”

  “Jesus,” Sherry said.

  “Sherry, you can’t imagine what technology is out there today.”

  Brigham shifted in his chair and held up his hand, ending the line of inquiry.

  But Sherry wasn’t listening anymore. She pushed her chair from the table and walked to the window.

  “If Monahan was subjected to radio waves that altered his neurological system, isn’t it possible that when I tapped into his mind I altered my own? Maybe the contact between us changed the cerebral partitioning of my optical nerves?” Sherry looked at Brigham.

  Brigham shrugged. “I’m actually beginning to believe it myself.”

  “Did you find his parents?”

  “Both dead. I asked a friend with contacts in the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to locate the family. There are none. No siblings, no aunts, no uncles.”

  “So that’s it. End of story.”

  “What Alpha Company did in the Catskills during the Cold War will long be protected by the National Security Act. This I can assure you.”

  “After all this time?” Sherry looked skeptical.

  Brigham laughed. “The CIA is still protecting invisible ink formulas from 1917.” He picked up his coffee. “Look it up.”

  “Okay, so what isn’t classified?”

  “All the conjecture.”

  “Great.”

  “No, wait, it’s better than you think. There are dozens of tell-all books about the Cold War. Someone is always willing to talk.”

  “Summary?”

  “Area Seventeen was rumored to be a secret weapons lab. Their proximity to the asylum would have made it one of the better locations to test radiation, and radiation testing in other places in the country has been well documented during the period Monahan would have been there.”

  “The radiation testing itself? The government admitted to doing it?”

  “Absolutely. The government’s settled out of court on a number of cases already, but it was hardly more than a token. The thing to remember is that, in spite of what we admitted to in the past, many of the projects that they were working on then continue even today. That’s the reason the records remain sensitive and secret.”

  “God…. What else?” Sherry wanted to know more.

  “There are always civilians involved. Scientists, doctors, people who if still living would not want the world to associate them with what they had done in Area 17.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, if you start making noises about any of the people still alive, you’re liable to ruffle some feathers. There are still secrets to protect.”

  “So you’re saying leave it alone. That there’s no one left or willing to tell us anything about this man.”

  “I’m saying that the more you know before you go around asking questions in public, the better chance you won’t be stopped by some spook in a trench coat. The better chance that more records won’t disappear. You know there’s always that security chief that found Monahan’s body at the bottom of the rocks. Betsy said she could introduce us to his widow—maybe there’s something there to learn. She said the lady would talk to you.”

  Sherry’s eyes dropped to the table, roaming across the papers that Brigham had laid in front of her. She let out a deep sigh, met eyes with him, and rubbed her knees with the palms of her hands.

  She nodded. “We have to go back there.”

  “Well, I’m in for now, but just for a while,” Brigham said. “Don’t go nuts on me, like you’re prone to do.”

  “Nuts!”

  “Remember your solemn promise of atonement in the hospital? For all the worry you’ve put me through?”

  “All right, you’re right, I promise I won’t go crazy.” She put up both hands as if to surrender. “If there’s nothing to learn from the widow, it’s over.”

  “That’s very reasonable, Sherry,” Brigham said admiringly.

  “I have a surprise,” Sherry said out of context.

  Brigham cringed. “Oh, Lord.”

  “Oh, don’t get all excited. I’m taking a literacy course. That’s all.”

  Brigham looked at her, surprised. “So soon?”

  “Why wait? If my sight stays, it stays, and I’ll be ahead of the game. If it goes away again I’ll have lost nothing but a little time. Right?”

  He nodded.

  “My first class is on Tuesday at three, in the city. Could we go to Stockton on Wednesday?”

  He nodded. “I’ll call Betsy and find out if McCullough’s widow will be there and talk to us.”

  Sherry smiled.

  “Stop smiling like that,” Brigham said.

 
; 17

  Weir could have appealed to the Department of Defense for a more sophisticated means of tracking Sherry Moore. The government shared its technology liberally when it came to protecting MIRA. But Weir didn’t want DOD to know about Sherry Moore. Not if there was a chance she would have to go missing. And they had already seen each other in the hospital waiting room. He only needed one opportunity to introduce himself into her life.

  Weir parked his car on the busy side street that paralleled Sherry’s riverfront home. It didn’t take long. On Tuesday just before 2 p.m. a city cab pulled into the half-circle portico and Sherry left the house alone. Forty-five minutes later, Troy and his quarry were in the city, on Walnut and approaching South Sixth Street, when the cab put on its turn signal, bent the corner, and pulled to the curb. Troy passed hurriedly, parking in a handicapped zone for the American Philosophical Society, where he left a government ID on the dash. Then he grabbed two books from the trunk and ran down South Sixth to where he’d last seen the cab. Sherry was on foot and just turning the corner at St. James. At a quarter to three he caught up to her. She was climbing the steps of the Athenaeum.

  Troy passed the security guard and walked down the dimly lit hall. Sherry was in a room to his right, talking to the receptionist, a pretty black woman. He pretended to be interested in exhibits in the hall and repositioned himself when she left the desk, seeing her take a seat at a table in the corner of the room. Five minutes later a man with thick gray hair approached the door and walked to the information desk. The receptionist pointed toward Sherry, who stood, waiting to shake his hand. A moment later they sat and began to talk.

  At five minutes after four, Sherry exited the Athenaeum and was walking down the steps when she heard someone yell, “Excuse me,” and she turned to see a handsome young gentleman getting to his feet. He had been sitting on the steps with books in his hand.

  “I know you.” He grinned with a look of boyish enthusiasm.

  “The hospital,” Sherry said. “You were in the neurology department last week. Right?”