Rasputin's Shadow (31 page)

M
iraculously, Thursday night had come and gone without us having to call in another convoy of coroners’ wagons.

I’d made it back from DC on time and spoken to Aparo on my way home. He’d confirmed that nothing noteworthy had happened while I was out of town. He pressed me on how my trip had been and when I was going to let him in on “Whatever the hell it is you’re getting yourself into,” as he put it. I’d said we’d talk about it in the morning and driven home to Mamaroneck, where I managed to grab some quality time with Tess before she glided into sleep and I mulled over whatever the hell I’d gotten myself into.

Then Alex had woken up, just before five a.m., with another nightmare. What frustrated me to no end was that I couldn’t go to him then and comfort him. I was worried it might only make things worse, given what they’d seeded about me in his head. Tess had spent the rest of the night—both hours of it—in bed with him. She was great at calming him down. I was truly lucky to have her in my life.

It was seven thirty and all four of us were in the kitchen, wolfing down pancakes—with slightly more elegance than Kurt had that day at IHOP, I hoped—along with a small mountain of raspberries and blueberries. I glanced at Alex and smiled, and he smiled back like everything was perfect in the world.

And right there, for that brief moment, it was.

A little over an hour later, I was back at Federal Plaza, and the ants in my pants were on tenterhooks, both from the frustration I was feeling regarding our lack of progress on tracking down Koschey and from wondering when I was going to hear from my favorite libertine.

As far as Koschey was concerned, we were at a standstill. Apart from hoping the APB on the van paid off, the only thing we could do was keep monitoring for any relevant chatter or hope for an NSA intercept that could clue us into his current movements. Homeland Security had a major lock on airports, ports, and border crossings, based on the assumption that Koschey had to be getting ready to get out of Dodge, with Sokolov and the van in tow. If not the whole van, then at least whatever it was Sokolov had put in it. But we live in a big country, and it’s not that difficult to smuggle something or someone out of here if you really put your mind to it.

By ten, I needed some air and some decent coffee and Aparo needed to hear what I was up to, so we stepped out of the building, did a pit stop at my favorite food cart, and took a bench across the street by the African Burial Ground monument.

Aparo didn’t take it too well.

“Jesus, Sean,” he said when his blood pressure finally settled enough to allow him to speak coherently. “You could go to jail for this.”

I shrugged. “I know. But what the hell. If it all gets that messy, maybe that’s how I’ll finally get to the truth.”

“You know that’s a pipe dream as much as I do. They can clam up and claim national security and lock your ass up faster than you can say patriot.”

“You have a better idea for how I can find him?”

Aparo frowned at me, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Let’s hope this Kirby really wants to hang on to his wife. ’Cause from where I’m standing, it’s not something I would gamble on.”

I was thinking about what he said when an unfamiliar ringtone warbled in my immediate vicinity. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was coming from the prepaid phone I’d bought before flying down to DC, the one I’d purchased specifically so I could give Kirby an untraceable phone.

You work in law enforcement long enough, you learn a few tricks from the criminals you spend your life chasing. Basic, in this case, but handy given my current predicament.

“It’s him,” I told Aparo as I flipped open the flimsy plastic clamshell phone. At least, I hoped it was him and not some CIA security officer calling to get a lock on who and where I was before the troops swooped in.

“You know what you’ve asked for isn’t exactly easy to access,” he said. His tone was hushed and clearly irritated, which was hardly surprising.

“If it were, I wouldn’t have needed you, would I? Do you have the name?”

“Reed Corrigan is mentioned in three case files,” he said. “All three were flagged, but I managed to pull them without tripping anything. Two of them are dormant and one’s active.”

I was crushing the phone with my grip. “His name, Kirby. What’s his name?”

“I can’t access it. These files are redacted. I can’t get to the clean ones without authorization, which means I’d have to tell them why I want them. And anyway, his name wouldn’t be in them. They would only ever mention his code name.”

A charge of fury went right through me. “That wasn’t our deal,” I hissed.

“Hey, nothing was ‘our’ deal,” Kirby shot back. “It was all
your
deal. It wasn’t open to negotiation, remember? Anyway, this is the best I can do. At my clearance level, anyway. If I get promoted tomorrow, maybe you’d be in with a chance. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

I tried to push back the searing sense of frustration that was engulfing me. “Send me the files.”

“I can’t,” Kirby said. “I can’t take them out of here and I can’t leave that kind of electronic trail. The e-mail would get blocked before it even left our servers.”

“Put them on a USB stick then,” I suggested gruffly.

“Same thing,” he countered. “Any copying is immediately logged by the system. What do you think this is, Dunder Mifflin?”

I was burning up inside. All that effort and risk, for nothing. I don’t know why, but I really wanted the damn files. Even though Kirby had already said they wouldn’t give me Corrigan’s real name.

“The files. Are they paper, or on your screen?”

“Screen. Any old paperwork’s been scanned in.”

“You have your phone with you, right? Use it. Take pictures of your screen. Message them to me.”

“They’re big files.”

“I don’t need all the cross references,” I told him. “Just the main body of each report.”

I heard him let out a long exhale. “Then we’re done, right?”

My turn to exhale. “Yeah. We’re done. But I need those screen grabs now.”

“Fine,” he said grudgingly. “And by the way, you’re a real asshole, you know that?”

I killed the call without replying.

***

I
CAN’T STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER
,
Shin thought.

He’d been there for more than twenty-four hours. Sticking to the immediate vicinity of the bench, watching life wind down and start off again. Living off any scraps he could find in the park’s garbage cans.

A fucking PhD
, he lamented.
What a joke
.

By this point he was dizzy, tired, and weary. His mind was starting to play tricks on him. One minute, he was imagining men in suits and dark glasses hustling his Nikki from their apartment and doing horrible things to her. The next he pictured her sipping Champagne and laughing it up in a luxurious hot tub with a rich, handsome dude in there with her.

He had to put an end to this nightmare. There was no point in living if it meant living like this.

He decided he’d make the call. An anonymous phone call. Tip the cops off to the Russian bastard’s location. Who knows. If they got him, maybe it would all go away. Maybe he’d have nothing left to worry about.

He’d do it for himself. For Nikki. And for Jonny and Ae-Cha.

He pushed himself to his feet and shuffled off to find a phone booth.

***

K
OSCHEY WAS BY THE
door of the warehouse, watching life resume across the industrial park. Today would be a big day. A long one. A challenging one.

He was ready for it. He’d spent most of the night planning the hit. He’d checked the schedule, laid out his timetable, and used the extensive resources available online to research the venue and everything around it. It would be tight, especially on such short notice, but it was doable. And the opportunity was too great to pass up. Besides, he was used to operating under pressure, and quick decisions and swift planning made leaks and last-minute-changes less likely.

He would also be enjoying the benefit of a significant tactical advantage.

He checked the time, then made the call.

The Lebanese car dealer told him his bosses in Tehran wanted to go ahead. Just as Koschey knew they would.

Koschey confirmed their arrangements, asked him to thank his bosses for their confidence, then hung up.

He glanced at the SUV. It was ready. But he’d need to try it out first. Make sure Sokolov had done his work properly.

Once that was done, there’d be no stopping him.

Until the next opportunity arose.

K
irby’s JPEGs were soon pouring into my phone. Lots of them.

I was at my desk, e-mailing them on to myself at my personal Gmail account, and going through them on my laptop as they arrived.

The first file, though heavily redacted, was interesting. It concerned an assignment code named Operation Bouncer and was marked SCI—Sensitive Compartmented Information. It involved the interrogation and subsequent assassination of a Bulgarian psychiatrist who had been torturing prisoners in El Salvador. From what I could make out between the words and lines that had been crossed out with a thick black marker, Corrigan was a field agent working for the CIA’s Office of Research Development. In El Salvador, the cover he’d used was a Boston-based CIA front called the Scientific Engineering Institute. All of this didn’t come as a surprise to me, given the reason Corliss had reached out to him.

Apart from these two institutions that I would need to look at more closely, the file didn’t offer me anything else. Too much of it was redacted to give me any more insights into who “Reed Corrigan” really was. Not that I expected it to. Code names were there for a reason.

Which was why I wasn’t feeling hugely hopeful when I turned my attention to the second file.

It concerned an assignment code named, of all names, Operation Sleeping Beauty. It was also marked SCI and its pages were also heavily redacted, more so than the first file. From what I could gather, it was about a Russian scientist, code named Jericho, who had managed to make contact with our people in Helsinki while attending a KGB-sponsored conference there. He claimed to be working on a highly classified program of psychotronic weapons.

I paused there. I’d never heard the word. I opened a browser window and looked it up and discovered it was a term the Russians had coined for a new generation of weapons.

Mind-control weapons.

I straightened up.

The report mentioned Jericho as a neurophysiologist and described how he had substantiated his claims by revealing details about the organizational structure of the KGB’s S Directorate and its Department of Information-Psychological Actions. Frustratingly, the information about what technology he was actually working on was heavily blacked out. From the information that was still readable, it had to do with something called entrainment and was of “paramount importance to the national security of the United States.”

Again, I paused and called up the browser window and typed in “entrainment.” The word was used in several contexts, but one of them darted off the screen and sent a charge through me.

Brainwave Entrainment.

I skimmed a couple of articles that explained it. They described it as using an external stimulus to alter the brain state of the person being “entrained.” Broadly, the concept was that you could make people feel or behave in a certain way by using auditory pulses, flashing lights, electromagnetic waves, or other stimuli to “entrain” their brains into particular states.

My nerves crackled as I sped-read through the history—about how the scientific concept of brainwave entrainment or synchronization dated back to 200 AD, when Ptolemy first noted the effects of flickering sunlight generated by a spinning wheel, and how humans have been using sensory entrainment throughout their history. Then in the 1930s and 1940s, technology made it possible to measure brainwave entrainment after the invention of the EEG in 1924. This created a flurry of research in the area, including looking at the effects of introducing frequencies into the brain directly through electrical stimulus.

I dug deeper.

I read about how entrainment influences brain function beyond visual and auditory stimuli because of a phenomenon called the
frequency following response
. If the human brain receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency will move toward the frequency of the stimulus. The most familiar side effect of entrainment was the way in which strobe lights at an “alpha” frequency could trigger photosensitive epilepsy.

Then in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a neuroscientist called Allan H. Frey discovered the Microwave Auditory Effect, which is caused by audible clicks induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies. There’d been a huge increase in radar coverage in the 1950s, and pilots had started to complain about a clicking in their ears when they flew directly into the path of the microwave radiation on which the radar systems were built. Frey discovered that these clicks were generated directly inside the human head and were not audible to people nearby. Research showed that this effect occurred as a result of thermal expansion of parts of the human ear around the cochlea, even at low power density. At specific frequencies, it was thought that these clicks could cause entrainment.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow was famously believed to have been bombarded with microwaves for several decades starting in the 1950s in an effort to confuse, disorient, and even harm its staff. Anecdotal evidence exists of many embassy employees dying in the ensuing years because of the damage that was done to them, although as was usual in these cases, I imagined the real truth was buried in some long-shredded documents or in the graves of those insiders who really knew what had happened—or of those who had been its victims.

I found references to a scientist from Yale called Delgado in several articles. He had implanted electrodes into the brains of animals and humans in order to send highly specific electromagnetic currents into targeted areas. In his most infamous experiment, he wired up a bull, then, in front of several colleagues, Delgado stepped into the bull ring armed with no more than a remote control. He hit a switch that made the bull furious, then as the bull charged at him, he hit another switch that stopped the big animal in its tracks and turned it into a docile pussycat. Delgado was quoted as saying that if he could do these things by implanting electrodes in the brain, he believed it was only a matter of time before he’d be able to do it from outside the brain, using a very precise electromagnetic field.

And if all that wasn’t enough to trip all kinds of circuits inside me, another article revealed that the same Microwave Auditory Effect was found to be inducible with shorter-wavelength portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The shorter the wave, it seemed, the more energy and information it could carry. The article then described how microwave pulses from modern cell-phone network towers could theoretically cause this effect. These behavioral changes had to do with chemical responses in the brain. The external stimuli triggered the release of neurochemicals that caused various reactions in the brain, resulting in remotely heightened emotional and intellectual responses such as calmness, trust, lust, or aggression. The difficulty, and the key to achieving this, was believed to be in pinpointing the right combination of frequency, wave form, and power level to bring about a specific reaction.

Microwaves. Cell-phone technology. Altering human behavior remotely. Aggression.

The bloodbath at Brighton Beach. The gear we found in Sokolov’s garage.

I couldn’t read this last section fast enough, and I could already feel my heart kicking in my neck before I saw this:

Russian and American psychological warfare programs are believed to be actively researching the sonic, electromagnetic, and microwave spectrums for wavelengths and frequencies that can affect human behavior and exploring the viability of using entrainment, both to control their own population as well as to use it as an advanced weapon. The Russians are widely acknowledged to be well ahead of their American counterparts in this field. A handful of independent scientists are also actively researching brainwave entrainment, with the more outspoken stating that it could theoretically be used to cause subjects to commit acts of extreme violence and even kill on a massive scale by activating extreme paranoia and predatory survival impulses inside them.

My insides twisted.

I went back and checked the first date in the report.

November 29, 1981.

My eyes went into tunnel vision, and everything outside those words and numbers went all blurry as a fury of connections and implications lit up my mind.

I had zero doubt about it.

This file was about Sokolov.

Leo Sokolov was “Jericho.”

And he was connected to Corrigan.