When they had passed through the town and were on the open road again, McGee put his foot down hard on the accelerator once more.
“You were about to tell me why I lost all my memories of Milestone,” Susan said.
“Yeah. Well, as it turns out, when anyone goes to work for the Milestone project, he must agree to undergo a series of highly sophisticated behavioral modification treatments that make it impossible for him to talk about his work with anyone outside of Milestone. If he won’t agree to undergo the treatment, then he doesn’t get the job. In addition, deep in their subconscious minds, all the employees of Milestone are fitted with cunningly engineered psychological mechanisms that can trigger memory blockages, memory blockages that prevent foreign agents from forcing vital information out of them. When someone tries to pry secret data out of a Milestone employee by means of torture or drugs or hypnosis, all of that employee’s conscious knowledge of his work drops instantly far, far down into his deep subconscious mind, behind an impenetrable block, where it cannot be squeezed out.”
Now she knew why she couldn’t even recall what her laboratory at Milestone had looked like. “All the memories are still there, inside me, somewhere.”
“Yes. When and if you get out of Russia, when you get back to the States, Milestone undoubtedly has some procedure for dissolving the block and bringing back your memory. And it’s probably a procedure that can only be carried out at Milestone, something involving you and the computer, perhaps a series of block-releasing code words that the computer will reveal only to you, and only after you’ve been positively identified to it by letting it scan your fingerprints. Of course, this is merely conjecture. We don’t really know how Milestone would restore your memory; if we knew, we’d have used the same technique. Instead, we had to resort to the Willawauk program in hopes of shattering the block with a brutal series of psychological shocks.”
The night flashed by them. The land was much flatter now than it had been back around Willawauk. There were fewer trees. A moon had risen, providing a ghostly radiance.
Susan slouched in her seat, both weary and tense, watching McGee’s face as he spoke, trying hard to detect any sign of deception, desperately hoping that he wasn’t just setting her up for another brutal psychological shock.
“A memory block can be based on any emotion—love, hate, fear—but the most effective is fear,” McGee said. “That was the inhibitor that Milestone used when creating your block. Fear. On a deep subconscious level, you are terrified of revealing anything whatsoever about Milestone, for they have used hypnotic suggestion and drugs to convince you that you will die horribly and painfully the moment that you make even the smallest revelation to foreign agents. A fear block is by far the most difficult to break; usually, getting through it is utterly impossible—especially when it’s as well implanted as your block is.”
“But you found a way.”
“Not me, personally. The KGB employs hordes of scientists who specialize in behavioral modification techniques—brainwashing and so forth—and a few of them think that a fear block
can
be demolished if the subject—that’s you, in this case—is confronted with a fear far greater than the one upon which the block is based. Now, it isn’t easy to find a fear that’s greater than the fear of death. With most of us, that’s numero uno. But the KGB had very thoroughly researched your life before they’d decided to snatch you, and when they looked through your dossier, they thought they saw your weak spot. They were looking for an event in your past that could be resurrected and reshaped into a living, breathing nightmare, into something you would fear more than death.”
“The House of Thunder,” she said numbly. “Ernest Harch.”
“Yes,” McGee said. “That was the key to the plan they put together. After studying you for some time, the KGB determined that you were an unusually well-ordered, efficient, rational person; they knew you abhorred disorder and sloppy thinking. In fact you seemed to be almost compulsively, obsessively ordered in every aspect of your life.”
“Obsessive? Yes,” she said, “I guess maybe I am. Or I
was.
”
“To the KGB, it appeared that the best way to make you come apart at the seams was to plunge you into a nightmare world in which
everything
gradually became more and more irrational, a world in which the dead could come back to life, in which nothing and no one was what it seemed to be. So they brought you to Willawauk, and they sealed off one wing of the behavioral research hospital located there, turned it into a stage for their elaborate charades. They intended to push you slowly toward a mental and/or an emotional collapse, culminating in a scene in the phony House of Thunder. They had a very nasty bit of business planned. Rape. Repeated rape and torture at the hands of the four ‘dead’ men.”
Susan shook her head, bewildered. “But forcing me into a mental and emotional collapse ... What good would that do them? Even if the fear block was broken in the process, I wouldn’t have been in any condition to provide them with the information they wanted. I’d have been a babbling fool ... or catatonic.”
“Not forever. A mental and emotional breakdown brought on by extreme
short-term
pressure is the easiest form of mental illness to cure,” McGee said. “As soon as they’d broken you, they would have removed your memory block by promising relief from terror in return for your total submission and cooperation. Then they’d have immediately begun to rehabilitate you, nursing you back to sanity, or at least to a semblance of it, to a state in which you could be questioned and in which you could be relied upon to provide accurate information.”
“But wait,” she said. “Wait a minute. Getting together the look-alikes, writing the script for the whole damned thing, working out all the contingencies, converting the wing of the hospital ... all of that must have taken a lot of time. I was only kidnapped a few weeks ago ... wasn’t I?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Wasn’t
I?
” she demanded.
“You’ve been inside the Soviet Union for more than a year,” McGee said.
“No. Oh, no. No, no, I can’t have been.”
“You have. Most of the time, you were on ice in Lubyianka, just sitting in a cell, waiting for something to happen. But you don’t remember that part of it. They erased all of that before bringing you to Willawauk.”
Her confusion gave way to white-hot anger.
“Erased?”
She sat up straight in her seat, her hands squeezed into fists. “You say it so casually. Erased. You talk as if I’m a goddamned tape recorder! Jesus Christ, I spent a year in a stinking prison, and then they stole that year from me, and then they put me through this thing with Harch and the others ...” Rage choked off her voice.
But she realized that she now believed him. Almost. She had almost no doubt at all that this was the truth.
“You have a right to be furious,” McGee said, glancing at her, his eyes unreadable in the glow from the dashboard. “But please don’t be angry with me. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to you then. I didn’t have anything to do with you until they finally brought you to Willawauk, and then I had to bide my time until there was a chance of breaking you out of there.”
They rode in silence for a minute, while Susan’s anger cooled from a boil to a simmer.
They came to the edge of the moonlit sea and turned south on a highway where, at last, there was other traffic, though not much. The other vehicles were mostly trucks.
Susan said, “Who the hell are you? How do you fit into this whole thing?”
“To understand that,” he said, “you’ll have to understand about Willawauk first.”
Confusion and suspicion roiled in her again. “Even in a year, they couldn’t possibly have built that entire town. Besides, don’t tell me they’d go to all that trouble just to pump me about the work being done at Milestone.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Willawauk was built in the early 1950s. It was designed to be a perfect model of an average, American small town, and it’s constantly being modernized and refined.”
“But why? Why a model American town here in the middle of the USSR?”
“Willawauk is a training facility,” McGee said. “It’s where Soviet deep-cover agents are trained to think like Americans, to
be
Americans.”
“What’s a ... deep-cover agent?” she asked as McGee swung the Chevy into the outer lane and passed a lumbering, exhaust-belching truck of stolid Soviet make.
“Every year,” McGee said, “between three and four hundred children, exceptionally bright three- and four-year-olds, are chosen to come to Willawauk. They’re taken from their parents, who are not told what the child has been chosen for and who will never see their child again. The kids are assigned new foster parents in Willawauk. From that moment on, two things happen to them. First, they go through intense, daily indoctrination sessions designed to turn them into fanatical Soviet Communists. And believe me, I don’t use the word ‘fanatical’ lightly. Most of those kids are transformed into fanatics who make the Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers seem like sober, reasonable Oxford professors. There’s a two-hour indoctrination session every morning of their lives; worse, subliminal indoctrination tapes are played during the night, while they sleep.”
“Sounds like they’re creating a small army of child robots,” Susan said.
“That’s precisely what they’re doing. Child robots, spy robots. Anyway, secondly, the kids are taught to live like Americans, to think like Americans, and to be Americans—at least on the surface. They must be able to pass for patriotic Americans without ever revealing their underlying, fanatical devotion to the Soviet cause. Only American English is spoken in Willawauk. These children grow up without knowing a word of Russian. All books are in English. All the movies are American movies. Television shows are taped from the three American networks and from various independent stations—all kinds of shows, including entertainment, sports, news—and are then replayed to every house in Willawauk on a closed-circuit TV system. These kids grow up with the same media backgrounds, with the same experiences as real American kids. Each group of trainees shares social touchstones with its corresponding generation of true Americans. Finally, after many years of this, when the Willawauk children are saturated with U.S. culture, when the day-to-day minutiae of U.S. life is deeply ingrained in them, they are infiltrated into the U.S. with impeccable documents—usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Some of them are placed in colleges and universities with the aid of superbly forged family histories and high school records that, when supported by a network of Soviet sympathizers within the U.S., cannot be disputed. The infiltrators find jobs in a variety of industries, many of them in government, and they spend ten, fifteen, twenty, or more years slowly working up into positions of power and authority. Some of them will never be called upon to do any dirty work for their Soviet superiors; they will live and die as patriotic Americans—even though in their hearts, where they truly exist, they know they are good Russians. Others will be used for sabotage and espionage. Are used, all the time.”
“My God,” Susan said, “the expense of such a program! The maniacal effort it would take to establish and maintain it is almost beyond conception. Is it really worth the expenditures?”
“The Soviet government thinks so,” McGee said. “And there have been some astonishing successes. They have people placed in sensitive positions within the U.S. aerospace industry. They have Willawauk graduates in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force; not more than a few hundred, of course, but several of those have become high-ranking officers over the years. There are Willawauk graduates in the U.S. media establishment, which provides them with a perfect platform from which to sow disinformation. From the Soviet point of view, the best thing of all is that one U.S. senator, two congressmen, one state governor, and a score of other influential American political figures are Willawauk people.”
“Good God!”
Her own anger and fear were temporarily forgotten as the enormity of the entire plot became clear to her.
“And it’s rare that a Willawauk graduate can be turned into a double agent, serving the Americans. Willawauk people are just too well programmed, too fanatical to become turncoats. The hospital at Willawauk, where you were kept, serves the town as a fully equipped medical center, much better than hospitals in many other parts of the USSR, but it’s also a center for research into behavioral modification and mind control. Its discoveries in those areas have helped to make the Willawauk kids into the most tightly controlled, most devoted and reliable espionage web in the world.”