by John Altman
A moment later the neighborhood had changed dramatically: He hastened past fruit and fish markets, grocery stores and small, dim restaurants. Caucasian faces dropped away, with Chinese faces rising to replace them. Signs flashing past read “Acupuncture” “Herbalist” “Live Snails,” with Asian characters scrawled beneath the English.
To his right: a muddy alley, stippled by drizzle. He sidestepped into it and then crossed, moving with his lead foot held at a ninety-degree angle to the body, his rear facing 135 degrees away. With each step, the rear foot passed the lead. As a result, his footsteps would appear to move in two directions at once; he could not be traced by his tracks.
Thunder rolled again, distantly.
He came out from the alley and saw a dark sedan turning into the narrow street.
A door was open across the way, leading into the lobby of an office building. He went for it, conscious of the sedan doors butterflying out behind him. A board listed names in Chinese and English. An elevator farther down the hall; beyond it, a door marked Stairs.
He pounded up the staircase, his breath coming harder.
On the third floor, he pushed into a corridor. A single door at the end—James Rong, DDS, FAGD. When he burst through it a receptionist looked up from behind her desk. She opened her mouth to speak—
—but he was at the window, working the lock even as the receptionist left her desk, hurrying deeper into the office. In the winding street below was the sedan, doors flung open. Between him and it was rickety-looking scaffolding, edges curled with barbed wire, surface slicked with rain. He put one leg over the windowsill and lowered himself onto slippery metal. Then moved off again, three stories above the city, keeping low.
They had been waiting.
Later.
He reached the end of the scaffolding. Across the way, a face stared at him from an apartment window—an elderly woman, her mouth sprung.
He pistoned his elbow into the nearest window. He carefully reached through and twisted the lock.
The room was another office, closed down for the night. He glided over pile carpeting. Through a pane in the reception area door was a corridor. Men were there—looking into the dentist’s office through which he had passed, with guns drawn. One by one, they entered the office.
He slipped back out into the hallway.
Back into the stairwell. Down the steps, feet clattering, breath rasping no matter how hard he tried to control it. When he reached the door opening into the lobby, he hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he continued down. They were out there, on the street. They had been waiting.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a basement. On the wall was a light switch; he left it untouched. He crossed to a small window, past stacked crates and a thudding water heater. The window was swollen shut. Too small to slip through anyway, even for him.
A dead end.
His eyes moved to the dark bulb hanging in the ceiling. He jumped up, swiping at it. On the second jump he connected, shattering the glass. It should not have taken two tries. He was tired.
He crept into a corner and lowered himself to the floor. Cobwebs tickled the back of his neck; the gloom felt moist and dense. From outside came the sound of rain, picking up and then dropping off.
He waited, looking not precisely at the door leading to the stairwell, but to alternate sides, one after the other. The cone region of the eye, useless in the dark, absorbs an image when the image is looked at straight on. The rod cells come into play when an object is seen from five to ten degrees above, below, or to the side. For the rod cells to function fully—for a man to see clearly in the dark—the eye must stay in constant motion.
The water heater pounded. Slowly, he regained control of his breathing and his heartbeat. All the while his eyes swept from one side of the door to the other.
After two minutes, the door cracked open—a slab of brown in the black.
He lowered his eyes, so that light would not reflect. One hand reached back to his collar, tugging up the hood. He covered his face and then slipped a blade from his right sleeve, cupping the metal with a hand to prevent a shine. He forced himself to stare at the floor. Here, in the darkness, he was in his element.
The light switch clicked up and down. A muttered curse. Then a flashlight came on. The circle moved across the floor; from the corner of his eye he saw a glue trap, a crate, a hulking piece of equipment. The circle darted in his direction and he closed his eyes.
Five seconds passed.
The sound of the door closing, softly.
He strained to hear beyond the thud of the heater. At length, he stood. His hands wanted to shake. Before moving again, he gave them time to steady. Then he crept back to the door and climbed to the lobby.
The lobby was empty. He stepped onto the sidewalk. The sedan was gone; the rain was falling harder. Then he saw the car on the next block, pulling away. Sweeping the doorways with light.
He turned in the other direction, losing himself in the rain.
PART TWO
8
Incarceration was taking its toll on Ali Zattout.
When Finney stepped into the cell, the eyes that turned up to absorb him were sunk deep in a face that seemed more angular, beneath the heavy beard, than it had just a day before. A yellowish tint had crept into the man’s pallor; his right leg bounced incessantly, trying and failing to work off a surplus of nervous energy. But Zattout retained enough control of himself to conceal the surprise he must have felt at the appearance of this new element. His forehead puckered as he leaned back on the cot and considered his visitor.
Finney turned the chair around, sat, and tried to find the language he would use for his introduction.
With the man’s eyes upon him, the words he had rehearsed proved difficult to retrieve. When he had been on the other side of the glass, Zattout had been an object, a collection of traits and quirks that could be analyzed and interpreted. Now Finney found himself facing a man, and the man was looking straight back at him.
This was not a man to be trifled with, he knew. Zattout had inspired other men to give their lives for his cause; he had survived years in hiding. And, despite nearly four weeks of confinement within this sepulchral cell, he had kept not only his wits but also an impressive amount of sangfroid.
Louis Finney himself, however, was no piker. He let a few moments pass. Then he cleared his throat. “Good morning.”
Zattout nodded warily.
“My name is Dr. Finney. From now on, I’ll be the one to speak with you.”
Zattout’s face registered mild surprise. He did not ask why Quinlan had been removed from the operation, nor where he had gone. His eyes remained locked on Finney’s; his leg kept jigging rapidly up and down.
Finney found a smile. “How are you feeling today?”
Zattout shrugged.
“It seems to me,” Finney said, looking around at the cell, “you could use a breath of fresh air.”
Zattout leaned forward on the cot. “Yes,” he said.
“Why don’t we take a stroll outside—and get to know each other in more pleasant circumstances?”
“I’d enjoy that.”
“Well,” Finney said. “Let’s see if we can arrange it.”
For the first few minutes of the stroll, Zattout didn’t speak.
He walked with his shoulders thrown back, his eyes drinking in the blue drift of the sky and the green spread of the land. Finney let the silence hang between them, biding his time. They passed a guardhouse, then a pair of marines standing with stone-faced aplomb. They came out into a clearing dotted with trees, with the gravel path winding down the middle. A hundred yards to their left, a creek soliloquized softly. “Can we go to the brook?” Zattout asked.
Finney shook his head. The grounds off the road were covered with security sensors; if they left the path, they would trigger an alarm. But there was no reason for Zattout to know that. “Not today,” he answered simply.
Zattout didn’t argue. They
kept walking, with James Hawthorne—the man who had replaced Thomas Warren as the case officer in charge—trailing two dozen feet behind. For a moment, as the wind shifted, Finney caught the sickly-sweet tang of fertilizer. The sun beat down, warm and lulling. “The sun is nice,” Zattout said.
“It is.”
From far overhead came the reedy buzz of an airplane. In the forest on their left, the mechanical sound of a Blackpoll warbler: zi-zi-zi-zi-zi-zi-zi.
They continued their saunter along the path; Finney’s mind rolled, wandering. The warbler, the creek, the man beside him—how had he gotten here?
Thanks to Arthur Noble, he thought.
Noble.
The young professor had arrived at the classroom five minutes late, puffing slightly, wearing a white shirt with perspiration stains under the arms. Finney still could remember the smells in the room: the faint odor of chalk dust, the mildewy air stirring under a fan. As Noble arranged his papers on the lectern, the students traded perplexed glances. Could this really be the legendary scion of G. H. Estabrooks?
Then Noble stepped out from behind the lectern to approach the chalkboard. “In less than an hour,” he declared in a ringing voice, “a ‘normal’ man can be conditioned to discard everything he’s been taught about morality. This rather disquieting fact has been proven by no less illustrious an institution than Yale University.”
He went on to describe the experiment undertaken at Yale, scrawling data on the chalkboard as he spoke. The previous year—1963—forty men in the prime of life had been solicited by newspaper advertisements to take part in a test. The subjects had been told that the purpose of the experiment was to assess human memory. They had been drawn from every socioeconomic background, from every race, color, and creed. They had signed on for a paycheck of four dollars and fifty cents.
Upon arriving at the test center, each subject found himself sitting in a room with two other men. One of these men wore a white lab smock. The other was presented as another subject who had answered the newspaper ad—although in truth, the second subject was in league with the scientists running the experiment. Very little, the lab-coated man explained, was known about the effects of punishment on memory. If a man was disciplined when he got an answer wrong, would he be more likely to get the next answer right? Determining this correlation was the purpose of the test. The two subjects then drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would be the Teacher and who the Learner—yet neither sheet read Learner. The true subject always became the Teacher, for his behavior was the actual focus of the experiment.
Finney scribbled notes, trying to keep up with the ever-expanding jumble on the chalkboard. Noble paused. He chose three students for eye contact—Finney was one—then continued.
Led to an adjacent room, the Learner was seated in a facsimile of an electric chair. Paste was applied to his skin; electrodes were attached to his body. The paste, it was announced, would minimize burning.
The Teacher was escorted to another room, containing a facsimile of a shock generator and a screen on which multiple choice answers would be displayed. Here he was given a list of questions—word pairs—and instructed to administer a shock at each wrong answer. In addition, he was to increase the charge at each subsequent error by turning a dial on the “shock generator.”
As had been previously arranged, the answers given by the Learner were wrong three out of four times. Until a shock level of 300 volts was administered, there came no sound from the adjacent room. At the 300 level, a pounding could be heard on the wall. If at this point the subject displayed an unwillingness to continue, a series of vocal prods was delivered. First: The experiment requires that you continue. Second, It is absolutely essential that you continue. If the subject still displayed recalcitrance: You have no other choice. You must continue.
Of course, Noble said, no electric shocks were delivered, and the connection of memory to punishment could not have interested the experimenters less. The purpose of the test was to see how far the Teachers would go—how quickly, in the face of lab-coated authority, they would turn their backs on the moral conduct they had been taught since childhood.
Another significant pause. Three more calculated instances of eye contact. The scratch of pens across notepads had ceased.
Of the forty subjects, Noble continued after a moment, not one stopped administering shocks before the 300 voltage level. At the 300 level, when pounding was heard from the next room and answers ceased appearing on the screen, only five of the forty refused to go further. In all, only fourteen of the forty subjects—thirty-five percent—eventually disobeyed the experimenter’s commands.
Sixty-five percent continued until the shocks being delivered were the maximum that could be produced by the “shock generator.”
There had been something smug in Noble’s face when he’d finished relating the experiment. Perhaps this had been due to the effect he had created in his students. Or perhaps the man’s satisfaction had more to do with his own self-image. In Noble’s mind, the experiment proved that morality was subjective. By extension, someone like Noble himself—who, unbeknownst to Finney at the time, already had been working with MKULTRA—could not be blamed for having explored murky ethical waters. Any real scientist would explore these same waters, given the chance; for there was no such thing as true morality. In Noble’s mind, the experiment absolved him.
On that day, he’d moved on to a discussion of morality during wartime. War, he said, reversed all traditional values. In Western society, men were raised to have and to hoard. Yet during war, a man was expected to share his food with a stranger in a foxhole, even to give away his life in defense of a fellow soldier he’d met only weeks before. Surely the rigid rules of “morality” were a construct, and the nature of the construct was an ever-changing one, depending entirely on circumstance.…
Almost a quarter of a century had passed, after that day, before Finney had stumbled onto a more detailed account of the shocking experiment conducted at Yale University. He had been alone in his study, poring through old books after Lila’s death. He had found the report titled “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” written by Stanley Milgram, the man who led the experiment. And he had discovered that Dr. Arthur Noble hadn’t quite told the whole truth, when he’d spoken of that test.
What Noble had neglected to mention was the comportment of the subjects—the “Teachers”—as they proved the flexibility of morality.
One sign of tension, the experimenter wrote, was the regular occurrence of nervous laughing fits. Fourteen of the 40 subjects showed definite signs of nervous laughter and smiling. The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment. The subject, a 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman, was seriously embarrassed by his untoward and uncontrollable behavior. In the post-experimental interviews subjects took pains to point out that they were not sadistic types and that the laughter did not mean they enjoyed shocking the victim.
Farther down the page: I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.
To Noble, the experiment offered absolution. To Finney, it implied just the opposite—illuminating everything problematic with the path down which he had allowed himself to be led.
Hadn’t the scientists eliminated the need for the experiment, simply by undertaking it? Hadn’t they proved with their own conduct—without realizing it—that morality could be bent, warped, and manipulated? Had these men lost sleep because they had pushed innocent subjects to seizures, hys
terical laughter, nervous collapse?
Or had they wrapped themselves in complacency, rationalizing their conduct because it had been done in the name of so-called scientific progress?
By the time he’d discovered the passage, sitting in his study with the window to the garden thrown open, Finney had been a very different man from the young student who had been so impressed by Noble. He had gained firsthand knowledge of MKULTRA, and through his own research, he had gained knowledge of more. A long, storied tradition of human experimentation had preceded their experiments with Susan Franklin.
In 1950, the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of bacteria over San Francisco to test the population’s susceptibility to biological attack. Monitoring devices were installed throughout the city to measure the results of the resulting infection.
Three years later, clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas were released over Minneapolis, Maryland, and Virginia. The same year, thousands of U.S. citizens in Manhattan and San Francisco were exposed to Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii.
And that had been only the beginning. In 1955 the military released mosquitoes infected with yellow fever into Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In 1965 prisoners at Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, then monitored for developing cancers. In 1990, 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles were given an unlicensed measles vaccine. The parents were not informed that the vaccine was experimental. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the brain electrode implantation program, the experiment code-named GREEN RUN, in which radioactive iodine-131 was released from the Hanford Nuclear Facility and allowed to drift into downtown Spokane …
As part of such a history, it was no surprise that Noble had been able to rationalize the experiments he had overseen. Perhaps it also was no surprise that Finney had allowed himself to do the same. Once a man became caught in a sense of a higher purpose, he compromised his values to an astonishing degree. And war served only to accelerate the process.