Rasputin's Shadow

by Raymond Khoury

  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.

  58

  Kirby’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 acknowledg
ed 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.

  59

  Sokolov was Jericho.

  And everything started to fall into place.

  Sokolov develops some kind of radical entrainment technology in Russia. Decides to defect for some reason. Maybe he doesn’t want his bosses at the KGB to have it. Maybe he doesn’t want his brain-manipulating technology in the hands of the most ruthless oppressors in history.

  Or anyone else, for that matter.

  Because as it turns out, he doesn’t trust us with it either.

  Soon after he lands on U.S. soil, he gives his CIA handlers the slip. It happens at a hotel in Virginia. He’s taken there by the agents who spirited him out of Europe from under the KGB’s nose. Somehow, he manages to smuggle in a powerful tranquilizer with him. Easy enough to do, I suppose. All he would have needed was a small sachet of powder. He slips the two agents a Mickey and by the time they wake up, he’s disappeared.

  They lose track of him. End of file.

  Except that we now know what happened to him.

  He lies low, takes menial jobs, and gets himself a fake identity as Leo Sokolov. Marries Daphne. Gets a job teaching at Flushing High. Lives happily ever after. Or should have. Except that, evidently, Leo couldn’t keep his inquisitive mind in check. He builds something, whatever it is he’s got in his van. Why he would do that—could be for any number of reasons. But regardless, he keeps it a secret. And, as we discovered, it works—which made me wonder if he’d ever tested it. He had to have done that. I made a mental note to look into it.

  Somehow, the Russians track him down, all these years later.

  I pored over the next JPEGs from Kirby.

  The code names of the two agents who smuggled him back from Europe and lost him in Virginia were Reed Corrigan and Frank Fullerton.

  Which triggered all kinds of questions in my mind.

  Corrigan was the point man on Sokolov all those years ago. Then I get assigned to Sokolov’s case.

  No need for electromagnetic or other stimuli to prod my paranoia. Was this just a coincidence? Or did Corrigan have anything to do with my being assigned to the murder at Sokolov’s apartment? And if so, why?

  Was Corrigan still working the Sokolov case?

  Was he still after the man who had slipped out of his fingers and most likely caused him all kinds of headaches and embarrassment inside the Company?

  Was he playing me? Had he been doing it from the get-go? And if so, why?

  Kirby had said the case file was live, and I needed to know if the updates mentioned any activity from Corrigan.

  The first entry was dated just over a week ago, a few days before Aparo and I were sent to Sokolov’s apartment. It was marked EYES ONLY: DDS&T—a reference to the director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology—and, in cold and urgent prose, it warned that Jericho’s current identity and whereabouts had been discovered by the Russians. He’d been conspicuously noisy and rambunctious at a protest outside the Russian consulate in Manhattan. They’d realized who he really was and tracked him down, but the identity he’d been living under was a closely guarded secret and whoever filed the update couldn’t get hold of it.

  A second update said Moscow had assigned its top SVR agent in New York, Fyodor Yakovlev, to bring Jericho in.

  I scanned the reports, looking to see who had authored these updates. It sounded to me like they were written by someone with a solid inside track into the Russian consulate. They could simply have been the result of electronic eavesdropping, but I’d seen such reports and their format would have been different. There’d be all kinds of references on there that these updates didn’t have. Alternatively, the updates’ author could have a mole inside the consulate. But in that case, I would have expected the mole to be referred to as the source of the information. The third option was that the updates were written by the mole himself. Which meant a CIA agent working inside the consulate—a double agent.

  The blood vessels around my eyes pulsed with anticipation as I checked who was credited on the reports, but there was no mention of Corrigan. Instead, the header ascribed them to Grimwood, no first name, reporting to FF—Frank Fullerton, Corrigan’s CIA partner back during Sokolov’s defection fiasco. “Grimwood” had to be the agent’s code name, which reinforced my mole suspicion. Then I flipped screens and saw that there were further updates. The first one was five days old and related that Yakovlev had died in a fall from Jericho’s apartment.

  The next one had my name on it.

  Well, if not my name, my initials. Because it said that “FBI SACs SR/NA” (meaning Special Agents in Charge—me, and NA, or Nick Aparo) “assigned to investigate FY death” (meaning Fyodor Yakovlev).

  Then it said something curious.

  It stated “Scene indicates physical struggle with no clarity on how Jericho managed to overpower FY. Unlikely FY would have accepted drugged drink. SR to follow up autopsy tox report.”

  SR to follow up autopsy tox report?

  I wasn’t sure how many shocks my system could take.

  Grimwood had to have been there. In Sokolov’s apartment. The morning Aparo and I first showed up, four days ago. The report was written by someone who’d visited the scene. Someone who knew I was going to follow up on the coroner’s report. My mind flashed back to the apartment and to who had asked me that. Then to that late meal at J. G. Melon’s when it had come up again.

  I knew who Grimwood was.

  And he wasn’t a “he” at all.

  ***

  KOSCHEY SAT IN THE Suburban with his engine running and watched as the youths battled it out on the basketball court.

  He couldn’t hear any of it, of course. The bulky ear protectors were blocking out all the screams and grunts, giving the savage outbreak an eerie and even more surreal tinge.

  Given everything he’d seen and done in his life, it took a lot to impress and even shock him, but this did. One minute, they were just a bunch of average neighborhood guys, some with their shirts off, some not, dribbling and blocking and jump-shooting away, all sweaty and committed, letting some steam off. Then Koschey started hitting the presets on the laptop.

  The first one was like hitting them with a massive dose of tranquilizer. They slowed down and went all sluggish. Some of them sat, others lay down on the rough concrete of the court. Some wandered around aimlessly with dazed expressions on their faces. They all seemed lost and disoriented.

  The second was more graphic. They started retching and throwing up as they hugged their stomachs in pain.

  Then he hit the third setting, and they began laying into one another with fists and kicks and anything they could get their hands on.

  The speed with which it took effect, the intensity and commitment of the savagery it triggered—it was as if the youths were suddenly facing a desperate life-or-death situation, one in which the only way they could survive was to make sure everyone else was dead.

  A sharp knock burst through the ear protectors and startled him. He turned to see a crazed teen with wild eyes and a bloodied nose pounding his side window, shouting wildly, trying to break through the glass and get at him.

  It was time to end the test.

  Koschey reached over to the o
pen laptop on the seat next to him and struck one of the keys. The kid by his window hammered it a couple more times, then his fist relaxed and he stared at Koschey with a look of utter bewilderment.

  Satisfied that it was all working properly, he put his Suburban into gear and pulled away. There was no time to waste. He needed to pick up Sokolov and hit the road.

  History was waiting.

  60

  I had to be sure.

  I snatched my phone off the desk and called Larisa.

  “Agent Reilly,” she answered, sounding surprised.

  “We need to talk.”

  She hesitated. “Okay, but—sounds like it’s urgent? What’s happened?”

  I just said, “Can you come down here?”

  “Sure. Where and when?”

  Half an hour later, I went downstairs to receive her and took her across the street, to Foley Square, opposite the steps of the State Supreme Court Building.

  I dove right into it. “I know all about Jericho and I know who you are. I’ve seen your updates in his case file. You’ve been playing me all along and for what? Just to help you track him down? You could have told me. Things might have turned out differently if I’d known what we were dealing with and how important he is.”

  She eyed me with a look of total confusion. “You’re— You’ve lost me.”

  She was definitely good, but I really didn’t feel like wasting time. “Okay, you know what?” I pulled out my phone. “Let’s call the consulate. Let me ask your boss there what he thinks. See if he thinks my theory that you’re a CIA double agent has any merit. What do you say?”

  She was still staring at me like I was a crackpot, but something had changed in her expression. A couple of worry lines had cracked her pristine face.