Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  Adler shook his head. “No indication so far, but they’re asking everyone who was at the Vigil to be tested as soon as possible.”

  “And if they test positive?”

  “Rid is getting ready to fly in a shipment of the antiserum as we speak. If it’s administered before symptoms appear, it should be effective.”

  “Should?”

  “Again, we’ve never had the chance to test it in the field. But we have every reason to believe it will be.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Fox hesitated a moment, then voiced the question that had been on his mind. “What’s to become of Shira?”

  “Agent Birnbaum will take her back tomorrow.”

  “Back?”

  “To Israel, of course.”

  Fox’s face fell. Adler went on, “Were you expecting anything different? She’s an Israeli citizen who committed a crime on Israeli soil.”

  “We got her to cooperate by suggesting that if she proved useful to our investigation, the United States could intervene on her behalf.”

  “The key word is ‘suggesting.’ We didn’t make any promises. And even if we had, come on! How many times did you lie to detainees?”

  “Too many.”

  “When she goes on trial—”

  “If ever!”

  “—then a representative in Tel Aviv will testify that she cooperated with the United States.”

  “A representative in Tel Aviv? Please tell me you don’t mean Birnbaum.”

  “Who else? She’s the only one who was an eyewitness.”

  “Come on, John, you saw how she was acting around Shira! If she’s an advocate for the defense, then the prosecution can just sit back and enjoy the show.”

  “What do you care? Since when are you her defense attorney? What is she to you?” Adler looked at Fox through narrowed eyes. “Would you be pleading her case so eloquently if she weren’t so young and pretty?”

  “John, how dare you!”

  “How dare you?” Adler shot back. “You broke the first rule for interrogators.”

  “What are you talking about? I haven’t violated any of the Geneva Conventions.”

  “I’m not talking about the goddamn Geneva Conventions! You got attached to a subject. You forgot the one thing you always need to remember: The people you work with are criminals and terrorists. Oh, I know everything they teach you about building rapport, establishing a human connection, blah blah blah…but at the end of the day, it’s all an act. You can never forget that you’re working with the worst of the worst.”

  “Right. That’s what they always told us at Gitmo. And how many of those people turned out actually to be guilty of anything? One in ten, at most.”

  “And in this case, Shira just happens to be that one. You know that better than anyone, you were the one who caught her in the act. She’s going to prison, and you can’t deny that she deserves it.”

  “I know what they do to Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. If they do the same to their own people, no one deserves that.”

  “Oh, stop it!” Adler snapped. “I’m tired of always hearing you talk as if you’re somehow morally superior. I’ve seen your service record. I know you’ve always said coercive methods don’t work, bragged about never using them yourself, looked down your Harvard nose at anyone who did. But how many subjects did you break by telling them, ‘If you won’t talk to me, I’ll have no choice but to turn you over to those other guys’? Look me in the eye and deny that you used that strategy on Shira.”

  Fox was silent.

  “You see?” Adler went on. “You’re a great Good Cop, Robin, but you can’t do that job without a Bad Cop. You’re a religion scholar, you must understand this. Sometimes the promise of Heaven by itself isn’t enough. To keep people in line, you also need the threat of Hell.”

  “I’ve always felt that we would be much better off without Hell.”

  “That’s a beautiful philosophy, Professor, but we live in the real world. And there are some people in it who just don’t respond to anything else.”

  When Fox made no reply, Adler put an end to the conversation by turning on the television and tuning in to the first English-language network he could find, which happened to be the BBC. Fox switched on his cell phone, which had been off since he boarded the flight to Rome.

  He saw that Miriam had tried to call him several times, and left multiple e-mail messages. There was also a message, with an attachment, from a sender identified only by an address that he had never seen. The subject line read, “Emily Harper.”

  Fox felt the sudden tightening in his chest, and numbness in his limbs, that he imagined a stroke victim must feel. A subject line bearing only a person’s name was rarely good news. It usually meant that the person was either in the hospital or dead. After several attempts to steady his finger, he opened the message.

  The attachment was a photograph of Emily, sprawled unconscious on a bed, with a hand at the edge of the frame pointing a pistol at her head.

  The text read:

  Dear Professor Fox: On the third day, I will reach my goal. You may already have deduced where the site will be. Be assured that if any cameras catch you there, Ms Harper will not live one moment beyond that. Cordially, Chris Warndale.

  A hole opened under Fox’s heart, and his soul flew out of it, bound for some unknown place, silently screaming an unheeded message: Take me instead! Do whatever you want to me, but let her go!

  With fingers turned to icicles, he dialed Miriam.

  “Robin!” came her anguished voice as soon as she answered. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

  “Miriam…”

  “It was my fault. If I had just—”

  “Calm down, Miriam,” he said, fully aware that his advice was impossible to follow. “Just tell me what happened.”

  She told him about Heathrow. “Of course, I reported it to the police, and the American embassy. I’ve told Rick, and Nels. Beyond that, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Take care of Leila. Stay in touch with the embassy, and let me know the second you hear any news. And pray like you’ve never prayed before.”

  He disconnected the phone, and sat down on the bed before his legs gave out on their own.

  Adler turned away from the TV to look at Fox. “Robin?” he said. “My God, you’re white as a ghost! What happened?”

  Fox told him. Adler’s reaction was stunned silence, which the BBC announcer on the television obliviously filled.

  “With St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, the traditional site of the Royal Family’s Easter celebration, still under repair from the fire two weeks ago,” the voice was saying, “it was decided that Their Majesties would instead attend Easter Sunday services at Westminster Abbey. The Royal Household has declared that, despite the recent worldwide spate of attacks on places of worship, the service will be held as scheduled, amid heightened security.”

  Slowly, Fox rejoined the universe, and turned his eyes to the screen. “Son of a…!”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he was about to say!”

  “Who?”

  “There is no God…so he can’t save the Queen.”

  THE REVELATION

  15

  LONDON

  SUNDAY, APRIL 5

  EASTER SUNDAY

  “Ms. Harper, are you awake?”

  Emily opened her eyes. She was in a bedroom that looked like it belonged in a Victorian house, lying on a four-poster bed among tasseled brocade pillows of every imaginable shape and size. Sitting in a chair beside her was a blond-haired man, perhaps about thirty, immaculately dressed in upscale brands. His smile was warm, but not enough to thaw the ice in his eyes. It was the smile she imagined might appear on the face of a man coming home to his family after a satisfying day’s work at the concentration camp.

  And she had seen those eyes before, above a surgical mask at Heathrow Airport.

  She tried to sit up, but her body responded to the command from her bra
in only with a few twitches and spasms.

  “Relax,” her captor said. “It’ll take a minute for your central nervous system to come back online.” He dipped a tea towel into a bowl of ice water on the marble-topped bedside table, moistened her lips with it, then clamped a pair of tongs around an ice cube. “You must be terribly thirsty. Your stomach probably isn’t ready for a drink of water just yet, but this should help for now.” He held the ice cube to her mouth. She hesitated a moment, then let her lips part to accept it.

  “I must apologize,” he went on, “for the rude way in which it was necessary to bring you here. I would much rather have made your acquaintance in a more civilized fashion, but such was the exigency of the moment.”

  Emily tried to calm herself and think. Like all USPRI staff working in the field, she had taken the kidnapping prevention training required by their insurers, but it was a long time ago and the memory had faded since then. Who, after all, ever really expected to need it? She reached into her memory and recited the prescribed lines.

  “I work for the United States Peace Research Institute, an independent body not connected in any way with the United States government. They will not negotiate for my release, or pay any ransom.”

  Her captor laughed as though this were the best joke he had heard in his life. “My dear Ms. Harper! Look around you. Do I really look like the sort who would be interested in ransom? No, you’re here because of your gentleman friend, Professor Robin Fox. He’s been rather a nuisance to me lately, and you’re here to ensure that he causes me no further trouble.”

  He gestured around the room. “In the meantime, I’ll do my utmost to make sure your stay here is as comfortable as possible. You have an ensuite bath. You have cable television, or some books if you prefer. I don’t imagine you have much of an appetite for solid food just now, but I’ll bring some soup later on that should go down fairly well. Do please make yourself entirely at home. There is only one rule: When you hear the doorbell ring, I must ask you to sit on the bed, where I can see you, and wait. Otherwise, I shan’t be able to come in and serve you. Do we have an understanding?”

  Emily glanced at the ceiling and saw a small dome, of the kind designed to mask a surveillance camera. She nodded, trying to keep her face from showing her reaction. Trying to condition me. Like Pavlov’s dogs.

  “Please try to relax, Ms. Harper, and don’t worry. I’m sure Professor Fox is a reasonable man, and he clearly cares very deeply about you. So, if everything goes smoothly, you’ll soon be on your way home to America.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  The expression in his eyes altered slightly. Now it looked as though the concentration camp guard was getting ready to leave for work in the morning.

  “That would be…regrettable.”

  ...

  When Fox and Adler landed at Heathrow, a stocky, red-haired, red-bearded man was standing at the gate, twitching, chafing at the wait—for them or for a smoke break, or both. Adler greeted him, and made the introductions. “Mr. Donovan, this is Robin Fox. Robin, this is Agent Liam Donovan, from MI5. Oh, sorry, you call it the Security Service now, right?”

  “That’s all right,” he said, in an accent that Fox struggled to place, somewhere between British and Irish. “Old habits die hard, and nearly everyone in Britain still uses the old name—even us, sometimes.”

  Donovan escorted them to an unmarked car, rolled down the window, and sacrificed a burned offering to the god Nicotine. He joined the chaos of the road to London, maneuvering the car expertly among trucks, taxis, and a red double-decker bus emblazoned with someone’s idea of a public service message: Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

  “I’ve briefed the Metropolitan Police,” Donovan was saying to Adler, “and they’ve pulled out all the stops. Specialist Operations 14 and 15—the Royal Protection Command and the Counter Terror Command—have been working round the clock. Last night, they scoured the entire Abbey looking for anything even slightly suspicious. No one will be able to get in today without a pass, issued by the Royal Household after a thorough vetting, and they’ll still have to be screened on entry. If there’s a way to make security any tighter, I don’t know it.”

  “What about our request to keep cameras out of the Abbey?” Fox asked.

  Donovan shook his head. “We tried again and again, but the Royal Household wouldn’t hear of it. They said this was a unique event—the Royal Family attending an Easter service at the Abbey open to the public—and to keep the media away was out of the question. We got them to agree to a compromise: everyone will have to check cameras and cell phones at the door except for licensed reporters, and even they will only be able to use theirs between the quire and the sanctuary. In other words, they can photograph the royals, the priests, or the choir, but not the congregation. That’s as much as we could get.”

  Fox grimaced. “I suppose it will have to do.”

  “And we’ve got something for you. Look in the bag.”

  Fox opened the duffel bag lying next to him in the back seat. He saw dark brown cloth, which proved on closer inspection to be a hooded robe with a white cord—the habit of a Franciscan monk.

  “A disguise?”

  “There’ll be lots of other Franciscan brothers there. And with the hood up, no one will be able to make out your face.”

  “Thanks,” said Fox, trying unsuccessfully to keep his misgivings out of his voice.

  “If you think it’s too big a risk, I don’t really see the need for you to be in there at all. We have the description you got from the subject in Rome. Everyone’s identity will be checked. If this Aidan tries to get in there, we’ll catch him. And if he manages to get any kind of device through security, it’ll be a Devil’s miracle.”

  “If I know anything about Chris Warndale,” Fox said, “he’s got more than one of those up his sleeve.”

  ...

  Once her captor had left her, Emily got up and examined her surroundings. The bed was so high that it had a matching step-stool to help its occupant climb in and out. Besides the bed, chair and bedside table, there was a flat-screen TV mounted on the far wall, and a bookcase full of the works of atheist philosophers ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Daniel Dennett.

  The door was locked with a hooded keypad. There was one curtained window, near the head of the bed. She drew aside the curtains, but found that the window was barred, and the pane was frosted, allowing no view outside.

  She went into the bathroom, where bright lights gleamed off the black and white marble tiles and gilt-edged glass. Her host had prepared thick towels, a cake of scented soap, small bottles of shampoo, even a velour bathrobe. All the amenities she would expect in a luxury hotel, but nothing that looked at all useful to help her escape.

  ...

  The bells were ringing in the tower of Westminster Abbey. On the flagstones far below, a queue of worshippers extended down the street, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet against the chill of the cloudy morning.

  Fox, in his borrowed Franciscan habit, hovered near the end of the line, surreptitiously surveying the scene from under his cowl. At the gate, the police had expanded greatly on the simple green sentry box that usually stood there. They scrutinized the tickets and IDs of everyone coming in, checked them against a list, and waved their metal-detector wands over each one. They inspected all bags, first with an X-ray machine and then by hand, before stashing them in a portable cabin for the duration of the service. Anyone who could smuggle any suspicious object past them, including a camera or cell phone, would have to be a master magician.

  Could someone waiting in line pass a canister through the bars to an accomplice inside the fence? But the police had anticipated that. Lashed to the fence were nine-foot wooden poles with plastic mesh between them, and officers stood watch at intervals.

  Fox agreed with Donovan’s assessment: the perimeter looked as secure as humanly possible. But the ingenuity of their adversary, he was beginning t
o think, went beyond human into the realm of the diabolical.

  ...

  The doorbell rang. Emily, deciding she was better off complying with her captor’s request until she had a clearer idea where she was and how she might escape, seated herself on the bed. The door opened, and he appeared, bearing a bowl of steaming soup on a bed tray.

  “Vichyssoise, with a bit of tomato. Careful, it’s quite hot.” He set the tray astride her lap. The presentation was worthy of a Michelin-starred restaurant: a gold-rimmed china bowl on a satin tablecloth, garnished with a sprig of fresh parsley, and in a glass vase in the corner of the tray, a rose.

  Establish a rapport with your captor. Engage him in conversation on neutral, non-threatening subjects. Help him to see you as a human being, rather than a pawn in some ideological game.

  She picked up her spoon and took a taste. “This is delicious. Thank you. Did you make it yourself, or did this house come with a live-in chef?”

  He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “My own clumsy attempt. I’m glad you find it satisfactory.” He seated himself in the chair and watched her take another spoonful.

  His gaze fell on her Celtic cross pendant. “You’re a woman of faith, then, Ms. Harper?”

  Her free hand self-consciously covered it. “You could say that.”

  “You have a choice, you realize.”

  “I know.”

  “So I’m curious about what makes you choose to stay in a place where they’ll always treat you as a second-class citizen. Try to hold you back from becoming who you really are.”

  She took a non-committal spoonful of soup. “What do you mean?” Keep your answers short and neutral. Let him talk as much as he wants.

  “The Devil’s gateway. The enemy of peace. Of all the wild beasts, the most dangerous. These are some of the charming little endearments your Early Church Fathers used for the female of the species. Pick any religion you like from anywhere in the world. At best, you’ll be told that you must always be meek and mild, submissive and subservient. At worst, you’ll be wrapped up in a burqa wherever you go, beaten to within an inch of your life if you make a sound in the marketplace, or expected to throw yourself onto your husband’s funeral pyre if he shuffles off this mortal coil before you do. So tell me, what makes an intelligent woman like you stay in this company when she doesn’t have to?”