Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Then who tried to kill me?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know too much, do you?”

  “Whether it was one of our own, or others, we can’t say yet.”

  One of our own. Meaning CIA? Or others within the government? So how much did they know about me?

  I reached over to the door handle and pulled up to open it, but it was locked from the inside.

  “Don’t try,” Rossi said. “Please. You’re far too valuable to us. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  The van was moving now. I didn’t know where, didn’t quite understand. But I knew one thing now.

  I said, “I was hit.”

  “Hmm? You appear to be fine, Ben.”

  “No. I was hit.”

  I reached down, felt the soreness on my upper thigh. I unbuckled my belt, slid down my pants. Found the needle mark, a tiny black dot surrounded by a red circular inflammation. I hadn’t seen a dart; it wasn’t a hypodermic needle. “How’d you do it?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  We were moving down Storrow Drive, into a traffic lane that pointed toward the expressways.

  Ketamine, I thought.

  Rossi’s voice came, metallically: “Hmm?”

  I must have spoken aloud, but made an effort to keep my thoughts to myself.

  Had they given me a benzodiazepine compound? No. It felt like ketamine hydrochloride. “Special K,” as it was called on the streets, an animal tranquilizer.

  The Agency occasionally had the need to administer ketamine to unwilling subjects. It produces something called “dissociative anesthesia,” which basically means it makes you feel dissociated from your environment—you can experience pain, for instance, but not feel it; it separates the meaning from the sensation.

  Or, at precisely the right dosage, you can remain alert but become amazingly agreeable, acquiescent, even though the self-preservation part of your brain warns you not to acquiesce.

  If you want to make someone do something he otherwise wouldn’t, it is the perfect drug.

  I looked at the road, watched as we moved closer to the airport. Wondered idly what they were about to do to me.

  Thought it couldn’t be so bad, after all.

  Nothing too bad.

  Part of me, a distant, weak, small-voiced part, wanted to get the van door open, leap out, run.

  But everything is basically all right, the stronger, closer, louder-voiced part reassured.

  I am being tested in some way. Tested by Charles Rossi. That is all.

  There is nothing they could learn from me, nothing of any value. If they were going to kill me, they would have done it long ago.

  But such thoughts of danger are foolish. Paranoid. Unnecessary.

  Everything is basically all right.

  I could hear Rossi speaking to me calmly from hundreds of miles away.

  “If I were in your position, given what’s happened to you, I’d no doubt feel the same way. You think nobody knows—you don’t quite believe it yourself. Sometimes you’re elated at what you’re suddenly able to do; sometimes you’re scared out of your mind.”

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re referring to,” I said, but my words came out flat and unconvincing, as if by rote.

  “It would be much simpler, much better for all of us, if you cooperated instead of being antagonistic.”

  I said nothing.

  A moment of silence, and then he spoke. “We’re in a position to protect you. Somehow there are others who are aware of your participation in the experiment.”

  “Experiment?” I said. “You’re referring to your MRI ‘polygraph’ device?”

  “We knew there was a one in a thousand—at best, one in one hundred—chance that the MRI would have the desired effect on you. Certainly we had good reason to believe, given the full medical evaluation in your Agency file, that you had all the necessary attributes—the IQ, the psychological profile, and particularly the eidetic memory. Precisely the right profile. Obviously we couldn’t be certain, but there was significant cause for optimism.”

  I absently traced a pattern on the burgundy-leather-upholstered seat.

  “You weren’t careful enough, you know,” he said. “Even someone with your training, your skills, can be sloppy.”

  All my alarms were ringing now. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck prickle unpleasantly. Yet my lazy, serene mind seemed utterly separate from my bodily instincts, and I felt myself nodding slowly.

  He said, “… won’t be at all surprised that your office and home telephones were tapped—all quite legally, by the way, given your possible involvement in the First Commonwealth debacle. Electronic devices were placed in several rooms of your house as well—we left very little to chance.”

  I just shook my head slowly.

  “Needless to say, we were able to monitor everything you said aloud—and you were somewhat indiscreet, both in your meeting the other day with Mel Kornstein and certainly in your conversations with your wife. I don’t mean to be at all critical, because you had no reason whatever to suspect that anything was amiss. There was no reason to resort to your Agency tradecraft training, after all.”

  I lowered my head to increase the blood supply to the brain, but that only made me dizzier. My head was swimming, and the headlights of the passing cars seemed far too bright, and my limbs felt heavy.

  He said, his voice tinged with concern, “It’s a good thing, too. If we hadn’t had you under such close surveillance, we might not have picked you up in time.”

  I stifled a yawn, tensing the tendons in my neck. “Alex,” I started to say.

  He said, “I’m sorry we had to do this. You’ll understand. It was a matter of protecting you from yourself. You’ll understand when the ketamine wears off that we had to do this. We’re on your side. We certainly don’t want to see anything happen to you. We simply need you to cooperate with us. Once you listen to us, I think you’ll cooperate. We can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “I guess good legal help … scarce,” I mumbled.

  “You represent a great hope to some very good people.”

  “Rossi…” I said. My speech was slurred; my mouth and tongue seemed lazy. “You were … the project director … the CIA psychic project … Oracle Project … your name…”

  “You’re very, very valuable to us,” Rossi said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  I said, “Why … you sitting up there … what do you have to hide?”

  “Compartmentalization,” he said. “You know the golden rule in the intelligence business. With your ability, it would be dangerous for you to know too much. You’d be a threat to all of us. Better to keep you as ignorant as possible.”

  We had pulled up now before some unmarked terminal at Logan Airport.

  “In just a few minutes there’s a military aircraft departing for Andrews Air Force Base. Soon, you’ll want to sleep, and you should.”

  “Why…” I began, but somehow I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  Rossi replied, a beat later, “Everything will be explained soon. Everything.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The last thing I remembered was talking with Charles Rossi in the van, and then I found myself groggily awake in some sort of barren airplane cabin that looked very much like a military plane. I became aware that I was strapped down horizontally, to a seat or a stretcher or something.

  If Rossi was on the flight, I couldn’t see him anywhere, certainly not from this angle. Seated nearby were men in some sort of military uniform. Guarding me? Did they think I planned to escape at ten thousand feet? Didn’t they realize I was unarmed?

  The ketamine that had been injected into me on the street must have been extremely potent, because even now I was unable to think clearly. Nevertheless, I tried.

  Destination was Andrews Air Force Base. Likely, I was headed for CIA headquarters. No. That would make no sense. Rossi knew I had the
ability to read thoughts, and so the last place he’d want to bring me was Langley. He seemed to know what I couldn’t do—couldn’t perceive brain waves through glass, or at a distance of more than a few feet—which told me that he had been through this extraordinary thing before.

  But was the ability still in effect? I had no idea now. How short-lived was it? Perhaps it had faded as quickly as it had come.

  I shifted in my seat, pulled against the restraints, and noticed my guards turn their heads, tense.

  Had that been Molly in the cab or not? Rossi had said they had her, safe and sound. But a cab? And parked down the street? It had to have been a decoy, someone who looked very much like Molly placed in the cab in order to lure me down the block. But had Rossi’s people done it? Or the unnamed, unspecified “others”?

  And who were these others?

  I managed to croak out, “Hey!”

  One of the guards rose, came near me (but not, I noticed, too near). “What can I do for you?” he asked pleasantly. He was in his early twenties, crew cut, tall, and massively built.

  I turned my head toward him, looked him directly in the face. “I’m sick,” I said.

  He furrowed his brow. “My instructions—”

  “I’m going to vomit,” I said. “The drugs. I just want to let you know that. Do whatever the fuck you’re instructed to do.”

  He looked around. One of the other guards frowned and shook his head.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

  I moaned. “Water? Jesus. What’s that going to do? There has to be a john around here.”

  The guard turned back to the other one, whispered something to him. The other was gesticulating with what seemed to be indecision. Then the first one turned toward me and said, “Sorry, buddy. The best I can do is offer you a pan.”

  I shrugged, or tried to, bound as I was by the restraints. “Have it your way,” I said.

  He went to the front of the cabin and returned shortly with what looked like an aluminum bedpan, which he placed alongside my head.

  I did my best to simulate the sounds of nausea, coughed and retched as he held the pan next to my mouth, his head no more than a foot and a half away, a look of deepest distaste curling his mouth.

  “Hope they’re paying you well for this,” I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  I did my best to focus my muddled, ketamine-befogged brain.

  … not hit him … I heard.

  I smiled, knowing what that was all about.

  I coughed again.

  Then: what for …

  And, a few seconds later:… what he did it’s Company business never tell us probably some espionage conviction doesn’t look like the type looks like a goddamned lawyer.

  “Guess you’re not so sick after all,” the guard said, pulling the pan away after a few seconds.

  “What a relief,” I said. “But don’t move that thing too far away.”

  I knew, number one, that it was still working; and, number two, that there was nothing I could learn from this guy, who had been kept deliberately ignorant of who I was and where I was going.

  In a short while I drifted back to a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  The next time I awoke I was seated in the back of still another vehicle, this one a standard-issue government Chrysler. My limbs ached.

  The driver was a tall, late-thirtyish man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, wearing a dark blue parka.

  We were entering a particularly rural section of Virginia now, somewhere outside of Reston, leaving behind the International Houses of Pancakes and the Osco Drugstores and the hundreds of little shopping malls for wooded, twisty two-lane roads. At first I wondered whether we were headed for Langley by some circuitous route, then I saw we were headed in another direction entirely.

  This was safe-house country—the part of Virginia where the CIA maintains a number of private homes used for Agency business: meetings with agents, debriefing defectors, and such. Sometimes they’re apartments in large anonymous suburban buildings, but far more often they’re unremarkable split-level ranches with cheap furniture rented by the month, one-way mirrors in garish frames, vodka in the freezer, and vermouth in the refrigerator.

  Ten minutes later we pulled up to a set of ornamental wrought-iron gates set into a wrought-iron fence over fifteen feet high. The gate and fence were spiked and looked high-security. Probably electrified. Then the gates swung open electrically, permitting us to enter a long, dark wooded expanse that suddenly ended after a few hundred yards, giving way to a long, circular drive in front of a large brick Georgian house that in the evening darkness seemed almost foreboding. One room on the third floor was lit up, a few on the second floor, and a large room on the first floor whose curtains were drawn. The outside entrance was lit up as well. I wondered what it cost the Agency to rent this impressive residence, and for how long.

  “Well, sir,” the driver said. “Here we are.” He spoke with the soft twang you hear in so many government employees who have emigrated to Washington from the Virginia environs.

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks for the lift.”

  He nodded quite seriously. “Best of luck, sir.”

  I got out of the car and walked slowly across the gravel drive and the flagstone entranceway, and as I approached the front door, it swung open.

  PART

  III

  THE SAFE HOUSE

  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  The CIA in Crisis

  * * *

  President Reportedly Close to Naming New CIA Head

  * * *

  Some Wonder Whether a New Broom Can Really Sweep Clean

  * * *

  Is Spy Agency Out of Control?

  * * *

  BY MICHAEL HALPERN

  STAFF REPORTER OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  Amid ugly rumors swirling in Washington of vast illegal activity within the Central Intelligence Agency, the President is said to be close to naming a new director.

  The latest speculation centers on a career Agency officer, Alexander Truslow, who is generally well regarded by Congress and the intelligence community.

  But many observers are concerned that Mr. Truslow faces the difficult, even insurmountable, challenge of attempting to reign in a CIA that is widely believed to be out of control.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I should not have been at all surprised to see the man in the wheelchair, regarding me calmly as I entered the vast, ornate sitting room. James Tobias Thompson III had aged terribly since I’d last seen him, the incident that had ended my Agency career, but, far more tragically, had ended a wonderful woman’s life and paralyzed a man from the waist down.

  “Good evening, Ben,” Toby said.

  His voice, a low rasp, was just barely audible. He was a trim man in his late sixties, wearing a conservatively cut blue serge suit. His shoes—which rarely if ever touched the ground—were black brogues, polished to a high shine. His full head of hair, worn a little long for a man of his age, especially an Agency veteran, was pure white. In Paris, when I had last seen him, it was jet black with dabs of gray at the temples. His eyes were hazel; he looked both dignified and dispirited.

  Toby’s wheelchair rested against an immense stone fireplace, in which, oddly, a great artificial fire blazed. Oddly, I say, because the room in which I stood, which must have been some fifty feet across and a hundred feet long, with a ceiling almost twenty feet high, was air-conditioned to an uncomfortably cold temperature. For some reason I remembered that Richard Nixon liked crackling fires in the air-conditioned Oval Office in the middle of the summer.

  “Toby,” I said, approaching him slowly to shake his hand. But instead, he gestured to a chair that was a good thirty feet away from him.

  Seated in a wing chair to one side of the fireplace was Charles Rossi. Not far away, on a small damask-upholstered sofa, were two young men in the cheap navy suits I always associated with the Agency’s secur
ity types. Almost certainly they were carrying weapons.

  “Thanks for coming,” Toby said.

  “Oh, don’t thank me,” I said, masking my bitterness. “Thank Mr. Rossi’s people. Or the Agency chemists.”

  “I’m sorry,” Toby said. “Knowing you and your temperament, I didn’t think we could bring you in any other way.”

  “You were quite clear,” Rossi interposed, “that you were unwilling to cooperate.”

  “Well done,” I said. “That drug really saps the will. Do you plan to keep me on a drip to ensure compliance?”

  “I think once you’ve heard us out fully, you’ll be more cooperative. If you decide not to cooperate, there’s nothing we can do about it. A caged animal makes a poor field agent.”

  “Then go ahead,” I said.

  The straight-back chair in which I sat seemed to have been placed especially for me in such a way that I could see and speak to Rossi and Thompson. Yet it was, I noticed, at a great distance from all of them.

  “The Agency found you folks a nice safe house this time,” I said.

  “It’s actually owned by an Agency retiree,” Toby said, smiling. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’m fine, Toby. You look well.”

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “I’m sorry we’ve never had a chance to talk,” I said.

  He shrugged and smiled again as if I’d made a flippant, foolish suggestion. “Agency rules,” he said. “Not mine. I wish we had, too.”

  Rossi was watching me silently. I continued: “I can’t tell you how sorry—”

  “Ben,” Toby interrupted. “Please don’t. I’ve never blamed you. These things happen. What happened to me was lousy, but what happened to you, to Laura…”

  We fell silent for a moment. I listened to the hiss of the deep orange gas flames as they licked the ceramic pinecones.