Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Molly,” I began.

  Toby put up a hand to silence me. “She’s fine,” he said. “Fortunately—thanks to Charles—you are, too.”

  “I think I’m owed a little explanation,” I said mildly.

  “You are, Ben,” Toby agreed. “I’m sure you understand that this conversation isn’t taking place. There is no record of your flight to Washington, and the Boston police have already buried a report of random gunfire on Marlborough Street.”

  I nodded.

  “I apologize for placing you at such a distance from us,” he resumed. “You understand the need for the precautions.”

  “Not if you have nothing to hide,” I said.

  Across the room, Rossi smiled to himself and said, “This is a highly unusual situation, one we didn’t entirely plan on. As I’ve explained, keeping you out of physical proximity is the only way I know of to ensure the sort of need-to-know compartmentalization this operation requires.”

  “What operation is that?” I asked quietly.

  I heard a low mechanical whir as Toby adjusted his chair to face me squarely. Then he spoke, slowly, as if with great difficulty.

  “Alex Truslow brought you in to do a job. I wish Charles hadn’t engaged in the trickery he did. He’ll be the first to admit, he’s no den mother.”

  Rossi smiled.

  “It’s an ends-and-means game, Ben,” Toby said. “We’re after the same end as Alex; we’re simply employing a different means. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is one of the most exciting and important developments in the history of the world. I think that once you hear us out, you’ll choose to go along with us. If you choose not to, that’s fine.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “We selected you some time ago as our most likely subject. Everything about your profile seemed right, the photographic memory, the intelligence, and so on.”

  “So you knew what would happen,” I said.

  “No,” Rossi said. “We’d failed time and time again.”

  “Hold on a second,” I said. “Hold on. How much exactly do you know?”

  “Quite a bit,” Toby said calmly. “You now have the ability to receive what’s called ELF—the extremely low frequency radio waves that the human brain generates. Do you mind if I smoke?” He took out a pack of Rothmans—I remembered now that Rothmans were the only brand he smoked when we knew each other in Paris—and tapped it against the arm of the wheelchair until one slid out.

  “If I did mind,” I replied, “I doubt the smoke would bother me at this distance.”

  He shrugged, and lighted the cigarette. Exhaling luxuriantly through his nostrils, he continued. “We know this … talent, for want of a better word, has not abated since it emerged. We know you’re sensitive only to thoughts that are occasioned at moments of strong feeling. Not yours, but those of whomever you’re trying to ‘hear.’ This gibes rather neatly with Dr. Rossi’s long-standing theory that the intensity of thought waves, or ELF, would be proportional to the intensity of one’s emotional reaction. That emotion varies the strength of the electrical impulses discharged.” He paused to inhale again and then said huskily, through the exhaled smoke, “Am I in the ballpark?”

  I only smiled in reply.

  “Of course, Ben, we’d be much more interested to hear your experiences than to listen to ourselves gas on like this.”

  “What led you to think of using the magnetic resonance imager?”

  “Ah,” Toby said, “for that I turn to my colleague Charles. As you may or may not know, Ben, for the last few years I’ve been on the DDO staff at home.” He meant that he was serving in the Deputy Directorate of Operations—the covert-action boys, to oversimplify—at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. “My area of responsibility is what they call special projects.”

  “Well, then,” I said, feeling an odd sense of vertigo. “Perhaps one of you gentlemen can explain what this … project, as you seem to be calling it, is all about.”

  Toby Thompson exhaled with a finality, and stubbed his cigarette out in a crystal ashtray on the carved oak end table next to him. He watched the plume of blue smoke rise and curl in the air, then turned back toward me.

  “What we’re talking about,” he said, “is a matter of the highest security classification.” He paused. “And it is, as you can imagine, a long and rather complex story.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “The Central Intelligence Agency,” Toby said, his eyes fixed on some middle distance, “has long had an interest in … shall we say … the more exotic techniques of espionage and counterespionage. And I don’t just mean that wonderful invention, the Bulgarian umbrella, whose tip injects deadly ricin.

  “I don’t know how much of this you know from your Agency days—”

  “Not much,” I said.

  Toby looked at me sharply, as if surprised to be interrupted. “And our team, of course, observed you at the Boston Public Library doing research, so you must know at least something of what’s in the public record. But the real story is far more interesting.

  “You have to keep one major thing in mind: the reason most government undertakings are cloaked in deepest secrecy is fear of ridicule. It’s as simple as that. And in a society like ours, a country like the United States, which prides itself on hardheaded pragmatism … well, I think the founders of the CIA recognized that the greatest risk to their existence came not from public outrage but public derision.”

  I smiled appreciatively and nodded. Toby and I had been good friends, before the incident, and I had always enjoyed his dry sense of humor.

  “So,” he continued, “only a handful of the most senior officers, historically, have ever known of the Agency’s work in this area. I wanted to make sure we were very clear on that.” He looked directly at me, then tilted back his head slightly. “Experiments in parapsychology, as you no doubt already know, go back to at least the 1920s at Harvard and Duke—serious experiments undertaken by serious scholars, but of course never taken seriously by the scientific community at large.” He gave a wry smile and added, “Such is the structure of scientific revolutions. Of course the world is flat; how could it be otherwise?

  “The first groundbreaking work was done by a man named Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke in the late twenties and early thirties. I’m sure you’ve seen the Zener cards.”

  “Hmm?” I murmured.

  “You know, those famous ESP cards of five symbols, the square, triangles, circles, wavy lines, and straight lines. In any case, Rhine and his successors learned that some people have the talent—very few people, as it turns out—and in varying degrees. The vast majority, of course, do not. Or, as some scholars postulated, more have the potential to develop the talent than they realize, but our conscious mind blocks it out.

  “Anyway, a number of laboratories in the decades since the 1930s engaged in research into parapsychology in its many forms, not just extrasensory perception. There was Dr. Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, of course, but there was also the William C. Menninger Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which did some interesting work in dream telepathy. Certain of these labs were funded by the National Institute of Mental Health—fronting for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “But the CIA wasn’t founded until—what?—1947,” I said.

  “Well, we came to this belatedly. As early as 1952, according to Agency archives, there was serious interest expressed in the possibilities of this research. Mostly this meant locating individuals with psychic abilities. But the early Agency officials seemed far more concerned with cloaking the work—”

  “For fear of ridicule,” I interrupted. “But how the hell did the CIA deal with these psychics? I mean, either the psychics were for real or they weren’t. And if they were for real, they’d know they were meeting with people from an intelligence agency.”

  Toby smiled, slowly and lopsidedly. “True enough. It was a real problem, from what I’ve read. They employed a doub
le-blind security system, using two middlemen. But as I said, we came to this belatedly. Spurred on, naturally, by the Soviets.”

  Rossi cleared his throat and remarked, “The Cold War had its uses.”

  “Indeed,” Toby resumed. “Going back to at least the 1960s, the Agency began hearing credible reports of Soviet military efforts in parapsychology. I think it was around that time that a small cell of senior Agency people decided to fund an in-house study of the espionage possibilities of ESP. But what a treacherous undertaking! For every person who may have some glimmering of the ability, there are hundreds of hucksters and nutty old ladies with crystals. In any case, you may remember hearing about the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, in 1971, when the astronaut Edgar Mitchell performed the first ESP experiment in space. Didn’t work, by the way. In those years—the early years, I think of them as—we and the Armed Forces Medical Laboratories and NASA were spending almost a million dollars a year on parapsychology research. Peanuts, yes, but then we were whistling in the dark anyway.

  “Then came a series of classified reports, in the early 1970s, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicting that we would soon be endangered by Soviet psychic research, which was enabling the KGB and the GRU and the Soviet Army to do such neat tricks as ascertain the deployment of troops, ships, even military installations. Someone at the top of the Agency got serious about it. I don’t suppose I’m spilling any secrets to tell you that Richard Nixon took a very strong interest in the program.

  “Our intelligence confirmed by the mid-seventies that the Soviets had several secret parapsychological laboratories for military purposes, the main one in Novosibirsk. Then, in 1977, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times was arrested by the KGB in Moscow while attempting to obtain top secret documents from an institute of parapsychology. This really spurred the CIA, since now both sides knew that the other knew …

  “Anyway, within the Agency, the program was so top secret that the term ESP never appeared anywhere, in any documents. It was called ‘novel biological information transfer systems’! A few years later, after my … accident … I was brought in to head the project, to accelerate it—or scrap it. ‘Shit or get off the pot,’ I was instructed.”

  I nodded. “And you decided to shit.”

  “In a manner of speaking. Certainly I was as much of a skeptic as anyone has ever been. I was quite hostile to all this foolishness, and I thought I was being given some make-work, time-wasting rehabilitation crap, the sort of thing they give a washed-up operations expert whose legs don’t work anymore.

  “But then”—here he waved his hands in Rossi’s direction—“then one day I met Dr. Charles Rossi, and I learned about something that I knew at once would change the world.”

  * * *

  “Can we get you anything?” Toby asked just as my curiosity was piqued. “You like Scotch, don’t you?”

  “Why not?” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Certainly has. And the ketamine appears to have worn off, so booze should be okay. Wally, Scotches all around—no, Charles, you like vodka, isn’t that right?”

  “On the rocks,” Rossi said. “A touch of pepper ground over it, if you please.”

  One of the security people got to his feet—he was, I now saw, definitely wearing a shoulder holster—and ambled out of the room. A few minutes later, during which we all sat in silence for some reason, he returned with a tray of drinks. Obviously he was not trained in the art of butlery, but he managed to serve each of us without spilling a drop.

  “So tell me this,” I said. “Why am I not able to scan you?”

  “At this distance—” Rossi said.

  “No. I wasn’t even able to scan your security guy here, just now, when he gave me my drink. Nothing comes across. What’s going on?”

  Toby watched me for a moment, thinking. The strong light made hollows of his eyes. “Jamming,” he finally said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “ELF. Extremely low frequency radio waves.” He swept a hand around the room. “The RF equivalent of inaudible white noise is being emitted from speakers set up throughout the room, broadcast on the same frequencies that the human brain in effect ‘broadcasts’ on. This makes it impossible for you to pick anything up.”

  “So you won’t mind if we sit a little closer.”

  Toby smiled. “We don’t like taking chances.”

  I nodded, decided to drop it. “All this CIA work on ESP—I thought it was terminated by Stan Turner in 1977.”

  “Officially, yes,” Rossi said. “In fact, it was simply buried in the bureaucracy under deep cover, so that hardly any personnel within the Agency knew of its existence.”

  Then Toby continued his narrative. “Until then, our efforts had concentrated on how to locate those few talented individuals. They’re few and far between. The question soon became, how can you actually instill the power? Is it possible? It seemed far-fetched, seemed in fact absolutely impossible. Charles … well, Charles can tell you himself.”

  Rossi shifted in his chair, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “In the early 1980s,” he said, “I was working with a small California firm, developing something the Pentagon found most interesting. It was, in simple terms, an electronic paranoia inducer—a ‘psychic neuron disrupter,’ they called it, which would ‘jam’ the synaptic connections between the brain’s nerve cells. In effect, this would do electronically what the drug LSD often does. Nasty stuff, really, but then, the Pentagon are the folks who brought us napalm, courtesy of Dow Chemical. Anyway, this project thankfully went nowhere, but then one day I got a call from Toby, who offered me double my salary and lured me from the sunny climes of Southern California to this lovely metropolis. I continued my work on the effects of electromagnetic stimuli on the human brain. Initially, we were intrigued by the notion of mind control. I was concentrating on ELF, extremely low frequency radio waves, as Toby said. You see, the brain generates electrical signals. So I was attempting to learn whether we could transmit strong signals in the same frequencies that the brain transmits in, to induce confusion, even death.”

  “Charming,” I said.

  But Rossi ignored me. “Nothing there either. But we had discovered the possibilities of ELF. I came upon research done by Dr. Milan Ryzl of the University of Prague involving hypnosis. Dr. Ryzl had discovered that certain people can, under hypnosis, relax themselves, relax their inhibitions, to such an extent that they can receive images by telepathy. That set me thinking.

  “And it turned out, quite by coincidence, that in 1983, in a hospital in the Netherlands, a middle-aged Dutchman underwent a routine examination in a magnetic resonance imager and emerged with a measurable, documented extrasensory perception. His doctors were aghast. The man and his doctors were immediately visited by agents of Dutch, French, and American intelligence, who all confirmed the report. The man had the ability actually to hear the thoughts of others in close proximity. Neurologists attributed this to the intense magnetizing effect of the MRI on the man’s cortex.”

  “Did the power last?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Rossi replied. “The man went mad, actually. He began to complain of terrible headaches, of awful noises, and one day he literally ran his head into a brick wall and killed himself.” He took a long sip of vodka.

  “Then why didn’t the MRI work like this on everyone?” I asked.

  “Exactly what I wondered about,” Rossi said. “The MRI has been in use around the world since 1982, and this was the first report of such an astonishing occurrence. Upon scrutiny of this Dutch gentleman, the Dutch-French-American joint team concluded that this man possessed certain characteristics that must have been prerequisites. For one thing, he was extremely bright, with an IQ, according to the Stanford-Binet test, of over 170. For another, he had an eidetic memory.”

  I nodded once.

  “There were other markers. The man had a highly developed verbal skill, but an equally developed mathematical and quantitative abilit
y. I flew over to Amsterdam, and managed to meet with this Dutchman before he went off the deep end. When I returned to Langley, I attempted to reproduce this bizarre effect.

  “We recruited males and females who seemed to have all the right markers, the intelligence, the memory, the verbal and quantitative abilities, et cetera. And, without revealing the exact nature of the experiment, we subjected them to the most powerful MRI we could locate. This particular model was manufactured by Siemens A. G., of Germany. We had it modified. But no success—until you.”

  “Why?” I asked, draining my Scotch and placing the empty glass on the adjacent table.

  “We don’t know,” Rossi said matter-of-factly. “If only we did, but we don’t. Certainly you had the right markers. The intelligence, obviously, but also the verbal skills, the eidetic memory, which is found in fewer than 0.1 percent of the population at large. You play chess, don’t you, Ben?”

  “Not too badly.”

  “Quite well, in fact. And you’re a whiz at such things as crossword puzzles. I believe you even indulged in Zen meditation at one time.”

  “I ‘indulged’ in it, yes,” I said.

  “We studied the records of your training at Camp Peary very closely,” Toby Thompson put in. “You were eminently suitable—but of course, we had no idea that you’d be a success.”

  “You seem strangely uninterested in a demonstration of my abilities,” I said, addressing them both.

  “Quite the contrary,” Rossi said. “We’re quite interested. Extremely interested, in fact. With your permission, we’d like to put you through a number of tests tomorrow morning. Nothing too arduous.”

  “That hardly seems necessary,” I replied. “I’d be glad to give you a demonstration right now.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Toby chuckled. “We can wait.”

  “You seem to know a good deal about this condition. Perhaps you can tell me how long it’s going to last.”

  Rossi paused again. “That we don’t know either. Long enough, I hope.”