The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  “You’re probably knocked out,” Harper said. “You also need a shower. You smell of firefight and Situation Room.”

  Kealey smiled. He was about to remark, “Hey, the ladies really go for it” when he thought of Julie and bit it off. “Yeah,” he said instead.

  Kealey rose. So did Harper. They hugged again, and the deputy director thanked him once more for everything. He was still struggling to hold it together.

  “Call me if you hear anything,” Kealey told him. “Or even if you don’t and just want to talk.”

  Harper promised that he would.

  Kealey left and got in the cab, which was still sitting at the curb.

  “Hope you don’t mind me spying on you,” the driver said. “Saw you go in, figured you might not be long.” He poked a thumb at the radio. “Nobody calling to go anywhere tonight, and Union Station was dead.”

  “No, I’m glad,” Kealey said. The cabbie was a young African American with an accent that sounded like Arkansas. Kealey gave him the address.

  “Courtesy call?” the driver asked as he pulled away.

  “Something like that,” Kealey responded.

  “Probably a lot of that today,” the driver remarked.

  “Yeah,” Kealey replied.

  People were always friendlier in a crisis, wanting to make a connection. On the way over the driver had been too preoccupied with negotiating the streets blocked off with police vehicles to do more than mutter unhappily about the detours. D.C. cabbies were paid by the sector, not the mileage, and he was burning a lot of extra gas.

  Kealey didn’t want to be rude, but he was too tired, too preoccupied to chat. He sat there, acutely aware now of the odors. That bothered him. He still had the old instincts for combat—those never left, even if the joints stiffened a little—but Kealey realized he was definitely out of practice. He hadn’t noticed the smells until Harper said something. That was the kind of slipup that could get someone killed in the field. He had always been alert to that after meeting a source overseas who smoked a distinctive tobacco or served him food that stayed on the breath for hours. Having Handi Wipes and flavored gum in his pocket was as important as having his passport and balisong.

  His eyelids drooped as he sat there. The streetlights became smears; the outside world dreamlike. He just now understood what Harper had meant but hadn’t quite been able to articulate: since 2001 life itself had seemed unreal. Attacks or the threat of them. Anthrax in envelopes. Constant war.

  Might as well call it what it is, he thought in his strangely lucid state. World War III on a slow burn.

  Each time one of these events happened, here or in Madrid, London, Israel, Kealey privately hoped it would be the tipping point, the event that caused the globe to scream, “Enough!” There had been another white paper, one prepared by the Department of Defense, called Operation Tripod. It was named for a code word ascribed to the theoretical next world war. The précis—which itself ran seventy-four pages, just one one-hundredth of the document’s entire length—described unprecedented bombing runs around Middle Eastern oil facilities and pipelines to cut them off, followed by a massive airdrop of personnel and matériel to protect them and the construction of secure spans to get the oil out. The idea was that without petrodollars the enemy would starve. Starving, he would be forced to attack for supplies. Attacking, he would be cut down. The most radical part of the proposal was the section called Dewdrop. Radical or fence-straddling regimes that did not instantly fall in line, from Iran to Pakistan, would have their capitals razed by MOABs, Massive Ordnance Air Blasts, bombs that delivered the destructive force of the smallest nuclear devices but without the radiation.

  A horrible scenario with countless innocent casualties, yes, Kealey reflected. But worth the price for normalcy, of an end to the Dark Ages nipping at the world’s extremities?

  He didn’t know. And, fortunately, it wasn’t his decision to make.

  And as he was thinking about that, his phone beeped. He checked the text message and frowned.

  “Driver,” he said, “I’ve got a change of plans.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Take me to Lafayette Square, please.”

  CHAPTER 17

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  “Hello, Yasmin.”

  The soft voice, speaking Arabic, came from all around her. The soft voice, speaking Arabic, came from all around her. There were probably speakers nearby.

  Clever, she had to admit. The blinding light her captors had turned on forced her to close her eyes, to pay attention.

  “As you may have realized, there is a marble in the pocket of your blouse,” the voice went on. “We will release your left wrist from the restraint. You are then going to remove the marble and hold it in your left hand. You will close your fingers tightly around it. You are to squeeze the marble. If you relax your hand, my voice will be replaced with a less pleasant sound and we will have to begin again. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” she said. For now, this was one of those plan-three responses to captivity: in the absence of any other option, pretend to cooperate.

  There was a low hum and a snap. Her restraints were electromagnetic. Her left wrist had just been released. She reached for the marble and placed it in her left hand.

  “You are not to speak unless a question is asked. Do you understand ?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The light will be dimmed. You will keep your eyes closed.”

  The bright red-orange hue of her eyelids darkened to a burnt sienna and then to deep brown.

  “We are going to give you a series of instructions. If you fail to obey any of them, we will know.”

  There was a long pause. When the voice returned, it was softer. Nearer, as though there were headphones a few centimeters from her ears.

  “You are to tell us the first thing that comes to your mind,” the voice said. “Do not open your eyes. Do not think about your answer. Give us an immediate response. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another pause. When she heard the voice again, it was a little softer, a little nearer.

  “Imagine that you are lying someplace. Where are you?”

  “On a beach,” she replied.

  “Imagine you turn to your left. What do you see?”

  “The ocean.”

  “What color is the water?”

  “Blue.”

  “Clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Calm?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you smell?”

  “Salt in the air.”

  “What else?”

  “A moldy piece of wood.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At my feet. From a boat. An old boat.”

  “Is it near the water?”

  “Yes. Partly buried in the sand.”

  “You turn to your right. What do you see?”

  “A cliff.”

  “Look up the cliff. What do you see?”

  “A fortress.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Imagine you are standing beside it. What do you see?”

  “A great wooden door.”

  “Is it windy?”

  “Yes. Up here.”

  “Are the skies clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Do you wish to enter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you say?”

  “ ‘Guard, let me in.’ ”

  “The guard asks, ‘Who are you?’ What do you answer?”

  “I tell him that I am Princess Yasmin,” she said.

  “You enter,” the voice told her. “What do you see directly in front of you?”

  “My father.” She smiled. “The king.”

  “He embraces you. How do you feel?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “What does he say to you?”

  “ ‘Did you enjoy the beach?’ ”

  “What do you tell him?”<
br />
  “ ‘Very much, Father ...’ ”

  Two men and a woman were watching Yasmin on a monitor. The forty-two-inch LED screen sat on a glass-topped desk against a bare wall. A third man sat in a converted bathroom at the far end of the room. He was watching the same image on a laptop. A translation program was running the exhange in English along the left side of the screen with just a two-second delay. The room they were in was less than 300 square feet, with white walls and a bank of windows that looked out on the Hudson River thirty-six floors below. The glass was double thick as a buffer against street noise from the West Side Highway. The room on the laptop was a third that size, with only a gurney and an attendant. The big man was standing off in the shadows, well behind the gurney.

  One of the men, Franklin May, was assistant director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence. He did not know who the subject really was; a volunteer from NYU, born in New Delhi, raped as a child, he was told. The other, Alexander Hunt, was assistant director of the New York field office. He knew exactly who was on the table. May was sipping black coffee, and Hunt stood beside him with his arms crossed.

  “The disassociation is working perfectly,” the woman said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “How can you tell?” asked May. He was short, balding, and was dressed in a black Brooks Brothers suit with a tightly knotted red tie. His whisper was like a rasp. “It’s been less than two minutes.”

  “You witnessed the point at which she actually joined the altered reality,” the woman said. “When she spoke of the board and the smell. It was the first time she took the initiative to elaborate and explain. He kept talking to her to see if she would expand on it, go further into that reality. But the wood, stuck in the sand, was a dead end, so he moved her away from it. But she was there.”

  “Not to doubt your expertise, Doctor, but you got that from her talking about a board?”

  “And her expressions,” the woman said with a trace of annoyance. “It isn’t just one nexus that informs us of success, but many. You saw the way she went on to personalize the princess as herself?”

  “Okay—”

  “All people have repressed desires,” the woman went on. “Family, society, our jobs, our financial status do that to us. When we go deep enough into our psyche and are given not just the freedom to express those desires but also a command to do so, people invariably, willingly submit. It is liberating. The id welcomes that freedom. It’s only a question of how long it takes. Someone in this woman’s situation—an impoverished, lonely childhood—is particularly susceptible. You see her hand, the one with the marble?”

  The man said he did.

  “Despite our orders, she relaxed her grip. She forgot that because of the very strong reality we impressed upon her. She abrogated her responsibility because of the power of the vision she’s creating for herself.”

  “You told her you’d start again if she did that.”

  “That was to emphasize how important it was,” the woman said. “Yet she still succumbed. That’s another way we know the hypnosis is working.”

  “And yet the marble will remind her of this session.”

  “It will do much more than that,” the woman told him. “It will keep her in the session, functioning outwardly as her old self, but inwardly focused on that object. It is called cognitive sublimation.” “So there is no ‘less pleasant sound,’ I think your associate called it?”

  “Oh yes,” the woman said. “There is definitely a less pleasant sound. It’s not something you want to hear.”

  May continued to peer into the adjoining room. The voice of Dr. Emile Samson, the moderator of the session, had already taken this Indian rani from the courtyard to the palace itself.

  “How do you know she’s not faking?” May asked.

  “Because we have seen virtually this same pattern in all the subjects who have come through here,” the woman replied.

  The woman, Dr. Ayesha Gillani, had been introduced to May as the “brilliant hypnotherapist” who had treated Jacob Trask’s bipolar daughter in Atlanta. Trask was so impressed that he’d hired her to work in Xana, his psyops R & D division. It was named after a fairytale character Trask remembered from a childhood storybook, a nymph who was the keeper of a great treasure.

  “It’s remarkable, Frank,” the other man said. Special Agent Hunt was in his early thirties. Square shouldered and six foot one, he was wearing a button-down white shirt, sleeves rolled up, knotted black tie pulled to one side at the neck.

  May nodded in agreement. “And when you’re finished with the process, in two days, this woman’s traumatic memories will be gone.”

  “That is correct,” said Dr. Gillani.

  “We’ve proven it numerous times,” said Hunt. He laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “But that’s not the beauty of it. We can turn the Gillani Technique into a goddamn assembly line at Guantánamo Bay, send those miserable SOBs back home to spy for us.”

  May shook his head. “It is amazing, and I’d back it in a New York minute. But I don’t see how I’ll ever get the director to go along with it.”

  “Why? Congress? The ACLU?”

  “For starters, but also Brenneman,” May said. “He’s not going to want to leave office under an indictment from the Justice Department for torturing detainees.”

  Hunt laughed. “Torture? Christ, everyone will be thrilled that we’re finally going to clear out Gitmo! Hell, we can turn it into a petting zoo for the Cubans, win the hearts and minds of those poor people.”

  The assistant director regarded his subordinate with a curious, wary expression. “The zoo I like. The rest of it is admirable, and some of the assistant directors may want to keep it going at a low burn. But I can’t see Cluzot going along with it. Hell, you’ve got her strapped down—”

  “In case she has a post-traumatic episode,” Hunt lied. The woman was a killer. They had to keep her bound in case she slipped from their control.

  “And if she does? And hurts herself in our custody, goes out one of these windows?”

  “We’ll board them,” Hunt said. His eyes were hard, fixed on the other man. “Give us more time. We weren’t expecting you. We can clean this up, Frank.”

  “Alex, look. I see the merits of the process. I do.”

  “It’s not costing us anything!”

  “That’s part of the problem and the main reason I came down early. A lot of people in D.C. don’t want Trask crossing from the military to the Feds. That’s too much influence in one place. Cluzot is being pressured to demonopolize, to sever ties like that.” May’s eyes were sympathetic. “You’re doing great work here, the three of you. Hell of an achievement. Beats all hell out of waterboarding. But frankly, speaking personally now, this is more CIA than FBI.”

  “I’m really not sure I follow that reasoning,” Hunt replied. His voice was taut. His hand was still on his superior’s shoulder. “One, protect the United States from terrorist attack. Two, protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage. Three, protect the United States against—”

  “I know the charter—”

  “Cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes. Four, combat transnational-national criminal organizations and enterprises. Five, freakin’ upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI’s mission.”

  May slowly shrugged off Hunt’s hand. His voice was still quiet, but there was an agitated little wire somewhere inside it. “You forgot the most important. These activities must have a proper purpose and may not undermine activities protected by the Constitution of the United States.”

  “I haven’t forgotten it,” Hunt said. “It just doesn’t apply to scum who want to kill us.”

  The men regarded one another. May shook his head. “I will recommend to the director that he communicate to Mr. Trask that the Bureau was extremely impressed by the remarkable work of the Xana team, and Dr. Gillani in particular,” he said. “But I will also strongly suggest that we do not add t
his procedure to our field operations.”

  “You’ll sink us,” Hunt said.

  “I’m sorry.” He looked back at the monitor. Yasmin Rassin was smiling. She was rolling the marble lightly between thumb and index finger. “Has the marble become something else in her little fantasy?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Gillani replied, apparently unmoved by the conversation that had taken place behind her. “She is being told that it is the world, her world. I will soon go back inside and take it from her. To get it back, she will have to do as she is told in the next session.”

  “Will she sleep like this from now until then?”

  “This is not sleep, but a sensitized waking state, and no. When my colleague, Dr. Samson, brings her out of this, she will remember having the marble in her pocket and waiting for something to happen. Her wrist will be restrained, and she will be hungry, thirsty, and tired. I will feed her, and she will be allowed to sleep. Then we will begin again.”

  “Fascinating,” May said. He finished his coffee, then turned and offered Hunt his hand. “You’ve done an excellent job here, and I’ll be sure to highlight that in my report.”

  “Thank you,” Hunt replied, without enthusiasm. “Well, let’s get you over to Penn Station so I can go back to the office to close out the file. I’ll walk you to the subway.”

  May thanked Dr. Gillani. She responded with a little smile but did not look back or leave her post.

  “She’s watching for facial signals and muscular reactions along her body,” Hunt explained. “It’s being recorded, but this way she can give Dr. Samson instructions.”

  “I see.”

  The men were silent as they left the corner penthouse and walked to the elevator. Dr. Gillani had rented two of the ten apartments on the floor, using Trask’s money. She had her hypnotherapy practice in one—this one—and lived in the other next door.

  May checked his cell phone on the way down. The assistant director held the phone straight in front of him. If there were overhead cameras in the elevator, they would not be able to see the screen.