The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  The iPhone was not equipped with encryption software, so messages were either oblique or coded with “words of the day.” This was a simple substitution dictionary physically downloaded via USB each morning and overwritten the following morning. The user had to check any unclear words manually so that anyone scanning the Wi-Fi signal would not be able to intercept the dictionary.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Hunt looked at him. He didn’t have to ask what it was about. “Update ?”

  “Yeah.”

  The door opened, and they crossed the lobby in silence. A few people moved around them, some tenants taking their dogs for a walk, deliverymen arriving with dinner for others. A few were sitting in the chairs along the walls, working on laptops. May had admired the maritime murals when he entered an hour before. He didn’t notice them now.

  “Two agents were killed at the hotel,” May said when they were outside. “By another agent.”

  “Obviously an impostor,” Hunt said.

  They walked east, turned north on Washington Street. Hunt walked slightly apart from May, to his left. He was still decrypting the message as they passed the dark edifice of One Western Union International Plaza, which was also on the left. To the right was the deep, sloping entranceway to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A block ahead, a footbridge over the tunnel ramp led to the subway entrance.

  The building had a large overhang supported by columns. A homeless man was huddled against the locked doors of the twenty-story black tower. While May was concentrating on the phone, Hunt stopped and walked over to the older African American, who was huddled in a worn blanket. There were no security cameras under here. They were all on the street, watching the street. Hunt had avoided them by walking close to the building. All they would show was May.

  Hunt kicked the man hard in the face with the bottom of his shoe. The homeless man yelped. May looked over.

  “Alex! What are you—”

  “Goddamn beggar!” Hunt snarled. He stomped on the cheek of the fallen man.

  May shoved his phone in his pocket as he ran over. He bear-hugged the bigger man, but Hunt was ready for him. He was expecting him.

  Hunt gave May a hard elbow to the chest, breaking the hold, then turned. He swung hard at the man’s face, catching him against his left ear. He threw an uppercut to his jaw, then jabbed his nose. May staggered back against the black tile wall. Hunt had taken pains to hit him square, never punching down, so it would look like a shorter man—which the homeless person was—had hit him. While May sucked blood up his nose, Hunt drove his knuckles repeatedly into his windpipe. Then he scratched his eyes, his cheeks, his neck as he went down.

  He had to make it look like a scrap.

  When May hit the sidewalk, Hunt pulled an old boot from the dazed beggar, slipped his fist inside, and pounded the heel hard, repeatedly, into May’s face. Then he put the boot, covered with blood, back on the homeless man, bent over May, grabbed his ears, and drove his head hard into the concrete.

  Brain tissue clung to the pavement. May was no longer breathing.

  Hunt glanced behind him to make sure no one was walking by. The street was empty. He had been down this road often enough to know that dog walkers preferred Battery Park across the street. Except for people coming in from the subway—and there were few this time of night—the street was largely untraveled. Even if anyone came by, the darkness beside the office building was thick. Because of the high fence beside the tunnel entrance, the street was invisible from the buildings across the way on Trinity Place.

  Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he fished May’s wallet from his inside jacket pocket and tucked it in the bundle of garments that was the homeless man.

  “Wha—”

  “Shut up, pig,” Hunt said to the groggy man.

  Then he took off May’s big college ring and punched the man again, leaving an impression on his jaw. He hit him several times in the side of the head, until blood oozed from his ear. Then he wiped his prints off and put the ring back on May’s dead finger. The cops would conclude that there had been an attempted mugging, a struggle, and mutual assured destruction.

  Hunt walked to the street and made a final check. No one was around. He walked quickly back to his building.

  You had to make a visit now, he thought angrily.

  They’d needed the cover of a legitimate FBI project to justify Hunt’s presence. But they also needed a little more time to finish. May had not recognized Yasmin Rassin, but then he did not know Veil was not on her way to Pakistan as planned. When he learned that back at his office, when he saw her photograph, he would have put things together.

  And then there was this latest news. Of all the goddamn luck, to have someone “made” at the hotel. The man at the hotel wasn’t real FBI; he was a Saudi medical student at Johns Hopkins. Unlike the “Indian rani,” he had actually volunteered to be part of Gillani’s bogus trauma mitigation studies. Still, that would put the Bureau in Baltimore under all kinds of scrutiny. If they found the kid, he would remember nothing, but they would learn from e-mails that he had been to New York, that he had been here.

  All they needed was another day. Hopefully, the kid would return to his daily life and would remain hidden for that long.

  Hunt walked through the revolving door at One West. He looked at the concierge and shook his head. “Text, text, text.”

  “Sir?”

  “My friend,” Hunt said. “I got tired of waiting. Pointed to the subway. He can find it himself.”

  “I don’t blame you.” The doorman smiled. “It’s the same with my kids.”

  “Hey, how are they?”

  “Good, sir. Thank you for asking.”

  Hunt smiled until he passed the reception desk. He liked the young man as far as that went, but he couldn’t worry about anything but the mission right now. All he wanted was the doorman’s good will and something resembling an alibi. Even if the police called him in as part of their investigation, they wouldn’t have cause to arrest him in time. Not before the second part of the operation put everything else in the city—in the nation—on hold.

  He took the penthouse elevator and returned to the laboratory. He was not about to let a premature review of the FBI’s investment in the Xana project jeopardize the program, not when they were so close to realizing their goal.

  “Is everything all right?” Dr. Gillani asked when he stepped up behind her.

  “It’s been taken care of,” he assured her.

  “Functionaries,” she said disdainfully. “It is their job to collect enough small minds to stop larger ones.”

  Hunt liked that. He looked at the contented subject on the video monitor. When Trask recruited him, the billionaire had described bureaucrats as the monkey bars from which the rest of us swing.

  “Sometimes monkeys get aggressive,” Trask had told him.

  That was how he had come to the industrialist’s attention, a newspaper article about an unusually violent pursuit of a terror suspect into a mosque. The media had come down on him for ignoring the sanctuary of holy ground in pursuit of a terror suspect. He was forced to undergo sensitivity training. All that did was make him hate the sycophants even more, living under the umbrella of American freedom so they could undo it. The worldview he shared with Trask was why Hunt had agreed to be the industrialist’s inside man at the Bureau. In return, Trask had promised to give him what he wanted most.

  America. Whole, safe, sane.

  That prize would not come for free, of course. But then, it was supposed to hurt. A quote from Thomas Jefferson had stuck in his brain when he was still in high school, and it had become his bold personal motto, typed and carried on a slip of paper folded into his wallet: God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.. . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? ... What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from t
ime to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

  Today had been a costly beginning. The next event would carry a higher price tag in blood and treasure.

  Hunt left to go clean himself up, get dinner, and take a nap. Dr. Gillani barely noticed that he was gone. She was observing the process carefully, watching Yasmin’s movements, listening to Dr. Samson’s prompts, paying special attention to the subject’s responses.

  A normal sleep consisted of five stages. The first was a light sleep, in which the brain threw off waking agitation in the form of theta waves. Theta brain waves were also generated during states of high creativity and emotional excitement; they were the source of daydreams. It had been Dr. Gillani’s belief, during her studies at Universität Heidelberg, that phobias, habits, and even mental illness could be treated by riding what she called “counter-instructions” into the brain on the peaks of those outgoing theta waves, almost like surfing, as she put it in her doctoral thesis.

  Her paper was greeted with reactions ranging from cautious interest to condemnation. The sheer bulk of overwritten instructions was deemed too large to be simply slipped into the mind. But Dr. Gillani’s goal was not to assault, but to invade, like a Trojan horse. To relax the subject and have him or her take the new instructions right to the part of the brain that was least defended, the home of the most pleasant thoughts.

  Mild hypnosis simulated stage one sleep, stimulated theta production. The voice kept the subject locked in that phase, relaxed but only nominally asleep, never allowing him or her to go to stage two. Together, the subject and the voice went to an idyllic spot. There, the voice walked the subject through new instructions. It introduced the subject to the marble, which was his or her real-world connection to the hypnotic suggestion. In the case of “cures,” as they had done with Jacob Trask’s daughter, no personal contact was necessary. The marble was sufficient to keep the suggestion alive, an object small enough to be carried, to be inconspicuous, to keep the owner attached to the commands they carried inside their head. In the case of “phased actions,” the rules were different. A phone call from the control voice, from Dr. Samson—a fellow student in Germany—would direct the individual to the marble and return him or her to the Trojan instructions.

  Though relatively straightforward, this was a delicate procedure. Pushing any individual too hard, too fast, in a direction that did not seem natural would cause the process to derail entirely and they would have to begin again—but with new, subconscious barriers against intrusion.

  There was also the likely potential of leaving subjects “unglued,” an informal, more descriptive word she preferred over the technical terminology. Should subjects not receive the full series of treatments, it left them deeply in tune with their darker “Jekyll” side and out of touch with their two or three other, more passive character personas. People “worked” because their various characters performed together in harmony. But subjects, having exercised and strengthened these mental pathways, could easily access and give preference to their dominant, more negative character at will, with very little instigation, and the other parts of their personality did not have the means or power to break free from the dominant character’s almighty grasp.

  As was the case early in Dr. Gillani’s studies with a local German author, whom she referred to in her paper as patient 8R. He was insistently curious about her cerebral process and wanted to personally experience the effects of her, at that time, mind-regression techniques. Making him aware of the “bad idea” quotient of his request, Dr. Gillani reluctantly agreed to give him a private demonstration and she arranged to meet 8R off campus, at his home across the river in Dossenheim.

  During his first consenting hypnosis session with Dr. Gillani, she accidentally accessed and provoked 8R’s heavily charged creative side, his dominant, darkest nature, to the point where it was necessary for Dr. Gillani to leave the room, then completely exit the house for a few minutes to simply remove her presence from the enraged subject. Patient 8R believed he was a ten-year-old boy, not in present times, who had injured his younger sister and was being punished by his father, a role Dr. Gillani played in his mind, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to be harmed by him again. Of course, 8R no longer realized he had the strength of a grown man and was lashing out like a wild child.

  Against her better judgment, Dr. Gillani returned inside to fully awaken and disengage the subject, who remained still somewhat unrepressed after she did so. Agreeing to meet again at a later date for successive sessions to correct her oversights, 8R was temporarily released back into his everyday routine. Dr. Gillani never heard back from patient 8R.

  Several weeks later Dr. Gillani learned that 8R had perfunctorily punched his way through his bathroom door to get at his mother and didn’t stop until her skull was as fractured as the plywood barrier. While Dr. Gillani had always been secretly, scientifically curious to see the consequences of leaving someone divided and unchecked, it ultimately became a necessary operating procedure for her to restrain patients, to hold them against their will if necessary, and she privately vowed to never again leave a patient unfinished. Unglued.

  Like the subject in Baltimore, Yasmin had to be done right. Compared to those others, however, they had less time and more instructions to convey.

  The scientist watched intently. Dr. Samson had guided Yasmin through the palace with gentle nudges. The movement had to be her own choice; otherwise, her brain would sense that it was being manipulated. Now Samson needed to get her to a bookmark, a place where they could bed her, put her briefly into a REM sleep, during which she would be given a control word. In case something went wrong, the word would take her back there instantly.

  Dr. Gillani leaned toward the microphone connected to her colleague’s headphones.

  “Emile, try to jump her.”

  “All right,” Dr. Samson replied. He spoke to Yasmin. “What do you see inside the tower?”

  “A great many stairs,” Yasmin told him.

  “You don’t need to climb them,” the voice told her.

  “Oh?”

  “You’re a princess, remember?”

  “Yes ...”

  “In a fairy tale,” he coaxed. “A magical fairy tale.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Just go there,” he told her. “Think of the top of the tower.”

  The young woman was silent for several moments. “I see! It worked. I’m there now.”

  “Very well done. Look around. What do you see?”

  “A beautiful room with white furniture. A dresser. A bed with a gossamer canopy. A full-length mirror. I see pictures of my parents framed in gold.”

  Dr. Gillani told him, “Take her to the marble first.”

  “All right.” To Yasmin he said, “Go to the dresser.”

  “Can I cross the rug? It seems so fragile.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go around it,” she said. “It’s such a lovely design. I want to admire it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The scientists watched as she smiled, as her eyes moved beneath her lids.

  “Are you still looking at the rug?” Dr. Samson asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Look ahead of you now. What do you see?”

  “I’m at the dresser. So many lovely things on top.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “There is a brush with a silver handle. A hand mirror. A jewelry box—”

  “Open it.” The voice waited a moment. “What do you see?”

  “Necklaces. Rings. Jewels.”

  “Do you see a bracelet?”

  “No—”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I don’t see it.”

  The voice hesitated. “Do you see a watch?”

  “Let me look. Yes, there is a watch.”

  “Very good. Take it out and put it on.”

  “All right.”

  The voice waited again. “Is it on?” />
  “Yes. It sparkles in the sunlight.”

  “There is a marble in your hand,” the voice went on. “Do you feel it?”

  “I do.”

  “It will sparkle, too.”

  “Let me see.” Her wrist moved up. She admired the object through closed eyes. “It’s so ... mysterious.”

  “Put it on the face of the watch.”

  Yasmin frowned slightly. “I don’t understand.”

  “Be careful,” Dr. Gillani warned. “You mustn’t confuse her.” That would take Yasmin to a problem-solving corner of the brain. We should have gone to the bed first, she thought. But connection to the marble was a bigger prize, would cut the need for a bookmark and an hour of sleep from the process.

  “The marble is like a little sun, is it not?” Dr. Samson asked.

  A smile played across Yasmin’s lips. “Yellow ... gleaming.” The smile stayed. “Yes.”

  Dr. Gillani exhaled. Her colleague had kept Yasmin in the illusion.

  “If you take that little sun and place it on top of the crystal, it will stay there.”

  “It will?”

  “Yes. The light of both will merge into something beautiful, something worthy of a princess, something you will like very, very much. Don’t release it when you put it there. Continue to hold it so you can feel its warmth.”

  “All right,” Yasmin said.

  Dr. Gillani pressed a button on the console in front of her. The magnetic strap around Yasmin’s right hand was released. She watched as Yasmin moved her wrist to the marble, held it there.

  “Oh, yes!” Yasmin said. “I am holding the sun!”

  Until she relaxed, Dr. Gillani did not realize how tightly her shoulders had been tensed. The rest of the process should go relatively quickly now. Dr. Samson would suggest that Yasmin change into something regal and would lead her to the closet. There, as she went through the gowns, she would find a chest. In that chest would be the items she would need for the mission. They would be made an anachronistic part of her fantasy, one in which—with Dr. Samson’s guidance—she would come to believe the palace was under attack.