The Syndrome

by John Case

  McBride thought about it. “So it would be like hearing voices,” he suggested.

  “It would be like hearing God,” Shapiro corrected. “But the implant is just a part of the process. The programmer would have other tools…”

  “Like what?”

  “Hypnosis… sensory deprivation…”

  “And how would that work?” Adrienne asked.

  Shapiro pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and replied. “Well, the subject could be given hypnotic suggestions, preparing him for the experience he’s about to have. Then we’d lower him into a blackout tank filled with saltwater that’s been heated to the same temperature as his body—around 98 degrees. It’s a very strange experience—like floating in space.”

  “You’ve tried it?”

  “Of course,” Shapiro replied. “I’ve tried everything.” He paused, and then went on. “After an hour or so in the tank, it’s impossible to say where your skin ends and the water begins. You just… dissolve.” He nodded at the cup in front of Adrienne. “Like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. And when that happens, the subject becomes… malleable.”

  McBride listened in fascinated disbelief, while Adrienne stared at the former spook, imagining her sister floating in the blackout tank.

  “After a protracted period—”

  “What’s ‘protracted’?” McBride demanded.

  “A day. A week. A month,” Shapiro told him. “The point is that, after a while, the subject’s identity begins to disintegrate. It’s like a near death experience, with all the senses shutting down—or seeming to. You can imagine: once you’re in the tank, there’s nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell, no sense of touch. No sense of time. If you think losing your mind is unsettling, try losing your body.” Shapiro paused, and a thin smile curled above his chin. “Even so, some people find the experience… enlightening.”

  “And others?” Adrienne asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Others don’t.”

  McBride leaned forward: “Then what?”

  Shapiro gave him a sidelong glance. “Then? Well, then you take it to the next level.”

  “Which is what?”

  “‘Intensification.’ Once the subject’s identity is broken down, he’s basically a tabula rasa. It’s a relatively simple matter to imprint whatever ‘memories’ you like.”

  “How?” McBride asked.

  “We’d create scenarios compatible with his psychological profile, and turn them into films. The subject would watch the films in tandem with a subliminal stream of audiograms.”

  “Like in a theater,” Adrienne suggested.

  Shapiro chuckled. “No,” he said, “it’s more engaging than that. He’d wear a special helmet, one that’s fitted with speakers and jacks. Audio in, audio out—that sort of thing. Then we’d plug him in and…”

  “What?”

  “Well, from the subject’s perspective, it’s like sitting six feet away from a sixty-two-inch television screen, watching 3-D images in binaural sound. It’s a very involving experience and that’s just the conscious part of it all. Add hypnosis and drugs and… it’s a lot like shaping clay. Soft clay.”

  “Drugs,” Adrienne said. She flashed on that little vial in Nikki’s computer: Placebo #1. “What kind of drugs?”

  Shapiro made a face. “Pyschedelics of every description. We had a great deal of success with a drug from Ecuador called burrandaga. And with Ketamine—more commonly used as an animal tranquilizer. Both of them cause a sort of dissociative amnesia.”

  “Ketamine,” Adrienne said. “Isn’t that one of the date rape drugs?”

  “Precisely,” Shapiro said. “It would be very effective for that purpose for the same reason it was effective for our purposes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you wanted to ‘take advantage of someone,’ as we used to say, ketamine has the effect of disconnecting a person from her body. Whatever happens seems to be occurring in another dimension. And these events fail to take hold in the memory.”

  “There’s a built-in amnesiac effect?”

  “Precisely. Afterwards, the rape—or whatever—it’s as if it never happened. Subjects never remembered being in the tank, or the helmet, or being bombarded with ‘new memories.’”

  “So you’d have this person in this helmet. And what would… what would the person be looking at?” McBride asked.

  “Men in hoods,” Adrienne muttered. “Satanists.”

  Shapiro gave her a peculiar look, then turned to answer McBride’s question. “It would depend.”

  “On what?” McBride demanded.

  “On what you wanted him to remember—and what you wanted him to forget.”

  McBride sipped his tea, and found that it was cold. “How long would this take?” he asked.

  Shapiro shook his head. “Hard to say. If you’re tweaking the subject’s identity, that’s one thing. If you’re building someone from the ground up—that’s quite another.”

  “‘Tweaking the identity,’“ Adrienne repeated, her voice heavy with a mix of wonder and incredulity.

  “Right.” Shapiro rearranged his legs on the cushion. “I’m curious,” he said, shifting gears in the conversation. “What was your relationship with—” he turned toward McBride “—with this young woman’s sister?”

  “I was her therapist,” McBride said.

  “And she came to your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, as it turned out, both of you had a prosthesis… ?”

  “Right.”

  Shapiro frowned. “How can you be sure of that? Did she have a CAT scan or—”

  “My sister was cremated,” Adrienne explained. “I found the implant in her ashes.”

  The scientist blanched. “Christ,” he muttered. Then he changed the subject, or seemed to. “Tell me something,” he said, turning to McBride. “Did you leave your apartment often?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, when you were practicing as a therapist—did you get out much? Or did you stay at home?”

  McBride’s shoulders rose and fell. “I guess I stayed pretty close to home.”

  “I’ll bet,” Shapiro told him.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it’s very likely that there was a monitoring site in your building. The apartment across the hall—”

  “—or next door,” Adrienne suggested.

  “Upstairs, or on the floor below… the point is: they’d have wanted a way to reinforce the signal. And one of the consequences would be that once you were out of range, you’d begin to feel uncomfortable—unless you were on medication. Were you taking medication?”

  “No,” McBride said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I just watched television.” He cleared his throat. “But what you’re telling me is that people can be turned into puppets and zombies—”

  “Automatons,” Adrienne interjected.

  Shapiro nodded. “Colloquially speaking, yes.”

  Adrienne looked away, tears in her eyes.

  “So you could do whatever you wanted with them,” McBride continued. “Make them laugh or cry, walk in front of a car—”

  “—or give them a childhood that wasn’t their own,” Adrienne suggested.

  Shapiro heaved a sigh. Turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Yeah.” He drew a sharp breath, reached out toward the flower arrangement and tapped his fingernail against the arching blade of grass. Exhaled. “Look,” he said, “I’m full of remorse for my part in this research. And I’m sorry if what I did has touched your lives. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You can help us understand,” Adrienne said.

  “Can I?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I want to know who did this,” Adrienne told him.

  Shapiro inclined his head. “Of course you do. But why? You say it’s because you want to ‘understand’—but I suspect it’s bec
ause you want revenge.”

  “Look,” McBride said, “you can call it whatever you like, but… “ He paused. A low-pressure front was moving through his head—at least, that’s what it felt like—and if he didn’t wait for it to pass, he’d go off like a flashbulb in Shapiro’s face. Because what he really wanted to do was take this born-again Buddhist, with his pared down life and his cute little cups of tea, and knock the hell out of him. Instead, he said, “I’m a wreck.”

  “What!?” Shapiro was startled by the remark, and Adrienne, too, seemed taken aback.

  “I’m sitting here with you in this very nice house, drinking tea,” McBride told him, “and I may seem fine. ‘No blood, no foul!’ Right? Wrong. I’m a walking shipwreck—no shit. Whoever did this… whoever did this took everything from me. My childhood. My parents. My self. I’ll never be the same. They took every memory I ever had, subverted every dream, and wasted I don’t know how many years of my life. Even now, when I try to think about it, it’s a blank. It’s all a blank until she came through the door, yelling about how she was going to sue me.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “Which is just a way of saying: I’ve lost a couple of things… and I’m not talking about books and furniture and clothes.”

  Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “What about my sister?” Adrienne asked. “What happened to her was worse than murder. They turned her inside out and drove her to suicide. What about her?”

  Shapiro closed his eyes for several seconds, then opened them. “The point I was trying to make is that what you’re doing—”

  “‘Doing’?” Adrienne repeated. “We’re not ‘doing’ anything—except asking questions.”

  “Exactly,” Shapiro said. “And my point is: that could be a dangerous thing to do.”

  The three of them were quiet for a moment. Finally, McBride said, “I want to stop whoever did this to me from doing it to anyone else.”

  Shapiro nodded slowly. Turned to Adrienne?” “You said your sister killed someone?”

  Adrienne nodded. “An old man. In a wheelchair.” She paused. “And then she killed herself.”

  Shapiro reached across the table for McBride’s medical file and, opening it, began to leaf slowly through its pages. After a while, he looked up and said, “I’d like to talk to your doctor… this man, Shaw.” Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. “Is that a problem?” Shapiro asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Adrienne said, remembering Shaw’s tight little smile and the suggestion that she tell Shapiro she’d learned about him from watching a documentary.

  Shapiro smiled, almost sheepishly. “I want to be sure that you are who you say you are—and that what you say happened, happened.”

  “You’ve got the file,” Adrienne told him.

  “‘The file,’“ Shapiro repeated with a soft chuckle. “The three of us are sitting here, talking about counterfeiting human beings—and you’re surprised that I should want to verify the contents of a manila folder?”

  In the end, Adrienne couldn’t see how talking to Shapiro could harm Ray Shaw. And it would only take a minute. All Shapiro wanted was confirmation that they weren’t making the whole thing up.

  Shapiro made the call from a cell-phone in the kitchen. They could hear him talking softly, but not well enough to understand what was being said. After a minute or two, he returned to the living room, and sat down beside them.

  “So?” McBride asked. “What did he say?”

  Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t able to reach him.”

  “But—”

  “I spoke with his wife…”

  Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. Shapiro seemed strangely subdued. “And what did she say?” Adrienne asked.

  “She was distraught. She said her husband was struck by a car outside the hospital last night. The police are looking for the driver.”

  Though the three of them were sitting on the floor, McBride felt his stomach drop, as if he were in a plane, and the plane had flown into an air pocket. “Will he be all right?”

  Shapiro looked at them. “No.”

  Chapter 35

  McBride replenished the wood stove and stacked wood outside as the old scientist cooked dinner for the three of them—a simple meal of jasmine rice and homegrown vegetables, served up with a bottle of Old Vine Red. It was delicious. While they ate, Shapiro reprised the sordid history of the CIA’s mind control program.

  “Most people think it was a response to what the communists were doing in Central Europe and Korea. There was a show trial involving a priest named Mindzenty, and lots of talk of ‘brainwashing.’ But the truth is, the program began long before that.”

  “‘The program’?” Adrienne asked, recalling the Web site on her sister’s computer.

  Shapiro frowned. “That’s what we called it among ourselves. But whatever the name—and it had a lot of names—it began in Europe during the Second World War, when the OSS was searching for a ‘truth drug’ they could use in interrogations.”

  Pouring himself a glass of wine, the scientist explained that the project expanded after the war, with funding from the newly created CIA. By 1955, more than 125 experiments were under way in some of the country’s best universities and worst prisons. Still other research was carried out in mental institutions, and in “civilian settings” using “unwitting volunteers.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” McBride asked.

  “It means we set up cameras in whorehouses, and tested drugs on the johns—without their knowledge,” Shapiro replied. “It means that we used drug addicts like Kleenex—and homosexuals, too. Communists. Perverts. Hoodlums.” He paused, and added with a smile, “Liberals and Dodger fans.” Then he turned serious again, and went on to explain that in the climate of the times—which is to say, amid the permafrost of the Cold War—America’s cultural conservatism was such that “transgressive personalities” were regarded as “fair game.” “We didn’t need ‘informed consent,’“ Shapiro pointed out, “because our research was classified. It was in the ‘national interest’—which made it, and us, exempt from normal constraints.”

  “So it was easy to hide,” Adrienne suggested.

  “We didn’t ‘hide’ anything—it was secret. And while some of us had ethical concerns about testing drugs and medical procedures on unwitting subjects… well, those concerns became irrelevant when you realized you were dealing with the enemy.”

  “I thought the Soviet Union was the enemy,” McBride remarked.

  “Of course. But the Cold War was as much a domestic jihad as it was an international one. It was a war for the American Way—which, I can assure you, did not (at least not at that time) include gays, lunatics, junkies or… sinners, even. They were all fair game.”

  “What kind of research are we talking about?” McBride asked.

  The old man hesitated, thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, as much to himself as his guests, “it’s hardly secret anymore. There were hearings twenty years ago. Books and law-suits.”

  “Right. So what kind of research are we talking about?” McBride repeated.

  “Drugs and hypnosis, telepathy and psychic driving. Remote viewing. Aversive conditioning—degradation and pain.”

  “‘Degradation and pain’?” Adrienne asked, her voice disbelieving.

  “How to induce it, endure it, use it—how to measure it,” Shapiro replied. “Not that the pain experiments were particularly productive.”

  “Why not?” McBride wondered.

  The scientist sighed. “We had difficulty finding reputable psychologists to do the research. And those we did find weren’t as objective as we’d have liked.”

  McBride looked puzzled. “How so?”

  “The studies kept getting mixed up with sadism—just as the drug experiments got mixed up with sex. In fact, it all got mixed up with sex. And that colored the results.”

  “You mentioned ‘psychic driving,’“ Adrienne said
.

  Shapiro shifted uncomfortably on his cushion. “Yes.”

  “Well… ?”

  The retired CIA man considered the question. Finally, he replied, “‘Psychic driving’ refers to… how should I put it? Terminal experiments in which the subject is given relatively large doses of a psychedelic drug and placed in a dark and sealed environment… where he… or she… is exposed to a continuous loop of recorded messages.”

  “‘A sealed environment’?” Adrienne wondered.

  “We used morgue drawers,” Shapiro explained.

  McBride gaped, even as he tried to formulate the question on his mind. “When you say ‘terminal experiments’—”

  “No one died,” Shapiro assured him. “But the subjects weren’t expected to recover. And most of them didn’t.”

  “So we’re talking about—”

  “Six hundred micrograms of LSD—daily,” Shapiro said. “For sixty to one-hundred-eight days. In darkness.”

  Adrienne and McBride were silent for a long time. Finally, Adrienne whispered, “How could you do that?”

  Shapiro looked her in the eye, and deliberately misunderstood the question. “As I recall, we catheterized the subject, fed her intravenously, and gave her a colostomy to facilitate things.”

  “Jesus Christ,” McBride muttered.

  “Refill?” Shapiro asked.

  Adrienne shivered, and looked away. McBride shook his head. Shapiro just closed his eyes and sat there, savoring the Old Vine Red, the fire, the company, and his own regrets. When, after a while, he opened his eyes and began to speak, the effect was unsettling—as if he’d been watching them all the time. Indeed, the transition was so fast, it made Adrienne think of a bird of prey, an eagle or hawk winking at her with its nictitating membrane. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” Shapiro told them. “You’re thinking I’m a war criminal.”

  Neither of them said a word.

  “Well,” Shapiro concluded, “I suppose you had to be there.” He sipped his wine, and looked at them. “It’s easy, now, to condemn what was done then. But the truth is, the program was built by people whose motives were as pure as the driven snow.”