Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

“Yeah, another reading,” she said, staring at his skin. It was the first bare chest she had seen in thirty-two years. “A journal, I’m reading a very, very old journal,” she said sleepily.

  He put a hand on her thigh and lifted her skirt a few inches. “Come on, we had a deal. You were supposed to tell me about the readings you do.”

  “Now?” She smiled wickedly, heady from the wine.

  “Deal’s a deal.”

  She shook her head like a stubborn child.

  “I’ve had too much wine,” she said.

  “All right, then tell me about your journal.”

  “It’s not my journal”—she made a face—“it’s a soldier’s journal.” She turned her head and yawned. “He’s dead. He died in an asylum.”

  “Is it a good journal?”

  Sherry shook her head. “It’s a sad journal.”

  “Why would someone want to read a sad journal?” Weir lifted her skirt another two inches, rubbing his thumb across her thigh. “There’s too much sadness in the world already.”

  “There is.” She nodded slowly.

  “So you are interested in it from a historical perspective.”

  “History,” Sherry whispered hoarsely.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Friend,” she said.

  “Old friend?” he asked.

  “Nah, I just met her once. Just last week, when I called you and told you I was out of town. She gave me the diary I told you about. It was her late husband’s.”

  “How did you come to meet her?”

  “Friend of a friend, as they say. I knew someone from up there and it was just some local people being nice to me.”

  “Did your first friend read the diary too?”

  “Huh-uh, she just glanced at it.”

  “May I see it?” Weir asked softly, carefully.

  “Brigham’s,” she said, opening her eyes and straining to look toward the door. She shook her head no, as if remembering something. “No, it’s at my neighbor’s,” she said, starting to rise and feeling very drunk and wondering if Brigham was waiting for her guest to leave.

  She looked at the door. He was, she thought. He’d be watching from his window. Looking to see if Weir’s car was still in the driveway. And it was long, long past ten.

  “I’ve got to clean up and get to bed,” she said, sitting up and suddenly reeling. She buried her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. Her hair was piled all around the sides of her face.

  “It’s very late,” she said.

  “All right.” He rubbed his palms together and started buttoning his shirt. “Then I’ll help you clean up.”

  “No, go, it’s late. Maybe I’ll just leave it all till morning.”

  “As you wish,” Weir said.

  Sherry stood and walked to the door and unlocked it.

  “I still owe you a tour of my office and the museum.” He slipped his arm around her and pulled her into a kiss. Then he undid his pants to tuck his shirt in.

  Sherry turned the knob.

  “Call me,” she said, and pulled the door open to see Brian Metcalf.

  “Brian…” she said, leaning with all her weight against the door frame to keep from swaying. “Brian, this is Troy, he’s a…”

  Troy was slowly zipping his pants and then he buckled his belt with a smile.

  Metcalf turned and walked away.

  23

  “Moore says there is a journal. Monahan’s journal.”

  Case let the pen fall from his hand and Troy watched the color drain from his stepfather’s face. They were in Case’s library, in the south wing of the Lancaster estate. The old man backed the wheelchair up to free himself from the desk and toggled forward, advancing to the windows and looking out, then back to his stepson.

  He waited a moment before walking toward him. Outside the window, beyond his full white head of hair, there were gardeners pruning flowers and green hummingbirds leapfrogging the plumes of purple hostas.

  “Where?” Case said at last.

  “In Philadelphia, at her neighbor’s house, he’s a retired admiral.”

  “The older man she was with at the psychiatric hospital?”

  “I can only assume,” Weir said.

  “How do you know? How do you know it’s his? That it’s Monahan’s?”

  “She said she’s reading a soldier’s journal. A soldier who died in an asylum.”

  Case stared at his stepson.

  Troy Weir shrugged.

  Case locked eyes with him, but the younger man didn’t think Case was looking at him. He seemed somewhere far, far away.

  “Doctor?”

  Suddenly Case pounded the top of a serpentine tea table, snapping the top from the delicately carved legs. “Goddamn it!” he yelled with a fury that belied his eighty-three years. He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling, all the muscles and leaders in his neck stretching like twine. He looked almost biblical for a minute, as if the backdrop of morning light that haloed his white hair was heaven-sent, to lift and deliver him from his agony. Troy knew right then that whatever else this journal held, it contained the ruin of Case’s lifetime of achievements.

  “I think it’s time you told me what this is all about,” Weir said.

  Case was still struggling in the throes of this new reality, the knowledge that he had lost a sizable chunk of his armor, and was seriously vulnerable. Weir thought he looked like a man imploding, all the grace and swagger and authority he liked to project dissipating until all that was left was an old man in a wheelchair.

  Case turned his head and gave the younger man a chilling look, his face white and empty as a death mask. Then he nodded, motored to the door and pushed it the rest of the way closed, then spun to face the leather sofa and chair.

  Troy walked to the bar, poured an inch of vodka, carried it to the leather chair, and handed it to the old man.

  Case was regaining composure, but only partially. He looked shaken. Troy would have loved to know what signals the old man’s autonomic nerves were sending from the stem of his brain. Once upon a time he had studied the autonomic nerves’ effect on heart rhythms during times of great stress. There was actually a percentage, albeit small, of people who died from heart arrhythmia due to sudden stress. The proverbial “died of fright” scenario. He had actually introduced the arrhythmia study to MIRA Project members from the Department of Defense. It was yet another means of close-contact assassination, he’d suggested, but that was a whole other story.

  “You have come to know Case and Kimble’s most closely guarded secret,” Case said, “and not because of any particular knowledge you possess. I have no shortage of experts at my disposal. You were chosen to liaise with the National Security Agency because you think in a way that better serves my purpose. You do not limit MIRA’s potential with a lot of unnecessary concern for risk.

  “I was held in high esteem following World War Two”—Case swept an arm to encompass the many pictures on the walls—“one of the very few and youngest minds at the heart of the Manhattan Project.” He nodded self-righteously, sat up, and the wheel of his chair made a splintering noise against an edge of his antique table.

  “So when the army learned of a mind-control machine the Russians were working on in 1950, they came to me.” He tapped the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “I was promised anything. Money, home, laboratory, access to their latest nuclear data, test subjects to continue my work involving radiation, literally anything.”

  “We had the primitive hypothesis in those days concerning the effects of radio waves. Low-frequency sound being directed at human beings, highly concentrated microwaves in which we melded visual images and voices.”

  “LIDA,” Weir said.

  “Yes, LIDA.” Case nodded, taking a sip of the vodka.

  “The Russians,” Case went on, “had their working model in Korea at the time and the army had proof they were using it on American pilots. Jason Kimble was at Princeton, that’s where they
sent the pilots who returned and that was how Jason and I first came to know each other. I was supposed to re-create the device based on intelligence smuggled out of the Kremlin. The army gave us test subjects, guinea pigs, from the front lines of Seoul.”

  “Disposable guinea pigs,” Troy said.

  Case shrugged. “I was told their absence could be explained, but only if things came to worse.” He spread out his open arms. “That was part of doing business when you’re at the cutting edge of science. Explorers, test pilots, researchers had always put their lives on the line.” Case wore a look of disgust. “Had,” he repeated. “Oh, the boys knew there was a risk. They knew they were walking away from all but certain death in Korea. Danger is synonymous with research. To find the threshold of a thing is to go out and touch its edge. Someone needed to do that. We didn’t know about the long-term effects of radiation. We didn’t know what exposures our boys could stand under attack. We didn’t know how to protect ourselves from radio waves and being brainwashed into submission by the enemy. We needed to get out in front of the game. To find out what they were doing over there and contain it.”

  “But there never was such a thing as the brainwash machine, was there? The LIDA machine was a failure. Hocus-pocus. Soviet propaganda,” Troy said.

  Case shook his head emphatically “No, no. That was what we reported. I was on the inside. There were cases, many cases we could never explain. Those machines worked. They just weren’t predictable. The brain was the unknown quantity in the equation. The brain’s reaction to the frequencies was unforeseeable. Some men acted upon suggestion. Some who did not and seemed impervious went on about their business for days and weeks at a time and then suddenly something tripped their brain and they went on the attack.”

  “They were trained to resist?”

  “Of course,” Case said. “They were supposed to do everything in their power not to act on a suggestion.”

  “And the strongest motivation you could hope to overcome would be their reluctance to commit murder. To assassinate.”

  Case shook his head and a cruel smile formed on his lips. “We thought of one even stronger,” he said. “Suicide.”

  Case raised his drink and Troy noticed that the doctor’s hand was shaking.

  “It was very dangerous stuff. We had to watch our subjects constantly. To make sure they weren’t going to harm one another. A psychiatrist monitored them daily. We removed dangerous articles from the dormitory. There was always an MP posted outside the entrance.”

  “But Monahan got out just the same.”

  Case looked at the young man. “Yes, he got out.”

  “How could he have kept a journal without your knowing it?”

  “We knew. Hell, we encouraged them to keep diaries. Their writings were evidence of their state of mind before and after the tests. We went through their bunks while they were out in the labs. We knew what they were thinking. We wanted to know what was happening to them as the tests proceeded.”

  “Where did you think the journal was after all these years?” Troy asked.

  “We didn’t know. We talked to the security men from the asylum who had found him. We asked if the kid had anything with him. All of them said he hadn’t. All but one had been together when they were with him. It didn’t seem likely that four people would conspire to hide something as innocuous as a journal as fast as we got to them, and they were interviewed within an hour of bringing him to the asylum. They didn’t have time to contrive a story.”

  Case sipped more of his drink. “We went up there on the summit many times afterward, looking for the book, but it never turned up. After that we could only hope it was lost to time and the elements.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” Troy said. “Hoping for something.”

  Case’s expression remained fixed.

  “This is where the all but one comes in, isn’t it?” Troy added.

  “The security chief. Jack McCullough. He was the one who found Monahan’s body. He was alone with the boy for over an hour. He told the ER doctor he thought the boy might have intentionally jumped from the cliff wall.”

  “So you questioned him?”

  “Not me, but the right people took him aside,” Case said. “He was convincing.”

  “What happened to the kid afterward?”

  “He was already in the asylum. Our best psychiatrists determined he was brain-dead. There was nothing we could do to make him go away so we decided to leave him there. Where better to tuck someone away than a mental institution in the Catskills? The government could pay for his interminable convalescence, and we could monitor his progress from time to time to ensure he was no threat. Standing orders were left for the administrator to contact our foundation should he ever awaken or pass away.”

  “And the security chief, McCullough?”

  Case looked at his hands. “He committed suicide.”

  Troy looked out the window, the slightest smile forming at his lips. He shook his head in admiration of the doctor.

  “It was I who laid the groundwork for MIRA. Block by block until what you have seen today is the most sophisticated mind-control device on the planet. A virtual library of human emotions, thirty years of EEGs catalogued and waiting for the moment they could be released in microwaves. Like a bullet they enter the body, with a complete set of blueprints, which guides the target’s every move. In ten years we will be able to direct such a bullet at the masses. We will be able to turn armies on their heels and send them walking and after all the lives it cost to create it, we will win wars without a single shot being fired. We will save whole nations. We will turn dictators into apostles and terrorists into lambs.”

  Case spun in the direction of the bar and poured another tumbler of scotch. “No one can read that journal and live, Troy.”

  He studied the old man a long moment and grunted.

  “Is that a problem?” Case asked.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Who has seen it?”

  “Obviously the security man who found Monahan had a wife or a child who kept his belongings. Sherry Moore found out about it somehow, so then there is Sherry Moore herself, and her neighbor.”

  “Troy, I think you now understand the gravity of the situation. This is why you have become so essential to what I do. I need this to go away, but with the finest touch. No clues, no loose ends, no inferences. Do nothing unnecessary, but end it. I want you to understand that. It must be very, very clean.”

  24

  Sherry’s mouth was dry, her head still pounding from last night’s wine. She wished she could forget how the evening had ended, but she kept seeing Brian Metcalf’s face at her door. She was reasonably sure she was dressed as she’d stood there, but Troy’s shirt had been out and they both must have looked quite disheveled.

  “You call him?”

  “No answer,” she said softly.

  “You going to call him again?”

  “Just read,” she whispered.

  Brigham, looking stern, put on his glasses and lifted the book.

  Sherry closed her eyes.

  November 16th

  Well the other group is all gone and more arrived to replace them. Tim Pollock and I are the two most senior guys in the barrack now. The replacements are straight back from the front lines in Korea. They couldn’t believe we were in Seoul two months ago ourselves. They said we did the right thing getting out of there. They said Chinese soldiers were found amongst the North Korean dead north of the 38th Parallel. If Chinese communists decided to join North Korea they would overrun the American lines with millions of new troops.

  Tim was beginning to suffer migraine headaches so they took him to the infirmary. I only hear the voices, but in time they begin to run together and the noise is overwhelming. Both of us look like we’ve been in the desert, our skin is flaking and red and our temperatures are running high. They say it will go away as soon as we get outside again. We haven’t seen the sun or sky or breathed fresh air si
nce the day we arrived. We were told it was necessary, both to keep the tests secret and to ensure the integrity of our results, whatever that is supposed to mean. They started giving us shots to counteract our symptoms. Just supplements they said.

  November 19th, 1950

  The machine on the table in R-lab has become my closest friend. I have talked to it more than to any human being in the past four days. Actually I haven’t talked to anybody since Tim was taken to the infirmary.

  I am beginning to get the headaches too, but with only five weeks to discharge I don’t say anything to the doctor. I don’t want to end up in their infirmary. I want to be home for the New Year and for good. I want to put this war behind me.

  I have learned something about solitude while I am here.

  Tim stopped talking for more than a day before he collapsed. I asked him what was wrong and I assumed it was the headaches, but he showed no sign of pain. He just lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling. And he was crying.

  The number thirty comes to mind more often. Thirty is just before can’t and on is just after thirty and there is comfort in the knowledge that can’t and thirty and on precede the gun.

  “This is really getting hard to hear,” Sherry said.

  Brigham nodded and laid the book on its spine. “Take a break?”

  She nodded and went to check the answering machine. Someone had been calling her during the last hour of Brigham’s reading.

  “Your friend?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Brian,” she said distantly. “Wait…” and she held up a finger as more messages came through. After the fourth, a frown formed on her face.

  She walked back to the chair as she punched numbers into the receiver. “Two calls from Kelly O’Shaughnessy in Wildwood.”

  “You guys still talk?”

  Sherry shrugged, pushing Send and lifting the phone to her ear. “It’s been awhile.”

  “Kelly,” she said after a long moment. “Sherry. How are you?”

  Kelly O’Shaughnessy had been a rookie lieutenant in charge of Wildwood, New Jersey’s detective division in 2006, when a string of boardwalk murders brought Sherry to the oceanside resort—an incredibly sad time in her life. That’s where she lost her best friend, John Payne.