Sleeping Bear

by Connor Sullivan

  “This is where you live?”

  “Most of the time,” Artur said, without turning around. “I prefer it over the residential rooms. Nobody bothers me here.”

  Cassie contemplated the guard that stood blocking the door, his blacked-out visor reflecting the gadgets and gizmos in the room. The guard tilted his chin up toward the ceiling and then directed his gaze at Cassie. It was the first time she had seen a vulnerable space in the guards’ protective attire—they usually wore a Kevlar neck wrap and sported a weapon, a Taser or a nightstick. “He doesn’t bother you?”

  Artur turned. “Who, him? No.”

  “Does he always watch you like this?”

  “Only if a subject is in the lab.”

  “Can he understand us?”

  “The guards only understand Russian and their thinking is limited to orders given to them by Captain Yermakova through her earpiece comm link.”

  Cassie studied the guard. “They don’t ever rebel?”

  “Their brains have been surgically and chemically castrated. The connectivity of their frontal and parietal lobes to that of their basal ganglias are completely altered.”

  “They’re lobotomized?”

  “It’s much more sophisticated than that. Their motor functions remain intact, but they have no sense of free will.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Because I both invented and carried out the procedure on each and every one of them.”

  Another wave of euphoria cascaded through Cassie’s body as she tried to understand what Artur had just said. The drug flowing through her veins felt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. She’d been given opioids by an army doctor once after she’d broken her ankle. The opioids had made her feel groggy, but this drug was different. “What did you give me?”

  Artur swiveled in his chair, offering a faint hint of a smile. “You like it?”

  “Very much.”

  “It’s a little cocktail I constructed—an opioid derivative that activates all the pleasure centers of the brain but doesn’t affect the prefrontal cortex. Meaning you still have your faculties—you feel clearheaded do you not?”

  “I feel amazing.” And Cassie did. Her mind wasn’t foggy in the least; in fact, she felt razor sharp. “You know your chemistry.”

  “My father was the brilliant chemist. It’s just a hobby of mine.” The scientist seemed oddly eager to talk, and with the clearness of the drug coursing through Cassie’s veins, a plan began to form in her mind.

  “Is that my brain?” Cassie asked, pointing at the computer monitor.

  “It is.”

  “In real time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you studying it?”

  “I’m accumulating data for my research.”

  Cassie thought back to when she was in the brightly lit room with Yermakova after her first encounter with the two tattooed men. She remembered Yermakova talking about her fMRI results—that Cassie’s brain was a bit of an anomaly—she decided to go with this. “When I was first brought here, Captain Yermakova said my brain responded well to the stress of combat. What did she mean?”

  “Ah,” Artur said. “Most people who go through highly stressful situations, like combat for instance, become victim to changes in their brain chemistry. Certain parts of the brain get overwhelmed, and other parts have to overcompensate. Every brain has different neural pathways, so every brain reacts differently to stressful stimuli.”

  Cassie tried to recall her sophomore-year biology class. “Like fight or flight?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And that’s what you study? Why some people fight and some flee?”

  “It is a component of my studies, yes, but not the main component.”

  Cassie could see that Artur was dying to talk about his work so she kept prodding. “What are you trying to achieve?”

  Artur took a proud breath. “The state has provided me with an inimitable environment not seen anywhere else in the world. An environment where I can study human beings under the pressures of live combat. At this facility I can study the subjects far away from the concerns of ethical, legal, and social impacts that would otherwise hinder my research in a modern society. Because of that, I have achieved more here in a decade than most scientists could possibly achieve in five lifetimes. Just look what I’ve done with the guards.” Artur walked back to his desk, collected his tablet, and returned to his chair. “Your file says you lost your husband to suicide, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a veteran, multiple deployments to the Middle East. He suffered from PTSD?”

  Cassie suddenly felt a wave of emotion and her throat constricted. She nodded her head.

  “Yes, a most unfortunate silent killer. And also why I was sent here.”

  “To study PTSD?”

  “To wipe it out entirely. To make sure no Russian soldier, no person who ever falls victim to neurological trauma ever has to go through what your husband went through.” He pointed to his computer monitor. “I’ve studied thousands of subjects at this facility. From psychopaths to the average Joe—as you Americans say. I’ve been able to map their brains before they’ve entered their trials and have been able to study their brains after. Over time, I’ve spotted recurring patterns in a subject’s response to stress. Through neuroimaging and neurointervention I’ve been able to dampen the negative effects of PTSD in suffering subjects, and I’m currently on the precipice of total and complete eradication.”

  “Neurointervention? You give them drugs?”

  “Think back to your last trial, you killed a man, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you feel?”

  “Nothing, but I didn’t have the time to think.”

  “And how is your mind responding to it now?”

  Cassie scrunched her eyes and tried to understand what Artur was saying. Honestly, she still hadn’t had the time to think about the fact that she had killed someone. “I… I don’t know.”

  Artur indicated the live 3-D rendition of Cassie’s brain. “From the time you came here, even before I stitched up your arm, I conducted tests and mapped out your brain. After your indoctrination trial with the two prisoners, you were mapped again. There were no neural changes whatsoever.”

  “What does that mean? I’m a psychopath?”

  “Far from it, actually. You exhibit none of the traits of a psychopath or even a sociopath—you display, in what we call in the world of neuroscience—guarded higher-brain functions. Your ventromedial prefrontal cortex, your amygdala, and your hippocampus all work the way they should during fight-or-flight stimulation, but unlike the vast majority of the population, those parts of your brain are able to return unchanged to an unstressful state much faster than normal.”

  “I am like this naturally?”

  “No, you’ve been given the intervening drug.”

  “When?” Cassie asked, shocked.

  “When you first arrived here. Your results are showing promise.”

  “So I won’t get PTSD?”

  “It’s hard to say. It will take many more trials to get a legitimate data sample.”

  Cassie looked down at her injured arm and thought for a moment and then said, “But what about Yermakova’s game? Doesn’t that disrupt your data samples? The subjects must die in the trials all the time, there is no way to control what happens out there.”

  “I am not a fan of Yermakova’s game. It is no secret, but it was the deal I had to accept when I was sent to this place.”

  “So what? You have a problem with Yermakova’s game, but you don’t have a problem with injecting humans with chemicals and sending them against their will to die? You don’t have a problem lobotomizing these guards?”

  Artur tilted his head. “I am a scientist, Subject 8831. I am also a prisoner at this facility just like you, but that doesn’t mean I am not a human being. I am making the most of my situation. I have the opportunit
y to change the world. I have the opportunity to save millions.”

  “You are a brainwashed prisoner,” Cassie said, pointing at the guard. “You’ve created the guards. The very thing that watches you and holds you captive. If that’s not brainwashed, I don’t know what is.”

  Artur tensed; Cassie had obviously struck a nerve. “Miss Gale, since I was thirteen I was taken from my family to be educated and controlled by the state. My existence has been confined to one sharashka or another, the only link to my family are these letters.” Artur placed a heavy hand on a mound of letters sitting on his desk. “Years ago, the state offered me a deal: cure PTSD and get my freedom back. Here I have a goal, here I have a drive to succeed, a drive to get out of this place and back to my mother and sisters.”

  Cassie gazed at the troubled scientist, whose hand still remained on the stack of letters. Cassie said, “You have been a prisoner your whole life and you’ve never tried to escape? You’ve never tried to fight your way out, get back to your family?”

  “Of course I have!” Artur snapped. “When I was a boy I tried to escape every week, but I never made it off sharashka grounds. The state sees everything, Miss Gale.”

  Since the beginning of their conversation, Cassie had been casing the room for the next component of her plan. She’d noted the surgical equipment on the tray, two arm’s lengths away from her gurney, especially the surgical knife. But one thing she also noticed was the lack of cameras in the laboratory.

  “The state doesn’t watch you in here, do they?”

  “No, here I have my privacy. A certain level of trust has been established between myself and Yermakova. Occasionally my minder watches me.” He flicked his head toward the unarmed guard.

  The minder you created, Cassie thought, but said, “So Yermakova doesn’t completely trust you.”

  “I don’t hold it against her. There is an old Russian saying: Trust but verify.”

  Cassie thought about that for a long moment, then went back to something Artur had said earlier. “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “You said he was a chemist; was he also a prisoner of the state?”

  “At Marfino, yes.”

  “And what does he think about his son being a prisoner at Yermakova’s facility?”

  “My father died when I was a boy, an explosion in his lab.”

  “I’m sure he would be sad that his son had to live out a worse existence than him. Why was he able to have a family and not you?”

  “Enough!” Artur spat and stood. “We’ve talked too much.” He walked over to Cassie, pulled the wires and electrodes from her head and took out the IVs.

  When his face got close enough, Cassie whispered, “Help me get out of this place.”

  “There is no getting out of this place, Subject 8831.”

  Artur motioned to the guard, barking something in Russian. The guard approached Cassie and dragged her onto her feet. Cassie pretended as if her legs couldn’t hold her weight and stumbled forward, landing over the surgical tray. Fingers folding around the surgical knife, she spun lightning fast, sunk the razor-sharp blade deep into the fleshy part of the guard’s unprotected neck, and sliced sideways.

  Hot, crimson blood erupted from under his helmet and the guard grabbed at his throat and stumbled back, knocking over a surprised Artur. Cassie moved fast, grabbing Artur by the scruff of his lab coat.

  The guard’s legs kicked violently then stopped moving.

  Cassie brought Artur in close. “We’re underground, right? You’re going to show me a way to the surface. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  Chapter 44

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  CIA EXECUTIVE SCIF

  “I THINK WE might have a problem, Susan,” McGavran said.

  “No shit we have a problem! I just heard a dead man’s voice spilling compartmented secrets to an air force colonel in Alaska, for Christ’s sake!”

  The old spymaster gazed at Carter from behind his bifocals as he reached into his tweed jacket and pulled out a microcassette player. He placed it on the table next to the steel briefcase and arched a bushy eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “Robert Gaines is alive! PEGASUS is alive?!”

  “He is,” McGavran said. “What do you mean you heard him spilling compartmented secrets?”

  Through gritted teeth, Carter explained that the Northern Unified Command had given her AD/MS Werner Monroe a USB of Robert Gaines’s distress call addressed to them. She held up the USB for McGavran to see. “You have ten seconds to explain what the hell is going on, Prescott, or so help me God.”

  “What would you like me to explain first, Susan?”

  “Let’s start with how Robert Gaines is still alive! Then maybe you can explain to me what the hell is going on in Alaska.”

  “Robert is alive because of me. He is alive because I hid him and his family after the events in Moscow. I gave his family a new life. New names and a fresh start.”

  “Why?!”

  “You know why.”

  “Robert Gaines has a star on the memorial wall upstairs. He died in the Khimki Forest!”

  “That’s what everyone was led to believe.”

  “Then what the hell happened in ’87?”

  “For now that is not important. We need to focus on what is happening at this very moment.” McGavran fingered the microcassette player. “At 1400 hours eastern time, I received a call on an old encrypted analogue line known only to me and Robert Gaines. I set up this line as a direct mode of communication if Robert ever needed to get in contact with me. For over thirty years that line was silent. That was, until this afternoon.”

  McGavran pressed play on the ancient microcassette player and Carter heard Robert Gaines’s voice again:

  “This is PEGASUS. I need to speak with Susan Carter and Prescott McGavran. Tell them it’s about Striker. Tell them Robert Gaines is blown. Viktor Sokolov found me. Russian Foreign Intelligence found me. Vympel teams kidnapped my daughters. They’re taking them to the sharashka… I need help, dammit… there was a plane crash off the coast of Alaska, I’m the sole survivor. I’ll likely be taken into federal custody in Anchorage. I repeat, I need help. I need to speak with Susan Carter and Prescott McGavran.”

  The message was nearly identical to the message Susan Carter had heard on the USB. For thirty seconds, the director of the CIA stared down at the microcassette player. Then she said, “Sokolov. The sharashka, do you think he’s talking about—”

  “Post 866.”

  “Can any of this be confirmed?”

  “I recently got off the phone with Jim Brower at the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Division. He spoke to the director of counterterrorism at the bureau who confirmed that a private jet crashed on Middleton Island off the coast of Alaska this morning. Five dead, one survivor. The pilot was identified as James Gale.”

  “His alias?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is he in federal custody?”

  “He was treated for injuries in Anchorage, and yes, he’s currently in federal custody at the FBI’s office in Anchorage and I’ve been unable to get in contact with him. An FBI counterintelligence team led by Jim Brower as well as a counterterrorism unit is en route to Anchorage as we speak. Turns out the plane that Robert crashed was flying east over the Gulf of Alaska and had no tail number, no transponder, or black box, and according to FBI special agents on scene, there were weapons and devices on board that suggest the deceased were all foreign operators.”

  “They died from the crash?”

  “Bullet wounds.”

  “Robert’s work?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “No. Have the deceased been confirmed as SVR Vympels?”

  “They all had the tattoo. I spoke with a contact in the NSA; the feds have run facial recognition software on them—two of the dead came up as matches on the Interpol database. These guys are tied to black operations in Syria, assassinations in Israel an
d Chechnya. Known SVR Vympels.”

  Carter took another long moment to think everything through. She felt betrayed by her old friend, the man who had taught her the art of tradecraft, the man she looked up to.

  Robert Gaines died over thirty years ago. I grieved for him, I grieved for his late wife, and now after everything that had happened, he’s alive.

  And not only alive, he was supposedly in a hell of a mess with one of the most dangerous men in the world. Viktor Sokolov. Vladimir Putin’s mentor.

  Every cell in Carter’s body screamed at her to force McGavran to tell her everything that had transpired in Moscow but that would have to wait.

  “If what Robert Gaines is saying is true, that means—”

  “It means that Russians are operating on United States soil.”

  “That’s an act of war.”

  “It is.”

  Carter cursed. “How did they find Robert in Alaska of all places?”

  “Brower also notified me of another unfortunate incident. A shooting in the township of Eagle in northeast Alaska this morning. Turns out, Robert’s youngest daughter, Cassandra, went missing in that area last week. I believe he was looking for her.”

  “You think the shooting and the plane crash are connected?”

  “The FBI is in the process of connecting those dots. But we do know that his eldest daughter, Emily, is now missing and his son-in-law is in critical condition in Fairbanks. That has been confirmed.”

  “Jesus.”

  McGavran tapped the steel briefcase with his fingers. “Susan, I believe Robert’s message was right on the money. There is no reason for him to lie, and I don’t believe this is an isolated incident. I believe the Russians have been taking Americans from US soil for a while now, just like the rumors swirling in the Soviet days. Considering the events that transpired today, I’d say there is enough evidence now to support my theory.”

  Carter took in the OREA analyst and shook her head in disbelief. Prescott McGavran should have had a spectacular career given his skill set in the field, but it had all fallen apart after the Striker program debacle. While Susan Carter had escaped with her career intact, Prescott McGavran had been fired from his role as Moscow Chief of Station and was subsequently demoted to headquarters to work a desk job for the rest of his career.