The nurse nodded and prepared the syringe. “You worry too much,” he told the doctor.
“I don’t like using the stuff,” the doctor said. “Just a little too much and you kill them. A little under and they come out too quickly. I wish we had a better way.”
The nurse put down the syringe and picked up a little chart, glancing at his watch. “Sixteen twenty?” he asked.
The doctor nodded. The nurse picked up the syringe again, waited until his digital watch clicked over, then plunged the needle in. Sandra O’Connell started, seemed to come awake, then sank back down as if asleep once again. The doctor checked her nervously, waiting a few minutes for full effect.
“What’re you gonna use on her, Doc?” the nurse whispered as they waited.
“Regression. I don’t know enough about her to do much else. It’s as good as any.”
He made some more checks, then seemed satisfied. The unconscious woman was breathing deeply and regularly, and did not respond when he thumped her in a few places and even partially opened an eye. The pupils were heavily dilated. He seemed satisfied, and pulled up a chair close to the head of her bed.
“Just relax,” he told her soothingly. “You are in a deep, deep sleep but you can hear me, you can hear only the sound of my voice, hear and understand me and even talk to me although you will remain in that deep, ever deepening sleep.”
He kept it up as a trained hypnotist would for several go-rounds, then seemed satisfied.
The drug, a derivative of several compounds used both legally and illegally, had been developed as a truth serum, a chemical hypnotic of the strongest sort. It hadn’t worked; there was a kind of euphoric effect that sometimes produced the same sort of falsehoods as scopolamine and the other so-called “truth” drugs. But it was found that anyone under its influence was tremendously susceptible to hypnotic-type suggestion, not merely while under but for almost two days after.
Behavioral scientists and the CIA both found it useful.
“How old are you, Sandra?” the doctor asked her.
“Forty,” she said. He sniffed. A lie already.
“All right, but now you feel yourself drifting, drifting in time and space. You are not forty any more or in your forties at all. You are thirty years old now, but you are still drifting back. Now you are twenty-five. Now you are twenty. Now you are fifteen.” He paused.
“How old are you, Sandra?” he asked again. “Fifteen,” she answered. Her voice seemed slightly different tonally.
“I see. And you go to school?”
“Urn. Hum.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“Sacred Heart of Mary High School for Girls,” she said.
’’All right,” he said. “But now you are drifting again. You are not fifteen. Now you’re fourteen… thirteen… twelve… eleven… ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four. Now you are four years old.”
Her face and positioning changed as he said this. She seemed to curl up, her face showed an almost childlike gleam, and, slowly, she brought her thumb up and put it in her mouth.
“A good subject,” the nurse whispered. “The bright ones usually are the best.”
The doctor nodded and turned back to Sandra O’Connell.
“Now, how old are you, Sandy?”
The thumb came out, and she drooled slightly. She tucked the thumb in and weakly held up four fingers. “This many,” she lisped, and back the thumb went.
He nodded. “Now, listen to me, Sandy. You are four years old, and no matter what happens don’t you forget it or think otherwise. You will see yourself as four years old, you will act as if you are four, you will believe you are four, and you will react to other people as if you were four. You are away from home, in a hospital, but that’s okay. You’re not scared, and you’re not really sick. You like it here. It’s fun. Now, when I say ‘four’ again you will go into a normal sleep and sleep really nicely, and when you wake up you’ll feel real good and you’ll be a four-year-old little girl and if you ask nice the man who will be here will give you a lollipop. Okay?”
Her head nodded yes but the thumb stayed in.
“Four,” he said, and sighed and got up. He and the nurse walked outside to the hall and shut the door.
“You sure this’ll be okay?” the nurse asked, worried. “I mean, why four?”
“Literacy and vocabulary,” he replied. “She’s a doctor. Lots of stimulation around here. Three’s too parent-dependent, five’s a little too old. It’s only for a while. Maybe after I study her records a bit and come up with a profile I can get a better and more useful set. Right now this’ll have to do.” He turned to leave and the nurse turned to go back into Sandra’s room. Then the doctor stopped, turned, and called, “Oh, Jerry?”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“Next cycle integrate her with the rest of the Baby Brigade so she can play with them.” He frowned as if trying to remember something. Then he had it. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a large lollipop, and threw it to the nurse who caught it and pocketed it.
She awoke several hours later and looked around. It was a strange room, and for a few minutes she was scared; then she remembered she was in the hospital for something, and hospitals were fun places. When she grew up she wanted to be a doctor.
There was a grown-up dressed all in white sitting by the door reading something. “Hi!” she called out, removing her thumb from her mouth to do so, then putting it back.
The man put down his book, got up, came over to her and smiled. “Hi, yourself, big girl!” he responded warmly.
“You have a lol’pop?” she asked playfully.
He grinned. “It just so happens I do,” he replied, and took it out.
She had some trouble until she finally figured out that she couldn’t fit both her thumb and the lollipop into her mouth at the same time. She settled for the latter and lay back, contentment on her face.
Hospitals were such fun!
THIRTEEN
Jake Edelman was furious.
“How the hell could you let this happen?” he demanded of a young man and woman standing before his desk. “It was your responsibility! I warned you something like this could happen!”
The man shifted nervously. “Look, I mean, we had all the entrances and exits covered, and the guards as well. Hell, we had no reason to believe they’d pull this today—and those guys had proper IDs and everything. Passed everybody by.”
Edelman picked up a sheaf of reports on his desk and gestured with them.
“All right, let’s see what we do know. We know they found out something, possibly who or why Dr. Spiegelman was killed. We also know that, as soon as they found it out, somebody else knew as well and sprung the trap. Somebody with real top connections in government.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” the woman said. “I mean, that would mean somebody big in with these terrorists.”
Edelman shook his head. “Now you’re catching on. That’s been obvious from the start of all this. How else could Spiegelman have been murdered?” The line of thought was uncomfortable for the two agents. “I just can’t believe somebody like that could be in such a position without us knowing about it,” the female said.
Jake Edelman gave her a grim smile. “Years ago in Italy they had a terrorist organization that kidnapped big shots and sometimes killed them—despite bodyguards, varied schedules, everything. They were so damned cocky they often used the same trash can for ransom drops time after time. How? Were the Italian police that bad? No, it’s because everybody has a fear line or index, and upper level people have husbands, wives, kids, too. Find the one weak link in the bigwigs and you got a man on the inside. In that case they actually had a bunch, including a cabinet minister who wasn’t being buffaloed but was part of the brains of the outfit, figuring to run the place in a revolution. No, being high up has very little to do with it.” He paused for a second, collecting his thoughts. “So now we have to ask ourselves why these things happened and what we can do about it.”