“I apologize for placing you at such a distance from us,” he resumed. “You understand the need for the precautions.”
“Not if you have nothing to hide,” I said.
Across the room, Rossi smiled to himself and said, “This is a highly unusual situation, one we didn’t entirely plan on. As I’ve explained, keeping you out of physical proximity is the only way I know of to ensure the sort of need-to-know compartmentalization this operation requires.”
“What operation is that?” I asked quietly.
I heard a low mechanical whir as Toby adjusted his chair to face me squarely. Then he spoke, slowly, as if with great difficulty.
“Alex Truslow brought you in to do a job. I wish Charles hadn’t engaged in the trickery he did. He’ll be the first to admit, he’s no den mother.”
Rossi smiled.
“It’s an ends-and-means game, Ben,” Toby said. “We’re after the same end as Alex; we’re simply employing a different means. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is one of the most exciting and important developments in the history of the world. I think that once you hear us out, you’ll choose to go along with us. If you choose not to, that’s fine.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“We selected you some time ago as our most likely subject. Everything about your profile seemed right, the photographic memory, the intelligence, and so on.”
“So you knew what would happen,” I said.
“No,” Rossi said. “We’d failed time and time again.”
“Hold on a second,” I said. “Hold on. How much exactly do you know?”
“Quite a bit,” Toby said calmly. “You now have the ability to receive what’s called ELF-the extremely low frequency radio waves that the human brain generates. Do you mind if I smoke?” He took out a pack of Rothmans-I remembered now that Rothmans were the only brand he smoked when we knew each other in Paris-and tapped it against the arm of the wheelchair until one slid out.
“If I did mind,” I replied, “I doubt the smoke would bother me at this distance.”
He shrugged, and lighted the cigarette. Exhaling luxuriantly through his nostrils, he continued. “We know this… talent, for want of a better word, has not abated since it emerged. We know you’re sensitive only to thoughts that are occasioned at moments of strong feeling. Not yours, but those of whomever you’re trying to ‘hear.’ This gibes rather neatly with Dr. Rossi’s long-standing theory that the intensity of thought waves, or ELF, would be proportional to the intensity of one’s emotional reaction. That emotion varies the strength of the electrical impulses discharged.” He paused to inhale again and then said huskily, through the exhaled smoke, “Am I in the ballpark?”
I only smiled in reply.
“Of course, Ben, we’d be much more interested to hear your experiences than to listen to ourselves gas on like this.”
“What led you to think of using the magnetic resonance imager?”
“Ah,” Toby said, “for that I turn to my colleague Charles. As you may or may not know, Ben, for the last few years I’ve been on the DDO staff at home.” He meant that he was serving in the Deputy Directorate of Operations-the covert-action boys, to oversimplify-at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. “My area of responsibility is what they call special projects.”
“Well, then,” I said, feeling an odd sense of vertigo. “Perhaps one of you gentlemen can explain what this… project, as you seem to be calling it, is all about.”
Toby Thompson exhaled with a finality, and stubbed his cigarette out in a crystal ashtray on the carved oak end table next to him. He watched the plume of blue smoke rise and curl in the air, then turned back toward me.
“What we’re talking about,” he said, “is a matter of the highest security classification.” He paused. “And it is, as you can imagine, a long and rather complex story.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“The Central Intelligence Agency,” Toby said, his eyes fixed on some middle distance, “has long had an interest in… shall we say… the more exotic techniques of espionage and counterespionage. And I don’t just mean that wonderful invention, the Bulgarian umbrella, whose tip injects deadly ricin.
“I don’t know how much of this you know from your Agency days-”
“Not much,” I said.
Toby looked at me sharply, as if surprised to be interrupted. “And our team, of course, observed you at the Boston Public Library doing research, so you must know at least something of what’s in the public record. But the real story is far more interesting.
“You have to keep one major thing in mind: the reason most government undertakings are cloaked in deepest secrecy is fear of ridicule. It’s as simple as that. And in a society like ours, a country like the United States, which prides itself on hardheaded pragmatism… well, I think the founders of the CIA recognized that the greatest risk to their existence came not from public outrage but public derision.”
I smiled appreciatively and nodded. Toby and I had been good friends, before the incident, and I had always enjoyed his dry sense of humor.
“So,” he continued, “only a handful of the most senior officers, historically, have ever known of the Agency’s work in this area. I wanted to make sure we were very clear on that.” He looked directly at me, then tilted back his head slightly. “Experiments in parapsychology, as you no doubt already know, go back to at least the 1920s at Harvard and Duke-serious experiments undertaken by serious scholars, but of course never taken seriously by the scientific community at large.” He gave a wry smile and added, “Such is the structure of scientific revolutions. Of course the world is flat; how could it be otherwise?
“The first groundbreaking work was done by a man named Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke in the late twenties and early thirties. I’m sure you’ve seen the Zener cards.”
“Hmm?” I murmured.
“You know, those famous ESP cards of five symbols, the square, triangles, circles, wavy lines, and straight lines. In any case, Rhine and his successors learned that some people have the talent-very few people, as it turns out-and in varying degrees. The vast majority, of course, do not. Or, as some scholars postulated, more have the potential to develop the talent than they realize, but our conscious mind blocks it out.
“Anyway, a number of laboratories in the decades since the 1930s engaged in research into parapsychology in its many forms, not just extrasensory perception. There was Dr. Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, of course, but there was also the William C. Menninger Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which did some interesting work in dream telepathy. Certain of these labs were funded by the National Institute of Mental Health-fronting for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“But the CIA wasn’t founded until-what?-1947,” I said.
“Well, we came to this belatedly. As early as 1952, according to Agency archives, there was serious interest expressed in the possibilities of this research. Mostly this meant locating individuals with psychic abilities. But the early Agency officials seemed far more concerned with cloaking the work-”
“For fear of ridicule,” I interrupted. “But how the hell did the CIA deal with these psychics? I mean, either the psychics were for real or they weren’t. And if they were for real, they’d know they were meeting with people from an intelligence agency.”
Toby smiled, slowly and lopsidedly. “True enough. It was a real problem, from what I’ve read. They employed a double-blind security system, using two middlemen. But as I said, we came to this belatedly. Spurred on, naturally, by the Soviets.”
Rossi cleared his throat and remarked, “The Cold War had its uses.”
“Indeed,” Toby resumed. “Going back to at least the 1960s, the Agency began hearing credible reports of Soviet military efforts in parapsychology. I think it was around that time that a small cell of senior Agency people decided to fund an in-house study of the espionage possibilities of ESP. But what a treacherous undertaking! For every person who may have some glimmering of the ability, there are hundreds of hucksters and nutty old ladies with crystals. In any case, you may remember hearing about the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, in 1971, when the astronaut Edgar Mitchell performed the first ESP experiment in space. Didn’t work, by the way. In those years-the early years, I think of them as-we and the Armed Forces Medical Laboratories and NASA were spending almost a million dollars a year on parapsychology research. Peanuts, yes, but then we were whistling in the dark anyway.