“The pope?” My mind rushed back to the attempt on the life of the great Polish pope, back in 1981. “You mean John Paul?”
Sokolov nodded. “You know about that, right?”
It was before my time, but I knew that back then, the CIA had its suspicions. His Holiness had become a major problem for the Kremlin. John Paul was known in intelligence circles as a man of indomitable courage. As a priest, in his homeland, he had confronted Nazis, then Communists, and as pope, he was determined to lead his people to freedom. At the time, Brezhnev had been threatening to invade Poland in order to put a lid on the influence of the burgeoning Solidarity movement. John Paul had challenged him on that openly. In August of the previous year, he’d sent the Russian leader a handwritten letter. One single sheet of stationery that bore the papal coat of arms. In it, he told Brezhnev how concerned he was about his homeland. Then the pontiff added something remarkable: he informed Brezhnev that if the Soviets invaded Poland, he would give up the Throne of Saint Peter, abandon the Holy See, and move back to Poland to lead his people in their resistance.
Nine months later, a lone gunman shot and critically wounded the Pope in front of a quarter million stunned pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square. The shooter, a Turk by the name of Mehmet Ali Agca, was captured. He was portrayed as a crazed, lone madman. The truth-or, in any case, the intelligence community’s suspicion-was somewhat different. He’d been working alongside members of the Bulgarian Secret Service. CIA and Italian intelligence doctors who examined him after the hit found traces of amphetamines in his blood. He had multiple injection bruises on his body. They were convinced he had been medically prepped for what they believed was a mission-essentially, that he’d been brainwashed. A real-life Manchurian Candidate.
Sokolov nodded ruefully. “It helped me make up my mind. I couldn’t let them have it. I contemplated destroying the device and all my research and killing myself. But I was too cowardly to do it. So I chose to run… after sabotaging it and making sure all my paperwork was destroyed. Without me, they couldn’t rebuild it.”
“But you didn’t want us to have it either,” I said.
“I decided no one should have it. No one could be trusted with it. No one.” He fixed me with a hard look and asked, “Do you disagree?”
I held his gaze, then I glanced at Larisa. I couldn’t read her look, but I know where my mind was heading on that question. And I hadn’t even seen its effects firsthand.
“So you drugged our guys and took off?”
“I brought some powder with me, something we’d developed,” he explained. “Powerful, tasteless, and harmless. We toasted our success after we arrived here. And I ran. Took on a new name. Got married. And you know the rest.”
“But you couldn’t turn off that part of your mind,” Larisa said.
Sokolov rubbed his eyes. He looked weary.
“I tried, of course. I actually managed it for quite a few years. But then I read this article about all the developments in cell technology, and I didn’t sleep for a week. It was the ideal delivery system. I needed to know if I could build a more sophisticated version of what I’d built in Moscow.” He looked at us ruefully. “I had to try. I couldn’t help myself.”
“And you stayed below the radar. Until the protest outside the embassy last week,” I said. “Why did you go there? What made you draw attention to yourself?”
Leo nodded to himself, his face lined with regret. “After I left, they came down hard on my relatives. I had three brothers. They took them all away, sent them off to work camps. It was years before I found out they had died there, and the only reason I did find out was because one of my brother’s sons became a big political activist and they wrote about him and his family in the Western press.”
“Ilya Shislenko was your nephew?” I asked.
Sokolov nodded. “When they killed him… when they murdered him, it just gutted me. Two of my brothers weren’t married, they never had any children. Ilya was my only nephew-as far as I know, anyway. And his death, at their hands… it was too much to take. I lost control.”
“And here we are,” Aparo said.
“Here we are,” Sokolov grumbled softly.
I watched him for a moment. “So,” I asked, “how does it work?”
Sokolov took a slug from the bottle of water I had handed him. “Do you know what entrainment is?”
I told him what I’d only just read.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Everything we feel, all our emotions, from happiness and elation to depression and aggression,” he said, “it’s all triggered by electrochemical events in our brains.”
Years as a high school science teacher kicked in as he patiently explained how the brain instinctively experiences a variety of strong emotions in response to rhythmic stimulus.
“You’ve got one hundred billion neurons in the three pounds of flesh between your ears,” he said, “and they’re connected by a hundred trillion synapses. That’s a huge network with limitless potential, and we know very little about it. But one thing we do know is that our brains are able to perceive things below our ability to consciously be aware of them or identify them. And that’s what I was tapping into to manipulate the neural circuits that govern states like euphoria, trust, fear, anxiety, depression. Even physical side effects like nausea and disorientation. And I discovered that we can effectively and selectively induce them.”
“With microwaves?”
He scrunched his face. “It’s very complicated and, honestly, you’d need PhDs in math and electrical engineering to understand it in any meaningful way. But basically, my discovery was that multiple alternating cavity and dielectric tubes combined with heavily customized magnetrons can create a targeted field of microwaves at stable wavelengths that can be fine-tuned precisely to control the vibrations in the inner ear so as to entrain the brain through its entire range of frequencies.”
This was the “basically” version.
He shrugged. “An anthropologist at Yale recently proposed the idea that our susceptibility to entrainment is due to natural selection,” he added. “Those of our ancestors who could achieve a state in which they didn’t feel fear or pain, but were instead united in a collective identity… they were more likely to survive against grassland predators-and against other tribes.”
“Sounds a lot like Communism,” I remarked. “And we all know how that turned out.”
Sokolov smiled grimly. Then he added, without a shadow of pride in his voice, “But this susceptibility to entrainment has a very dark side. My machine can do everything from put you to sleep to make you kill your children.”
A cold nail slid down my spine.
He couldn’t have said it any more simply than that.
I could see why everybody wanted him. Having access to that kind of technology-especially if you were the only one who possessed it-would give you immeasurable power over both your own people and your enemies.
Aparo asked, “What about the man who came to your apartment Monday morning? How’d you manage to overpower him? What kind of Jedi mind trick did you use on him?”
Sokolov didn’t seem to get the reference. He looked a bit confused, then said, “I had put some monaural beats on a CD. Basic, but effective. I kept it ready for just that kind of emergency, in case anyone ever came looking for me.”
“What does it do?” Aparo asked.
“It makes you confused. Dizzy. Nauseous. You lose focus. Makes you amenable to suggestion. To answering questions truthfully.”
“But it didn’t affect you?” he asked.
“Like I said, it’s more basic. Much less potent than what’s in the van. I know what it does and how it does it, and I’d trained myself to resist its effect.”
Aparo just said, “Wow.”
I remembered the neighbor and his suddenly aggressive dog. “A neighbor said his dog attacked him at around that time. Said it had never happened before.”