By Dr. Paul Berger
A chill ran down his spine. A doctor, maybe the one in the car, had carried out deliberate mind-control experiments just after World War II. After having lost control of part of his mind, the idea horrified Joe in a way that he couldn’t have imagined a year ago. A person’s mind was his most fundamental possession. It was not meant to be toyed with, or experimented on.
Yet it had happened. If this report was accurate, the CIA had sponsored mind-control experiments right after World War II. Using parasites. He immediately thought of the toxoplasmosis that had infected Rebar. That was the link.
Blotches of dark mold obscured most of the first paragraph. He read the second.
Primate trials have been most encouraging — with the toxoplasmosis parasite taking hold easily and well. After a week-long period of illness, the rhesus monkeys seem to subdue the physical symptoms. Their behavior, however, is radically altered.
There it was in black and white. This scientist had been injecting monkeys with toxoplasmosis experimentally to control their behavior.
Formerly docile specimens can become quite aggressive, even reckless, and seem to have no recollection of actions that they commit during their aggressive bouts (See Chart 15.6).
The practical application of this kind of treatment to soldiers in wartime is clear — soldiers can perform dangerous and reckless missions and then have no recollection of them afterward, thereby making it impossible for them to reveal mission details even under the most extreme duress.
Joe read it again. This was an attempt to make supersoldiers who did what they were told and didn’t remember it afterward. No vulnerability to interrogation. Or the debilitation of conscience.
Once we have the volunteer soldiers in place, we can begin human inoculations. I propose three groups — Group 1 knows they are being exposed to the parasite. Group 2, a control group, believes they are exposed but are not. Group 3 is exposed but without their knowledge or consent. We will measure the following:
Suggestibility: How far can we control what these soldiers do.
Recklessness: How far can we push the soldiers in stressful situations.
Selective amnesia: What will and won’t the soldiers remember.
I suggest one hundred soldiers for each group, initially. As per established protocols, we need not receive explicit informed consent as these are active-duty soldiers who have volunteered for this program knowing that there might be certain risks involved.
Joe stopped reading. They had planned to inject soldiers without their knowledge or consent. All that he had suffered since his agoraphobia seemed trivial in comparison.
He fired up his laptop, hid the IP address, and searched for Project Bluebird, growing more horrified with every word that he read. Project Bluebird had actually existed. It had been a large-scale project initiated after World War II, sometimes using Nazi scientists, to research mind-control techniques.
Joe studied the antique, typewritten pages. They provided evidence that a scientist had planned to infect soldiers against their will with a parasite to control their behavior, but compared with the horrors already well documented online and in books, it wasn’t a revelation. Why had it mattered to Rebar?
The next layer of papers explained that. They weren’t typewritten. They were laser-printed — modern day.
They described a recent trial in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also using the toxoplasmosis parasite. Initially used as an aid for interrogations of hostiles, infections had been introduced to volunteer troops in order to study their reactions.
Initially, the trials had gone well — the subjects had shown no reluctance to take on the most dangerous missions, they had not been troubled by post-traumatic stress disorder, and they had acted with cunning and ruthlessness under stress. In short, they had become better soldiers. But something had gone wrong with the soldiers who’d taken part in the 500 series of trials. That must have included Subject 523 — Ronald Raines, aka Rebar. Those soldiers had become very aggressive and mentally unstable. The report said the project scientist, Dr. Francis Dubois, had managed to destroy the parasite in the 500 series subjects. They had suffered no long-term effects.
Except for Rebar, who had been murdered not far from where Joe sat. And who knew how many others? This part of the report, at least, was a lie.
With an uneasy feeling, Joe remembered the boat that had sunk in Cuba the day after Rebar had gone AWOL. The press had reported that it had contained one hundred and three people. One of them was a doctor. A few minutes of research produced the name of a doctor who had died in Cuba at around that time — Janet Johansson — and a curriculum vitae. She’d reported directly to Dr. Dubois as a research assistant.
Joe kept reading. Dr. Dubois explained that the trials had gone well, making soldiers braver, more biddable, and less prone to post-traumatic stress. He’d even infected soldiers and sent them to war zones to document their reactions.
Because of this, Dr. Dubois felt that the project was ready for widespread trials, with over fifty thousand men, using the standard double-time structure with no consent issues. Fifty thousand men? That was the population of a small city. All of them infected by a mind-altering parasite without their knowledge.
Injections were due to start on December first. Joe checked his online calendar.
Tomorrow.
Where was Dr. Dubois now? Joe checked online. The doctor lived in Tuckahoe, a city on the Metro North line, about forty minutes from Grand Central by train. He worked at a lab not far from his house.
But where was he right now? Joe went to the list of hacked phones he’d used for his seagull prank, hoping he’d get lucky. He did. It didn’t take long for him to locate the doctor’s phone from there. The little blue dot that represented the phone’s location was heading south. He waited a few minutes to make sure: Dr. Dubois’s blue dot was following the rail line. He was on a train heading to New York, which meant that he would arrive at Grand Central.
Joe ran over the schedule in his head. Based on his current location, Dr. Dubois had boarded the Harlem line train (color coded as blue) in Tuckahoe at 8:24 (purple, blue, green), which meant that he would arrive at Grand Central Terminal at 9:07 (scarlet, black, slate), probably on Platform 112 (cyan, cyan, blue).
Every platform would be crawling with policemen. Joe would never get a chance to get near him there. He could try to send the information that he had out to Torres, but so far as he could tell she wasn’t passing that information along. He didn’t want to involve Celeste or Leandro — it was too dangerous. He could try to leak it to the press himself, but he’d have to persuade a reporter to meet him underground, after the media had painted him as a crazy murderer.
He needed more proof.
Maybe he could intercept the doctor before his train arrived at Grand Central. Maybe he’d get lucky and the doctor would be carrying incriminating files, or even the serum itself. After all, how else would he get such a dangerous biological specimen to New York City? If he found either files or the serum, that would give him enough proof to back up his assertions. He could convince people.
So, to get to the doctor before his train arrived, he had to figure out how to hack the train, stop it just before it arrived at the station, and get aboard. And he had thirty minutes to figure it out.
He bundled the files back in the briefcase, slipped it into his backpack, threw off the blanket, and began to run.
Chapter 40