Extraordinary Powers

The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars, according to three new reports, on secret projects to investigate extrasensory phenomena and to see if the sheer power of the human mind can be harnessed to perform various acts of espionage…

– The New York Times, January 10, 1984

FINANCIAL TIMES

Europe Fears Nazi Rule in Ravaged Germany

BY ELIZABETH WILSON IN BONN

In the three-man race for Chancellor of Germany, Mr. Jurgen Krauss, leader of the reborn National Socialist Party, appears to be overtaking both the moderate candidate, Christian Democratic Party leader Wilhelm Vogel, and the incumbent…

In the wake of the German stock market crash and the subsequent depression, there are widespread fears here and around Europe of a resurgence of a new form of Nazism…

TWELVE

We stared at each other for a moment, Rossi and I. In the long months since that instant, I’ve never been able to explain this aspect to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all mine.

I heard Charles Rossi’s voice almost as clearly, almost as distinctly, as if he’d spoken to me.

Not quite as if he’d spoken aloud. The timbre was different from the spoken voice, the way a long distance telephone connection sounds at once different from a clear, local one. A little less distinct; a little distant, a trace muffled, like a voice heard through a cheap motel room plasterboard wall.

There was an unmistakable difference between Rossi’s spoken voice and his-what else can I call it?-his “mental” voice, his thought voice. The spoken voice was somehow crisper; the mental voice was softer, smoother, more rounded.

I was able to hear Rossi’s thoughts.

My head began to pound, a throbbing, vicious pain that localized at my right temple. Around everything in the room-Rossi, his gaping assistant, the machinery, the rubberized lab coats that hung on hooks by the door-was a shimmering rainbow of an aura. My skin began to prickle unpleasantly, flushing hot and then cold, and I could feel a wave of nausea overtake my stomach.

There have been volumes upon volumes written on the subject of extrasensory perception and psychic phenomena and “psi,” the vast majority of which is packed with nonsense-I know, I’ve probably read every bit of it-but not one theorist ever speculated that it would be like this.

I could hear his thoughts.

Not all of his thoughts, thank God, or I would surely have gone crazy long ago. Certain ones, things that entered his mind with sufficient urgency, sufficient intensity.

Or at least so I came to realize much later.

But at that moment, at that moment of realization, I had not put all of this together the way I have by now. I only knew-knew-that I was hearing something that Rossi had not spoken aloud, and it filled me with a bottomless dread.

I was on the edge of a precipice; it was a struggle now to keep from losing my mind entirely.

At that moment I was convinced that something in me had snapped, some thread of my sanity had broken; that the magnetic forces of the MRI machine had done something terrible to me, had somehow precipitated a nervous breakdown, that I was losing my grip on reality.

And so I responded in the only way I could: absolute denial. I wish I could claim credit for being shrewd, or clever, say I knew even then I must keep this strange and awful development to myself, but that wasn’t the first thing that came to me. My instinct was to preserve some semblance of sanity-not to let on to Rossi that I was hearing things.

He spoke first, quietly. “I didn’t say anything about Mr. Truslow.” He was probing me, watching my eyes from this uncomfortably close distance.

I said slowly, “I thought you did, Charlie. Must have misheard.”

Turning to the lab table, I gathered my wallet, keys, coins, and pens, and began putting them in my pocket. As I did so, I backed slowly, casually, away from him. The headache intensified, the cold flush. It was a full-blown migraine.

“I didn’t say anything at all,” Rossi said levelly.

I smiled dismissively, nodded. Wanted to sit down somewhere, tie something around my forehead, squeeze the pain from it.

He gave me another long, penetrating stare, and-

– and I heard, a murmur: Does he have it?

With forced joviality, I said, “So if we’re all through for the day-”

Rossi eyed me suspiciously. Blinked once, twice, and said, “Soon. We need to sit down and talk for a couple of minutes.”

“Look,” I said. “I have a terrific headache. A migraine, I’m pretty sure.”

I was at least six feet away from him now, putting my suit jacket back on. Rossi was still watching me as if I were a boa constrictor coiling and uncoiling in the middle of his bedroom. In the silence I strained to hear another of these murmurs, these faint voices.

Nothing.

Had I imagined these last few moments? Had they been hallucinations, like the shimmering aura that surrounded all the objects in the room? Would I come to my senses now, after this momentary departure from sanity?

“Are you prone to migraines?” Rossi asked.

“Never had one before. The test must have caused it.”

“That’s impossible. It’s never happened before, not in any test of the magnetic resonance imager, ever.”

“Well,” I said, “in any case, I should be heading back to the office.”

“We’re not quite done here,” Rossi said, turning back toward me.

“I’m afraid-”

“We’ll be done shortly. I’ll be right back.”

He went off in the direction of the adjacent room in which the computer banks were being monitored. I watched him approach one of the computer techs and say something quick and furtive. The tech handed him a small sheaf of printouts.

Then Rossi returned, bearing the computer images from the lie-detector test. He sat at a long, black-topped laboratory table and gestured for me to sit opposite him. I paused a moment, considered, and then sat obligingly.

He spread out the images on the lab table. Looked them over, his head bowed, seeming to consult them. We sat perhaps three feet apart.

I heard Rossi’s voice, muffled but astonishingly clear: I believe you have the ability.

He said: “Here, you’ll notice, is your brain at the outset of the test.”

He pointed to the first image, which I drew closer to inspect. “Unchanged, for the most part, throughout the test, because you’re telling the truth.”

I heard: You must trust me. You must trust me.

Then he indicated a final set of images, which even I could tell were colored somewhat differently-yellow and magenta along the cerebral cortex rather than the normal rust and beige. He described with a finger the areas that manifested change.

“Here, you’re lying.” He smiled quickly and added with unnecessary politeness, “As I asked you to do.”

“I see.”

“I’m concerned about your headache.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“I’m concerned that this machine might have caused it.”

“The noise,” I said. “The noise is probably what did it. I’ll be fine.”

Rossi, head still bent, nodded.

I heard: It will be so much easier if we trust each other. The voice seemed to fade out for a moment, and then came back:-to tell me.

He did not reply, and so I said, “If there’s nothing further…”

Behind you, the voice came, urgent and loud now. Coming up behind you. Loaded gun. You’ve become a threat. Pointed at your head.

He was not speaking. He was thinking.

I betrayed no response. I continued staring at him questioningly, yet as casually as I could.

Now, now, now. Hope to God he can’t hear the footsteps behind him.

He was testing me. I felt sure of it. Mustn’t respond, mustn’t show fear, that’s what he wants, he wants some little sign, some glimmering of fear in my face, wants me to whip around suddenly, flinch, show him I can hear it.

“Then I really should be getting along,” I said calmly.

I heard: Does he?

“Well,” Rossi said, “we can talk next time.”

I heard: Either he’s lying or-

I watched his face; saw that his mouth hadn’t moved. Once again I felt that creeping dread, a tingling on my skin, and my heart began to beat much too quickly.

Rossi looked at me, and I felt sure I saw resignation in his eyes. I had, for the time being at least, fooled him, I thought. But there was something about Charles Rossi that told me I would not fool him for long.

THIRTEEN

I sat, stunned, in the back of a taxicab making its way through the broad, clogged streets near Government Center toward my office. My head throbbed worse than ever, and I felt constantly on the edge of being sick to my stomach.

It is an understatement of the highest order to tell you that I was in the early stages of some sort of deep, wild panic. My world had been turned upside down. Nothing made sense anymore. I was deeply afraid that I was on the verge of losing touch with sanity altogether.

I was hearing voices now, voices unspoken. I was hearing, to put it plainly, the thoughts of others almost as clearly as if they had spoken them aloud.

And I was convinced I was losing my mind.

Even now I’m unable to put straight what I knew then and what I concluded much later. Had I really “heard” what I thought I’d heard? How was this possible? And, more directly to the point, what precisely did Rossi and his lab assistant mean by asking themselves, “Did it work?” It seemed to me there was only one possible explanation: they knew. Somehow, they-Rossi and his lab assistant-were not stunned that the MRI had done to me what it did. For there was no doubt in my mind that it was the MRI that had somehow altered my brain’s hardwiring.

But did Truslow know what had happened?

And yet a minute after thinking this whole thing through lucidly, I found myself wondering, in a panic, whether I had taken a left turn into lunacy.

As the taxi crawled through traffic, my thoughts grew increasingly suspicious. Was that “lie detector test” business merely a pretext, a way to compel me to undergo this procedure?

Had they, in short, known what would happen to me?

Again: had Truslow known?

And had I fooled Rossi? Or did he know that I had this strange and terrible new ability?

Rossi, I feared, knew. Normally, when someone says something that echoes in some way what we’ve been thinking-we’ve all had moments like that-we respond with surprise, often delight. It is no doubt pleasurable on some level to find another human being connecting with us in such a way.

But Rossi didn’t seem surprised. He seemed-how would I describe it?-alert, alarmed, suspicious. As if he’d been waiting for such a development.

I wondered, as I reflected on that scene with Rossi, whether I had really convinced him that there was nothing out of the ordinary in my response-that I merely seemed to be tuned in to his thoughts, that it was nothing more than coincidence.

As the cab pulled into the financial district, I leaned forward to give the driver directions. The driver, a middle-aged black man with a sparse beard, sat back in his seat distractedly as he drove, as if in a reverie. Separating us was a scuffed Plexiglas partition. I spoke into the speaker holes, and suddenly realized something startling: I wasn’t “hearing” the driver. Now I was totally confused. Had this talent subsided, or disappeared altogether? Was it the Plexiglas, or the distance, or something else? Again: had I imagined the occurrence altogether?

“Take a right here,” I said, “and it’ll be the large gray building on the left.”

Nothing. The sound of the radio, an all-talk station chattering along at low volume, and the occasional burst of static from his CB, but nothing else.

Had the MRI done something to my brain that had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared?

Totally confused now, I paid him and entered the building lobby, which was crowded with people returning from their early lunches, noisy with their babble. Along with a sizable crowd of lunchtime returnees, I pressed my way into the elevator, pushed the button for my floor, and-I will admit it-tried to “listen” or “read” or whatever you call it, but the various loud conversations made that impossible in any case.

My head throbbed. I felt claustrophobic, nauseated. Perspiration dripped down the back of my neck.

Then the elevator doors shut, and the crowd fell silent, as it so often does in elevators, and it happened.

I could hear, kaleidoscopically, snatches of words-or, as it seemed to me at that moment, smears of words and phrases, the way a record or tape sounds when you play it backward (or did in the days before digitally recorded sound, when the technology actually allowed you to do such tricks). The woman next to me-pressed up against me by the crush of people-was a serene-looking woman of around forty, plump and red-haired. Her expression was pleasant, a slight smile. But I could hear at the same time a voice-it had to be coming from her-that came in surges, distant and then distinct, fading in and out, like voices on a party line. Stand it can’t stand it, the voice went. Do it to me he can’t do it to me he can’t. Startled by the contrast between this woman’s pleasant demeanor and the thoughts that bordered on the hysterical, I turned my head toward the man on my left, who looked like a lawyer, in a lawyerly pinstripe suit and horn-rimmed glasses, early fifties, his expression one of vague boredom. And then it came, a distant shout in a male voice: minutes late they’ve started without me the bastard…

I was “tuning in,” without consciously doing it, the way you can listen for a familiar voice in a crowd, selecting for a certain timbre, a certain sound. In the silence of the elevator, it was simple.

The bell sounded and the doors opened onto the reception area of Putnam & Stearns. I brushed past several of my colleagues, barely acknowledging them, and found my way to my office.

Darlene looked up as I approached. As usual, she was wearing black, but today it was some sort of frilly high-necked thing that she probably imagined was feminine. It looked as though she’d picked it up at a Salvation Army.

As I neared her, I heard: “something seriously wrong with Ben.”

She started to say something, but I waved her away. I entered my office, silently greeted the Big Baby Dolls who kept their silent vigil against one wall, and sat down at the desk. “Hold my calls,” I said, closed my office door, and sank into my chair, safe at last in the solitude. For a very long time I sat in absolute silence, staring into the middle distance, squeezing my throbbing temples, cradling my head in my hands, and listening only to the hammering of my heart.

A little while later I emerged to ask Darlene for my messages. She looked at me curiously, obviously wondering whether I was all right. Handing me a pile of pink message slips, she said, “Mr. Truslow called.”

“Thanks.”

“You feeling any better?”

“What do you mean?”

“You got a headache, right?”

“Yeah. A nasty migraine. ‘A headache so bad it shows.’”

“You know, I’ve always got some Advil here,” she said, pulling open a desk drawer that revealed her stash of medications. “Take a couple. I get migraines, too, every month, and they’re like the worst.”

“The worst,” I agreed, accepting some of the pills.

“Oh, and Allen Hyde from Textronics wants to talk to you as soon as possible.” Mr. Hyde was the beleaguered inventor of Big Baby Dolls who was on the verge of making a settlement offer.

I said, “Thanks,” and scanned the messages. Darlene had turned to her IBM Selectric-yes, we still use typewriters at Putnam & Stearns; in certain instances the law requires typewriters, not laser printers-and returned to her frenetic typing.

I could not stop myself from moving close to her desk, then leaning forward and trying.

And it came, with that same damned clarity. Looks like he’s losing it, I heard in Darlene’s voice, and then silence.

“I’m okay,” I said quietly.

Darlene spun around, her eyes wide. “Huh?”

“Don’t worry about me. I had a tough meeting this morning.”

She gave me a long, frantic look, then composed herself. “Who’s worried?” she said, turning back to the typewriter, and I heard, as if in the same conversational tone, Did I say anything? “Want me to get Truslow on the line?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Kornstein, which goes right into Lewin, and I need to get some fresh air or my head’s going to explode.” What I really wanted was to sit in a dark room with the blankets over my head, but I figured that a walk, painful as it might be, would do as much to alleviate the headache.

As I turned back to my office to get my overcoat, Darlene’s phone trilled.

“Mr. Ellison’s office,” she said. Then: “One moment, please, Mr. Truslow,” and she punched the hold button. “Are you here?”

“I’ll take it.”

“Ben,” Truslow said when I picked it up in my office. “I thought you’d be returning to chat.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The test ran on longer than I anticipated. I’ve got a crazy day here. If you don’t mind, let’s reschedule.”

A long pause.

“Fine,” he said. “What did you make of this Rossi? He seems a bit thuggish to me, but maybe I worry too much.”

“Didn’t have much of a chance to size him up.”

“In any case, Ben, I understand you passed the lie detector with flying colors.”

“I trust you’re not surprised.”

“Of course not. But we need to talk. I need to brief you fully. The thing is, a little wrinkle has turned up.”

There was a smile in his voice, and I knew.

“The President has asked me to go to Camp David,” he said.

“Congratulations.”

“Congratulations are premature. He wants to talk things over with me, his chief-of-staff says.”

“Sounds like you got it.”

“Well…” Truslow said. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then he said, “I’ll be in touch very soon,” and he hung up the phone.

I walked up Milk Street to Washington Street, the pedestrian mall sometimes called Downtown Crossing. There, along Summer Street, the gulf between the two great, rival downtown department stores, Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, I wandered aimlessly among pushcart vendors selling popcorn and pretzels, Bedouin scarves, Boston tourist T-shirts, and rough-knit South American sweaters. The headache seemed to be subsiding. The street was, as usual, teeming with shoppers, street musicians, office workers. Now, though, the air was filled with sounds, a bedlam of shouts and mutterings, sighs and exclamations, whispers and screams. Thoughts.

On Devonshire Street I entered an electronics shop, blankly examined a display of twenty-inch color television sets, fended off the salesman. Several of the sets were tuned to soap operas, one to CNN, one to a Nickelodeon rerun of a black and white TV show from the fifties that may have been The Donna Reed Show. On CNN the blond anchorwoman was saying something about a United States senator who had died. I recognized the face flashed on the screen: Senator Mark Sutton of Colorado, who had been found shot to death at his home in Washington. The police in Washington believed the slaying was probably not politically motivated, but instead committed during an armed robbery.

The salesman approached again, saying, “All the Mitsubishis are on sale this week, you know.”

I smiled pleasantly, said no thanks, and went out to the street. My head throbbed. I found myself standing close to passersby at stoplights and crossings, listening. One attractive young woman with short blond hair, in a pale pink suit and running shoes, stood next to me while the Don’t Walk sign flashed at Tremont Street. In normal circumstances we all keep a certain social distance from strangers; she was standing a few feet away, immersed in her own thoughts. I bent my head toward her in an attempt to share some of those thoughts, but she scowled at me as if I were a pervert, and moved quite a distance away.

People were bustling past too quickly for my feeble, novice efforts. I would stand, craning my neck this way and that as unobtrusively as I could, but nothing.

Had the talent disappeared? Had I simply imagined the whole thing?

Nothing.

Had the power merely faded?

Back on Washington Street, I spotted a newsstand, where a clot of people were buying their Globes and Wall Street Journals and New York Times, and when the Walk sign flashed, I crossed over to it. A young guy was looking at the front page of the Boston Herald-MOB HIT MAN NABBED it said, with a picture of some minor Mafia figure who’d been arrested in Providence. I moved in close, as if contemplating the pile of Heralds in front of him. Nothing. A woman, thirtyish and lawyerly, was scanning the piles of papers, looking for something. I moved in as close as I could without alarming her. Nothing there either.

Was it gone?

Or, I wondered, was it that none of these people was upset enough, angry enough, scared enough, to be emitting brain waves-is that how it worked?-of a frequency I could detect?

Finally, I saw a man in his early forties, dressed in the natty apparel of an investment banker, standing near the piles of Women’s Wear Daily, blankly staring at the rows of glossy magazines. Something in his eyes told me he was deeply upset about something.

I moved in closer, pretending to be inspecting the cover of the latest issue of The Atlantic, and tried.

– to fire her she’s going to bring up that whole fucking business about the affair God knows how she’ll react she’s a fucking loose cannon would she call Gloria and tell her ah Jesus what am I going to do I don’t have any choice so goddamned stupid to fuck your secretary-

I stole a furtive glance at the banker, and his dour face had not moved.

By this time I had formulated a number of what I guess you could call understandings, or perhaps theories, about what had happened, and what I should do.

One: The powerful magnetic resonance imager had affected my brain in such a way that I was now able to “hear” the thoughts of others. Not all people; perhaps not most, but at least some.

Two: I was able to “hear” not all thoughts but only those that were “expressed” with a fair degree of emphasis. In other words, I only “heard” things that were thought with great vehemence, fear, anger. Also, I could “hear” things only at close physical proximity-two or three feet away from a person, maximum.

Three: Charles Rossi and his lab assistant were not only not surprised at this manifestation, but were actually expecting it. That meant they had been using the MRI for this express purpose, even before I came on the scene.

Four: The uncertainty they felt indicated that either it had not worked in the proper way before, or it had rarely done so.

Five: Rossi did not know for certain that this experiment had succeeded on me. Therefore, I was safe only as long as I did not let on that I had this ability.

Six: Therefore, it was only a matter of time before they caught up with me, for whatever purposes they intended.

Seven: In all probability, my life would never be the same. I was no longer safe.

I glanced at my watch, realized I had strolled far too long, and turned back toward the office.

Ten minutes later I was back at the offices of Putnam & Stearns, with a few minutes to spare before my next appointment. For some reason I suddenly found myself recalling the face of the senator I had seen on the CNN newscast. Senator Mark Sutton (D.-Col.), shot to death. I remembered now: Senator Sutton was the chairman of the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence. And-was it fifteen years ago?-he had been Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, before he’d been appointed to fill a Senate vacancy, and then was elected in his own right two years later.

And…

And he was one of Hal Sinclair’s oldest friends. His roommate at Princeton. They had joined the CIA together.

That made three CIA types now dead. Hal Sinclair and two trusted confidants.

Coincidences, I believe, occur everywhere except in the intelligence business.

I buzzed Darlene and asked her to send in my four o’clock.

FOURTEEN

Mel Kornstein entered, in an Armani suit that looked untailored and did little to conceal his girth. His silver tie was stained with a bright yellow half-moon of what appeared to be egg.

“Where’s the asshole?” he asked, giving me a soft, damp handshake and looking around my office.

“Frank O’Leary will be here in about fifteen minutes. I wanted to give us a little time to go over some things.”

Frank O’Leary was the “inventor” of SpaceTime, the computer game that is an exact rip-off of Mel Kornstein’s amazing SpaceTron. He and his attorney, Bruce Kantor, had agreed to a conference to initiate the exploratory stages of some sort of agreement. Ordinarily that would mean they realized they’d better settle, that they’d lose big if it ever went to trial. A lawsuit, as lawyers like to say, is a machine you enter as a pig and come out a sausage. Then again, they could be showing up simply as a courtesy, but lawyers aren’t much into courtesy. It was also entirely possible that the two just wanted to display their gladiatorial confidence, try to rattle us a bit.

I was not at my best that afternoon. In fact-though my headache had by this time mostly disappeared-I could barely think straight, and Mel Kornstein picked up on this. “You with me here, Counselor?” he asked querulously at one point when I lost the thread of argument.

“I’m with you, Mel,” I said, and tried to concentrate. I’d found that if I didn’t want to pick up a person’s thoughts, I generally didn’t. What I mean is that I discovered, sitting there with Kornstein, that I wasn’t bombarded with thoughts on top of conversation, which might have been unbearable. I could listen to him normally, but if I wanted to “read” him, I could do so simply by focusing in a way, homing in.

Obviously I can’t describe this adequately, but it’s like the way a mother can single out the voice of her child playing on the beach from the voices of dozens of other children. It’s a bit like listening to the jumble of voices on a party line, some of them more audible than others. Or maybe it’s more like the way, when you’re speaking on a cordless phone, you can hear the ghosts of other people’s conversations overlapping your own. If you listen with some effort, you can hear everything clearly.

So I found myself listening to Kornstein’s voice, rising in aggrievement and falling in despair, and realizing that I could hear only his spoken voice if I so desired.

Fortunately, I regained some footing by the time O’Leary and Kantor showed up, effusing cordiality. O’Leary-tall, red-haired, bespectacled, thirtyish-and Kantor-small, compact, balding, late forties-made themselves right at home in my office and sank into their chairs as if we were all old chums.

“Ben,” Kantor said by way of greeting.

“Good to see you, Bruce.” Good old casual chummy banter.

Only the attorneys are supposed to talk at these conferences. The clients, if they appear at all, are there only for their attorneys’ ready reference; they’re supposed to keep silent. But Mel Kornstein sat there, fuming, refusing to shake hands with anyone, and couldn’t restrain himself from blurting out, “Six months from now you’re going to be washing dishes at McDonald’s, O’Leary. Hope you like the smell of french-fry grease.”

O’Leary smiled calmly and gave Kantor a look that said, Will you handle this lunatic? Kantor bounced the look over to me, and I said, “Mel, let Bruce and me handle this right now.”

Mel folded his arms and smoldered.

The real point of this meeting was to determine one simple thing: had Frank O’Leary seen a prototype of SpaceTron while he was “developing” SpaceTime? The similarity of the games wasn’t even in question. But if we could prove beyond any doubt that O’Leary had seen SpaceTron at any point before it went on the market, we won. It was as simple as that.

O’Leary maintained, naturally, that the first time he saw SpaceTron was in a software store. Kornstein was convinced that O’Leary had somehow gotten an early prototype of the game from one of his software engineers, but of course he couldn’t prove his suspicion. And here I was, trying to fence with Bruce Kantor, Esq., the feisty little bantam.

After half an hour Kantor was still making noises about restraint of trade and unfair practices. I was finding it hard to concentrate on his line of argument, in that half-dazed state I’d been in since the morning, but I knew enough to realize he was just blustering. Neither he nor his client was going to give an inch.

I asked, for the third time, “Can you say for absolutely certain that neither your client nor any of his employees had any access to any of the research or development work that was going on at Mr. Kornstein’s firm?”

Frank O’Leary continued to sit impassively with folded arms, looking bored, and let his attorney do the heavy lifting. Kantor leaned forward, gave his saucy little smile, and said, “I think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, Ben. If you’ve got nothing else-”

And then I heard, in that gauzy, soft-focus tone that I’d begun to recognize, Frank O’Leary’s voice mutter something. I could barely make it out, but I tilted my head forward, pretending to be consulting my legal pad, and concentrated to separate it from Kantor’s chatter.

Ira Hovanian, O’Leary was saying.

Jesus, if Hovanian spills-

“Ah, Bruce,” I said. “Perhaps your client can tell us a little about Ira Hovanian.”

Kantor frowned, looked annoyed, and said, “I don’t know what you’re-”

But O’Leary grabbed his arm and whispered something into Kantor’s left ear. Kantor looked at me quizzically for a moment, then swiveled around, and whispered something back.

I consulted my yellow pad and tilted my head and began to listen, but at that instant Kornstein tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “What does Ira Hovanian have to do with anything?” he whispered. “How did you know about Ira Hovanian?”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“You don’t-”

“Just tell me.”

“He’s a guy who quit the company a couple of months before SpaceTron came out. A schlemazel.”

“A what?”

“I felt sorry for the schmuck. He lost a shitload in stock options. I guess he found a better job somewhere else, but if he had stayed, he’d be a rich man by now.”

“Did he sell trade secrets?”

“Ira? Ira was a nothing.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “For some reason, O’Leary knows that name. It means something to him.”

“You didn’t mention-”

“It’s something I picked up recently,” I replied. “All right, let me think for a minute.” I turned away from Kornstein, and feigned deep concentration on the scribblings on my yellow pad. Several feet away, O’Leary and Kantor were deep in whispered colloquy.

– stole a working prototype from the safe. He had a combination. Sold it to me for twenty-five thousand bucks and the promise of another hundred grand when we started turning a profit.

I took notes as quickly as I could, and continued to listen, but the voice faded out. O’Leary was smiling, visibly relaxed now, and his thoughts were placid, therefore unreadable.

I was about to turn back to Kornstein to ask him about this, when suddenly I picked up another flow.

… burned him. What the hell was he going to do? He’s the guy who committed the illegal act, right? So who’s he going to turn to?

Now Kantor swiveled back toward me and said, “Let’s meet again in a day or two. We’ve gone on long enough today.”

I reflected for a few seconds and said, “If that’s what you and your client would like, that’s fine. If anything, that will give us time for an additional deposition of Mr. Hovanian, who has already given us some interesting information concerning a prototype of SpaceTron and a company safe.”

Kantor looked supremely uncomfortable. He unfolded his legs, then folded them again, and pulled nervously at his chin with a thumb and forefinger.

“Look,” he said, his voice a few notes higher than before, “bluff all you like. But let’s not waste each other’s time. If a minimum settlement is what you want, I think it would be in my client’s interest just to get all this stuff behind him, so we’d be prepared to make a-”

“Four point five million,” I said.

“What?” he gasped.

I stood up and extended my hand. “Well, gentlemen, I’ve got some depositions to take. With your knowing cooperation in the concealment of a felony, as the attorney of record I think we should have an interesting trial. Thank you for coming.”

“Hold on a second here,” Kantor blurted out. “We can come to an agreement of-”

“Four point five,” I repeated.

“You’re out of your mind!”

“Gentlemen,” I said.

The two clients, O’Leary and Kornstein, were staring at me, dumbstruck, as if I’d suddenly pulled down my trousers and danced a jig on my desk. “Jesus,” Kornstein said to me.

“Let’s-let’s talk,” Kantor said.

“All right,” I said, and sat down. “Let’s talk.”

The meeting broke up forty-five minutes later. Frank O’Leary had agreed to pay an outright settlement of $4.25 million in one lump sum, payable within ninety days, with a further stipulation that SpaceTime would remove its flagship computer game from the market forthwith.

At half past five, O’Leary and Kantor, considerably more subdued, filed out of my office. Mel Kornstein gave me a humid, bearlike embrace, thanked me profusely, and left, beaming for the first time in months.

And I sat alone in my office, ignoring the ringing phone, and tossed a perfect hook shot into my electronic hoop. It emitted a wild packed-Boston-Garden cheer and shouted tinnily, “Score!” I grinned to myself like an idiot, wondering how long this peculiar good fortune could last. As it happened, it lasted for precisely one day.

FIFTEEN

My mistake, as it turned out, was that classic error of the novice intelligence operative: neglecting to assume that you’re being watched.

The problem was that I had lost my bearings. My world had turned upside down. The normal logic of my staid, ordered, lawyerly life no longer applied.

We go through our lives by rote, I think, doing our jobs and performing our duties as if with blinders on. Now, suddenly, the blinders were off. How could I possibly be as circumspect, as cautious, as I once might have been?

I was able to leave the office early enough to make a stop before home. When the elevator arrived, it was empty-too late, as usual, for the evening rush-and I got in.

I needed desperately to talk to someone, but who, in truth, could I talk to? Molly? She would immediately think I had gone off the deep end. Like all physicians, her world was a very rational one. Of course I would have to tell her at some point-but when? And what about my friend Ike? Possible, I suppose; but at this point I couldn’t risk telling anyone.

Two floors below, the elevator stopped, and a young woman got in. She was tall, auburn-haired, with a little too much eye makeup, but with a nice full figure, and her silk blouse accented her large breasts. We stood there in the normal silence shared by elevator passengers who do not know each other but happen to be standing in a metal box a few feet apart. She seemed distracted. Both of us were busily looking up, watching the numbers change. My headache, that terrible welling-up of pain, was all but gone, thank God.

I happened to be thinking about Molly, in fact, when I “heard” it-what he’s like in bed.

I glanced over at her, instinctually, assuring myself once again that she hadn’t said anything aloud. Her eyes seemed to catch mine for a split second, but turned back toward the flashing red numerals in the panel above the door.

I concentrated now, and I picked up more.

nice ass. Probably a pretty strong guy. Looks like a lawyer, which means he’s probably the real conservative boring type but one night who cares.

I turned again, and this time her eyes met mine for an instant, a second too long.

If ever a woman were available, she was. I at once felt a strange spasm of guilt. I was privy to her most intimate fantasies, her private calculations, her daydreams. It was a terrible violation. It violated all the rules we human beings have developed for flirtation, the dance of cues and hints and suggestions, which works so well because nothing is ever said, nothing is ever certain.

I knew this woman would go to bed with me. Ordinarily, you can never be certain no matter what the body language. Some women like to flirt, to take things to the brink just to see if they’re sufficiently desirable to lead a man that far. Then they’ll pull back, playing along with social conventions, feigning unwillingness, a need to be wooed. The whole game, which has baffled both men and women since we all began standing upright (and likely before then), relies upon our inability to know what is in the minds of others. It is premised upon uncertainty.

But I knew. I knew with absolute certainty what this woman was thinking. And for some reason I found this deeply upsetting, as if I’d just become an outsider to the normal rules of human behavior.

I’m also quite aware that another man might have taken immediate advantage of the situation. And why not? I knew she was willing; I found her attractive enough. Even if she affected a lack of interest, I could see-or “hear”-through it, knowing just what to say and when to say it. The power was enormous.

Well, I’m no more virtuous than any man. It’s just that I was in love with Molly.

And it was at that point that I realized that my relationship with Molly could never be quite the same.

The Boston Public Library was not too busy at this time of the early evening, and I was able to get the pile of books I’d ordered within twenty minutes.

The literature on extrasensory perception is actually quite extensive. A number of books had (reasonably) sober-sounding titles like Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain and The Scientific Basis of Telepathy. Some, on the other hand, had such unpromising titles as Develop Your Mind Potential! or Anyone Can Have ESP; those I discarded after the briefest scan. Some of the serious-seeming ones turned out, after a few minutes of reading, to be not so serious after all-they’d dressed up a lot of speculation and the slimmest evidence in pages full of statistics and learned references. Finally I was down to three volumes that seemed to hold out hope: Psi (which turned out to be a jargon abbreviation of “psychic”), Recent Findings in Parapsychological Phenomena, and The Frontier of the Mind.

I felt a little strange looking through these books, speculative as they were. It was a bit like a migraine sufferer poring over volumes that hypothesized that there just might possibly be such a thing as a migraine headache. I wanted to shout out to the library’s hushed, cavernous interior: “It’s not goddamn theoretical! I have it!”

Instead, I plowed through the studies. Apparently, amid all the quacks and the loonies there were a number of credentialed, credible scholars who believed that certain human beings possessed the ability to read minds in one way or another. Among them were a few Nobel laureates and some prominent researchers at Duke, UCLA, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Freiburg in Germany. They studied such subspecialties as “psychometry” and “psychokinesis.” Mostly these scientists had attained recognition in more traditional fields of research and drew little or no serious attention for their work in parapsychology, despite the occasional article in respected science journals like Britain’s Nature.

What it seemed to come down to was this: perhaps a quarter of all human beings, at one time or another, experience some form of telepathy. Most of us, however, refuse to allow ourselves to accept it. I read a number of accounts that seemed plausible. A woman is dining with friends in New York City and suddenly feels certain that her father has died. She rushes to the phone-and the father, indeed, died of heart failure in a hospital at the moment she felt it. A college student feels a sudden, unexplained urge to call home, and learns that his younger brother has been in a terrible car accident. Most often, I learned, people receive “signals” or “feelings” while asleep and/or dreaming, because it is at those times that we are least hindered by our skepticism.

But none of this really applied to what had happened to me. I wasn’t experiencing “feelings” or “signals” or “urges.” I was “hearing”-there’s no other word for it-the thoughts of others. Yet not at a distance. In fact, more than a few feet away, I could not “hear” a thing. Which meant that I was receiving some sort of transmissible signal from the human brain. Nothing in these books dealt with that.

Until I came across an intriguing chapter in The Frontier of the Mind. The author was discussing the use of psychics by various police forces throughout the United States, and by the Pentagon during a search for MIAs in Vietnam. There was a reference to the Pentagon’s use of a psychic in January 1982, in a hunt for General Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy.

And then I spotted a reference to a 1980 article in the U.S. Army’s house journal. Military Review, on “the new mental battlefield.” It discussed the “great potential” of “the use of telepathic hypnosis” in warfare-psychic warfare, the article called it! There was a mention of Soviet “psychotronic” weapons-the use of parapsychology to sink U.S. nuclear submarines-and of the National Security Agency’s use of a psychic to crack codes.

The book continued on to discuss a rumored “psychic task force” in the basement of the Pentagon, maintained under the highest of security and headed by an assistant chief of staff for intelligence.

And then, on the next page, I came across a reference to a top secret CIA project involving the intelligence possibilities of extrasensory perception.

The project, according to this account, was terminated in 1977 by the new Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner. At least, the author speculated, it was terminated officially. Very little was known about the project, the author said, except one name associated with it, obtained from a renegade CIA officer. It was the name of the project’s director.

The name was Charles Rossi.

Deeply anxious now and disoriented, I needed to get some exercise, to clear my head and think rationally.

For a couple of years now I have belonged to an athletic club on Boylston Street that I like mostly for its proximity both to work and to home. Its clientele is a real mix, lawyers and businessmen, salesmen and midlevel executives, real jocks, and so on; the gym facilities are top-notch. I could never prevail upon Molly to work out with me. She was of the opinion that we all have a finite number of heartbeats, and she didn’t want to waste hers on some Nautilus machine. And she called herself a physician.

I changed out of my work clothes and into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and worked out on the rowing machine for twenty minutes, thinking all the while about what I had read at the library.

In the strictest sense I was not reading the thoughts of others, I’d concluded. I was able to receive the low-frequency brain waves generated by one single part of the brain, the speech center in the cortex. In other words, I was hearing words and phrases as they were converted from abstract thoughts and ideas into words, as they were given form in speech, preparatory to their being uttered aloud. Apparently, if my theory was right, when certain thoughts occur to us with the right force or passion or emotion, we prearticulate them-ready them for speaking, even if we will never speak the words. And it is at those moments that the brain gives off signals perceptible to-well, to me.

If only I knew more about how the brain functioned! But I could scarcely risk consulting a neurologist at this point: no one could be trusted, really, to keep my condition a secret.

All of this was going through my mind as I got off the rowing machine, my gray T-shirt already stained dark with sweat, and got on the Stairmaster. This particular torture device requires you to pump up and down on a set of pedals while grasping on to a handlebar, all the while standing vertical, while a bright red computer display keeps track of your pain.

On the next Stairmaster was a portly gentleman of about fifty in a light blue T-shirt and white shorts, spewing droplets of sweat onto the machine’s metal base, rivulets of perspiration running down his ears, nose, jaw, and brow. He was wearing wire-rim glasses that were fogged over. I had once talked to him at the club-I don’t remember what about-and I seemed to remember his name was Alan or Alvin or something, and that he was a vice president at a troubled Boston bank, the Beacon Guaranty Trust. Because of a history of lousy management added to the nation’s economic woes. Beacon was slowly going down the tubes. Alan or Alvin, as I recall, was a perennially depressed man, and who could blame him?

Pumping away at the Stairmaster as he was, Al didn’t notice me. His eyes were hooded, his mouth half open, his breathing labored.

It was not my intention, because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and mine alone, but I could not help hearing what I did.

Catherine’s uncle, maybe?

No. The SEC will get right on to that. Those bastards don’t miss a trick.

That’s just as illegal as my selling my own stock.

Gotta be a way.

I couldn’t pick up everything he was saying. His thoughts came in and out, loud and then faint, clear and then indistinct, like a shortwave radio picking up some distant foreign station.

But all that stuff about the SEC and illegality drew my attention right away. I tilted my head ever so slightly toward Al’s heaving, dripping body.

The stock’s going to just goddamn rocket. How come I’m not allowed to buy stock in my own company? Doesn’t seem right. Wonder whether anyone else on the board of directors is thinking what I’m thinking. Of course they are. They’re all trying to figure out a way to get rich off this.

This monologue was getting more and more interesting, and I strained to tune in without seeming too obvious about it. Al, lost in his greedy little thoughts, seemed oblivious of me.

So let’s see. The announcement is made tomorrow, two o’clock P.M. Every financial analyst in the country, and hundreds of thousands of shareholders, see that poor beleaguered old Beacon Trust is now being acquired by the rock-solid Saxon Bancorp and everyone and their grandmother will be buying badly undervalued shares of Beacon. We’re going to go from eleven and a half to fifty or sixty in two days. Jesus. And I gotta sit on my hands? There’s gotta be a way. Maybe one of Catherine’s rich lady friends. Maybe her uncle can work something out that’s insulated from me enough-buy up Beacon tomorrow morning in someone else’s name-

I found my heart beginning to thud rapidly. I had just learned what could be described only as the ultimate insider information. Beacon Trust was going to be acquired by Saxon. The deal was going to be announced tomorrow. Alan or Alvin was one of probably only a handful of insiders, executives, and attorneys who knew about the deal. The stock of Beacon would certainly shoot up, and anyone who had advance knowledge could become a rich man. Al was scheming out a way to get rich off it himself, if he could find a way that wouldn’t attract the hound dogs of the SEC. I doubted he’d be able to pull it off.

But I could.

Tomorrow I could, in a matter of hours, make a killing in shares of Beacon Trust that would make the disappearance of my half-million-dollar nest egg seem inconsequential.

There was no way in the world anyone could connect me to Beacon Trust. My firm did no business with Beacon (we wouldn’t deign to). I would have to make a point of not even saying hello to Al: better we didn’t even exchange a word.

What could the Securities and Exchange Commission possibly do? Bring me into a courtroom, facing a jury of my peers, and charge me with mind reading with intent to profit illegally? The chairman of the SEC would be locked up in a rubber room before they could even file the paperwork.

I got off the Stairmaster, sweating profusely. I’d done a good three-quarters of an hour on the torture equipment without even realizing it.

SIXTEEN

Twenty minutes later or so, I heard a key turn in both front door locks, then heard Molly’s voice calling out, “Ben?”

“You’re late,” I said, feigning irritation. “Tell me what’s more important-the life of an infant, or my supper?”

I looked up, gave her a smile, and saw that she looked exhausted.

“Hey,” I said, getting up to embrace her. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head slowly, wearily. “Tough day.”

“Ah,” I said, “but now you’re home.” I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her, a good, long, extended kiss. I gave her bottom a squeeze and pressed myself hard against her.

She slid her hands, cold and dry, down my back, under the elastic band of my shorts. “Mmm,” she said. Her breath was hot on the back of my neck.

Now I slipped my hands under her blouse, up under the white cotton fabric of her bra, felt her warm, erect nipples, stroked.

“Mmmph,” she said.

“Upstairs?” I asked.

She moaned quietly, then gave a brief shiver.

– the kitchen-I heard.

I leaned toward her, still running my fingertips over her right breast, squeezing the thickened nipple.

– do it in the kitchen. Standing up. Ah, right here-

I got up, took her by the shoulders, and gently maneuvered her from the sitting room into the kitchen, then pushed her back against the burnished, scarred oak tabletop.

Her thoughts. It was wrong, it was evil, it was shameful, but, carried away in my lust, I couldn’t stop myself-

Oh, yes-

She moaned softly as I pulled off her blouse.

– my other breast. Don’t stop. Both breasts-

Obediently, I caressed both her breasts with my palms, then bent my head down and sucked first one nipple, then the other.

Don’t move-

I continued to suck and lick, all the while pushing against her until she was lying flat on the table, safely clear of the bowls. I had never seen The Postman Always Rings Twice, but I remembered the iconography of it; hadn’t Lana Turner and John Garfield done it on the kitchen table, too?

Now, still nuzzling her breasts, I pressed my erect member against her thigh, grinding slowly, and as I began to undo the drawstring of her sweatpants, I heard

– No. Not yet.

And, obeying her unspoken wishes, I turned my full attention to her breasts, dallying there longer than I otherwise might have.

We did in fact make love on the kitchen table, losing one cheap china bowl to the commotion, but neither one of us much noticed the crash. It was, I have to say, the most erotic, intense sex I had ever had. Molly had been so carried away, she had forgotten to insert her diaphragm. She came time after time, the tears flowing down her cheeks. Afterward we lay tangled in each other’s arms, wet with sweat and musky with the fluids and odors of lovemaking, on the couch in the sitting room next to the kitchen.

Yet when it was over, I felt enormously guilty.

They say that all human beings are sad after sex. I believe that it is only men who experience the postcoital blues. Molly looked at once blissful and disoriented, stroking my now-flaccid, reddened, drained penis.

“You weren’t protected,” I said. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind about kids?”

“No,” she said dreamily. “I’m not at the fertile part of my cycle right now. Not much of a risk. But that was great.”

I felt increasingly guilty and predatory and generally evil. I had violated her in a fundamental way, I felt. By responding to her every unspoken desire, I had in a terrible sense manipulated her, engaged in a reprehensible dishonesty.

I felt shitty.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was great.”

Our wedding was held on the grounds of a lovely old estate outside Boston. The day is still a blur. I remember bustling around, looking for my cummerbund and studs and a pair of half-decent black socks to wear.

Shortly before the ceremony began, Hal Sinclair caught hold of my elbow. In his tuxedo he was even more distinguished-looking than when I first met him: his white hair glowed against his tanned, long, narrow, handsome face. He had a cleft chin, thin lips, laugh lines around the eyes and mouth.

He seemed angry, but I quickly realized he was being stern, and I’d never seen him stern before.

“You take care of my daughter,” he said.

I looked at him, expecting him to crack a joke, but his mien was unrelievedly somber.

“You hear me?”

I said I did. Of course I will.

“You take care of her.”

And it suddenly hit me, like a punch to the solar plexus. Of course! My last wife had been killed. Hal would never, ever say it, but were it not for my failure to follow correct procedures, Laura would be alive. Were it not for my bungling.

You killed your first wife, Ben, he seemed to be saying. Don’t kill your second one.

My face flushed hotly. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But not my future father-in-law, not on the day of my wedding.

I replied, as warmly as I could, “Don’t you worry about it, Hal. I will.”

“I’ve got a client, Mol,” I said later as we drank vodka and tonics at the kitchen table. “A normal, totally sane guy-”

“What was he doing at Putnam & Stearns?” She took a sip from the icy glass. “Excellent. Lot of lime, the way I like it.”

I chuckled. “So this client who seems totally on the level, asked me if I believed in the possibility of extrasensory perception.”

“ESP.”

“So this client insisted he can, in a way, pick up on the thoughts of others. Sort of ‘read’ them.”

“Okay, Ben. What’s your point?”

“So, he tried it on me, and I’m convinced. I guess, what I want to know is, do you accept the possibility?”

“No. Yes. How the hell do I know? What are you getting at?”

“You ever hear of such a thing?”

“Sure. On The Twilight Zone, I think there might have been some episode like that. A kid in a Stephen King book, too. But listen, Ben-I-we need to talk.”

“All right,” I said warily.

“A guy accosted me at the hospital today.”

“What guy?”

“‘What guy?’” she echoed sardonically. “You know damned well what guy.”

“Molly, what are you talking about?”

“This afternoon. At the hospital. He said you told him where to find me.”

I put down my drink. “What?”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“I promise you, I have no idea what this is all about. Someone ‘accosted’ you?”

“Not ‘accosted,’ I don’t mean that. There was this guy, you know, a guy sitting outside the NICU, in the waiting area, and I guess he’d sent in word for someone to get me. I didn’t recognize him. He had that sort of official look-the gray suit and the blue tie and all that.”

“Who was he?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.”

“You don’t-”

“Listen,” she said sharply. “Listen to me. He asked if I was Martha Sinclair, the daughter of Harrison Sinclair. I said yes, who was he? but he asked if he could talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said all right.”

She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and continued. “He said he’d just talked to you, that he was a friend of my father’s. I assumed that meant he was an Agency employee, since he sort of had that look, and he wanted to talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said okay.”

“What’d he want?”

“He asked if I knew anything about an account my father had opened before his death. Something about an access code or something. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

“What?”

“He didn’t talk to you, did he?” she said, failing to suppress a sob. “Ben, it’s a lie, it has to be.”

“You didn’t get his name?”

“I was in a state of shock! I could barely talk.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Very light skin, almost an albino. Light blond hair. Strong-looking, but somehow, I don’t know, feminine. Epicene. He said he was doing security work for the Central Intelligence Agency,” she said in a small, thin voice. “He said they were investigating-what he called Dad’s ‘alleged embezzlement,’ and he wanted to know whether my father had left me any papers, gave me any information. Left any access codes. Anything.”

“You told him they have their heads up their collective asses, didn’t you?”

“I told him there was some horrible mistake, you know, what kind of proof did they have, all that. And the guy just said something like, I’ll be in touch again, but in the meantime, think very hard about anything your father might have told you. And then he said-”

Her voice cracked, and she covered her eyes with one cupped hand.

“Go on, Molly.”

“He said the embezzlement was, in all likelihood, connected to my father’s murder. He knew about the photo of-” She closed her eyes.

“Go ahead.”

“He said there was a lot of pressure from the Agency to make these allegations public, release them to the news media, and I said, but they couldn’t do that, it was a lie, you’d ruin his reputation. And he said, We’d hate to do that, Ms. Sinclair. All we want, he said, is your cooperation.”

“Oh, my God,” I moaned.

“Does this have anything to do with the Corporation, Ben? With whatever you’re doing for Alex Truslow?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think it does.”

SEVENTEEN

Early the next morning-and it had to have been early, because Molly had not yet gotten up to go to work-I opened my eyes, looked around the room as I habitually do, and saw from the digital clock-radio that it was not even six o’clock.

Molly was asleep next to me, curled into the fetal position, her hands clasped to her chest. I like looking at her asleep: I like the little-girl vulnerability and seeing her hair mussed up and her makeup off. She has the ability to sleep far more deeply than I. Sometimes I think she enjoys sleep more than sex. And indeed, she inevitably awakes in a buoyant mood, happy and refreshed, as if she’d just returned from a wonderful though brief vacation.

Whereas I awake dyspeptic, dazed, grumpy. I got out of the bed, walked across the cold wooden floor, and went to the john, hoping the noise would wake her up. But she couldn’t be lured away from whatever she was dreaming. Then I approached her side of the bed, sat down on the edge of it, and leaned my head down toward hers.

I was startled to “hear” something.

It was nothing coherent, none of the brief snatches of ordered thought that I’d been able to pick up the day before.

I heard bits and pieces of sounds almost musical, tonal, that didn’t sound like any language I’d ever heard. It was as if I were dialing a radio’s tuning knob in some foreign country. And then-a cluster of words that made perfect sense. Computer, I heard, and then something that sounded like fox and then, clearly a hospital dream now, monitor, and then, suddenly, Ben, and then more of the musical nonsense phrases.

And then Molly was awake. Had she felt my breath on her face? Her eyes opened slowly, focusing on me. She jolted upright. “What is it, Ben?” she asked urgently.

“Nothing,” I said.

“What time is it? Is it seven?”

“It’s six.” I hesitated, then said: “I want to talk.”

“I want to sleep,” she grumbled, and closed her eyes. “Talk later.” She rolled over on her side and clutched the pillow.

I touched her shoulder. “Mol, honey. We have to talk now.”

Eyes closed, she mumbled, “Okay.”

I touched her shoulder again, and her eyes opened again. “What?” She sat up slowly.

I moved over on the bed, and she made room for me.

“Molly,” I began, and then paused.

How do you say this? How do you explain something that doesn’t even make sense to oneself?

“Hmm?”

“Mol, this is going to be really hard to explain. I think you’re just going to have to listen. You’re not going to believe me, I expect-certainly I wouldn’t believe it-but for now, just listen. Okay?”

She regarded me suspiciously a moment. “This has something to do with the guy at the hospital, doesn’t it?”

“Please, just listen. You know this CIA man came over and asked me to submit to an MRI polygraph exam.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I think the MRI did something to me-to my brain.”

Her eyes widened, then her eyebrows went up, worried. “What happened, Ben?”

“No, listen. This is tough. Do you believe in at least the possibility that some human beings possess extrasensory perception?”

“This client you talked about last night,” she said. “There isn’t any client, is there?” She groaned. “Oh, Ben.”

“Listen, Molly-”

“Ben, I’ve got some friends you can consult with. At the hospital-”

“Molly-”

“Very good, very smart people. The chief of the adult psychiatric division is an especially-”

“For Christ’s sake, I haven’t flipped out.”

“Then-”

“Look, you know there have been a number of studies in the last few decades that demonstrate-not conclusively, but at least persuasively if you’re of an open mind-the possibility that some of us are able to perceive the thoughts of others.

“Look,” I went on. “In February of 1993, a psychologist from Cornell gave a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is a matter of public record. He presented hard statistical evidence that ESP exists-that human beings actually can read the thoughts of others. His paper was accepted for publication by the most prestigious journal in psychology. And the chairman of Harvard’s psychology department said he was ‘quite persuaded.’”

She seemed to be pouting, not even looking at me any longer, but I continued, undeterred. “Until recently I never paid any attention to that kind of stuff. The world is full of hucksters and charlatans, and I’d always dismissed those kind of people as naive, if not worse.”

I was rambling now, desperately trying to sound as rational and grounded and lawyerly as possible. “Let me get to the point. The CIA, the old KGB, and a number of other intelligence agencies around the world-I think Israel’s Mossad, too-have historically been interested in the espionage possibilities of people who possess even a modicum of-for want of a better word-‘psychic’ abilities. There are well-funded programs to search out such people-this is a fact-and try to employ them for intelligence purposes. When I was with the Agency, I remember hearing rumors about a special program. And I’ve done a fair bit of reading about it by now.”

Molly was shaking her head slowly, though I couldn’t tell whether this was in disbelief or sorrow. She touched my knee with her hand and said, “Ben, do you think Alex Truslow is involved in this?”

“Hear me out,” I said. “When I…” My voice trailed off as I thought of something.

“Hmm?”

I held a hand up to silence her. I tried to make my mind a blank, then concentrated. Surely, if she was as upset as she seemed-

Rosenberg, I heard as clearly as anything. I bit my lower lip and continued to concentrate.

have let him do this fucking Truslow work. It’s got to be so hard on him to come back into contact with these spook types after giving all that up, after what happened to him, it’s got to take a toll. Stan Rosenberg will make time for him today if I ask him to as a special favor…

I said: “Molly, you’re going to call Stan Rosenberg, right? That’s the name, isn’t it?”

She looked at me sadly. “He’s the new chief of psychiatry. I’ve mentioned him to you before, haven’t I?”

“No, Molly. Never. You were thinking it.”

She nodded, and looked away.

“Molly. Humor me for a second. I want you to think of something. Think of something I can’t possibly know.”

“Ben,” she said, a wan smile on her face.

“Think of-think of the name of your first-grade teacher. Do it, Molly.”

“Okay,” she said patiently. She closed her eyes, as if thinking very hard, and I cleared my mind and heard it-

Mrs. Nocito.

“It’s Mrs. Nocito, isn’t it?”

She nodded. Then she looked up at me, exasperated, and said, “What’s the point of all this, Ben? Are you having fun?”

“Listen to me, dammit. Something happened to me in Rossi’s MRI lab. It altered my brain in some way, did something. I came out of it with an ability to-how can I explain this?-to hear, or read, or something-listen in on the thoughts of others. Not all the time, and not all thoughts. Only things that others think in anger or fear or arousal-but I can do it. Obviously someone discovered that a very powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine can alter the brain, or at least some brains-”

Five five five oh seven two oh. When he goes in the bathroom, or when he goes downstairs, I’ll call Maureen. She’ll know what to do-

“Molly. Listen to me. You’re going to call someone named Maureen. The phone number is 555-0720.”

She looked at me dully.

“There’s no way I could know that, Molly. No way. Believe me.”

She continued looking at me, her eyes shining with tears, her mouth slightly agape. “How did you do that?” she whispered.

Oh, thank God. Thank God. “Molly, I want you to think of something-something I couldn’t possibly know you’re thinking. Please.”

She brought her knees up to her chest, hugged them against her, and compressed her mouth.

Trollope. I’ve never read Barchester Towers. I want to read that next. Next vacation…

“You’re thinking you’ve never read Trollope’s Barchester Towers,” I said very deliberately.

Molly breathed in slowly, audibly. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

I nodded.

“Oh, no,” she said, and I was taken aback to see her face overtaken with an expression, not of excitement, but of enormous fear. “Oh, Ben,” she said. “Please. No.”

She pulled at her chin in an unconscious gesture of deep reflection. She got out of bed and began pacing. “Would you agree to see someone at the hospital?” she asked. “Like a neurologist, someone whom we can talk this over with?”

I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Who’s going to believe me?”

“If you do to them what you did to me-if you just demonstrate it-how could they not believe you?”

“True. But what’s the point? What would we learn?”

She flailed her hands about, then brought them down to her sides. “How this happened,” she said, her voice taking on that shrill edge of tension. “How it could possibly have happened.”

“Molly,” I said, turning to face her as she toyed with a conch shell on the dresser. “It happened. No one’s going to tell me anything I don’t know.”

She looked at me. “How much does Alex Truslow know, do you think?”

“About me? Probably nothing. And I didn’t let Rossi know-at least, I don’t think I did-”

“Did you talk to Alex about this?”

“Not yet?”

“Why not?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Call him now.”

“He’s at Camp David.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“Meeting with the President,” I explained.

“The directorship. I see. Did you tell Bill Stearns?”

“No, of course not.”

She paused. “Why not?”

“What do you mean, why-”

“I mean, what are you afraid of?”

“Molly, come on-”

“No, Ben, think this through for a second.” She returned to the side of the bed and sat next to me, still toying with the conch shell’s pink labia. “Truslow Associates is hired to locate a missing fortune. It’s top secret work, so some guy from CIA flies down and, in the guise of fluttering you, puts you through this protocol. A superior lie detector. As they told you. So maybe it does work that way. Okay. So what makes you think they’re aware that this same superpowerful MRI also has some sort of-well, let’s call it a subsidiary effect-of rearranging the human brain, or a tiny part of the human brain? In such a way that people thus exposed develop the ability to listen to the brain waves of others? I mean, how do you know they know what it did to you, what it could do to a person?”

“After what you went through yesterday-the guy at the hospital-how can you think otherwise?”

“Ben,” she said in a small voice after a moment’s silence.

“Hmm?”

She turned to me, close enough to kiss, her face worried. “When we-when we made love last night. In the kitchen.”

I drew myself up straight involuntarily, guiltily. “Uh-huh?”

“You were doing it, weren’t you?”

“Doing-”

“You were reading my mind, weren’t you?” The sharpness had returned to her voice.

I smiled tensely. “What makes you-”

“Ben.”

“You and I don’t need extrasensory perception,” I began with false joviality.

She pulled herself away from my embrace. “You did, didn’t you?” Now she was angry. “You were listening in on my thoughts, on my fantasies, right?”

Before I could say yes, she spat out, “You bastard!”

She stood up, hands on her hips, facing me squarely. “You son of a bitch,” she said quietly. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

EIGHTEEN

Molly’s reaction, I suppose, was understandable. There is something creepy and awful about knowing that your innermost thoughts, which we all take for granted are inaccessible to anyone but ourselves, can be eavesdropped upon.

We’d just enjoyed the best sex we’d ever had, Molly and I, and now it must have seemed to her cheap, fraudulent. But why? Logically, this power enabled me to know something we normally can never know, what another person secretly wants, and to give it to her.

Right?

Yet one of the things that makes us intelligent, thinking beings is the ability not to share our thoughts with others-to decide what to disclose and what to keep a secret. And here I was, trespassing across that line. Molly seemed especially distant when we kissed good-bye an hour after that. But after what she’d just learned about me, who could blame her?

I suppose that on some level I had hoped to awake that morning and realize I had dreamed the whole thing, that I would now go back to my safe and reassuring work as a patent lawyer, go through my rounds of conferences and meetings as usual.

This may strike you as a bit odd. After all, the ability to read the thoughts of others is one of those stock fantasies or daydreams that many of us keep to ourselves. There are those on the lunatic fringe who buy books or tapes that promise to teach them extrasensory perception. At one time or another we have all wished for such a power.

But you do not want it, not really. Take my word for it.

As soon as I arrived at the office and chatted a bit with Darlene, I shut my office door and called my broker, John Matera, at Shearson. I’d moved a few thousand dollars from my savings account to my Shearson brokerage account. That, plus the small equity I still had in some blue chips-mostly Nynex and other utilities-would give me enough money to play with. In effect, I was gambling with the money that Bill Stearns had advanced me to stave off bankruptcy, poverty, and ruin.

But it was a sure thing, after all.

“John,” I said after a few pleasantries, “what’s Beacon Trust selling at?”

John, who is a gruff, plainspoken type, replied without pause, “Nothing. It’s free. They’re giving it away to anyone who’s foolish enough to express an interest. What the hell do you want that dog shit for, Ben?”

“What’s the asking price?”

He gave a long, soulful sigh. There was a clicking of computer keys, and then he said, “Eleven and a half asked, eleven bid.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “For thirty thousand dollars, that means I can get-what?-”

“An ulcer. Don’t be a lunatic.”

“John, just do it.”

“I’m not allowed to give you advice,” John said. “But why don’t you think this over and call me when you’ve come to your senses.”

Over his vehement protestations, I put in an order for 2800 shares of Beacon Trust at up to eleven and a quarter. Ten minutes later he called to say that I was the “proud owner” of 2800 shares of Beacon Trust at eleven, and couldn’t resist adding, “Chump.”

I smiled to myself for a few seconds, and then screwed up the courage to call Truslow. Suddenly remembering that he said he was going to Camp David, I momentarily panicked. It was imperative that I reach him, find out whether what had happened to me was intended, whether he knew…

But how to reach him?

I first called Truslow Associates, where his secretary informed me that he was out of town and couldn’t be reached. Yes, she said; she knew who I was, knew I was a friend, but even she didn’t know how to get in touch with him.

Next, I called his Louisburg Square home. The phone was answered by a woman (a housekeeper, presumably) who said that Mr. Truslow was out of town-“in Washington, I believe”-and that Mrs. Truslow was in New Hampshire. She gave me the New Hampshire phone number, and at last I reached Margaret Truslow. I congratulated her on Alex’s selection, then told her I needed to reach him immediately.

She hesitated. “Can’t this wait, Ben?”

“It’s urgent,” I said.

“What about his secretary? Is it something she can handle for you?”

“I need to talk to Alex,” I said. “At once.”

“Ben, you know he’s in Maryland, at Camp David,” she said delicately. “I don’t know how to reach him, and I have a feeling this isn’t a good time to disturb him.”

“There has to be a way to reach him,” I insisted. “And I think he’ll want to be disturbed. If he’s with the President or something, fine. But if he’s not…”

Sounding somewhat annoyed, she agreed to call the person at the White House who had first contacted Alex, to see if her husband could be reached. She also agreed that she’d relay my request that when and if Truslow called me, he do so only over a portable scrambler.

Partners’ meetings at Putnam & Stearns are as dull as partners’ meetings anywhere, except perhaps on television, on L.A. Law. We meet once a week, on Friday mornings at ten, to discuss whatever Bill Stearns wants us to discuss, decide whatever must be decided.

In the course of this particular meeting, over coffee and very good sweet rolls from the firm’s caterer, we went over a number of matters ranging from the dull (how many new associates should we hire for the upcoming year?) to the mildly sensational (should the firm agree to take on the representation of a well-known Boston underworld crime lord-no, make that alleged crime lord-who happened to be the brother of one of the state’s most powerful politicians, and who was being charged with fraud by the state Lottery Commission?).

The answers: No on the crime lord and six on the associates. If it weren’t for the sole item of business that involved me-could I make a good case to a giant food conglomerate that would impress them into hiring me in their suit against another food conglomerate over who stole whose formula for a fake fat-I would have been unable to keep my attention on the business at hand at all.

I was feeling unsettled and decidedly unlawyerly, as if I could burst out of my skin at a moment’s notice. Bill Stearns, at the head of the coffin-shaped conference table, seemed to be giving me too many glances. Was I being paranoid? Did he know?

No, the real question was: How much did he know?

I was tempted to try to tune in on the thoughts of my fellow partners as they doodled or spoke up, but, truth to tell, it was difficult. So many of the partners were on edge, nervous, irritated, angry, that the din, the hubbub, arose as one great wall of sound, or one wall-to-wall pile rug of chatter, out of which I could barely sort one person’s thoughts out from another’s spoken words. Yes, I’ve described the qualitative difference-the difference in timbre-in the thoughts I was able to receive as compared with the normal spoken voice. But the difference is a subtle one, and when too much was going on, I simply got confused and frustrated.

Yet I couldn’t stop receiving the random thought. So one moment I would hear Todd Richlin, the firm’s financial whiz, discussing billables and receivables and deliverables and at the same time I could hear, overlaid, his frenetic, edgy thoughts-Stearns just raised his eyebrows, what does that mean? and Kinney’s trying to jump in and embarrass me, that asshole. And over that would come interjections by Thorne or Quigley, something about hiring an outside consultant to train our basically illiterate associates in writing and speaking, and then their thoughts over that. So what I ended up with was a nightmarish babble of voices, which gradually drove me to distraction.

And all the while, whenever I looked toward the head of the conference table, Bill Stearns seemed to be looking at me.

Soon the meeting began to take on that accelerated rhythm that always indicates we’ve got less than a half hour left. Richlin and Kinney were locked in some sort of gladiatorial struggle over the course of Kinney’s corporate litigation involving Viacorp, a huge entertainment concern in Boston, and I was still trying to clear my head of all the babble, when I heard Stearns adjourn the meeting, rise quickly from his seat, and stride out of the room.

I ran to catch him, but he continued a brisk pace down the hallway.

“Bill,” I called out.

He turned around to look at me, his eyes steely, and did not break his stride. He deliberately, it seemed, was keeping a good physical distance between us. The jovial Bill Stearns was gone, replaced by a man of severe, frighteningly intent demeanor. Did he, too, know? “I can’t talk to you now, Ben,” he said in a strange, peremptory voice I’d never heard him use before.

A few minutes after I returned to my office, a call was put through from Alexander Truslow.

“Jesus Christ, Ben, is this something important?” His voice had that odd, flat tone that a scrambler imparts.

“Yes, Alex, it is,” I said. “Is this a sterile line?”

“It is. Glad I thought to bring the device with me.”

“I hope I didn’t call you out of a meeting with the President or something.”

“Actually no. He’s meeting with a couple of his Cabinet members on something to do with the German crisis, so I’m cooling my heels. What’s up?”

I gave him an abbreviated account of what had happened in “Development Research Laboratories,” and, as sparely as I could, I told him about what I was now able to do.

A long, long pause ensued. The silence felt infinite. Would he think I’d lost my mind? Would he hang up?

When he finally spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “The Oracle Project,” he breathed.

“What?”

“My God. I’ve heard tales-but to think-”

“You know about this?”

“God in heaven, Ben. I knew this fellow Rossi was once involved in such an undertaking. I thought… Jesus, I’d heard they’d had some success, that it worked on one person, but the last I heard, Stan Turner had shot the whole project down, quite some time ago. So that’s what he was really up to. I should have known there was something fishy about Rossi’s story.”

“You weren’t informed?”

“Informed? They told me this was a regulation flutter. You see what I meant when I told you that something’s afoot. The Company’s out of control. Dammit all, I don’t know who the hell I can trust anymore-”

“Alex,” I said. “I’m going to have to sever my links with your firm entirely.”

“Are you sure, Ben?” Truslow protested.

“I’m sorry. For my safety, and Molly’s-and yours-I’m going to have to lay low for a while. Stay out of sight. Cut off all contacts with you or anyone else associated with CIA.”

“Ben, listen to me. I feel responsible-I’m the one who got you involved in all this in the first place. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll respect your decision. Part of me wants you to press on, to see what these Agency cowboys want from you. Part of me wants to tell you to just head up to our weekend place and hide out for a while. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I don’t know what the hell has happened to me. I still haven’t fathomed it. I don’t know if I ever will. But-”

“I have no right to tell you what to do. It’s up to you. You may want to talk to Rossi, suss out what he wants from us. Perhaps he’s dangerous. Perhaps he’s merely overzealous. Use your judgment, Ben. That’s all I can tell you.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll think it over.”

“In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do-”

“No, Alex. Nothing. Right now there’s nothing anyone can do.”

As I hung up, another call came in.

“A man named Charles Rossi,” Darlene announced over the intercom.

I picked it up. “Rossi,” I said.

“Mr. Ellison, I’m going to need you to come in as soon as possible and-”

“No,” I said. “I have no arrangement with CIA. My arrangement was with Alexander Truslow. And as of this minute, the arrangement is over.”

“Now, hold on a second-”

But I had hung up.

NINETEEN

John Matera, my Shearson broker, was so excited he could barely get his words out. “Jesus,” he said. “Did you hear?” We were speaking on Shearson’s recorded line, so I said innocently, “Hear what?”

“Beacon-what happened to Beacon-they’re being bought out by Saxon-”

“That’s terrific,” I said, feigning excitement. “What does that mean for the stock?”

“Mean? Mean? It’s already up thirty fucking points, Ben. You’ve-you’ve like tripled your money, and the day’s not even over yet. You’ve already raked in over sixty thousand dollars, which ain’t half bad for a couple hours’ work. Christ, if you could’ve bought call options-”

“Sell it, John.”

“What the fuck-?”

“Just sell, John. Now.”

For some reason I didn’t feel elated. Instead, I felt a dull, acid wave of fear wash over my insides. Everything else I’d been through in the last few hours I could on some level dismiss as my imagination, as some sort of terrible delusion. But I had read a human being’s mind, had thereby learned inside information, and here was the concrete evidence of it.

Not just for me, but for anyone else who might be watching me. I knew there was a serious risk that the SEC would be suspicious of such a quick turnover; but I needed the cash, and I let it get the better of my good sense.

I gave him quick instructions on what to do with the proceeds, which account to place it in, and then I hung up. And called Edmund Moore in Washington.

The phone rang, and rang, and rang-there was no answering machine; Ed Moore had always considered such contraptions gauche-and when I was about to hang up, it was answered by a male voice.

“Yes?”

The voice of a young man, not Ed’s. The voice of someone in a position of authority.

“Ed Moore, please,” I said.

A pause. “Who’s calling?”

“A friend.”

“Name, please.”

“None of your business. Let me speak to Elena.”

In the background I could hear a woman’s voice, high and keening, her cries rising and falling rhythmically. “Who is it?” the woman’s voice called out.

“She’s unable to come to the phone, sir. I’m sorry.”

In the background the cries became louder, then became words: “Oh, my Lord!” and “My baby. My baby” and a loud, anguished gasping.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

The man covered the phone, consulted with someone, and then came back on the line. “Mr. Moore has passed away. His wife discovered him just a few minutes ago. It was a suicide. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say.”

I was stunned, almost speechless.

Ed Moore… a suicide? My dear friend and mentor, that diminutive, feisty, and, above all, enormous-hearted old man. I was too dazed, too shocked, even to shed the tears for him I knew I would.

It couldn’t be.

A suicide? He had talked about vague threats against him; he had feared for his life. Surely it was no suicide. Yet he had seemed so disoriented, even unbalanced, when we spoke.

Edmund Moore was dead.

It was no suicide.

I called Mass. General and had Molly paged. I trusted her good sense, her sound advice, and I needed it now more than ever.

I was deeply scared. There’s a macho tendency among new clandestine-officer recruits to belittle and mock fear, as if it somehow demeans your competence, your virility. But the experienced field men know that fear can be your greatest ally. You must always listen to, and trust, your instincts.

And my instincts now told me that this sudden talent had put both Molly and me in great danger.

After a long wait the page operator got on and said, in a cigarette-husky voice, “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no answer. Would you like me to connect you to the neonatal intensive-care unit?”

“Yes, please.”

The woman who answered at the NICU had a slight Hispanic accent. “No, Mr. Ellison, I’m sorry, she’s already left.”

“Left?”

“Gone home. About ten minutes ago.”

“What?”

“She had to leave suddenly. She said it was an emergency, something about you. I assumed you knew.”

I hung up and hurried toward the elevator, my heart racing.

Rain was coming down in sheets, gusted by winds of almost gale force. The sky was gunmetal gray, streaked with yellow. People walked by in yellow slickers and khaki raincoats, their black umbrellas turned inside out by the howling wind.

By the time I mounted the steps to my town house, drenched during the short walk from the taxi to the front door, it was twilight, and all of the lights in the house seemed to be off. Strange.

I hurried into the outside foyer. Why would she have gone home? She was scheduled to spend the night in the hospital.

The first peculiar thing I noticed was that the alarm was off. Did that mean she was in the house? Molly had left after I did that morning, and she was always scrupulous-even a little obsessive-about turning the alarm on, though there was little if anything for anyone to steal.

When I unlocked the front door, I noticed the second peculiar thing: Molly’s briefcase was there, in the foyer, the briefcase she took with her wherever she went.

She must be home.

I switched on a few lights and quietly climbed the stairs to our bedroom. It was dark, and there was no Molly. I climbed another flight of stairs to the room she uses as her study, though at that point it was in a dismaying state of renovation.

Nothing.

I called out: “Mol?”

No reply.

The adrenaline began to course through my bloodstream, and I made a series of mental calculations.

If she wasn’t here, could she be on the way? And if so, who or what had caused her to come home? And why hadn’t she tried to call me?

“Molly?” I called out a little louder.

Silence.

I descended the staircase rapidly, my heart thudding, switching on lights as I moved.

No. Not in the sitting room. Not in the kitchen.

“Molly?” I said loudly.

Complete, utter silence in the house.

And then I jumped as the telephone rang.

I leapt to pick it up, and said, “Molly.”

It wasn’t Molly. The voice was male, unfamiliar.

“Mr. Ellison?” An accent, but from where?

“Yes?”

“We must talk. It is urgent.”

“What the fuck have you done with her?” I exploded. “What the-”

“Please, Mr. Ellison. Not over the telephone. Not in your house.”

I breathed in slowly, trying to slow my heartbeat. “Who is this?”

“Outside. We must meet right now. It is a matter of safety for both of you. For all of us.”

“Where the hell-” I tried to say.

“Everything will be explained,” came the voice again. “We will talk-”

“No,” I said. “Right now I want to know-”

“Listen,” the accented voice hissed through the receiver. “There is a taxi at the end of your block. Your wife is in it right now, waiting for you. You must go left, down the block-”

But I did not wait for him to finish. Throwing the handset to the floor, I whirled around and ran toward the front door.

TWENTY

The street was dark, quiet, slick with rain. A slight drizzle fell, almost a mist.

There it was, at the end of the block, a yellow cab, a few hundred yards off. Why at the end of the block? Why there? I wondered.

And as I set off, running, accelerating, I could make out, in the taxi’s backseat, the silhouette of a woman’s head, the long tangle of dark hair, unmoving.

Was it in fact Molly?

I couldn’t be sure at this distance, but it might-it had to-be. Why, I thought wildly, my legs pumping, was she there? What had happened?

But something felt wrong. Instinctually, I slowed to a fast walk, my head whipping to either side.

What was it?

Something. One too many strollers on the street at this time of night, in the rain. Walking too casually. People normally stride through rain to get out of it…

But was I being paranoid?

These were normal passersby, certainly.

For just an instant, a split second really, I caught a glimpse of one of the pedestrians. Tall, gaunt, wearing a black or navy blue raincoat, a dark knit watch cap.

He appeared to glance at me. Our eyes locked for a millisecond.

His face was extraordinarily pale, as if it had been bleached entirely of color. His lips were thin and as pale as the rest of his face. Under his eyes were deep yellowish circles that extended to his cheekbones. His hair, or what I could see of it beneath his cap, was a pale strawlike blond, swept back.

And just as quickly, he glanced away, casually.

Almost an albino, Molly had said. The man who had “accosted” her at the hospital, who had wanted to know about any accounts, any money Harrison Sinclair might have bequeathed to her.

The whole thing seemed wrong. The call, Molly sitting in the cab: it smelled wrong, and my years of Agency training had taught me to smell things a certain way, to see patterns, and-

– and something caught my eye, a tiny flash of something, a glint of something-metal?-in the light of the lamp across the narrow street.

I heard it then, a faint shoosh of cloth against cloth, or cloth against leather, a familiar sound distinct against all the ambient street noises, a holster, could it be?

I flung myself to the pavement, just as a deep male voice shouted: “Get down!”

Suddenly the silence was shattered by a frightful cacophony.

The next moment was a terror, a hellish confusion of explosions and screams-the phut-phut of silencer-equipped semiautomatic pistols, the metallic shrieks of bullets creasing the hoods of the cars in front of me. From somewhere came a squeal of brakes, and then an explosion of glass. A window had been blown out somewhere-a stray shot?

I got up into a crouch, trying to determine where the gunfire was coming from. I moved with lightning speed, my brain whizzing through a million calculations.

Where was it coming from?

Couldn’t tell. Across the street? Off to the left? Yes, to the left, from the direction-the direction of the cab!

A dark figure was running toward me, another shout, which I couldn’t understand, and then, as I flung myself to the pavement again, another explosion of gunfire. This time the shots were perilously close. I felt a piece of something sting my cheek, my forehead, felt the pain of the sidewalk scraping against my jaw. Something pricked my thigh. And then the windshield of the car I was crouching behind exploded into a milky webbing.

I was trapped; my unknown assailants had moved in closer, and I was unarmed. Frantically, I dove under the car, and then came another round of silenced shots, an agonized yelp, and the squeal of tires…

and silence.

Absolute silence.

The shooting had momentarily ceased. From under the car’s chassis I could just make out a circle of light directly across the street. In it sprawled a man’s body, dark-clad, his face turned away, the back of his head a horrifying mess of blood and tissue.

Was it the pale man I had glimpsed a few seconds earlier?

No, I saw at once. The dead man’s build was stockier, shorter.

In the silence my ears still rang from the shots and the explosions. For a moment I lay there, afraid to move, terrified that the slightest motion would indicate my position.

And then I heard my name.

“Ben!” A voice, somehow familiar.

The voice was closer now. It came from the window of an approaching vehicle.

“Ben, are you all right?”

Momentarily I was unable to reply.

“Oh, Christ,” I heard the voice say. “Oh, God, I hope he wasn’t hit.”

“Here,” I managed to say. “I’m right here.”

TWENTY-ONE

A few minutes later I was sitting in the back of a bulletproof white van, dazed.

Seated in the front compartment, behind the uniformed driver and separated from me by a panel of thick glass, was Charles Rossi. The interior of the van was elegantly appointed: a small inset television screen, a coffeemaker, even a fax machine.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” came Rossi’s amplified voice, metallically emanating from a two-way intercom. The glass that divided us appeared to be soundproof. “We need to talk.”

“What the hell was that all about?”

“Mr. Ellison,” he said wearily. “Your life is in danger. This isn’t some sort of game.”

Oddly, I felt no anger. Was I numb from what I’d just gone through? From the shock of Molly’s disappearance? What I felt, instead, was a distant, remote sense of indignation, an awareness that all was not right… Yet, strangely, no anger.

“Where’s Molly?” I said dully.

Over the intercom Rossi sighed. “She’s quite safe. We want you to know that.”

“You have her,” I said.

“Yes,” Rossi replied as if from afar. “We have her.”

“What have you done with her?”

“You’ll see her soon,” Rossi said. “I promise you that. You’ll understand we did what we did for her safety. I promise you.”

His voice was soothing, reasonable, and plausible. “She’s safe,” Rossi continued. “You’ll see her soon enough. We’re protecting her. You’ll be able to speak with her in a few hours, and you’ll see.”

“Then who tried to kill me?”

“We don’t know.”

“You don’t know too much, do you?”

“Whether it was one of our own, or others, we can’t say yet.”

One of our own. Meaning CIA? Or others within the government? So how much did they know about me?

I reached over to the door handle and pulled up to open it, but it was locked from the inside.

“Don’t try,” Rossi said. “Please. You’re far too valuable to us. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

The van was moving now. I didn’t know where, didn’t quite understand. But I knew one thing now.

I said, “I was hit.”

“Hmm? You appear to be fine, Ben.”

“No. I was hit.”

I reached down, felt the soreness on my upper thigh. I unbuckled my belt, slid down my pants. Found the needle mark, a tiny black dot surrounded by a red circular inflammation. I hadn’t seen a dart; it wasn’t a hypodermic needle. “How’d you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

We were moving down Storrow Drive, into a traffic lane that pointed toward the expressways.

Ketamine, I thought.

Rossi’s voice came, metallically: “Hmm?”

I must have spoken aloud, but made an effort to keep my thoughts to myself.

Had they given me a benzodiazepine compound? No. It felt like ketamine hydrochloride. “Special K,” as it was called on the streets, an animal tranquilizer.

The Agency occasionally had the need to administer ketamine to unwilling subjects. It produces something called “dissociative anesthesia,” which basically means it makes you feel dissociated from your environment-you can experience pain, for instance, but not feel it; it separates the meaning from the sensation.

Or, at precisely the right dosage, you can remain alert but become amazingly agreeable, acquiescent, even though the self-preservation part of your brain warns you not to acquiesce.

If you want to make someone do something he otherwise wouldn’t, it is the perfect drug.

I looked at the road, watched as we moved closer to the airport. Wondered idly what they were about to do to me.

Thought it couldn’t be so bad, after all.

Nothing too bad.

Part of me, a distant, weak, small-voiced part, wanted to get the van door open, leap out, run.

But everything is basically all right, the stronger, closer, louder-voiced part reassured.

I am being tested in some way. Tested by Charles Rossi. That is all.

There is nothing they could learn from me, nothing of any value. If they were going to kill me, they would have done it long ago.

But such thoughts of danger are foolish. Paranoid. Unnecessary.

Everything is basically all right.

I could hear Rossi speaking to me calmly from hundreds of miles away.

“If I were in your position, given what’s happened to you, I’d no doubt feel the same way. You think nobody knows-you don’t quite believe it yourself. Sometimes you’re elated at what you’re suddenly able to do; sometimes you’re scared out of your mind.”

“I don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re referring to,” I said, but my words came out flat and unconvincing, as if by rote.

“It would be much simpler, much better for all of us, if you cooperated instead of being antagonistic.”

I said nothing.

A moment of silence, and then he spoke. “We’re in a position to protect you. Somehow there are others who are aware of your participation in the experiment.”

“Experiment?” I said. “You’re referring to your MRI ‘polygraph’ device?”

“We knew there was a one in a thousand-at best, one in one hundred-chance that the MRI would have the desired effect on you. Certainly we had good reason to believe, given the full medical evaluation in your Agency file, that you had all the necessary attributes-the IQ, the psychological profile, and particularly the eidetic memory. Precisely the right profile. Obviously we couldn’t be certain, but there was significant cause for optimism.”

I absently traced a pattern on the burgundy-leather-upholstered seat.

“You weren’t careful enough, you know,” he said. “Even someone with your training, your skills, can be sloppy.”

All my alarms were ringing now. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck prickle unpleasantly. Yet my lazy, serene mind seemed utterly separate from my bodily instincts, and I felt myself nodding slowly.

He said, “… won’t be at all surprised that your office and home telephones were tapped-all quite legally, by the way, given your possible involvement in the First Commonwealth debacle. Electronic devices were placed in several rooms of your house as well-we left very little to chance.”

I just shook my head slowly.

“Needless to say, we were able to monitor everything you said aloud-and you were somewhat indiscreet, both in your meeting the other day with Mel Kornstein and certainly in your conversations with your wife. I don’t mean to be at all critical, because you had no reason whatever to suspect that anything was amiss. There was no reason to resort to your Agency tradecraft training, after all.”

I lowered my head to increase the blood supply to the brain, but that only made me dizzier. My head was swimming, and the headlights of the passing cars seemed far too bright, and my limbs felt heavy.

He said, his voice tinged with concern, “It’s a good thing, too. If we hadn’t had you under such close surveillance, we might not have picked you up in time.”

I stifled a yawn, tensing the tendons in my neck. “Alex,” I started to say.

He said, “I’m sorry we had to do this. You’ll understand. It was a matter of protecting you from yourself. You’ll understand when the ketamine wears off that we had to do this. We’re on your side. We certainly don’t want to see anything happen to you. We simply need you to cooperate with us. Once you listen to us, I think you’ll cooperate. We can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I guess good legal help… scarce,” I mumbled.

“You represent a great hope to some very good people.”

“Rossi…” I said. My speech was slurred; my mouth and tongue seemed lazy. “You were… the project director… the CIA psychic project… Oracle Project… your name…”

“You’re very, very valuable to us,” Rossi said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

I said, “Why… you sitting up there… what do you have to hide?”

“Compartmentalization,” he said. “You know the golden rule in the intelligence business. With your ability, it would be dangerous for you to know too much. You’d be a threat to all of us. Better to keep you as ignorant as possible.”

We had pulled up now before some unmarked terminal at Logan Airport.

“In just a few minutes there’s a military aircraft departing for Andrews Air Force Base. Soon, you’ll want to sleep, and you should.”

“Why…” I began, but somehow I couldn’t finish my sentence.

Rossi replied, a beat later, “Everything will be explained soon. Everything.”

TWENTY-TWO

The last thing I remembered was talking with Charles Rossi in the van, and then I found myself groggily awake in some sort of barren airplane cabin that looked very much like a military plane. I became aware that I was strapped down horizontally, to a seat or a stretcher or something.

If Rossi was on the flight, I couldn’t see him anywhere, certainly not from this angle. Seated nearby were men in some sort of military uniform. Guarding me? Did they think I planned to escape at ten thousand feet? Didn’t they realize I was unarmed?

The ketamine that had been injected into me on the street must have been extremely potent, because even now I was unable to think clearly. Nevertheless, I tried.

Destination was Andrews Air Force Base. Likely, I was headed for CIA headquarters. No. That would make no sense. Rossi knew I had the ability to read thoughts, and so the last place he’d want to bring me was Langley. He seemed to know what I couldn’t do-couldn’t perceive brain waves through glass, or at a distance of more than a few feet-which told me that he had been through this extraordinary thing before.

But was the ability still in effect? I had no idea now. How short-lived was it? Perhaps it had faded as quickly as it had come.

I shifted in my seat, pulled against the restraints, and noticed my guards turn their heads, tense.

Had that been Molly in the cab or not? Rossi had said they had her, safe and sound. But a cab? And parked down the street? It had to have been a decoy, someone who looked very much like Molly placed in the cab in order to lure me down the block. But had Rossi’s people done it? Or the unnamed, unspecified “others”?

And who were these others?

I managed to croak out, “Hey!”

One of the guards rose, came near me (but not, I noticed, too near). “What can I do for you?” he asked pleasantly. He was in his early twenties, crew cut, tall, and massively built.

I turned my head toward him, looked him directly in the face. “I’m sick,” I said.

He furrowed his brow. “My instructions-”

“I’m going to vomit,” I said. “The drugs. I just want to let you know that. Do whatever the fuck you’re instructed to do.”

He looked around. One of the other guards frowned and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

I moaned. “Water? Jesus. What’s that going to do? There has to be a john around here.”

The guard turned back to the other one, whispered something to him. The other was gesticulating with what seemed to be indecision. Then the first one turned toward me and said, “Sorry, buddy. The best I can do is offer you a pan.”

I shrugged, or tried to, bound as I was by the restraints. “Have it your way,” I said.

He went to the front of the cabin and returned shortly with what looked like an aluminum bedpan, which he placed alongside my head.

I did my best to simulate the sounds of nausea, coughed and retched as he held the pan next to my mouth, his head no more than a foot and a half away, a look of deepest distaste curling his mouth.

“Hope they’re paying you well for this,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

I did my best to focus my muddled, ketamine-befogged brain.

… not hit him… I heard.

I smiled, knowing what that was all about.

I coughed again.

Then: what for…

And, a few seconds later:… what he did it’s Company business never tell us probably some espionage conviction doesn’t look like the type looks like a goddamned lawyer.

“Guess you’re not so sick after all,” the guard said, pulling the pan away after a few seconds.

“What a relief,” I said. “But don’t move that thing too far away.”

I knew, number one, that it was still working; and, number two, that there was nothing I could learn from this guy, who had been kept deliberately ignorant of who I was and where I was going.

In a short while I drifted back to a dreamless sleep.

The next time I awoke I was seated in the back of still another vehicle, this one a standard-issue government Chrysler. My limbs ached.

The driver was a tall, late-thirtyish man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, wearing a dark blue parka.

We were entering a particularly rural section of Virginia now, somewhere outside of Reston, leaving behind the International Houses of Pancakes and the Osco Drugstores and the hundreds of little shopping malls for wooded, twisty two-lane roads. At first I wondered whether we were headed for Langley by some circuitous route, then I saw we were headed in another direction entirely.

This was safe-house country-the part of Virginia where the CIA maintains a number of private homes used for Agency business: meetings with agents, debriefing defectors, and such. Sometimes they’re apartments in large anonymous suburban buildings, but far more often they’re unremarkable split-level ranches with cheap furniture rented by the month, one-way mirrors in garish frames, vodka in the freezer, and vermouth in the refrigerator.

Ten minutes later we pulled up to a set of ornamental wrought-iron gates set into a wrought-iron fence over fifteen feet high. The gate and fence were spiked and looked high-security. Probably electrified. Then the gates swung open electrically, permitting us to enter a long, dark wooded expanse that suddenly ended after a few hundred yards, giving way to a long, circular drive in front of a large brick Georgian house that in the evening darkness seemed almost foreboding. One room on the third floor was lit up, a few on the second floor, and a large room on the first floor whose curtains were drawn. The outside entrance was lit up as well. I wondered what it cost the Agency to rent this impressive residence, and for how long.

“Well, sir,” the driver said. “Here we are.” He spoke with the soft twang you hear in so many government employees who have emigrated to Washington from the Virginia environs.

“Right,” I said. “Thanks for the lift.”

He nodded quite seriously. “Best of luck, sir.”

I got out of the car and walked slowly across the gravel drive and the flagstone entranceway, and as I approached the front door, it swung open.