Extraordinary Powers

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The CIA in Crisis

President Reportedly Close to Naming New CIA Head

Some Wonder Whether a New Broom Can Really Sweep Clean

Is Spy Agency Out of Control?

BY MICHAEL HALPERN

STAFF REPORTER OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Amid ugly rumors swirling in Washington of vast illegal activity within the Central Intelligence Agency, the President is said to be close to naming a new director.

The latest speculation centers on a career Agency officer, Alexander Truslow, who is generally well regarded by Congress and the intelligence community.

But many observers are concerned that Mr. Truslow faces the difficult, even insurmountable, challenge of attempting to reign in a CIA that is widely believed to be out of control.

TWENTY-THREE

I should not have been at all surprised to see the man in the wheelchair, regarding me calmly as I entered the vast, ornate sitting room. James Tobias Thompson III had aged terribly since I’d last seen him, the incident that had ended my Agency career, but, far more tragically, had ended a wonderful woman’s life and paralyzed a man from the waist down.

“Good evening, Ben,” Toby said.

His voice, a low rasp, was just barely audible. He was a trim man in his late sixties, wearing a conservatively cut blue serge suit. His shoes-which rarely if ever touched the ground-were black brogues, polished to a high shine. His full head of hair, worn a little long for a man of his age, especially an Agency veteran, was pure white. In Paris, when I had last seen him, it was jet black with dabs of gray at the temples. His eyes were hazel; he looked both dignified and dispirited.

Toby’s wheelchair rested against an immense stone fireplace, in which, oddly, a great artificial fire blazed. Oddly, I say, because the room in which I stood, which must have been some fifty feet across and a hundred feet long, with a ceiling almost twenty feet high, was air-conditioned to an uncomfortably cold temperature. For some reason I remembered that Richard Nixon liked crackling fires in the air-conditioned Oval Office in the middle of the summer.

“Toby,” I said, approaching him slowly to shake his hand. But instead, he gestured to a chair that was a good thirty feet away from him.

Seated in a wing chair to one side of the fireplace was Charles Rossi. Not far away, on a small damask-upholstered sofa, were two young men in the cheap navy suits I always associated with the Agency’s security types. Almost certainly they were carrying weapons.

“Thanks for coming,” Toby said.

“Oh, don’t thank me,” I said, masking my bitterness. “Thank Mr. Rossi’s people. Or the Agency chemists.”

“I’m sorry,” Toby said. “Knowing you and your temperament, I didn’t think we could bring you in any other way.”

“You were quite clear,” Rossi interposed, “that you were unwilling to cooperate.”

“Well done,” I said. “That drug really saps the will. Do you plan to keep me on a drip to ensure compliance?”

“I think once you’ve heard us out fully, you’ll be more cooperative. If you decide not to cooperate, there’s nothing we can do about it. A caged animal makes a poor field agent.”

“Then go ahead,” I said.

The straight-back chair in which I sat seemed to have been placed especially for me in such a way that I could see and speak to Rossi and Thompson. Yet it was, I noticed, at a great distance from all of them.

“The Agency found you folks a nice safe house this time,” I said.

“It’s actually owned by an Agency retiree,” Toby said, smiling. “How’ve you been?”

“I’m fine, Toby. You look well.”

“As well as can be expected.”

“I’m sorry we’ve never had a chance to talk,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled again as if I’d made a flippant, foolish suggestion. “Agency rules,” he said. “Not mine. I wish we had, too.”

Rossi was watching me silently. I continued: “I can’t tell you how sorry-”

“Ben,” Toby interrupted. “Please don’t. I’ve never blamed you. These things happen. What happened to me was lousy, but what happened to you, to Laura…”

We fell silent for a moment. I listened to the hiss of the deep orange gas flames as they licked the ceramic pinecones.

“Molly,” I began.

Toby put up a hand to silence me. “She’s fine,” he said. “Fortunately-thanks to Charles-you are, too.”

“I think I’m owed a little explanation,” I said mildly.

“You are, Ben,” Toby agreed. “I’m sure you understand that this conversation isn’t taking place. There is no record of your flight to Washington, and the Boston police have already buried a report of random gunfire on Marlborough Street.”

I nodded.

“I apologize for placing you at such a distance from us,” he resumed. “You understand the need for the precautions.”

“Not if you have nothing to hide,” I said.

Across the room, Rossi smiled to himself and said, “This is a highly unusual situation, one we didn’t entirely plan on. As I’ve explained, keeping you out of physical proximity is the only way I know of to ensure the sort of need-to-know compartmentalization this operation requires.”

“What operation is that?” I asked quietly.

I heard a low mechanical whir as Toby adjusted his chair to face me squarely. Then he spoke, slowly, as if with great difficulty.

“Alex Truslow brought you in to do a job. I wish Charles hadn’t engaged in the trickery he did. He’ll be the first to admit, he’s no den mother.”

Rossi smiled.

“It’s an ends-and-means game, Ben,” Toby said. “We’re after the same end as Alex; we’re simply employing a different means. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is one of the most exciting and important developments in the history of the world. I think that once you hear us out, you’ll choose to go along with us. If you choose not to, that’s fine.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“We selected you some time ago as our most likely subject. Everything about your profile seemed right, the photographic memory, the intelligence, and so on.”

“So you knew what would happen,” I said.

“No,” Rossi said. “We’d failed time and time again.”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Hold on. How much exactly do you know?”

“Quite a bit,” Toby said calmly. “You now have the ability to receive what’s called ELF-the extremely low frequency radio waves that the human brain generates. Do you mind if I smoke?” He took out a pack of Rothmans-I remembered now that Rothmans were the only brand he smoked when we knew each other in Paris-and tapped it against the arm of the wheelchair until one slid out.

“If I did mind,” I replied, “I doubt the smoke would bother me at this distance.”

He shrugged, and lighted the cigarette. Exhaling luxuriantly through his nostrils, he continued. “We know this… talent, for want of a better word, has not abated since it emerged. We know you’re sensitive only to thoughts that are occasioned at moments of strong feeling. Not yours, but those of whomever you’re trying to ‘hear.’ This gibes rather neatly with Dr. Rossi’s long-standing theory that the intensity of thought waves, or ELF, would be proportional to the intensity of one’s emotional reaction. That emotion varies the strength of the electrical impulses discharged.” He paused to inhale again and then said huskily, through the exhaled smoke, “Am I in the ballpark?”

I only smiled in reply.

“Of course, Ben, we’d be much more interested to hear your experiences than to listen to ourselves gas on like this.”

“What led you to think of using the magnetic resonance imager?”

“Ah,” Toby said, “for that I turn to my colleague Charles. As you may or may not know, Ben, for the last few years I’ve been on the DDO staff at home.” He meant that he was serving in the Deputy Directorate of Operations-the covert-action boys, to oversimplify-at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. “My area of responsibility is what they call special projects.”

“Well, then,” I said, feeling an odd sense of vertigo. “Perhaps one of you gentlemen can explain what this… project, as you seem to be calling it, is all about.”

Toby Thompson exhaled with a finality, and stubbed his cigarette out in a crystal ashtray on the carved oak end table next to him. He watched the plume of blue smoke rise and curl in the air, then turned back toward me.

“What we’re talking about,” he said, “is a matter of the highest security classification.” He paused. “And it is, as you can imagine, a long and rather complex story.”

TWENTY-FOUR

“The Central Intelligence Agency,” Toby said, his eyes fixed on some middle distance, “has long had an interest in… shall we say… the more exotic techniques of espionage and counterespionage. And I don’t just mean that wonderful invention, the Bulgarian umbrella, whose tip injects deadly ricin.

“I don’t know how much of this you know from your Agency days-”

“Not much,” I said.

Toby looked at me sharply, as if surprised to be interrupted. “And our team, of course, observed you at the Boston Public Library doing research, so you must know at least something of what’s in the public record. But the real story is far more interesting.

“You have to keep one major thing in mind: the reason most government undertakings are cloaked in deepest secrecy is fear of ridicule. It’s as simple as that. And in a society like ours, a country like the United States, which prides itself on hardheaded pragmatism… well, I think the founders of the CIA recognized that the greatest risk to their existence came not from public outrage but public derision.”

I smiled appreciatively and nodded. Toby and I had been good friends, before the incident, and I had always enjoyed his dry sense of humor.

“So,” he continued, “only a handful of the most senior officers, historically, have ever known of the Agency’s work in this area. I wanted to make sure we were very clear on that.” He looked directly at me, then tilted back his head slightly. “Experiments in parapsychology, as you no doubt already know, go back to at least the 1920s at Harvard and Duke-serious experiments undertaken by serious scholars, but of course never taken seriously by the scientific community at large.” He gave a wry smile and added, “Such is the structure of scientific revolutions. Of course the world is flat; how could it be otherwise?

“The first groundbreaking work was done by a man named Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke in the late twenties and early thirties. I’m sure you’ve seen the Zener cards.”

“Hmm?” I murmured.

“You know, those famous ESP cards of five symbols, the square, triangles, circles, wavy lines, and straight lines. In any case, Rhine and his successors learned that some people have the talent-very few people, as it turns out-and in varying degrees. The vast majority, of course, do not. Or, as some scholars postulated, more have the potential to develop the talent than they realize, but our conscious mind blocks it out.

“Anyway, a number of laboratories in the decades since the 1930s engaged in research into parapsychology in its many forms, not just extrasensory perception. There was Dr. Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, of course, but there was also the William C. Menninger Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which did some interesting work in dream telepathy. Certain of these labs were funded by the National Institute of Mental Health-fronting for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“But the CIA wasn’t founded until-what?-1947,” I said.

“Well, we came to this belatedly. As early as 1952, according to Agency archives, there was serious interest expressed in the possibilities of this research. Mostly this meant locating individuals with psychic abilities. But the early Agency officials seemed far more concerned with cloaking the work-”

“For fear of ridicule,” I interrupted. “But how the hell did the CIA deal with these psychics? I mean, either the psychics were for real or they weren’t. And if they were for real, they’d know they were meeting with people from an intelligence agency.”

Toby smiled, slowly and lopsidedly. “True enough. It was a real problem, from what I’ve read. They employed a double-blind security system, using two middlemen. But as I said, we came to this belatedly. Spurred on, naturally, by the Soviets.”

Rossi cleared his throat and remarked, “The Cold War had its uses.”

“Indeed,” Toby resumed. “Going back to at least the 1960s, the Agency began hearing credible reports of Soviet military efforts in parapsychology. I think it was around that time that a small cell of senior Agency people decided to fund an in-house study of the espionage possibilities of ESP. But what a treacherous undertaking! For every person who may have some glimmering of the ability, there are hundreds of hucksters and nutty old ladies with crystals. In any case, you may remember hearing about the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, in 1971, when the astronaut Edgar Mitchell performed the first ESP experiment in space. Didn’t work, by the way. In those years-the early years, I think of them as-we and the Armed Forces Medical Laboratories and NASA were spending almost a million dollars a year on parapsychology research. Peanuts, yes, but then we were whistling in the dark anyway.

“Then came a series of classified reports, in the early 1970s, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicting that we would soon be endangered by Soviet psychic research, which was enabling the KGB and the GRU and the Soviet Army to do such neat tricks as ascertain the deployment of troops, ships, even military installations. Someone at the top of the Agency got serious about it. I don’t suppose I’m spilling any secrets to tell you that Richard Nixon took a very strong interest in the program.

“Our intelligence confirmed by the mid-seventies that the Soviets had several secret parapsychological laboratories for military purposes, the main one in Novosibirsk. Then, in 1977, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times was arrested by the KGB in Moscow while attempting to obtain top secret documents from an institute of parapsychology. This really spurred the CIA, since now both sides knew that the other knew…

“Anyway, within the Agency, the program was so top secret that the term ESP never appeared anywhere, in any documents. It was called ‘novel biological information transfer systems’! A few years later, after my… accident… I was brought in to head the project, to accelerate it-or scrap it. ‘Shit or get off the pot,’ I was instructed.”

I nodded. “And you decided to shit.”

“In a manner of speaking. Certainly I was as much of a skeptic as anyone has ever been. I was quite hostile to all this foolishness, and I thought I was being given some make-work, time-wasting rehabilitation crap, the sort of thing they give a washed-up operations expert whose legs don’t work anymore.

“But then”-here he waved his hands in Rossi’s direction-“then one day I met Dr. Charles Rossi, and I learned about something that I knew at once would change the world.”

“Can we get you anything?” Toby asked just as my curiosity was piqued. “You like Scotch, don’t you?”

“Why not?” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

“Certainly has. And the ketamine appears to have worn off, so booze should be okay. Wally, Scotches all around-no, Charles, you like vodka, isn’t that right?”

“On the rocks,” Rossi said. “A touch of pepper ground over it, if you please.”

One of the security people got to his feet-he was, I now saw, definitely wearing a shoulder holster-and ambled out of the room. A few minutes later, during which we all sat in silence for some reason, he returned with a tray of drinks. Obviously he was not trained in the art of butlery, but he managed to serve each of us without spilling a drop.

“So tell me this,” I said. “Why am I not able to scan you?”

“At this distance-” Rossi said.

“No. I wasn’t even able to scan your security guy here, just now, when he gave me my drink. Nothing comes across. What’s going on?”

Toby watched me for a moment, thinking. The strong light made hollows of his eyes. “Jamming,” he finally said.

“I don’t understand.”

“ELF. Extremely low frequency radio waves.” He swept a hand around the room. “The RF equivalent of inaudible white noise is being emitted from speakers set up throughout the room, broadcast on the same frequencies that the human brain in effect ‘broadcasts’ on. This makes it impossible for you to pick anything up.”

“So you won’t mind if we sit a little closer.”

Toby smiled. “We don’t like taking chances.”

I nodded, decided to drop it. “All this CIA work on ESP-I thought it was terminated by Stan Turner in 1977.”

“Officially, yes,” Rossi said. “In fact, it was simply buried in the bureaucracy under deep cover, so that hardly any personnel within the Agency knew of its existence.”

Then Toby continued his narrative. “Until then, our efforts had concentrated on how to locate those few talented individuals. They’re few and far between. The question soon became, how can you actually instill the power? Is it possible? It seemed far-fetched, seemed in fact absolutely impossible. Charles… well, Charles can tell you himself.”

Rossi shifted in his chair, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “In the early 1980s,” he said, “I was working with a small California firm, developing something the Pentagon found most interesting. It was, in simple terms, an electronic paranoia inducer-a ‘psychic neuron disrupter,’ they called it, which would ‘jam’ the synaptic connections between the brain’s nerve cells. In effect, this would do electronically what the drug LSD often does. Nasty stuff, really, but then, the Pentagon are the folks who brought us napalm, courtesy of Dow Chemical. Anyway, this project thankfully went nowhere, but then one day I got a call from Toby, who offered me double my salary and lured me from the sunny climes of Southern California to this lovely metropolis. I continued my work on the effects of electromagnetic stimuli on the human brain. Initially, we were intrigued by the notion of mind control. I was concentrating on ELF, extremely low frequency radio waves, as Toby said. You see, the brain generates electrical signals. So I was attempting to learn whether we could transmit strong signals in the same frequencies that the brain transmits in, to induce confusion, even death.”

“Charming,” I said.

But Rossi ignored me. “Nothing there either. But we had discovered the possibilities of ELF. I came upon research done by Dr. Milan Ryzl of the University of Prague involving hypnosis. Dr. Ryzl had discovered that certain people can, under hypnosis, relax themselves, relax their inhibitions, to such an extent that they can receive images by telepathy. That set me thinking.

“And it turned out, quite by coincidence, that in 1983, in a hospital in the Netherlands, a middle-aged Dutchman underwent a routine examination in a magnetic resonance imager and emerged with a measurable, documented extrasensory perception. His doctors were aghast. The man and his doctors were immediately visited by agents of Dutch, French, and American intelligence, who all confirmed the report. The man had the ability actually to hear the thoughts of others in close proximity. Neurologists attributed this to the intense magnetizing effect of the MRI on the man’s cortex.”

“Did the power last?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Rossi replied. “The man went mad, actually. He began to complain of terrible headaches, of awful noises, and one day he literally ran his head into a brick wall and killed himself.” He took a long sip of vodka.

“Then why didn’t the MRI work like this on everyone?” I asked.

“Exactly what I wondered about,” Rossi said. “The MRI has been in use around the world since 1982, and this was the first report of such an astonishing occurrence. Upon scrutiny of this Dutch gentleman, the Dutch-French-American joint team concluded that this man possessed certain characteristics that must have been prerequisites. For one thing, he was extremely bright, with an IQ, according to the Stanford-Binet test, of over 170. For another, he had an eidetic memory.”

I nodded once.

“There were other markers. The man had a highly developed verbal skill, but an equally developed mathematical and quantitative ability. I flew over to Amsterdam, and managed to meet with this Dutchman before he went off the deep end. When I returned to Langley, I attempted to reproduce this bizarre effect.

“We recruited males and females who seemed to have all the right markers, the intelligence, the memory, the verbal and quantitative abilities, et cetera. And, without revealing the exact nature of the experiment, we subjected them to the most powerful MRI we could locate. This particular model was manufactured by Siemens A. G., of Germany. We had it modified. But no success-until you.”

“Why?” I asked, draining my Scotch and placing the empty glass on the adjacent table.

“We don’t know,” Rossi said matter-of-factly. “If only we did, but we don’t. Certainly you had the right markers. The intelligence, obviously, but also the verbal skills, the eidetic memory, which is found in fewer than 0.1 percent of the population at large. You play chess, don’t you, Ben?”

“Not too badly.”

“Quite well, in fact. And you’re a whiz at such things as crossword puzzles. I believe you even indulged in Zen meditation at one time.”

“I ‘indulged’ in it, yes,” I said.

“We studied the records of your training at Camp Peary very closely,” Toby Thompson put in. “You were eminently suitable-but of course, we had no idea that you’d be a success.”

“You seem strangely uninterested in a demonstration of my abilities,” I said, addressing them both.

“Quite the contrary,” Rossi said. “We’re quite interested. Extremely interested, in fact. With your permission, we’d like to put you through a number of tests tomorrow morning. Nothing too arduous.”

“That hardly seems necessary,” I replied. “I’d be glad to give you a demonstration right now.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Toby chuckled. “We can wait.”

“You seem to know a good deal about this condition. Perhaps you can tell me how long it’s going to last.”

Rossi paused again. “That we don’t know either. Long enough, I hope.”

“Long enough?” I said. “Long enough for what?”

“Ben,” Toby said softly, “we’ve brought you here for a reason, as you’ve guessed. We need to run you through a series of tests. And then we need your help.”

“My help,” I said, not bothering to conceal my hostility. “What sort of ‘help’ are you talking about?”

A long beat of silence in the cavernous room, and at last Toby spoke. “Spy stuff, I guess you’d call it.”

I sat there, unmoving, for what seemed like five minutes, as the men watched me. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said, standing. I turned slowly toward the door and began walking.

The two security guards rose, and one of them strode to the doorway, blocking my path, while the other took up a position behind me.

“Ben!” Toby called out.

“Really, Ben,” Rossi said almost simultaneously.

“Please sit down,” I heard Toby say calmly. “Now, I’m afraid, you don’t have much of a choice.”

TWENTY-FIVE

One of the things I learned in my Agency days was when to persist and when to quit. I was outnumbered-not just by the two guards, but by whoever else they had in the house, and I knew there had to be others. I’d calculated the odds of an escape, and they were against me ten thousand to one, a hundred thousand to one.

“You’re putting us in a difficult position,” Toby said to my back.

I turned around slowly. “So much for caged animals.”

He was looking at me with just the slightest trace of anxiety. “We-I-do not want to resort to compulsion. We’d much rather appeal to reason, to duty, to the basic decency I know you have.”

“And to my desire to see my wife again,” I said.

“There’s that, yes,” he admitted. Nervously, he closed his fingers into a loose fist and then opened them, closed and opened.

“And, of course, you’ve already told me quite a bit,” I said. “I ‘know too much,’ right? Isn’t that the expression? So I have the absolute right to walk out of here, but I probably wouldn’t make it to the gate.”

Exasperated, Toby said: “You’re being ridiculous. After what we’ve told you, why in the world would we want to do anything to harm you? If for no other reason than scientific-”

“Did the Agency arrange the freezing of my money, too?” I asked bitterly. I felt the muscles in my legs tense, begin to cramp. My stomach was queasy; beads of perspiration sprang to my brow. “That fucking First Commonwealth thing?”

“Ben,” Toby said after a long silence. “We’d much rather keep things positive, appeal to reason. I think once you hear us out, we can come to some agreement.”

“All right,” I said at last. “That much I’m willing to do. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s late, Ben,” Toby said. “You’re tired. More to the point, I’m tired, but then, I tire easily. In the morning, before you’re brought to Langley for tests, we’ll all talk again. Charles?”

Rossi murmured his assent, gave me a quick, penetrating glance, and left the room.

“Well, Ben,” Toby said when we were alone. “I believe the housekeeping staff has put out everything you’ll need tonight, a change of clothes, toiletries, and whatnot.” He smiled gently. “A toothbrush.”

“No, Toby. You’ve forgotten one detail. I want to see Molly.”

“I can’t let you see her yet, Ben,” Toby said. “It’s just not physically possible.”

“Then I’m afraid we’re not going to come to any sort of agreement.”

“She’s not in the area.”

“Then I want to speak to her on the phone. Now.”

Toby assessed me for a moment, and then gave another hand signal to the security men. One of them left the room and returned with a black touch-tone telephone, which he plugged into a jack near me, placing the phone on the adjacent end table.

Then the guard lifted the handset and punched a long series of numbers. I counted: eleven digits, which may have meant long distance, and then another set of three. An access code, probably. Then two more digits. The guard listened impassively for a moment and then said, “Ninety-three.” He listened again, and handed the phone to me.

Before I could say anything, I heard Molly’s voice, high-pitched, anguished.

“Ben? Oh, God, is it you?”

“I’m here, Molly,” I said as reassuringly as I could.

“Oh, God, are you all right?”

“I’m-I’m fine, Molly. Are you-?”

“Okay. I’m okay. Where did they take you?”

“A safe house somewhere in Virginia,” I said, watching Toby. He nodded, as if in confirmation. “Where the hell are you?”

“I don’t know, Ben. Something-a hotel or an apartment, I think. Outside Boston, not too far.”

I felt my anger rise once again. Addressing Toby, I said, “Where is she?”

Toby paused. “Protective custody in the Boston suburbs.”

“Ben!” Molly’s voice came out of the receiver urgently. “Just tell me these people are-”

“It’s okay, Mol. As far as I know. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

“It’s all connected,” she whispered, “connected with that-with that-”

“They know,” I said.

“Please, Ben. Whatever the hell is going on, why am I involved? They can’t do this! Is this legal? Can they-”

“Ben,” Toby said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to disconnect the call now.”

“I love you, Mol,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it?” she said incredulously.

“Everything will be under control soon,” I said without believing it.

“I love you, Ben.”

“I know,” I said, and then I heard a dial tone.

I put down the handset. “You had no business scaring Molly this way,” I said to Toby.

“It was for her protection, Ben.”

“I see. The way I’m being protected.”

“That’s right,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm.

“Maximum security,” I persisted. “We’re as safe as any two prisoners can be.”

“Come on, Ben. Tomorrow, after we’ve talked, you’ll be free to walk out.”

“And now? What about now?”

“Tomorrow,” he replied. “Tomorrow, hear us out. If you want to leave then, I promise you, I won’t stand in your way.”

With an electric hum he guided his wheelchair across the long expanse of Persian carpet toward the door. “Good night, Ben. They’ll show you to your room.”

It was at that point that an idea occurred to me and, thus preoccupied, I followed the two guards out to the main staircase.

TWENTY-SIX

The room they had provided for me was large and comfortable, furnished in the style of a Vermont country inn, spare and elegant. Against one wall was a plump, king-size bed draped in a white chenille spread. After this long, exhausting day, it looked supremely inviting, but I couldn’t sleep yet. There was a dark walnut armoire and matching end tables; I noticed after brief inspection that they were immobile, somehow bolted down. The adjoining bathroom was spacious and elegant as well: green Italian marble floor, the walls tiled in white and black porcelain, the fixtures of 1930s vintage.

The floor, which creaked reassuringly as I walked, was covered in pale wall-to-wall carpeting. A few paintings had been placed, tastefully, here and there: oil paintings of nautical aspects, done in a nondescript style. Those, too, were fastened to the wall. It was as if they were expecting a violent animal who might at any moment decide to fling objects around the room.

A set of heavy floor-length drapes, striped in broad bands of maroon and gold, concealed a set of windows, finely leaded. I saw at once that the windows were reinforced with a fine, almost invisible, metallic webbing, which no doubt made them at once shatterproof and electronically alarmed.

I was a prisoner.

This particular room in this “safe house,” I decided, was probably used to keep intelligence defectors or other agents with whom they couldn’t be too careful. That category obviously included me.

For all intents and purposes, I was a hostage, despite Toby’s gilded rhetoric. They had caught me here, like an exotic laboratory specimen, to be run through a set of extensive tests and then pressed into service.

But everything about this setup smacked of improvisation. Usually, when an operation is preplanned, every angle is covered, every detail thought through, sometimes ridiculously so. Often, of course, things still go wrong-SHIT HAPPENS, as the bumper sticker says-but not for want of planning. But I sensed that arrangements here had been hasty, ad hoc, jury-rigged, and that gave me hope.

They held Molly captive, but I would be able to negotiate her release much more readily if I were free. I had to move at once.

Even then, as I changed out of my ripped, soiled suit (a casualty of the shootout on Marlborough Street) I knew that Molly was going to be all right. It was quite possible that they were indeed protecting her-in addition to which, of course, they wanted to keep her separated from me as a means of suasion. You know, tie the girl up to the railroad tracks so that you’ll change your mind, right? Well, there wouldn’t be any express train coming, and the worst that would happen from this was that Molly would have subjected her captors to a severe tongue-lashing. I knew how the Agency liked to apply pressure.

As for me, however-well, that was another story. Ever since I had acquired this extraordinary talent, my life was in danger of one sort or another. And now I had the simple choice of cooperating, or…

Or what?

Hadn’t Toby spoken the truth-why would they want to take out the only living, successful subject of their top secret project? Wouldn’t it be like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Or would the need for secrecy take precedence over everything else?

Perhaps, though… perhaps I could take matters into my own hands.

For I had an unquestionable advantage over other human beings, at least as long as it lasted, and it showed no signs of diminishing. And-this was what told me that my incarceration was hastily, even sloppily, arranged-I had been able to acquire some useful information from one of my guards.

Toby, or whoever was running this operation, had taken the precaution of requisitioning guards who were absolutely uninformed about me, or about the project itself. But naturally, they had to be fully briefed about the details of their own security operations.

As one of the guards-Chet, his name was-took me upstairs to the third-floor bedroom in which I was to be kept, I walked beside him, as close as I could. He had evidently been ordered not to engage me in discussion, and to keep a good distance from me.

But he had not been instructed not to think, and thinking is one of the few human activities over which we have no control.

“I’m concerned,” I said to him as we mounted the first staircase. “How many of there are you?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Chet said with a brusque dip of his head. “I’m really not permitted to speak with you, sir.”

I raised my voice in mock anger. “But how the hell do I know I’m safe? How many of you are going to protect me? Can’t you at least tell me that?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Please step back.”

By the time he had ushered me into my bedroom, I had learned that there would be two stationed in front of my room throughout the night, that Chet was on the first shift, that he was glad of it, and that he was insatiably curious to know who I was and what I had done.

I spent the first hour or so carefully inspecting the room, looking for the transmitting devices (they had to be there, but I couldn’t locate them) and such. Beside the bed was a clock-radio, which was a likely candidate for a bug.

But the radio was a mistake.

At about half past one in the morning I knocked on my bedroom door to summon the guard. The door opened after a few moments to reveal Chet. “Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “It’s just that my throat is parched, and I wonder whether you can get me a glass of seltzer.”

“There should be a little refrigerator in there,” he said tentatively, but he was tense, his body as tightly coiled as a clock spring, his hands at his sides, as he’d been taught.

I smiled sheepishly. “All gone.”

He looked annoyed. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, then closed the door. I expected that he would call downstairs on the walkie-talkie, since he had been given instructions under no circumstances to leave his post.

About five minutes or so later there was a soft knock on the door.

By now I had the clock-radio on full blast, an AM rap station, raucous and rhythmic. And the shower was running, filling the bathroom with steam. The bathroom door was open, and steam billowed into the bedroom.

“I’m in the shower,” I yelled. “Just put it anywhere, thanks.”

A different uniformed guard entered, bearing a tray, on it a bottle of French mineral water-nice touch, I thought-and looked around the room appraisingly for a few seconds, trying to decide where to put it down, and that was when I lunged.

He was a professional, well trained, but so was I, and that two or three seconds that I had on him was just enough to take him by surprise. I tackled him to the floor, the tray and water tumbling noiselessly onto the carpet. He recovered with impressive speed and reared up, knocking me aside momentarily, his left arm smashing into my jaw, a painful, wounding blow.

That old glacial calm came over me.

The radio blasted on and on, stridently: “DOWN she gotta go DOWN now I really gotta…” and the white noise of the shower drummed and above this racket very little could be heard, of course, and-

The tray was a terrific weapon, and with my right hand I swept it off the floor and chopped it back toward him, toward his throat, toward the vulnerable cartilaginous area that shielded his jugular, and with great force smashed the wooden tray’s narrow edge into his Adam’s apple, winding him, and he groaned as his legs scissored upward to pin me, and I heard, suddenly-… can’t… shoot… mustn’t shoot… fucker…

And I knew I had him, I knew what he wouldn’t do. This was his real vulnerability, the reason he wasn’t reaching for his gun, and just as his fists formed themselves into cudgels, I managed to get my arms into a locked wedge, crashing into his abdomen, toppling him backward against the massive oak arm of the stolid overstuffed armchair, the back of his head cracking audibly against the wood, and with a whoof the air came out of his lungs, and he suddenly slackened, his mouth open, and slid to the floor.

Unconscious. He was hurt, but not badly. He would be out for ten, maybe twenty minutes.

And over it all the radio voice was ranting, ranting.

I had, I knew, maybe a few seconds before the back-up guard entered, suspicious about the delay.

The unconscious guard had a gun in his shoulder holster, an excellent Ruger P90.9mm semiautomatic, which I had trained on though rarely had occasion to fire in action. I pulled it out, inserted the spare cartridge, released the gun’s safety, and-

Looming over me was another guard, not Chet, but another one, on the early morning shift, and his gun was pointed at me.

“Drop it,” he commanded.

We faced each other, both frozen.

“Easy,” he said. “No one’s going to get hurt if you drop it. Lower it slowly to the floor, let go, then-”

I had no choice.

I stared at him blankly and pulled the trigger.

Aimed to hurt him only, not to do any serious harm.

A sudden sharp explosion, a flash of light, that acrid smell. He’d been hit, I saw at once, in the thigh, and he did what came naturally: he dove down. He wasn’t a trained killer; that much I had read earlier, and the information was priceless.

Now I stood over him, the Ruger pointed at his head.

The look in his eyes was a combination of great pain, from the gunshot, and enormous fear. I heard a great anguished rush of words-

no God no God no he’ll do it please God

– and said very quietly, “If you move, I’m going to have to kill you. I’m sorry.”

His eyes widened still farther, and his lower lip trembled involuntarily. I disarmed him and pocketed his weapon.

I said, “You stay there quietly. Count to one hundred. If you move before then-if you make one fucking noise-I’ll come after you.” And, stepping out of the room, I shut the door, heard it lock automatically, and I was out in the darkened corridor.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Crouching down now, I crept along the oak-wainscoted walls of the hallway and quickly surveyed the situation. At one end of the hall glowed a light that seemed to be coming from an open door. Perhaps there was someone there. Just as likely there was no one. The room was, I surmised, used by the guards while awaiting the change in shift, where they had their coffee.

I thought would there be anything in the room I might need?

No. Unlikely, and not worth the risk.

I continued along the edge of the hall, away from the light.

Suddenly I heard a static crackle, loud and metallic. It was coming from a walkie-talkie that the second guard had left in the hallway when he entered my bedroom. A signal, requesting confirmation. I didn’t know the codes, couldn’t fake it. Not worth trying.

That meant I had maybe a minute or so before someone would come from elsewhere in the house to investigate why nobody was answering his query.

Darkness everywhere, a long series of closed doors. I knew only as much of the layout of the palatial house as I’d managed to garner while they brought me up.

I was walking away from the main staircase now. The main staircase had to be dangerous territory, far too central; but I was convinced there would be a back stairway, for servants.

And there was.

Unlit and narrow, the treads wooden and worn, the servants’ stairs were located at the end of this wing of the house. I descended, walking as lightly as I could, but still the creaks echoed in the stairwell.

By the time I reached the second floor, there were footsteps above. Running footsteps, then shouted voices. They had discovered my escape much more quickly than I’d hoped they would.

They knew I was in the house still, somewhere, and I had no doubt that all entrances were guarded; all had now been put on alert, and I was trapped.

Looking first up, then down, I knew I couldn’t make it all the way to the first floor.

But what was on the second?

No choice; I had to take a chance. I sprinted out of the dark stairwell and into the second-floor corridor, but this one was not carpeted as the hallway upstairs had been, and my footsteps rang out with an alarming clatter. The voices were growing louder, nearer.

The only light came from the moon outside, shining meekly into a window at the end of the corridor, and I spun around, dashed toward the window, poised to pull it open and jump, dammit all, before I realized that the window overlooked not soft, spongy lawn but asphalt.

An asphalt, or macadam, car-park area depressed into the ground, a good twenty-five feet below me, a suicidal plunge. Nothing to break my fall. I couldn’t do it.

Then came the alarm, the shrilling of hundreds of bells, deafening, throughout the house, coming from all over, and now all the lights were on, a brilliant halogen blaze illuminating the hall, illuminating everything, flashing on and off and on, and the ringing kept on.

For God’s sake, move! I shouted inwardly.

Move, yes, but where?

Running desperately along the hall, away from the window, toward the main central staircase, I tried door after door, and then, four, five, six doors later, one opened.

A bathroom, small and dark, its window opened a crack, and through the crack came a cool draft. The vinyl shower curtain rustled and fluttered in the breeze, and that was it, of course.

I tore the shower curtain off its hooks, and it fell to the floor.

The alarm’s ringing seemed even louder now, insistent. There was a crash somewhere, the slam of a door, shouts.

Now what?

Break the box!

Only a goddamned shower curtain. If only I’d thought to take a bedsheet!

Tie it to something, I thought wildly. Tie it. Hook it somewhere. Something stable.

But there was nothing! Nothing to hold the length of vinyl, to anchor me as I climbed out of the window, and there was certainly no time to mess around, because the footsteps were thundering closer, closer. They had to have followed me to the second floor, and as I looked around desperately, my heart thudding crazily, I heard, not twenty feet away in the hall, “On the right! Move it!”

Raising the window all the way, I found a screen, cursed aloud, and clawed at it, at the goddamned release pins at the base, but it was frozen in place, wouldn’t move, and I backed up and dove-

And hurled through the window, through the screen, and into the night air, my body contorted awkwardly, trying to break my fall.

And crashed to the ground-dirt, not sod, but cold, hard earth, which rose up to meet me and crack against my shoulders and the back of my neck, and I sprung immediately to my feet, somehow twisting my ankle a bit, bellowing out in pain.

Trees ahead of me, a small copse of trees, just barely visible in the darkness, but now illuminated by the flashing alarm lights mounted into the third-floor eaves, now dark, now light.

An explosion of gunfire.

Behind me, to my left, then a whiz of something awfully close, the sting of something against my ear, and I dove down. The gunshots kept up, erratic, close, and I scuttled along the grass and into the trees, thank God. A natural cover, protection. Just feet away a tree trunk splintered, then another one, and I put on one last agonizing burst of speed, running through the dizzying pain in my ankle and my shoulders, and I was at the fence.

Electrified, yes?

A fifteen-foot fence, solid black wrought iron, burglar-proof, high security… high tension? Was it possible?

I could scarcely turn around now, couldn’t turn back, couldn’t stop, I had a few seconds’ lead time on them, that was all, but now I heard them coming into the yard, in my direction, many of them, it seemed, and the gunshots were back now, they had located me, but their aim was off; the trees blocked their line of sight.

I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of the situation. The house is surrounded by nature, set in the rolling Virginia woods, which means trees and animals, squirrels and chipmunks that skitter here and there, up and down fences, and-

I threw myself toward the fence, grasping a horizontal section as a handhold, and climbed up, toward the spiked top, up, and, hesitating a mere split second, which seemed an eternity, grabbed the ominous black spears atop the fence-

And felt the cool, hard iron.

No. Not electrified. Squirrels and chipmunks would wreak havoc on an electrified fence, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t do it. I spun my legs around carefully, just grazing the sharpened spikes, and over, and dropped to the moist spongy grass below, and I was out.

Behind me the mansion was flashing, the lights pulsing, the clamor shattering the night’s stillness.

I ran, hearing shouts and running footsteps behind me, but they were on the other side of the fence, and I knew I had them.

I ran, and ran, wincing, probably moaning aloud, but keeping my stride, until the road bent, and I was at a junction that I had noticed as we arrived, and as I dashed up the dark, narrow road, I saw a pair of headlights coming toward me.

The car was moving along at a good clip, not too fast, not too slow, a Honda Accord. I saw it as it approached, and I considered waving it down, but I couldn’t be sure.

It had come from the main highway, but I had to be careful, and as I slowed down, its headlights suddenly went bright, blindingly so, and then another set of headlights came up behind me, high beams, and suddenly I was caught between the two vehicles, the Honda facing me, and behind me, another car, larger, American-make.

I spun, but the cars had hemmed me in, and then two others came out of the darkness, brakes squealing, pulling up alongside the other.

I was blinded by four sets of headlights, and I spun around again, tried to figure a way of escape, but knew there wasn’t one, and then I heard a voice coming from one of the cars.

Echoing in the night. “Nice try, Ben,” came Toby’s voice. “You’re as good as ever. Please, get in.”

I was surrounded by men and guns pointed at me, and slowly I lowered the Ruger.

Toby was seated in the back of a van, one of the last vehicles to arrive. He was speaking through the window. “Terribly sorry,” he said calmly. “But nice try all the same.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

They drove me in a plain government car, a dark blue Chrysler sedan, to Crystal City, Virginia. We entered an anonymous-looking office building with an underground parking garage. I knew the CIA owned several buildings in Crystal City and its environs; this was certainly one of them.

I was escorted by the driver into an elevator and up to the seventh floor, through a plain governmental-looking corridor painted bureaucrat tan. ROOM 706 was painted in a black curve on frosted glass. Inside, a receptionist greeted me and showed me to an inside office, where I was introduced to a bearded, fortyish, Indian neurologist named Dr. Sanjay Mehta.

You will no doubt wonder whether I attempted to read the thoughts of my driver, the people I passed in the corridor, the neurologist, and so on; and the answer, of course, is yes. My driver was another Agency employee, as uninformed as my last driver. I learned nothing there. The most I learned, walking down the hallway, was that I was indeed in a CIA building where work was being done on scientific and technical matters.

With Dr. Mehta, things were different. As I shook his hand I heard, Can you hear my thoughts?

I hesitated for a moment, but I had decided not to play coy, and I responded aloud, “Yes, I can.”

He gestured to a chair, and thought: Can you hear everyone’s thoughts?

“No,” I told him. “Only those who…”

Only those of a particular salience-such as those accompanied by powerful emotions, is that right? I heard.

I smiled and nodded.

I heard a phrase of something, in a language I didn’t know, which I assumed was Hindi.

For the first time, he spoke. “You don’t speak Hindi, Mr. Ellison, do you?” His English was British-accented.

“No, I don’t.”

“I am fully bilingual, which means that I can think in Hindi or in English. What you’re telling me, then, is that you don’t understand my thoughts when they’re in Hindi. You hear them. Is that right?”

“Right.”

“But not all of my thoughts, of course,” he continued. “I have thought a number of things in the last two minutes, in Hindi and in English. Perhaps hundreds of ‘thoughts,’ if one can so categorize the flow of the processing of ideas. But you were able to hear only those that I thought with great force.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“Can you sit there for a moment, please?”

I nodded again.

He got up from his desk and left the room, closing the door behind him.

I sat for a few moments, inspecting his collection of plastic souvenir paperweights, the kind that produce a snowfall if shaken, and soon I was picking up another thought. This time it was the timbre of a woman’s voice, high and anguished.

They killed my husband, it went. Killed Jack. Oh, God. They killed Jack.

A minute later. Dr. Mehta returned.

“Well?” he said.

“I heard it,” I said.

“Heard what?”

“A woman, thinking that her husband had been killed,” I replied helpfully. “The husband’s name is Jack.”

Dr. Mehta exhaled audibly, nodding slowly. After a long silence he said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“You didn’t ‘hear’ anything just then, did you?” He gave the word “hear” the same spin I’d been mentally giving it myself.

“Just silence,” I said.

“Ah. But previously, it was a woman; you’re right. That’s quite interesting. I would have thought you’d pick up only that someone was in distress. But you don’t perceive feelings; you actually seem to hear things, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”

I repeated it for him.

“Just so,” he said. “Excellent. Can you distinguish between what you hear and what you ‘hear’?”

“The-I guess the timbre is different, the feel of the voice,” I attempted to explain. “It’s like the difference between a whispered and a spoken phrase. Or… or the way you can remember a conversation sometimes, inflections and intonations and all. I perceive a spoken voice, but it’s much different from the audible voice.”

“Interesting,” he said. He rose, picked up a snowball paperweight of Niagara Falls from his desk, and toyed with it as he paced in a small area behind his desk. “But you didn’t hear the first voice.”

“I wasn’t aware there was another one.”

“There was another one, a man, on the other side of this wall, but he was instructed to think placidly, if you will. The second one was a woman, in the same room, who was instructed to conjure up a horrifying thought and think it with a certain intensity. The room is soundproof, incidentally. The third attempt, which you say you also didn’t hear, came from the woman, but this time she was a hundred yards or so down the hall, in another room.”

“You said she was ‘conjuring it up,’” I said. “Meaning that her husband wasn’t really killed.”

“That’s right.”

“Which means that I was unable to distinguish between her genuine thoughts and her simulated ones?”

“You might say that,” Mehta agreed. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

“That’s an understatement,” I replied.

For the next hour or so he ran me through a battery of tests, designed to ascertain how sensitive my “gift” was, how strong the emotions accompanying the thoughts had to be, how close the person had to be, and so on.

At the end he ventured an explanation.

“As you have already speculated,” Dr. Mehta said, “the magnetizing effect of the MRI on your brain produced this peculiar result.” He lighted a Camel straight. His ashtray was a tacky souvenir from a place called Wall Drug in South Dakota.

He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which seemed to enable him to think deeply. “I don’t know much about you, just that you’re some kind of lawyer, and that you used to be with the Agency. I’d rather not know more than that anyway. As for me, I’m the chief of CIA’s psychiatric division.”

“Psych tests, debriefings, and all that?”

“Basically. I’m sure my staff ran tests on you before they sent you to the Farm, before sending you wherever they sent you, and at the end of your term of duty. Your file’s been pulled, so I couldn’t know anything more about you than I do even if I wanted. Which I don’t.” Another cloud of smoke, and then he continued: “But if you expect me to enlighten you about your ability to read minds, I’m sorry to disappoint you. When Toby Thompson came to me a few years back, I thought he’d taken leave of his senses.”

I smiled.

“I frankly am not one of those who believed in human extrasensory perception. Not that there’s anything inherently ludicrous about it. There’s quite a body of evidence to suggest that certain animal species possess the ability to communicate that way, whether you’re talking about dolphins or dogs. But I’ve never seen any evidence beyond highly unreliable anecdotal reports that suggest that we humans can do it.”

“I assume you’ve changed your mind now,” I said.

He laughed. “Thoughts take place throughout the human brain, in the hippocampus and the frontal-lobe cortex and the neocortex. A colleague of mine, Robert Galambos, has theorized that thinking is ‘done’ by the glial cells, not the neurons. You’ve heard about Broca’s brain?”

I told him I’d only heard the term, but didn’t know what it meant.

“The French surgeon Pierre-Paul Broca discovered an area of the human brain where language is produced, an area in the left frontal lobe. Broca’s area is the seat of the speech mechanism. Another place, known as Wernicke’s area, is where we recognize and process speech. That’s in the left temporal and parietal lobes. I’m postulating that when one of these two areas, probably Wernicke’s, was subtly altered somewhat by the powerful magnetism of the magnetic resonance imager, the neurons realigned. And that enables you to ‘hear’ output, low frequency radio waves, from others’ Broca areas. We’ve long known that the human brain puts out these electrical signals. What you’re doing, I suspect, is simply receiving those signals. You know how sometimes we can ‘hear’ ourselves think, as if in our own spoken voice?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Well, I’d theorize that at some point in the formation of such thoughts there’s concurrent activity in the speech centers. And it’s at that point that the electrical signals are generated. All right. So. Then two recent scientific findings set us to thinking, as it were.

“One was a study published in Science magazine two years or so ago, done by a team at Johns Hopkins that discovered they could actually produce a computer image of the thinking process of the brain. They hooked up electrodes to a monkey’s brain, and used computer graphics to track the electrical activity in the motor cortex-that area of the brain that controls motor activity. So that in the instant before a rhesus monkey performed an action, they could see on the computer screen, a thousandth of a second in advance, the electrical activity in the monkey’s brain. Amazing! We could actually see the brain thinking!

“And then, a couple of geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology discovered that the human brain contains something like seven billion microscopic magnetic crystals. In effect, bar magnets made of magnetite crystals, an iron mineral. They were wondering whether there was a link between cancer and electromagnetic fields, though there’s no evidence yet that the magnetic crystals have anything to do with cancer. But my colleagues and I thought: what if we could use the magnetic resonance imager to somehow alter those little magnets in the human brain-to align them? Now, you’re a patent attorney, so I assume you keep up with technological developments.”

“As a rule, yes.”

“Early in 1993, a stunning breakthrough was announced, almost simultaneously, by the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Graz University of Technology in Austria. Using various techniques of biocybernetics, the collection of the electrical impulses put out by the brain by means of electroencephalography, human beings could actually control specially configured computers simply by thinking a command! By using their minds they could move a cursor around on a computer screen, even type letters. Well, that was it. At that point we knew it was possible.”

“So why can’t you induce this in everyone?”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” he said. “It may have to do with the way your Wernicke’s area is situated. Perhaps with the number, or density, of the neuronal cells there. Whatever it is about you that gives you an eidetic memory. To be honest, I have no idea. This is only sheerest speculation. But for whatever reason, for whatever confluence of reasons, it happened to you. Which makes you quite valuable indeed.”

“Valuable,” I said, “to whom?” But he had already turned and left the room.

TWENTY-NINE

“I’m really quite satisfied,” Toby Thompson said, and indeed, he was visibly pleased with himself.

I sat in an antiseptic, brightly lit white interrogation room, watching Toby in an adjoining room through a large, thick pane of glass. The glass was smudged with fingerprints, and the room was so bright that it was easy to forget it was eight in the morning and I’d been up all night. The room was situated in an underground level of the same unlovely 1960s-vintage office building.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Why the glass barrier? Why aren’t you jamming the room with ELF like you did at the safe house?”

Toby smiled almost wistfully. “Oh, we are. Better not to take chances. I don’t much trust technology. Do you?”

But I was in no mood for banter, having been through more than an hour of Dr. Mehta’s testing. “If I’d managed to escape…” I began.

“We’d have stopped at nothing to find you, Ben. You’re much too valuable. Actually, our psychological profile of you indicated, unequivocally, that you would attempt an escape. So I’m not altogether surprised. You have to remember, Ben, that with your retirement from the Agency, you no longer have the colony odor.”

“The colony odor?”

“Entomology. Ants. You remember my interest in ants.”

Toby had in fact studied to become an entomologist before World War II moved him very far afield, to military intelligence, the OSS, and later the CIA. But he’d kept up his interest in ants, reading voraciously in the professional journals, staying in contact with an old friend of his from Harvard, E. O. Wilson, who was one of the world’s great scholars of ants. Just about the only use for ants Toby had managed to find in his life, however, was in metaphors.

“I certainly do, Toby. The colony odor?”

“When one ant greets another, she runs her antennae over the other’s body. If the other is an intruder from another species, she will be attacked. But if she’s from the same species, and just, say, a different colony, she will be accepted. Yet she’ll be offered less food until she acquires the same odor-the same pheromone-that the others in the colony have. Then she’s one of them.”

“So, am I from a different colony?” I asked impatiently.

“Have you ever seen an ant offer its food? It’s very intimate, very touching. The attack is of course very unpleasant. One, or both, dies.”

I ran my fingers over the brown fake-wood-grain-Formica-topped conference table at which I had been placed. “All right,” I said. “Now, tell me this: Who came after me the other night?”

“In Boston?”

“Correct. And ‘we don’t know’ isn’t satisfactory.”

“But accurate. We really don’t know. We do know that there’s been a leak-”

“Goddammit, Toby,” I exploded. “We have to level with each other.”

He raised his voice to a shout, which surprised me. “I am leveling with you, Ben! As I told you, since my accident in Paris, I have been in charge of this project. They call it the Oracle Project-you know how the Covert-Op boys are so damned attached to their melodramatic code names-from the original Latin oraculum, from orare, to speak. The mind speaks, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“The Oracle Project is the Manhattan Project of telepathy-expensive, intensive, ultrasecret, and considered a hopeless cause by just about everyone who knows of its existence. Since the Dutch gentleman’s several months of ESP-to be precise, 133 days, before he committed suicide-we have gone through more than eight thousand experimental subjects.”

“Eight thousand?” I exclaimed.

“The vast majority of these individuals, of course, knew only that they were undergoing medical experiments, for which they were reimbursed handsomely. Of all of them, two subjects emerged with some small manifestation of ESP, but the ability faded after a day or two. With you-”

“It’s two days, and nothing has changed.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

“But what the hell is this for? The Cold War is over, Toby, the damned-”

“Ah,” he said. “Precisely wrong. Yes, the world has changed, but it’s just as dangerous a place. The Russian threat is still there, waiting for another coup d’état or a total crash of the system, the way Weimar Germany was lying in wait for a Hitler to restore its ruined empire. The Middle East remains a caldron. Terrorism is rampant-we’re entering the age of terrorism like we’ve never seen before. We need to cultivate this ability you now have-desperately. We need agents who can divine intentions. There will always be Saddam Husseins or Muammar Qadhafis or whoever the hell else.”

“So tell me this: Why the gunfire in Boston? The Oracle Project has been under way for-what?-five years?”

“Approximately.”

“And suddenly people are shooting at me. There’s an urgency, obviously. Some people want something very badly, and very quickly. It makes no sense.”

Toby sighed, touched his fingers to the glass separating us. “There’s no more Soviet threat,” he said slowly. “Thank God. But now we’re facing a much more difficult, more diffuse threat: hundreds of thousands of unemployed East Bloc spies-watchers, wet workers-a real nasty bunch, many of them.”

“That’s not an explanation,” I replied. “Those are assets. Who the hell do they work for? And why?”

“Damn it,” Toby thundered. “Who do you think took out Edmund Moore?”

I stared at him. Toby’s eyes were wide, frightened, teary. “You tell me,” I said very quietly. “Who killed him?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, the public version is that he swallowed the barrel of his gun, a 1957 Agency-issue Smith & Wesson Model 39.”

“And?”

“The Model 39 is chambered for the 9mm Parabellum, right? It’s the first 9mm made by an American manufacturer.”

“What the hell are you getting at?”

“The bullet that penetrated Ed Moore’s brain came from the special 9mm × 18 cartridge. The cartridge used in the 9mm Makarov pistol. Follow me?”

“Soviet,” I said. “Vintage late 1950s. Or-”

“Or East German. The cartridge was manufactured for the Pistole M. East German. I don’t think Ed Moore would have used ammunition issued by the East German secret police in his old Agency pistol. Do you?”

“But the goddamned Stasi doesn’t exist anymore, Toby!”

“East Germany doesn’t exist. The Stasi doesn’t exist. But Stasi assets exist. And someone is hiring them. Someone is using them. We need you, Ben.”

“Yes,” I said, raising my voice. “Obviously. But to do what, dammit?”

He went through his ritual of extracting a pack of Rothmans, tapping it against the side of his wheelchair until one protruded, lighting it, then speaking fuzzily through the smoke.

“We want you to locate the last head of the KGB.”

“Vladimir Orlov.”

He nodded.

“But surely you know his location? With all the Agency’s resources…?”

“We know only that he’s somewhere in northern Italy. Tuscany. That’s it.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I never divulge sources and methods,” he said with a crooked smile. “Actually, Orlov is a sick man. He’s been seeing a cardiologist in Rome. That much we know. He’s seen this fellow for years, since he first visited Rome in the late 1970s. This doctor treats a number of world leaders, with great discretion. Orlov trusts him.

“Also, we know that after his consultations with this cardiologist, he is driven back to some undisclosed location in Tuscany. His drivers so far have been admirably skilled at shaking the tail.”

“So do a black-bag job.”

“On the Italian cardiologist? We tried his office in Rome. No success; he must keep the files on Orlov well hidden.”

“And if I find Orlov?”

“You’re Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law. Married to Hal’s daughter. It’s not entirely implausible for you to have business with him. He will be suspicious, but you can work it. Once you’re in his presence, we want you to find out everything about whatever it was that he and Hal Sinclair discussed. Everything. Did Hal really steal a fortune? What did Orlov have to do with it? You speak Russian, and with your ‘talent’-”

“He doesn’t have to say a word.”

“In one fell swoop you may be able to locate the missing fortune and clear Hal Sinclair’s name. Now, it’s entirely possible that what you learn about Hal will not please you.”

“Unlikely.”

“No, Ben. You do not want to believe that Harrison Sinclair was a crook, nor does Alex Truslow, nor do I. But prepare yourself for the possibility that this is what you’ll discover, repugnant though it may be. This assignment will not be without risks.”

“From whom?”

He leaned back in his wheelchair. “The most treacherous people in the intelligence business are one’s own. You know, there was a great nineteenth-century entomologist named Auguste Forel who once observed that the greatest enemies of ants are-other ants. The greatest enemies of spies are other spies.”

He laced his fingers into a church steeple. “Whatever deal Vladimir Orlov struck with Hal Sinclair, I’m sure he does not want it revealed.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Toby,” I said. “You don’t believe Hal was innocent.”

He exhaled almost soulfully. “No,” he admitted, “I don’t. I wish I could believe otherwise. But at the very least you might be able to find out what Hal was up to before he died. And why.”

“What Hal was up to?” I thundered. “Hal is dead!”

Startled, Toby looked up. He seemed frightened, though by my outburst or by something else I couldn’t tell.

“Who killed him?” I demanded. “Who killed Hal?”

“Former Stasi employees, I would guess.”

“I don’t mean the wet work. Who ordered his death?”

“We don’t know.”

“These CIA renegades-the ‘Wise Men’ Alex told me about?”

“Possible. Although perhaps-I know you hate to hear this, but consider it anyway-perhaps Sinclair was one of them. One of the so-called Wise Men. And perhaps there was a falling out.”

“That’s one theory,” I said coldly. “There must be others.”

“Yes. Perhaps Sinclair made some sort of deal with Orlov, something involving a great deal of money. And Orlov-out of greed or out of fear-had Sinclair killed. After all, wouldn’t it be logical that some of these former East German and Romanian thugs would do some freelance work for the man who used to be their boss?”

“I need to talk to Alex Truslow.”

“He’s unreachable.”

“No,” I said. “He’s at Camp David. He’s reachable.”

“He’s in transit, Ben. If you must speak to him, try tomorrow. But there is no time to lose. This is a matter of the gravest urgency.”

“You plan to keep Molly, is that it? Until I deliver the goods?”

“Ben, we’re desperate. Things are too vital.” He inhaled deeply. “It wasn’t my idea, by the way. I argued against it with Charles Rossi until I was blue in the face.”

“But you went along with it.”

“She’s being treated exceptionally well, I promise you. She’ll confirm that. The hospital has been told she’s been called away on an urgent family matter. She’ll have a peaceful rest for a few days, which she badly needs.”

I felt the adrenaline surge, and struggled mightily to keep my composure. “Toby, I believe it was you who once told me that when an ant nest is under attack, the ants don’t send out the young-men ants as guards, as soldiers. They send out the old-lady ants, you told me. Because it’s okay if the old ladies get killed off. That’s called altruism-it’s better for the colony. Right?”

“We will do everything we can to protect you.”

“Two conditions,” I said.

“Yes?”

“First, this is the only assignment I will undertake for anyone. I will not be made a guinea pig, or an errand boy, or anything else for that matter. Is that understood?”

“Understood,” Toby said equably. “Although I should hope at some point we could induce you to change your mind.”

I ignored him and went on. “And second, you receive the information only after Molly is released. I’ll work out the exact terms and arrangements. But it’s going to be my game, with my rules.”

“You’re being unreasonable,” Toby said more loudly.

“Perhaps. But it’s a deal breaker.”

“I can’t allow it. It’s against all accepted procedure.”

“Accept it, Toby.”

Another long, long pause. “Dammit, Ben. All right.”

“All right, then,” I said. “We have a deal.”

He put both palms flat on the table before him. “We’ll fly you to Rome in a few hours,” he said. “There’s not a minute to lose.”