Rasputin's Shadow

65

I asked Sokolov, “And your grandfather destroyed the machine?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “The machine. All his notes. Everything. All he left behind were the journals.”

I was puzzled. “So you don’t know what it was? How it worked?”

“Not exactly. But there were clues, in what he wrote. He mentioned things like it was powered by batteries, then the piezoelectric transducer-”

“Hang on, batteries?” Aparo interrupted. “We’re talking early nineteen hundreds, right? They had batteries back then?”

“Batteries have been around for over two hundred years,” Sokolov said. “That ‘Ever Ready’ Flash Light my grandfather referred to? The first one came out in 1899. They’ve even found clay jars in Iraq that are over two thousand years old and that are believed to be primitive electric cells.” He waved it off. “Anyway, my grandfather also talked about having studied drumbeats and church organs and how they affected us. He said he needed to put wax in his ears when he used it, whereas he was surprised that Rasputin didn’t need to, that he had trained himself to be immune to it-which meant its effect came through the ears. He mentioned Heinrich Wilhelm Dove and his ‘magic.’ Dove was no magician. He was a Prussian scientist, and it became clear that the magic my grandfather was talking about was actually what Dove had discovered in 1839: binaural beats. All pieces of the puzzle. And gradually, they all fell into place. I figured out how he did it. I suppose part of his hubris couldn’t resist leaving some trace of his work, teasing his reader and alluding to his genius.” He dropped his gaze. “Perhaps we all suffer from it.”

Sokolov told us about his journey, from his local village to the technical school a long bus ride away and on to Leningrad University.

“Manipulating neural circuits was a big priority back then,” Sokolov told us. “They were recruiting the best minds from universities across the USSR, and I was lucky in that I came to it all at a time when technology was opening up all kinds of possibilities. It was an exciting time. Subliminal messages, inaudible commands, radio-frequency radiation, infrasound, isochronic tones, transcranial magnetic stimulation of specific areas of the brain… all kinds of new approaches to psychic driving and psycho-correction, all of us looking for the Holy Grail: the ability to influence thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and behavior. To control people from a distance.”

“And you figured it out.”

He nodded. “When they transferred me from Leningrad University to the KGB’s Department of Information-Psychological Actions in 1974, research into microwaves hadn’t progressed much beyond attempts to disorient and confuse by aiming a broad range of wavelengths at the subject. That’s where I started. And I discovered other frequencies and settings that could do a whole lot more.” He let out a ragged sigh, then said, “I worked on it for eight years before we finally tested it on human subjects.” He shook his head, visibly pained by the memory. It took him a moment before he could resume his story. “Mujahedin rebels the Army had captured in Afghanistan. They never knew what hit them. They turned into killers within seconds. We just watched them butcher each other to death. Dozens of them.”

He looked up at me, his eyes imploring for some kind of empathy. I nodded, encouraging him to continue. It was a strange feeling to be sitting there with him. And it was oddly satisfying to finally hear him tell us what had happened, even if his entire story appeared to be filled with death.

“So you defected,” I said. “Why?”

“All those deaths. It woke me up. Before that, I was naïve. I was too caught up in my own ego, in the science of it, in this extraordinary possibility of controlling people’s emotions and desires. My fellow researchers and I, we had these big conversations about what it would mean to create a completely psychocivilized society. It was fascinating and addictive. But I didn’t dwell on the fact that it could also program people to kill on command. Then when it happened… it was a huge shock to me. The implications of what I had invented… And I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t let something like that happen again. I couldn’t hand it over to them. Not after everything they’d done, everything I knew they were capable of. I mean, they’d just tried to kill the pope. The pope… There was nothing they wouldn’t do.”

“The pope?” My mind rushed back to the attempt on the life of the great Polish pope, back in 1981. “You mean John Paul?”

Sokolov nodded. “You know about that, right?”

It was before my time, but I knew that back then, the CIA had its suspicions. His Holiness had become a major problem for the Kremlin. John Paul was known in intelligence circles as a man of indomitable courage. As a priest, in his homeland, he had confronted Nazis, then Communists, and as pope, he was determined to lead his people to freedom. At the time, Brezhnev had been threatening to invade Poland in order to put a lid on the influence of the burgeoning Solidarity movement. John Paul had challenged him on that openly. In August of the previous year, he’d sent the Russian leader a handwritten letter. One single sheet of stationery that bore the papal coat of arms. In it, he told Brezhnev how concerned he was about his homeland. Then the pontiff added something remarkable: he informed Brezhnev that if the Soviets invaded Poland, he would give up the Throne of Saint Peter, abandon the Holy See, and move back to Poland to lead his people in their resistance.

Nine months later, a lone gunman shot and critically wounded the Pope in front of a quarter million stunned pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square. The shooter, a Turk by the name of Mehmet Ali Agca, was captured. He was portrayed as a crazed, lone madman. The truth-or, in any case, the intelligence community’s suspicion-was somewhat different. He’d been working alongside members of the Bulgarian Secret Service. CIA and Italian intelligence doctors who examined him after the hit found traces of amphetamines in his blood. He had multiple injection bruises on his body. They were convinced he had been medically prepped for what they believed was a mission-essentially, that he’d been brainwashed. A real-life Manchurian Candidate.

Sokolov nodded ruefully. “It helped me make up my mind. I couldn’t let them have it. I contemplated destroying the device and all my research and killing myself. But I was too cowardly to do it. So I chose to run… after sabotaging it and making sure all my paperwork was destroyed. Without me, they couldn’t rebuild it.”

“But you didn’t want us to have it either,” I said.

“I decided no one should have it. No one could be trusted with it. No one.” He fixed me with a hard look and asked, “Do you disagree?”

I held his gaze, then I glanced at Larisa. I couldn’t read her look, but I know where my mind was heading on that question. And I hadn’t even seen its effects firsthand.

“So you drugged our guys and took off?”

“I brought some powder with me, something we’d developed,” he explained. “Powerful, tasteless, and harmless. We toasted our success after we arrived here. And I ran. Took on a new name. Got married. And you know the rest.”

“But you couldn’t turn off that part of your mind,” Larisa said.

Sokolov rubbed his eyes. He looked weary.

“I tried, of course. I actually managed it for quite a few years. But then I read this article about all the developments in cell technology, and I didn’t sleep for a week. It was the ideal delivery system. I needed to know if I could build a more sophisticated version of what I’d built in Moscow.” He looked at us ruefully. “I had to try. I couldn’t help myself.”

“And you stayed below the radar. Until the protest outside the embassy last week,” I said. “Why did you go there? What made you draw attention to yourself?”

Leo nodded to himself, his face lined with regret. “After I left, they came down hard on my relatives. I had three brothers. They took them all away, sent them off to work camps. It was years before I found out they had died there, and the only reason I did find out was because one of my brother’s sons became a big political activist and they wrote about him and his family in the Western press.”

“Ilya Shislenko was your nephew?” I asked.

Sokolov nodded. “When they killed him… when they murdered him, it just gutted me. Two of my brothers weren’t married, they never had any children. Ilya was my only nephew-as far as I know, anyway. And his death, at their hands… it was too much to take. I lost control.”

“And here we are,” Aparo said.

“Here we are,” Sokolov grumbled softly.

I watched him for a moment. “So,” I asked, “how does it work?”

Sokolov took a slug from the bottle of water I had handed him. “Do you know what entrainment is?”

I told him what I’d only just read.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Everything we feel, all our emotions, from happiness and elation to depression and aggression,” he said, “it’s all triggered by electrochemical events in our brains.”

Years as a high school science teacher kicked in as he patiently explained how the brain instinctively experiences a variety of strong emotions in response to rhythmic stimulus.

“You’ve got one hundred billion neurons in the three pounds of flesh between your ears,” he said, “and they’re connected by a hundred trillion synapses. That’s a huge network with limitless potential, and we know very little about it. But one thing we do know is that our brains are able to perceive things below our ability to consciously be aware of them or identify them. And that’s what I was tapping into to manipulate the neural circuits that govern states like euphoria, trust, fear, anxiety, depression. Even physical side effects like nausea and disorientation. And I discovered that we can effectively and selectively induce them.”

“With microwaves?”

He scrunched his face. “It’s very complicated and, honestly, you’d need PhDs in math and electrical engineering to understand it in any meaningful way. But basically, my discovery was that multiple alternating cavity and dielectric tubes combined with heavily customized magnetrons can create a targeted field of microwaves at stable wavelengths that can be fine-tuned precisely to control the vibrations in the inner ear so as to entrain the brain through its entire range of frequencies.”

This was the “basically” version.

He shrugged. “An anthropologist at Yale recently proposed the idea that our susceptibility to entrainment is due to natural selection,” he added. “Those of our ancestors who could achieve a state in which they didn’t feel fear or pain, but were instead united in a collective identity… they were more likely to survive against grassland predators-and against other tribes.”

“Sounds a lot like Communism,” I remarked. “And we all know how that turned out.”

Sokolov smiled grimly. Then he added, without a shadow of pride in his voice, “But this susceptibility to entrainment has a very dark side. My machine can do everything from put you to sleep to make you kill your children.”

A cold nail slid down my spine.

He couldn’t have said it any more simply than that.

I could see why everybody wanted him. Having access to that kind of technology-especially if you were the only one who possessed it-would give you immeasurable power over both your own people and your enemies.

Aparo asked, “What about the man who came to your apartment Monday morning? How’d you manage to overpower him? What kind of Jedi mind trick did you use on him?”

Sokolov didn’t seem to get the reference. He looked a bit confused, then said, “I had put some monaural beats on a CD. Basic, but effective. I kept it ready for just that kind of emergency, in case anyone ever came looking for me.”

“What does it do?” Aparo asked.

“It makes you confused. Dizzy. Nauseous. You lose focus. Makes you amenable to suggestion. To answering questions truthfully.”

“But it didn’t affect you?” he asked.

“Like I said, it’s more basic. Much less potent than what’s in the van. I know what it does and how it does it, and I’d trained myself to resist its effect.”

Aparo just said, “Wow.”

I remembered the neighbor and his suddenly aggressive dog. “A neighbor said his dog attacked him at around that time. Said it had never happened before.”

“Animals react differently from us. And when they get scared, some of them attack.”

I wondered how many other neighbors had been affected by the brief burst.

“Apart from the earmuffs,” I asked, “is there any way to protect against what you’ve got in the van? Anything that can block it?”

“Not really. And if you’re too close to it and especially if you’re in its direct line of sight, even the ear guards can’t block out the more aggressive frequencies. The only way is to be standing behind enough insulation to stop the microwaves from reaching you. We’re talking at least an inch of iron or several feet of concrete or even a screen of very fine wire mesh to disrupt the waves. The mesh is actually the most effective, but it has to be very fine to disrupt the wavelength. They use it widely these days to block cell-phone reception.”

Aparo asked, “What about jamming it? Like with a cell-phone-signal jammer.”

“It might work if the jammer is powerful enough and broad enough to block out all frequencies,” Sokolov said. “The different settings have different frequencies, so you’d need to kill the full range of signals to make sure nothing gets through.”

“What range are we talking about?” I asked.

“Depends on the power source. In the right conditions, it could reach over half a mile with full line of sight. But ultimately, you could say the range is limitless. Think of how a cell network provides seamless coverage for your cell phone. Theoretically, the same thing could be done with this. If you can get a phone signal, this can reach you too.”

I felt like I’d been dropped on a bed of nails. “Are you saying you could link it to a network of cell-phone towers?”

He nodded. “Theoretically, yes. You couldn’t just plug my version into one, though. I don’t know how network control centers are set up. It would take some figuring out, but, basically, it’s doable.”

“Jesus.”

The amount of damage that one psychopath could do with this technology at his command was staggering. You could take out a whole city with it. Maybe even more than that.

I looked at the faces around me and could only state the obvious. “We need to stop him.”