“I have, but not from someone so lovely, so delicious.” With fingers spread, he rakes both hands through her hair, which falls freely over her shoulders. “All the others just poked and prodded, tested and analyzed. There’s never been anyone so perfectly suited to be the vessel of my wisdom, the repository of my seed.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Oh, but you won’t.”
Susan fights to stay calm, wanting to draw him out, make him continue talking. She needs to probe his personality, find his weaknesses and attack them. At the same time, she knows that David is using his own psychological warfare against her, alternating doses of charm and terror. His flaw, she believes, is his ego, his overwhelming belief that his charisma will draw people to him, make them do his bidding. This leads her to a startling conclusion. David believes he can convert her, make her one of his followers and even more, make her worship him.
Susan Burns is well aware of the Stockholm syndrome, the intense relationship whereby a hostage forms an artificial emotional attachment to a terrorist, a dependence born of the lust for survival. He has traumatized her and weakened her. She is tired, alone and frightened. But she vows to fight.
“Tell me about your therapy,” she says.
“Are you familiar with the Mach test, doctor?”
“It’s named for Machiavelli and tests a person’s willingness to manipulate, to dehumanize, to treat others as objects. At the high end, there is total lack of concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating and deceit are considered the norm.”
“And how do you think I scored?”
“A twenty.”
“No, twenty-one.”
“That’s impossible. Twenty is the highest, or lowest, depending how you look at it.”
“I got a bonus,” he says, proudly, “for killing the psychiatrist’s hamsters.”
“You’re trying to shock me,” she says. “Why not just tell me about it?”
“The shrink was one of your sixties peaceniks who still drove a VW bus and listened to Joan Baez. Had a kitchenette in his office, used to make godawful fruit and veggie drinks. One day, I dropped the little fellow — the hamster, not the shrink — into the blender. Put some lumps in his smoothie.”
Still fighting the pain in her arms, Susan struggles not to show her revulsion.
David smiles to himself and unfastens another button of her blouse. “So, doctor, any more thoughts on little Davy? And don’t sugar coat it. If you lie to me, I’ll cause you pain.”
She takes a breath and says, “Primary narcissism with delusional episodes and bouts of sadistic sexual paraphilia.”
“Mmm. You’re getting warmer. And so am I.” Suddenly, he rips the blouse open, popping the remaining buttons. Susan gasps with fear, then strains for control, even as her breasts heave under her bra.
David watches her intently, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “My mother wore white brassieres with little pink bows, just like you. Now there’s grist for your mill, eh doctor?”
Susan is silent, afraid to venture more opinions. It is a struggle for control, she knows. She must wrest it away without enraging him.
“Come now, doctor,” he says. Playful now. “Don’t you want to know how a boy like me got to be a boy like me? Wouldn’t you like to venture an expert medical opinion?”
“I would suspect that you had a successful, distant, authoritarian father and a frivolous, indulgent, highly seductive mother. Your parents were self-centered, and rather than being affectionate, merely indulged you. Instead of experiencing feelings, you became charming and manipulative and simply pretended to feel for others in order to obtain what you wished. It is possible that your parents, particularly your father, had criminal impulses which he never acted on, but which he unconsciously projected onto you, hoping you would actualize them, giving him the vicarious pleasure without the risk. In short, your nuclear family was sick, and they made you sick.”
“Nuclear family,” he muses. “An apt phrase, given our circumstances, don’t you think? Still, you can do better than that. Be more specific. Your generalities may apply to bottom-feeding serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer, but I consider myself rather special.”
Susan feels the muscles in her calves beginning to cramp and her arms are growing numb. “From an early age, you engaged in fetishistic masturbatory fantasies. You daydreamed about killing, probably on a massive scale. You—
“You’re getting off the track. My family, doctor. Tell me about my family, and do entertain me. If you’re boring, I shall have to entertain myself, and you wouldn’t like that, I assure you.”
“As I said, your father was likely powerful and remote. He either pushed you—”
“Ah, more clichés.”
“Or ignored you. The cliché would be that he never played ball with you.”
“He played chess with me, taught me the game when I was four, my beloved father did. If I made a move he considered inferior… ”
Wham. David slams his open palm into the overhead pipe. Startled, Susan instinctively raises her legs. The movement causes her to swing to and fro on the pipe. Her arms throb.
“He’d box my ears,” David says.
Her voice quaking, a hot pain searing her shoulders, she says softly, “Your father didn’t know how to express—”
“Shut up! It’s my forty-five minutes, doctor. One day, when I was eight, we were playing chess, just like always. I tried a new maneuver, something he hadn’t seen before, and it appeared that my queen was vulnerable… ” Wham. David hits the pipe again, and Susan winces. “He hits me, screams at me for being stupid, but I don’t cry. I just keep playing. Five moves later, checkmate. I win!”
“And he never hit you again.”
“Wrong! He hit me harder. He just never played with me again.”
Susan senses the opportunity and goes for it. “Don’t you see? Surely, you do. You have the intelligence. You know precisely what shaped you. Armed with that knowledge, you can change. You can—”
“Doctor, doctor. What is the primary reason why therapy is almost always useless for true psychopaths?”
She considers lying, figures he would know, then simply speaks the truth. “Motivation. They don’t want to change. They enjoy their aberrational behavior.
“Quite so,” he says, as he unhooks her bra, and lets it fall to the floor.
The unmarked C-21A, a Lear jet in the military configuration, descends from twenty thousand feet over the flat Nebraska countryside. Professor Lionel Morton sits with his head pressed against the window, staring at the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Griggs has silently studied the professor for the past ninety minutes. He knows that Lionel Morton was the boy genius of the missile program in the fifties and sixties. Now, he is considered an oddball, a dinosaur. Brilliant and combative, he’s been fired and rehired by the Air Force a dozen times.
“Without the S.L.C., they can’t launch the missile, can they?” Griggs asks. He has a well-trimmed mustache and his pale hair has gone gray at the temples.
“Correct. The professor still stares out the window.
“So there’s no problem, is there? Special Forces can take back the silo in what, fifteen or twenty minutes. Hell, they would have done it already if we didn’t have the bad luck to have half-a-dozen foreign ambassadors down the hole.”
“Bad luck or clever planning?”
That makes the colonel think. “You mean the bastards knew about the U.N. delegation?”
“It was in the newspapers,” the professor says, dismissing the notion of luck, good or bad. “It is consistent with a well-planned operation.”