The doctor placed the razor on the cart and picked up a syringe. He began short injections into the exposed scalp. Miller hardly winced.
“Some anesthetic, Mr. Miller, so that you don’t go into shock from the boring. We need you conscious.”
“He’ll be able to answer questions directly?” asked the blond man.
The doctor nodded. “Nothing fancy. Conversational. You ask, and he’ll answer.”
“You’ll get nothing!” screamed Miller.
The doctor smiled. “Given all the personality and perceptual changes from drugs and brain injuries studied in the medical literature, it’s amazing it took as long as it did, but finally, people tried to manipulate the thoughts and feelings of a living mind. Pioneering studies at MIT showed that even weak, externally applied magnetic fields could change the electrochemical signaling in portions of the brain. These foundational studies showed that the application of simple magnets could completely change the moral judgments that people would make about identical situations! Beautiful, amazing work!”
He stared off into the distance, a childlike smile on his face. Shaking his head, he picked up a drill and plugged it in. “Of course, the intelligence community and the military have taken these studies much, much further. Less red tape and advisory committee oversight! Specialists like me are still rare, and still suspect by many in the government. Old fashioned methods, blunt, often ineffective, are still the norm. But times are changing. And with the booming privatization of all things military and intelligence related, well, let’s just say that I believe in the free market. They demand, I supply.”
He began drilling. Miller screamed, terror in his eyes, every muscle in his body tensing. But he could not move. He could only scream helplessly as the bit bored into his bone. The drilling drew a lot of blood, but the doctor was fast to staunch the bleeding and patch off the area. Three times he drilled into three different regions of the front of Miller’s head. At the end, he set the smoking drill on the cart with a clattering sound. He picked up in its place several long, gleaming needles ending in wires that he inserted into his portable power supply.
“There. Through to the soft tissue. We’ll be able to insert these deeply — you’ll feel nothing — and reach the right temporoparietal junction, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex from each of these holes. When the brain is stimulated directly with electrodes, Mr. Miller, we can do so much more than the MIT scientists did outside the body with magnetic fields. I now have access to several critical areas of your brain that control your sense of conscious will, trust, and threat evaluation. Stimulated properly, as countless animal and secret human studies have shown, it is trivial to remove all resistance to questioning, all the while leaving the rest of your higher-order cortical function intact. Basically, in the next five minutes, my paying customer will be able to ask you anything he wants, and you’ll tell him without reservations.”
“Goddamn you both!”
The doctor smiled. “There is no God, Mr. Miller. Don’t you know that?”
He inserted the needles.
The questioning was finished, and the doctor began to stow his equipment. He spoke as he worked, his attention on the items on the cart, responses from his client emanating from behind him. Miller slumped forward in the chair against the restraints, his eyes open, fixed and staring, mouthing the word “no” over and over as he sat, his body and skull still lashed to steel.
“He told you all he knows,” the doctor spoke.
“It’s not enough!” came the blond man’s voice.
The doctor continued to rack objects on the cart. He shook his head. “He gave you names, addresses. What more?”
“The names I knew. The addresses are home and work addresses. He mentioned a farm house. That is where they are, at that safe house. He gave no address for it!”
“Then he doesn’t know.” The doctor paused, his brow wrinkled. “What is this ‘safe house’?”
There was no response, only the sound of footsteps walking slowly. The doctor stood up and turned around, an anxious look in his eyes. “This term I have only heard— “ He stopped. The barrel of a gun was pointed at his head. “But it is none of my business. I only want there to be payment.”
“What you do disgusts me, Doctor. And there will be payment.”
Before the physician could move or protest, there was a loud explosion, and his body dropped to the floor. The wraith lowered his weapon.
“You are a filthy hypocrite,” came the hoarse voice of CIA agent Miller. His eyes glanced to the side at his tormenter, his expression hateful. The blond man turned slowly to the chair, his expression neutral. “You want justice, but you torture me, rape my mind and body, the same way they did you! Now you kill that Nazi doctor because his methods offend you? You should be on that floor. If there were any justice, I would have that gun, and your time would come!” The grown man wept again, his head limp against the steel cage around his head.
“Of course, I deserve to be there,” said the wraith flatly. “I have no delusions of purity. And I will be there, or somewhere similar, when my mission is complete.”
At the last phrase, Miller looked up quizzically, a dawning understanding on his ravaged face. “You’re not going to stop with the Agency.”
The blond man smiled and raised the weapon. “I want the Grail, Agent Miller. An unholy Grail. And I will have it. Then it will be my time.” He aimed. “But now, it is yours.”
He pulled the trigger.
42
“We can leave the car here, hidden under these trees,” said Houston, parking and undoing her seatbelt.
Lopez rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. He was dirty. He stank. They had traveled another two thousand miles by a frustratingly circuitous path, constantly monitoring the police transmissions, using GPS navigation and traffic updates on their smartphones to find any hints of roadblocks or increased police surveillance, limiting their travel to late hours when law enforcement numbers were lower on the roadways.
It seemed to him that they had left the world he knew before and entered something surreal and dark. Gone was the simple and necessary circadian rhythm of sleeping at night and waking in the daylight. Human interaction had to be shunned. Anxiety was a constant emotion as every turn, every stoplight, every new town became another chance for them to be identified and caught. They maintained their disguises. They used the accounts provided by Fred Simon. They spent only cash. The accounts on their smartphones were aliases. They could confide in no one, not even the friends and family who had rejected them. They were erasing themselves from society. From existence.