She nodded. “I promise.”
He left the room and snapped his fingers at the two guards outside. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid,” he said.
Smith’s office was big, with a real oak desk, made when furniture was still built my men with skill. It glowed a rich brown from the reflected light of the flat-panel computer monitors. The chairs were soft leather, the carpet a brown weave. Eric sat stiffly across from Smith and sighed. “Her cousin’s fiancé had a son. He was killed, along with his classmates.”
Smith shook his head. “Of course, the school bus. Twenty three children, I believe.” He stood and poured a cup of hot coffee, delicately added cream and sugar. “Coffee?”
He shook his head. “No, thanks. I interrogated the woman. She wanted him to suffer. Nothing else.”
“There often isn’t,” Smith said, as he returned to his chair. “You plan and prepare, but there is one variable you can’t account for. The human. The human is unpredictable. It’s the best of us and the worst of us. Emotion, passion, justice. It can elevate us to great heights, or take us to great depths. The Germans learned this.”
“The Germans?” Eric asked.
“I interviewed a member of the SS, once, a guard in one of the death camps. He was living here, in the United States. This particular man had found influence. His exposure would be…undesirable. We captured him and interrogated him before we turned him over to the Israelis. I looked in his eyes and asked how could he do something so wrong. So evil. He didn’t have an answer. He made excuses. Justifications. Then, he told of the humiliation, of how the world treated his country after World War One. How Hitler inspired them, made them feel proud. Gave them purpose. How Hitler would right the wrongs against them. How the Aryan race would triumph.”
Eric felt nauseous. It was one thing to read about history in a textbook, but Smith had actually lived it. “That’s what motivated him?”
“It turned him into a monster,” Smith said. “We must keep that kind of insanity from happening again. People are unpredictable. Mr. Frist, for instance. A young man, by all accounts, a patriot, obsessed with revenge for an imagined slight against him. How much was it the shock and horror of war? Or was it the damage to his mind? But now he is here, and the young nurse, Ms. Tulli, is here as well.”
“Yes, she is. She says she’s willing to continue working with the program and that she would never do anything like that again.”
“Do you believe her?”
Eric paused. “I know it sounds crazy, but yeah, I do.”
“Listen to your instincts. What are they telling you?”
“They say we can trust her. Besides, what are my alternatives? Have her locked up? Terminated?”
Smith blinked softly. “Eric. I’ve watched you for years. You’re a good man. If you believe she needs to be terminated, it’s your decision. If you should free her, that’s your decision as well.”
A dull ache settled in the back of his head. He believed Smith. He could order the death of Kara Tulli. The guards would execute her, a cover story crafted. As head of project StrikeForce and as the base CO, he could order the complete removal of another human being.
He shook his head. “We’ll keep her working on the project. She won’t cause any more problems.”
Smith nodded. “See that she doesn’t. Dismissed.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Frist slumped in the chair, his arms and legs held by leather restraints, his head strapped to a thick plastic cross-beam. The monitor in front of him displayed a pulsating test pattern.
Eric watched through the observation window as Dr. Barnwell and Dr. Elliot worked the computers. Dr. Barnwell was the base psychologist, a soft, doughy man in his late sixties, but Eric had read his jacket and knew the doc had been with the Office since the Vietnam war.
“How long will this take?” Eric asked.
“Several hours,” Dr. Barnwell said. “This is a fairly ambitious Wipe. We’ve got to find the trigger, the memory of the bombing.”
“You’ll just erase it?”
“Hardly,” Dr. Barnwell said. “We used to think there were hundreds of thousands of neurons associated with the formation of a single memory. It turns out there are fewer than a thousand. The problem is they cross-link with the neurons around them.”
Frist groggily opened his eyes. The monitor started playing idyllic scenes of the countryside. First stared at the monitor, unable to turn his head.
“The sedative is working, he’s conscious, but not fully awake,” Dr. Elliot said.
“Good,” Dr. Barnwell said. “The procedure is fairly simple. We’ll play images from his life, pictures of where he grew up, his grade school, that sort of thing. The fMRI maps the blood flow levels in the brain tied to neural activity. We’ll map the neuron clusters associated with various memories to construct a model of his brain. Then, we’ll play back images of the Red Cross bombing. When we have those clusters mapped, the cyclotron will send two streams of high-power particles, and where they meet, the resulting energy will destroy those neuron clusters.”
Eric shuddered. “Sounds dangerous.”
“Not necessarily. The real problem is that one of the neurons might also contain a link to the word bomb, the overall memory of bombs, how to make bombs, or even something completely unrelated. We don’t want to destroy his entire memory, just excise certain aspects of it. What good would he be if we turned him into a drooling idiot?”
“How safe is this?”
Dr. Barnwell smiled. “Everything about this project carries a risk. I thought you understood that.”
“Sorry, Doc. If you told me a month ago that you had this kind of tech, I would have called you a liar.” Eric shook his head. “What about his time in Gitmo?”
Inside the room a deep and loud thrumming shook the floor. The pictures changed, morphing from image to image, first a small bungalow, bicycle in front, then pictures of an early seventies Ford LTD. Dr. Elliot’s computer lit up with a three dimensional map of Frist’s brain.
“When we are done with the Wipe, we’ll administer a drug called an HDAC2 inhibitor. We can’t completely erase his memories of the past year,” Dr. Barnwell continued, “especially memories that have a high emotional content, but the HDAC2 inhibitor will help stimulate the formation of new memories, memories that also have high emotional content. We’ll blame any lingering problems on his concussion. His mind will fill in the blanks.”
“It’s funny,” Eric mused. “The one person who should never forget what he did, and he won’t remember a thing. He completely escapes punishment.”
“It’s not my job to punish him,” Dr. Elliot said. “It’s my job to make him ready for training. Your job is to make him a weapon.”
The images slowly shifted — a grade school, a high school, a recruiter’s station. The map of Frist’s brain continued to build, a blazing display of bright-colored threads. Dr. Elliot glanced over his shoulder. “This is going to take some time. We’ll call you when it’s done.”
Eric stood and walked to the window of the control room. He watched as the images morphed, Frist unable to turn away. “Doc? You’re sure he won’t remember Guantanamo?”
Barnwell shook his head. “Not after we’re finished. Why do you ask?”
Eric shrugged. “No reason. Keep me posted.”
Deion was jet-lagged and more than a little edgy when he entered the room. The hard-boned man with the intense brown eyes waited, a man he worked with once before in Afghanistan, a man he had almost forgotten until the previous week. “Steeljaw. I should have known.”
Eric smiled. “Glad you could make it, Freeman. I thought you might like a change of pace.”