“We’re not big on formality,” Dr. Elliot said. He motioned to Frist. “He’s been asleep the entire trip?”
“Yes,” Eric replied.
“Good. We’ll get him to the lab and start immediately.”
“That fast?”
Elliot grinned. “No need to wait, and I prefer him unconscious. We need to run tests before we perform the Implant.”
Nancy led Eric through a labyrinth of hallways until they reached his living quarters.
“This is yours,” she said, pointing to a door with his name embossed on a steel plate. “Inside you’ll find a sitting area, a desk, and a kitchenette. Your bedroom, bathroom, and closet are in the back. We took the liberty of stocking everything you might need. There’s a million channels to choose from, and we even have movies on demand.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame you won’t have time to watch them. Read as much of the paperwork as you can, but get some sleep, you’ll be observing tomorrow.”
She left and he opened the door with his thumbprint. When he stepped inside he let out a long whistle. It was big, five meters across and ten deep, and was decorated with dark wood furniture, not the barrack-style steel that he expected. It even had recessed lights.
The kitchenette had a full size refrigerator. He found the bedroom in the back, with a simple bed and a plasma screen hanging from the wall. He was surprised to find a walk-in shower in the bathroom.
The toilet was functional, but he was most impressed by the completely stocked vanity with several types of soap, deodorant, toothpaste, and other sundries.
He opened the closet door and found it furnished with both military fatigues and street clothes, a rack of boots and shoes on the floor. He did not bother to check the fit. The Office did everything well, it seemed, and he knew they would be his size.
He turned out the lights and went back to the sitting room. “Might as well get to work,” he said to himself. He sighed as he read the instructions for setting up his computer login.
It was going to be a long night.
Eric shook his head. The subterranean base was huge. According to his briefing papers, it originally housed America’s secret aircraft program, especially their fascination with enemy technology. The US did a booming business in stolen Soviet aircraft during the Cold War, and as the engineers worked furiously to reverse-engineer and evaluate the jets, the hangars were soon bursting at the seams.
So, in the early seventies, CIA-designed boring machines carved out the massive underground base. It was large enough to hold thousands of workers, with cavernous rooms for testing equipment, numerous machine shops, state of the art manufacturing facilities, and underground aircraft hangars that opened to the desert floor.
Once Area 51 and the Groom Lake facility entered the public lexicon, most of the operations had been shipped elsewhere and the underground base mothballed. The Groom Lake facility still warehoused stolen military aircraft, but the days of Russia or China making huge technological leaps in aircraft design were over. It was easier for them to steal American designs from outsourced vendors.
Smith realized that with the underground base mothballed, and with the public fascination with Area 51 dwindling, it was an excellent choice for the Office. Much of the traffic to and from Area 51 over the past decade had been to update and revitalize the underground base.
While the above-ground facility was starting to look shabby, the great rooms under the mountain were cleaned and refurbished, billions of dollars of high tech equipment trucked in.
The base now housed over a thousand technicians. It boasted a well-stocked cafeteria, two coffee shops, and a small theater. There were lecture halls, large inviting rooms with stepped seating, plasma screens and projectors, and conference rooms with multimedia capabilities.
He knew the budget for the project was large, but when he finally read the report that gave the actual numbers, he was astounded. The Office had invested heavily in the base, and even more in Frist.
CHAPTER THREE
The next morning, Eric followed the map to a circular room full of lab technicians. Nathan Elliot was there, as was Nancy, sitting at the conference table at the front of the room. The big-screen monitor on the far wall was ablaze with charts and graphs, all of which could have been written in a different language, for all the sense it made to him.
Nancy glanced over. “Glad you made it. We’ve got a busy day ahead.”
Nathan looked up from his laptop, his heavy brow furrowed. “We finished the diagnostics overnight. If we’re lucky, we’ll be ready for the Implant.”
“How’s the data so far?” Eric asked.
Dr. Elliot smiled. “The MRI’s and CT scans show more brain damage than expected. We have concerns about that, of course, our procedures are highly experimental. We checked his leg where a small piece of shrapnel was removed from the IED in Iraq. It healed nicely. Remarkable, given the IED killed everyone else in his Humvee.”
Dr. Elliot paused. “He’s quite healthy — physically, that is. Mentally? Given the trauma he experienced in Iraq it’s obvious that he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
“A lot of soldiers suffer from PTSD. They don’t all become terrorists,” Eric said.
“That’s correct. In his case, it appears the brain damage combined with the PTSD caused him to fixate on the Red Cross.”
“That doesn’t excuse what he did,” Eric said.
Dr. Elliot shrugged. “I’m not saying it does. If the Wipe is successful, the mental trauma he experienced will disappear. He will be unmade. He won’t remember anything from Iraq until now.”
The Wipe was Eric’s biggest concern. He listened as Elliot explained the groundbreaking studies that unlocked the mystery behind human memory, and with that came another discovery — how to wipe memories and replace them with false ones. The process was barely out of the theoretical studies, but had been successfully tested on several death-row convicts.
“For the Wipe to work,” Dr. Elliot explained, “we need Frist to maintain a sense of self, a sense of his life until he went to Iraq. We need him to remember his training in the Army, to build on it. It would be a disaster if we accidentally erased much of what made him who he was.”
“You’re sure it will work?” Nancy asked.
“The tests have been encouraging,” Dr. Elliot said. “First, we’ll install the Implant. It will allow us to remotely administer drugs such as pain killers or stimulants.”
“Continue the tests,” Eric said. “I’ve got to check the training preparations.”
Abdullah sat cross legged, waiting for Naseer. The cave was cold and the tin stove provided little heat. The chimney failed to vent all the smoke, and it settled on his worn clothes. His teapot steamed upon the stove-top. A light, recharged through a solar cell, provided just enough illumination for him to read his journal.
He had written much of it as a young Mujahideen, when he had felt so lost and helpless, unsure if he would live to see the Soviets driven away. He was barely older than a child during the war, blindly following orders in the name of Allah.
Now he was a grown man fighting another war.
There was a scrabbling outside, rock scraping against rock, soft voices whispering, and then a polite cough. Naseer entered the room, a short young man no more than twenty-two, with oily black hair plastered against his head. Abdullah had tried and failed to get him to stop smoking, and he stank of clove beedis. The dying man, Fahad, followed behind.
“Abdullah, are you there,” Naseer whispered, squinting in the dim light.
“Of course,” he replied patiently, “I’ve been waiting for you. Is this Fahad?”