“Put them on a USB stick then,” I suggested gruffly.
“Same thing,” he countered. “Any copying is immediately logged by the system. What do you think this is, Dunder Mifflin?”
I was burning up inside. All that effort and risk, for nothing. I don’t know why, but I really wanted the damn files. Even though Kirby had already said they wouldn’t give me Corrigan’s real name.
“The files. Are they paper, or on your screen?”
“Screen. Any old paperwork’s been scanned in.”
“You have your phone with you, right? Use it. Take pictures of your screen. Message them to me.”
“They’re big files.”
“I don’t need all the cross references,” I told him. “Just the main body of each report.”
I heard him let out a long exhale. “Then we’re done, right?”
My turn to exhale. “Yeah. We’re done. But I need those screen grabs now.”
“Fine,” he said grudgingly. “And by the way, you’re a real asshole, you know that?”
I killed the call without replying.
I CAN’T STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER, Shin thought.
He’d been there for more than twenty-four hours. Sticking to the immediate vicinity of the bench, watching life wind down and start off again. Living off any scraps he could find in the park’s garbage cans.
A fucking PhD, he lamented. What a joke.
By this point he was dizzy, tired, and weary. His mind was starting to play tricks on him. One minute, he was imagining men in suits and dark glasses hustling his Nikki from their apartment and doing horrible things to her. The next he pictured her sipping Champagne and laughing it up in a luxurious hot tub with a rich, handsome dude in there with her.
He had to put an end to this nightmare. There was no point in living if it meant living like this.
He decided he’d make the call. An anonymous phone call. Tip the cops off to the Russian bastard’s location. Who knows. If they got him, maybe it would all go away. Maybe he’d have nothing left to worry about.
He’d do it for himself. For Nikki. And for Jonny and Ae-Cha.
He pushed himself to his feet and shuffled off to find a phone booth.
KOSCHEY WAS BY THE door of the warehouse, watching life resume across the industrial park. Today would be a big day. A long one. A challenging one.
He was ready for it. He’d spent most of the night planning the hit. He’d checked the schedule, laid out his timetable, and used the extensive resources available online to research the venue and everything around it. It would be tight, especially on such short notice, but it was doable. And the opportunity was too great to pass up. Besides, he was used to operating under pressure, and quick decisions and swift planning made leaks and last-minute-changes less likely.
He would also be enjoying the benefit of a significant tactical advantage.
He checked the time, then made the call.
The Lebanese car dealer told him his bosses in Tehran wanted to go ahead. Just as Koschey knew they would.
Koschey confirmed their arrangements, asked him to thank his bosses for their confidence, then hung up.
He glanced at the SUV. It was ready. But he’d need to try it out first. Make sure Sokolov had done his work properly.
Once that was done, there’d be no stopping him.
Until the next opportunity arose.
58
Kirby’s JPEGs were soon pouring into my phone. Lots of them.
I was at my desk, e-mailing them on to myself at my personal Gmail account, and going through them on my laptop as they arrived.
The first file, though heavily redacted, was interesting. It concerned an assignment code named Operation Bouncer and was marked SCI-Sensitive Compartmented Information. It involved the interrogation and subsequent assassination of a Bulgarian psychiatrist who had been torturing prisoners in El Salvador. From what I could make out between the words and lines that had been crossed out with a thick black marker, Corrigan was a field agent working for the CIA’s Office of Research Development. In El Salvador, the cover he’d used was a Boston-based CIA front called the Scientific Engineering Institute. All of this didn’t come as a surprise to me, given the reason Corliss had reached out to him.
Apart from these two institutions that I would need to look at more closely, the file didn’t offer me anything else. Too much of it was redacted to give me any more insights into who “Reed Corrigan” really was. Not that I expected it to. Code names were there for a reason.
Which was why I wasn’t feeling hugely hopeful when I turned my attention to the second file.
It concerned an assignment code named, of all names, Operation Sleeping Beauty. It was also marked SCI and its pages were also heavily redacted, more so than the first file. From what I could gather, it was about a Russian scientist, code named Jericho, who had managed to make contact with our people in Helsinki while attending a KGB-sponsored conference there. He claimed to be working on a highly classified program of psychotronic weapons.
I paused there. I’d never heard the word. I opened a browser window and looked it up and discovered it was a term the Russians had coined for a new generation of weapons.
Mind-control weapons.
I straightened up.
The report mentioned Jericho as a neurophysiologist and described how he had substantiated his claims by revealing details about the organizational structure of the KGB’s S Directorate and its Department of Information-Psychological Actions. Frustratingly, the information about what technology he was actually working on was heavily blacked out. From the information that was still readable, it had to do with something called entrainment and was of “paramount importance to the national security of the United States.”
Again, I paused and called up the browser window and typed in “entrainment.” The word was used in several contexts, but one of them darted off the screen and sent a charge through me.
Brainwave Entrainment.
I skimmed a couple of articles that explained it. They described it as using an external stimulus to alter the brain state of the person being “entrained.” Broadly, the concept was that you could make people feel or behave in a certain way by using auditory pulses, flashing lights, electromagnetic waves, or other stimuli to “entrain” their brains into particular states.
My nerves crackled as I sped-read through the history-about how the scientific concept of brainwave entrainment or synchronization dated back to 200 AD, when Ptolemy first noted the effects of flickering sunlight generated by a spinning wheel, and how humans have been using sensory entrainment throughout their history. Then in the 1930s and 1940s, technology made it possible to measure brainwave entrainment after the invention of the EEG in 1924. This created a flurry of research in the area, including looking at the effects of introducing frequencies into the brain directly through electrical stimulus.
I dug deeper.
I read about how entrainment influences brain function beyond visual and auditory stimuli because of a phenomenon called the frequency following response. If the human brain receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency will move toward the frequency of the stimulus. The most familiar side effect of entrainment was the way in which strobe lights at an “alpha” frequency could trigger photosensitive epilepsy.
Then in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a neuroscientist called Allan H. Frey discovered the Microwave Auditory Effect, which is caused by audible clicks induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies. There’d been a huge increase in radar coverage in the 1950s, and pilots had started to complain about a clicking in their ears when they flew directly into the path of the microwave radiation on which the radar systems were built. Frey discovered that these clicks were generated directly inside the human head and were not audible to people nearby. Research showed that this effect occurred as a result of thermal expansion of parts of the human ear around the cochlea, even at low power density. At specific frequencies, it was thought that these clicks could cause entrainment.