“Shoot.”
Don’t tempt me. “Hypothetically—how would you put someone together? The whole package?”
The old man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. After a moment, he asked: “Based on what I’ve read in the open literature?”
“Of course,” McBride replied.
Shapiro thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’d give the subject an EEG—get a record of his brainwaves under different stumuli. With that, and a PET scan, you could put together a map of the subject’s brain—its emotive and intellectual centers.”
“Then what?” Adrienne asked.
“Well, once you had that information, you could encrypt a set of audiograms that would target those centers, delivering them on the back of ELF transmissions—”
“Elf?” Adrienne asked.
“It’s an acronym for Extremely Low Frequency radio waves. That’s what I was talking about before: the four to seven megahertz band.”
“And so, if you did all that, what would happen?” Adrienne asked.
“Well,” Shapiro replied, “you’d change the landscape of the brain.”
“What does that mean?” McBride asked.
“Just what I said: you’d bring about some very specific—but temporary—changes in the physical structure of the brain.”
“And that would accomplish… what?”
“Depends on the audiograms,” Shapiro told them. “But amnesia might be one result.”
“Total amnesia?” McBride asked.
Shapiro shrugged. “You might remember how to speak Italian, but you wouldn’t remember how you’d learned it—or if you’d ever been to Italy.”
“Would you remember who you were?” McBride asked.
Shapiro looked at McBride. “That would depend.”
“On what?”
“On what the programmer was trying to achieve. Once the subject was prepped, and his memory blocked, he’d probably have a neurophonic prosthesis implanted.”
“A ‘prosthesis,’“ Adrienne repeated.
Shapiro uncurled a forefinger in the direction of the snapshot that was lying on the table. “One of those. If you were to look at the object in that photograph under a microscope, my guess is you’d find it contains insulated electrodes that receive and process audiograms on particular frequencies. The prosthesis would allow the transmissions to bypass the inner ear—the cochlea and eighth cranial nerve—delivering the messages directly to the brain.”
McBride thought about it. “So it would be like hearing voices,” he suggested.
“It would be like hearing God,” Shapiro corrected. “But the implant is just a part of the process. The programmer would have other tools…”
“Like what?”
“Hypnosis… sensory deprivation…”
“And how would that work?” Adrienne asked.
Shapiro pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and replied. “Well, the subject could be given hypnotic suggestions, preparing him for the experience he’s about to have. Then we’d lower him into a blackout tank filled with saltwater that’s been heated to the same temperature as his body—around 98 degrees. It’s a very strange experience—like floating in space.”
“You’ve tried it?”
“Of course,” Shapiro replied. “I’ve tried everything.” He paused, and then went on. “After an hour or so in the tank, it’s impossible to say where your skin ends and the water begins. You just… dissolve.” He nodded at the cup in front of Adrienne. “Like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. And when that happens, the subject becomes… malleable.”
McBride listened in fascinated disbelief, while Adrienne stared at the former spook, imagining her sister floating in the blackout tank.
“After a protracted period—”
“What’s ‘protracted’?” McBride demanded.
“A day. A week. A month,” Shapiro told him. “The point is that, after a while, the subject’s identity begins to disintegrate. It’s like a near death experience, with all the senses shutting down—or seeming to. You can imagine: once you’re in the tank, there’s nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell, no sense of touch. No sense of time. If you think losing your mind is unsettling, try losing your body.” Shapiro paused, and a thin smile curled above his chin. “Even so, some people find the experience… enlightening.”
“And others?” Adrienne asked.
The old man shrugged. “Others don’t.”
McBride leaned forward: “Then what?”
Shapiro gave him a sidelong glance. “Then? Well, then you take it to the next level.”
“Which is what?”
“‘Intensification.’ Once the subject’s identity is broken down, he’s basically a tabula rasa. It’s a relatively simple matter to imprint whatever ‘memories’ you like.”
“How?” McBride asked.
“We’d create scenarios compatible with his psychological profile, and turn them into films. The subject would watch the films in tandem with a subliminal stream of audiograms.”
“Like in a theater,” Adrienne suggested.
Shapiro chuckled. “No,” he said, “it’s more engaging than that. He’d wear a special helmet, one that’s fitted with speakers and jacks. Audio in, audio out—that sort of thing. Then we’d plug him in and…”
“What?”
“Well, from the subject’s perspective, it’s like sitting six feet away from a sixty-two-inch television screen, watching 3-D images in binaural sound. It’s a very involving experience and that’s just the conscious part of it all. Add hypnosis and drugs and… it’s a lot like shaping clay. Soft clay.”
“Drugs,” Adrienne said. She flashed on that little vial in Nikki’s computer: Placebo #1. “What kind of drugs?”
Shapiro made a face. “Pyschedelics of every description. We had a great deal of success with a drug from Ecuador called burrandaga. And with Ketamine—more commonly used as an animal tranquilizer. Both of them cause a sort of dissociative amnesia.”
“Ketamine,” Adrienne said. “Isn’t that one of the date rape drugs?”
“Precisely,” Shapiro said. “It would be very effective for that purpose for the same reason it was effective for our purposes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you wanted to ‘take advantage of someone,’ as we used to say, ketamine has the effect of disconnecting a person from her body. Whatever happens seems to be occurring in another dimension. And these events fail to take hold in the memory.”
“There’s a built-in amnesiac effect?”
“Precisely. Afterwards, the rape—or whatever—it’s as if it never happened. Subjects never remembered being in the tank, or the helmet, or being bombarded with ‘new memories.’”
“So you’d have this person in this helmet. And what would… what would the person be looking at?” McBride asked.
“Men in hoods,” Adrienne muttered. “Satanists.”
Shapiro gave her a peculiar look, then turned to answer McBride’s question. “It would depend.”
“On what?” McBride demanded.
“On what you wanted him to remember—and what you wanted him to forget.”
McBride sipped his tea, and found that it was cold. “How long would this take?” he asked.
Shapiro shook his head. “Hard to say. If you’re tweaking the subject’s identity, that’s one thing. If you’re building someone from the ground up—that’s quite another.”
“‘Tweaking the identity,’“ Adrienne repeated, her voice heavy with a mix of wonder and incredulity.
“Right.” Shapiro rearranged his legs on the cushion. “I’m curious,” he said, shifting gears in the conversation. “What was your relationship with—” he turned toward McBride “—with this young woman’s sister?”
“I was her therapist,” McBride said.
“And she came to your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“And, as it turned out, both of you had a prosthesis… ?”