“Right.”
Shapiro frowned. “How can you be sure of that? Did she have a CAT scan or—”
“My sister was cremated,” Adrienne explained. “I found the implant in her ashes.”
The scientist blanched. “Christ,” he muttered. Then he changed the subject, or seemed to. “Tell me something,” he said, turning to McBride. “Did you leave your apartment often?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when you were practicing as a therapist—did you get out much? Or did you stay at home?”
McBride’s shoulders rose and fell. “I guess I stayed pretty close to home.”
“I’ll bet,” Shapiro told him.
“Why?”
“Because I think it’s very likely that there was a monitoring site in your building. The apartment across the hall—”
“—or next door,” Adrienne suggested.
“Upstairs, or on the floor below… the point is: they’d have wanted a way to reinforce the signal. And one of the consequences would be that once you were out of range, you’d begin to feel uncomfortable—unless you were on medication. Were you taking medication?”
“No,” McBride said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I just watched television.” He cleared his throat. “But what you’re telling me is that people can be turned into puppets and zombies—”
“Automatons,” Adrienne interjected.
Shapiro nodded. “Colloquially speaking, yes.”
Adrienne looked away, tears in her eyes.
“So you could do whatever you wanted with them,” McBride continued. “Make them laugh or cry, walk in front of a car—”
“—or give them a childhood that wasn’t their own,” Adrienne suggested.
Shapiro heaved a sigh. Turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Yeah.” He drew a sharp breath, reached out toward the flower arrangement and tapped his fingernail against the arching blade of grass. Exhaled. “Look,” he said, “I’m full of remorse for my part in this research. And I’m sorry if what I did has touched your lives. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“You can help us understand,” Adrienne said.
“Can I?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“It was a long time ago.”
“I want to know who did this,” Adrienne told him.
Shapiro inclined his head. “Of course you do. But why? You say it’s because you want to ‘understand’—but I suspect it’s because you want revenge.”
“Look,” McBride said, “you can call it whatever you like, but… “ He paused. A low-pressure front was moving through his head—at least, that’s what it felt like—and if he didn’t wait for it to pass, he’d go off like a flashbulb in Shapiro’s face. Because what he really wanted to do was take this born-again Buddhist, with his pared down life and his cute little cups of tea, and knock the hell out of him. Instead, he said, “I’m a wreck.”
“What!?” Shapiro was startled by the remark, and Adrienne, too, seemed taken aback.
“I’m sitting here with you in this very nice house, drinking tea,” McBride told him, “and I may seem fine. ‘No blood, no foul!’ Right? Wrong. I’m a walking shipwreck—no shit. Whoever did this… whoever did this took everything from me. My childhood. My parents. My self. I’ll never be the same. They took every memory I ever had, subverted every dream, and wasted I don’t know how many years of my life. Even now, when I try to think about it, it’s a blank. It’s all a blank until she came through the door, yelling about how she was going to sue me.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “Which is just a way of saying: I’ve lost a couple of things… and I’m not talking about books and furniture and clothes.”
Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t suggesting—”
“What about my sister?” Adrienne asked. “What happened to her was worse than murder. They turned her inside out and drove her to suicide. What about her?”
Shapiro closed his eyes for several seconds, then opened them. “The point I was trying to make is that what you’re doing—”
“‘Doing’?” Adrienne repeated. “We’re not ‘doing’ anything—except asking questions.”
“Exactly,” Shapiro said. “And my point is: that could be a dangerous thing to do.”
The three of them were quiet for a moment. Finally, McBride said, “I want to stop whoever did this to me from doing it to anyone else.”
Shapiro nodded slowly. Turned to Adrienne?” “You said your sister killed someone?”
Adrienne nodded. “An old man. In a wheelchair.” She paused. “And then she killed herself.”
Shapiro reached across the table for McBride’s medical file and, opening it, began to leaf slowly through its pages. After a while, he looked up and said, “I’d like to talk to your doctor… this man, Shaw.” Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. “Is that a problem?” Shapiro asked.
“I’m not sure,” Adrienne said, remembering Shaw’s tight little smile and the suggestion that she tell Shapiro she’d learned about him from watching a documentary.
Shapiro smiled, almost sheepishly. “I want to be sure that you are who you say you are—and that what you say happened, happened.”
“You’ve got the file,” Adrienne told him.
“‘The file,’“ Shapiro repeated with a soft chuckle. “The three of us are sitting here, talking about counterfeiting human beings—and you’re surprised that I should want to verify the contents of a manila folder?”
In the end, Adrienne couldn’t see how talking to Shapiro could harm Ray Shaw. And it would only take a minute. All Shapiro wanted was confirmation that they weren’t making the whole thing up.
Shapiro made the call from a cell-phone in the kitchen. They could hear him talking softly, but not well enough to understand what was being said. After a minute or two, he returned to the living room, and sat down beside them.
“So?” McBride asked. “What did he say?”
Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t able to reach him.”
“But—”
“I spoke with his wife…”
Adrienne and McBride exchanged glances. Shapiro seemed strangely subdued. “And what did she say?” Adrienne asked.
“She was distraught. She said her husband was struck by a car outside the hospital last night. The police are looking for the driver.”
Though the three of them were sitting on the floor, McBride felt his stomach drop, as if he were in a plane, and the plane had flown into an air pocket. “Will he be all right?”
Shapiro looked at them. “No.”
Chapter 35
McBride replenished the wood stove and stacked wood outside as the old scientist cooked dinner for the three of them—a simple meal of jasmine rice and homegrown vegetables, served up with a bottle of Old Vine Red. It was delicious. While they ate, Shapiro reprised the sordid history of the CIA’s mind control program.
“Most people think it was a response to what the communists were doing in Central Europe and Korea. There was a show trial involving a priest named Mindzenty, and lots of talk of ‘brainwashing.’ But the truth is, the program began long before that.”
“‘The program’?” Adrienne asked, recalling the Web site on her sister’s computer.
Shapiro frowned. “That’s what we called it among ourselves. But whatever the name—and it had a lot of names—it began in Europe during the Second World War, when the OSS was searching for a ‘truth drug’ they could use in interrogations.”
Pouring himself a glass of wine, the scientist explained that the project expanded after the war, with funding from the newly created CIA. By 1955, more than 125 experiments were under way in some of the country’s best universities and worst prisons. Still other research was carried out in mental institutions, and in “civilian settings” using “unwitting volunteers.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” McBride asked.
“It means we set up cameras in whorehouses, and tested drugs on the johns—without their knowledge,” Shapiro replied. “It means that we used drug addicts like Kleenex—and homosexuals, too. Communists. Perverts. Hoodlums.” He paused, and added with a smile, “Liberals and Dodger fans.” Then he turned serious again, and went on to explain that in the climate of the times—which is to say, amid the permafrost of the Cold War—America’s cultural conservatism was such that “transgressive personalities” were regarded as “fair game.” “We didn’t need ‘informed consent,’“ Shapiro pointed out, “because our research was classified. It was in the ‘national interest’—which made it, and us, exempt from normal constraints.”