“So it was easy to hide,” Adrienne suggested.
“We didn’t ‘hide’ anything—it was secret. And while some of us had ethical concerns about testing drugs and medical procedures on unwitting subjects… well, those concerns became irrelevant when you realized you were dealing with the enemy.”
“I thought the Soviet Union was the enemy,” McBride remarked.
“Of course. But the Cold War was as much a domestic jihad as it was an international one. It was a war for the American Way—which, I can assure you, did not (at least not at that time) include gays, lunatics, junkies or… sinners, even. They were all fair game.”
“What kind of research are we talking about?” McBride asked.
The old man hesitated, thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, as much to himself as his guests, “it’s hardly secret anymore. There were hearings twenty years ago. Books and law-suits.”
“Right. So what kind of research are we talking about?” McBride repeated.
“Drugs and hypnosis, telepathy and psychic driving. Remote viewing. Aversive conditioning—degradation and pain.”
“‘Degradation and pain’?” Adrienne asked, her voice disbelieving.
“How to induce it, endure it, use it—how to measure it,” Shapiro replied. “Not that the pain experiments were particularly productive.”
“Why not?” McBride wondered.
The scientist sighed. “We had difficulty finding reputable psychologists to do the research. And those we did find weren’t as objective as we’d have liked.”
McBride looked puzzled. “How so?”
“The studies kept getting mixed up with sadism—just as the drug experiments got mixed up with sex. In fact, it all got mixed up with sex. And that colored the results.”
“You mentioned ‘psychic driving,’“ Adrienne said.
Shapiro shifted uncomfortably on his cushion. “Yes.”
“Well… ?”
The retired CIA man considered the question. Finally, he replied, “‘Psychic driving’ refers to… how should I put it? Terminal experiments in which the subject is given relatively large doses of a psychedelic drug and placed in a dark and sealed environment… where he… or she… is exposed to a continuous loop of recorded messages.”
“‘A sealed environment’?” Adrienne wondered.
“We used morgue drawers,” Shapiro explained.
McBride gaped, even as he tried to formulate the question on his mind. “When you say ‘terminal experiments’—”
“No one died,” Shapiro assured him. “But the subjects weren’t expected to recover. And most of them didn’t.”
“So we’re talking about—”
“Six hundred micrograms of LSD—daily,” Shapiro said. “For sixty to one-hundred-eight days. In darkness.”
Adrienne and McBride were silent for a long time. Finally, Adrienne whispered, “How could you do that?”
Shapiro looked her in the eye, and deliberately misunderstood the question. “As I recall, we catheterized the subject, fed her intravenously, and gave her a colostomy to facilitate things.”
“Jesus Christ,” McBride muttered.
“Refill?” Shapiro asked.
Adrienne shivered, and looked away. McBride shook his head. Shapiro just closed his eyes and sat there, savoring the Old Vine Red, the fire, the company, and his own regrets. When, after a while, he opened his eyes and began to speak, the effect was unsettling—as if he’d been watching them all the time. Indeed, the transition was so fast, it made Adrienne think of a bird of prey, an eagle or hawk winking at her with its nictitating membrane. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“You do?”
“Of course,” Shapiro told them. “You’re thinking I’m a war criminal.”
Neither of them said a word.
“Well,” Shapiro concluded, “I suppose you had to be there.” He sipped his wine, and looked at them. “It’s easy, now, to condemn what was done then. But the truth is, the program was built by people whose motives were as pure as the driven snow.”
Adrienne couldn’t help herself: she rolled her eyes.
“They knew what men like Hitler could do. And it made them ruthless in the defense of freedom. I know it sounds corny—‘freedom’ always sounds corny—but it’s true.” The scientist paused, placed his left hand on the floor and sprang to his feet with surprising agility. Crossing the room to the woodstove, he opened it up, stirred the coals with a poker and put in a fresh log. Then he turned to his guests. “From the very beginning, the idea was to find ways to identify and eliminate men like Hitler and Stalin—before they came to power.”
“So it was an assassination program,” McBride suggested.
Shapiro shrugged. “In part. The idea was to develop behaviorally-controlled agents who would carry out an assignment, even if the outcome was counterinstinctive.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” McBride asked.
“It means they didn’t care if they lived or died,” Adrienne guessed.
Shapiro inclined his head in reluctant agreement. “The agent’s survival wasn’t a critical issue—except in the sense that deniability was paramount. If the agent survived, and the agent was caught—well, that was a problem. And people will get caught. Not the first time. Not the second time. But, eventually.”
They looked at him.
“Guns misfire,” he explained. “Policemen become unexpectedly, even irrationally, interested in the most innocuous-seeming things. That’s how it starts. And the next thing you know, your man’s hanging by the balls from a hook in the cellar of somebody’s Ministry of Defense, entertaining questions from one and all. So quite a lot of research went into the issue of building an agent who was deniable from the get-go.”
“Let me guess,” McBride suggested. “You drove them nuts.”
Shapiro thought about it as he walked back to the table, and sat down. “No. If we’d done that, they wouldn’t have been able to function. We spent years—and quite a lot of money—studying differential amnesia and ways of engendering multiple personalities. In the end, we decided that screen memories were the optimal solution—though, even there, we had problems. They tended to destabilize the personality, so you needed a therapist figure to provide reinforcement.”
Adrienne glanced at McBride, then turned a puzzled eye on Shapiro. “What’s a screen memory?” she asked.
The scientist considered the question. Finally, he said, “It’s a memory that’s verifiably false and inherently ridiculous—so that anyone who claims that it’s real is discredited, simply on the face of that assertion.”
“Give me an example,” McBride suggested.
“‘I was kidnapped by aliens and flown to an underground base in the Antarctic,’“ the scientist replied.
“‘Satanists tortured me as a child,’“ Adrienne suggested.
“Exactly,” Shapiro said. “It pigeonholes the speaker—in this case, the assassin—as a ‘lone nut.’ Which, as you can imagine, is reassuring to everyone involved.”
“‘Reassuring’?” Adrienne spat the word at him. “You’re talking about people’s lives. You’re talking about my sister’s life!”
The old man was startled by her sudden intensity. “I’m talking hypothetically,” he told her. “And, anyway, it’s as I said: unless your sister was a lot older than you, this program had nothing to do with her.”
“How can you say that?” Adrienne demanded. “You’ve seen the implant—”