Masquerade (35 page)

Levine shook his head. “You know I can't tell you that.”

“Then why should I tell you a damn thing?”

He leaned even closer. “For science, Sarah. For knowledge. For humanity and the future. Raise yourself above pettiness. I promise I'll make Hughes free you as soon as the operation is
over.” Again the smarmy smile. “Did your memory come back slowly, or all at once? Tell me, and you'll walk away.”

She had to give him something, keep him interested. “A little of both. The first hint I had of returning memory was a single word. A name—Hamilton. That—” She looked toward the small bar. “I'm feeling a little shaky. Could I have a drink?”

“What?” Levine was totally involved in her story. He glanced toward his wet bar. “Oh, yes, of course.”

A man with a fully stocked bar usually liked his liquor. With luck—

She saw him hesitate. She guessed he was considering whether to ring for an attendant.

“Hamilton,” she went on. “The name came to me at the Ranch one day in cipher class. Then—”

She stopped and looked at the bar. Levine got the point. He stood and crossed toward it. She stood, too, following.

“You're not going to make me drink alone, I hope.”

Levine glanced back at her, the gracious host. “Of course not,” he said smoothly. As he moved behind the counter and took two glasses from the overhead rack, she leaned up against the front of the bar, where the cameras wouldn't be able to see, and slipped her fingers inside her jeans pocket. Feverishly she worked the vial of delirium out. A mist of sweat formed on her forehead. At last the vial slid into her palm.

He set two glasses onto the bar and reached for the bottle of Scotch. As he poured into the first glass, Sarah asked in her most composed voice, “Is there bourbon?”

“Bourbon?” He turned to search the rows of bottles. He was a Scotch drinker. It took him a while to locate the bourbon.

Meanwhile, barely moving her hand, her back to the video camera that monitored the bar area, she now worked frantically to get the stopper from the vial. A sigh of relief caught in her throat as the cork finally popped out into her hand. Quickly she dumped the golden liquid into the glass of Scotch. When Levine turned back with the bourbon, the empty vial was again in her pocket and she was suddenly drenched in sweat. He added water to both glasses and handed her the bourbon. As
she followed him back to their chairs, she mopped her forehead with her sleeve.

His leg swung nervously. “Hamilton, yes. Your father's name. How did you feel when you thought of the name?”

He had all the advantages: Full security system, locked room, hellish drugs. Every advantage but one—he wanted data only she could give, scientific information he'd never get by force and still trust to be valid.

He took a long drink. “How long after you stopped taking the memory suppressant did you—?”

“I took a pill that suppressed memory?”

“Yes. Your last pill.”

“You told me it was an antidepressant.” She glared at him. “Then you did give me amnesia!”

“Yes.” He smiled, thin lips over tombstone teeth. “I can tell you about that and a great deal more. Are you interested?”

“Obviously I was chosen because I could be made into Liz Sansborough's double, but was it more of your drugs that made me believe I was Liz?”

Levine nodded proudly, and Sarah saw he was as eager to brag about his work as he was to find out how she'd retrieved her past.

She suggested, “I'll tell you all about it in exchange for what I want to know.”

“Agreed.” He held his glass up in a toast.

They drank again as there was a knock on the door. Sarah's belly knotted. Had security seen her drug his drink after all?

“Come!” Levine snapped, annoyed by the interruption.

A waiter in a gold-trimmed white jacket and black trousers pushed a serving cart across the floor and into the dining room.

“Ah, dinner.” Levine stood. “The usual 1,000 calories for me. Your fat-to-lean tissue rating at the Ranch was twenty-one percent, that means only 700 calories for you. But I guarantee the food is excellent. Our clients insist. Come.”

With giddy relief, she watched him finish his Scotch and water in a single long drink. Then he marched into the dining room. She followed and took a seat at a small rococo table. The waiter served what looked like a gourmet casserole with
chicken and many vegetables. Levine's plate contained nearly half again as much as hers. His fingers drummed on the table until the waiter had finished. Then he abruptly waved him out and leaned toward her again without touching his food.

“First tell me when you stopped taking your memory pill. What made you do it? Had your memory begun to return before?”

She ate. He waited, impatient, not looking at his food, and she finally began to reveal some of the timetable and details. She didn't let him know she still had little memory of the time between meeting Gordon and awaking as Liz Sansborough. That was one piece of information she needed to learn from him before the delirium took effect.

She had to keep him talking, eating, doing anything, for thirty more minutes. Each time she insisted she'd given him enough, he told her more of what she wanted to know, until, as the minutes passed slowly, she learned at last what they'd done to her.

Chapter 39

It had all started in late spring with the Carnivore's offer to come in. What neither Arlene Debo, the President, nor the Carnivore himself had known was that the assassin had knowledge so threatening to the operations of Hughes Bremner and his board that they couldn't let him come in alive. Not ever, not anywhere.

Bremner had to silence the Carnivore. But the White House and half of Europe would be watching the coming-in, so he needed a plan involving minimal risk and maximum certainty. He'd gone to Dr. Allan Levine, one of the world's foremost brain scientists, who had long been on the CIA payroll. And on Bremner's secret payroll as well.

In his youth, Levine had been the protégé of the “godfather” of Canadian psychiatry—Dr. Ewen Cameron, who, in the 1950s and 1960s, had conducted CIA-funded experiments in brainwashing. The code name for that vast black project had been MK-U
LTRA
. Using a front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, MK-U
LTRA
had piped some $25 million through Cornell University to fifty universities in twenty-one countries.

The purpose of MK-U
LTRA
had been to discover how to control the mind, because the Soviets and the Chinese had been refining techniques in brainwashing and interrogation, and because Langley wanted more efficient ways to restore mental health than were offered by conventional psychiatry.

An obvious recipient of MK-U
LTRA
funding had been Montreal's McGill University, where the renowned Dr. Cameron worked. While scientists in the United States conducted MK-U
LTRA
experiments on prisoners and prostitutes, Dr. Cameron used average Canadian citizens who came to his clinic with problems like anxiety and depression. None of the U.S. prostitutes and prisoners, nor the ordinary Canadians, was informed he or she was the subject of mind-altering experiments.

Dr. Cameron's treatments were intense, as extreme as the politics of the time. They included enormous amounts of drugs, including a then-brand-new hallucinogen, LSD. He conducted up to a hundred high-intensity electroshock treatments on patients, medicated them to sleep for up to eighty days, and played uninterrupted messages around the clock, often during drug-induced sleep.

The doctor worked directly on the central nervous system, and one of his findings was that this approach could go too far. One patient, who had sought treatment for mild anxiety, emerged six months later unable to recognize her husband or children, unable to read, write, cook, drive a car, or control her bladder. It was unfortunate, of course, but to Cameron and his protégé, Dr. Levine, it was an acceptable cost for scientific progress.

Eventually news of the experiments leaked out. Inquiries and lawsuits followed.

To protect everyone, Langley burned its MK-U
LTRA
files in 1973. Dr. Cameron had died in a mountaineering accident in 1967, and his family had the foresight to destroy his project records, too. MK-U
LTRA
was abandoned and destroyed.

But, at Hughes Bremner's urging, Langley secretly kept the sole link to MK-U
LTRA
—Cameron's brilliant assistant, Dr. Allan Levine.

They gave Dr. Levine his own secret lab in New Mexico to continue his search for biochemical solutions to psychoses. In furthering Dr. Cameron's dream of perfecting the mind, Levine developed a simple theory: In plumbing, when a pipe was badly broken, it must be replaced. So, too, the badly broken personality. He foresaw the future mental health of the
world resting on its ability to redesign sick personalities.

And in total secrecy, with Hughes Bremner's encouragement and private financial support, he continued MK-U
LTRA
.

Every year his experiments on lab animals and the occasional human “volunteer” yielded impressive data. Then, two years ago, Bremner instructed the doctor to move his work, including the secret new MK-U
LTRA
experiments, to Paris. He would start a visionary “health” club and fulfill the promise of his research. Dr. Levine had leaped at the chance.

Thus MK-U
LTRA
continued. And, because Langley fostered a cult of protectiveness and deniability—the tendency to deny anyone was doing anything—Hughes Bremner and Dr. Levine had successfully kept the reborn MK-U
LTRA
and its unique spa/clinic under wraps. In any case, club members themselves required absolute secrecy. None wanted to be remade in the harsh glare of publicity or government rumor, and all wanted to keep this remarkable rejuvenation to themselves. There were only thirty members, each with his or her special attendants and masseuse.

Like his Canadian mentor, Levine focused on the brain, a three-pound galaxy with more nerve cells than the Milky Way had stars, some hundred billion of them. These nerve cells controlled all brain functions, including sensation, emotion, memory, and movement. In the early days of MK-U
LTRA
, Cameron had used a medical sledgehammer to attack all the nerve cells. Now his protégé took a far more refined approach. His new MK-U
LTRA
worked on the specific parts of the brain where modification was desired.

And then the Carnivore's decision to come in had jeopardized it all. The assassin could unmask and destroy everything. He had to be eliminated, and it had to be done without the faintest hint that Hughes Bremner, Mustang, or the CIA was involved. There could be no suspicion, no investigation. So Bremner had conceived M
ASQUERADE
and delivered Sarah Walker to the doctor.

Dr. Levine claimed he could impose a range of changes on anyone—from a simple attitude to a whole new personality. He was particularly enthusiastic about Sarah Walker, because
she provided a special challenge: Her type was the hardest to reprogram—she was young, resilient, optimistic, self-confident, held firm beliefs, had a strong sense of self, and had stable ties to family and friends.

He had begun by cutting her off from her family and friends. Then he'd provided a single surrogate “friend” on whom she could depend, a “friend” who would make her believe she needed psychiatric help, because cooperative subjects interacted more readily with the medication and more quickly and easily assumed new identities.

Sarah tried to get the details of how he and Bremner had manipulated her into cooperating, but his mind was so obsessed with his own theories she could learn no more without alarming him.

Once they'd convinced her to not only agree with but
want
treatment, Dr. Levine had put her on his state-of-the-art drugs. The various chemicals had affected two areas of her brain. The first was the hippocampus, where long-term memory was established. The second was the neocortex, where permanent memory accumulated. The drugs shut down the synapses of her fact-memory storage in both areas.

She lost her past, but her ability to function and perform most tasks soon returned. With new chemicals, she easily assumed a new identity.

But there was a problem. The human brain was so powerful, its ability to store and retrieve data so vast, that even the world's greatest supercomputers were no match for it. In fact, the brain was such a strong, resilient instrument, there was always the risk it might rebalance itself.

In other words, she might regain her memory on her own.

The doctor had forestalled that possibility by instructing Gordon Taite to feed her a daily pill that was a powerful fact-memory suppressor disguised as an antidepressant. As long as she took it, she'd never recall she was Sarah Walker. She would be Liz Sansborough, career CIA agent, recently retired.

When the Carnivore came in, Bremner would personally take the assassin to a safe house in France—not the United States—for the first debriefing. Experts from various Langley
desks would be invited, all eager to pump the infamous killer. But before anyone could be alone with him, the assassin would die without any possibility of suspicion falling on Bremner, Mustang, or the CIA itself. An unforeseeable murder. Tragic, but unpreventable. M
ASQUERADE
would fulfill its goals.

Dr. Allan Levine ran his fingers across the rococo dining table, his voice triumphant. “What I and other scientists have done with our subjects benefits the human race as a whole. Because of us, the species can surge forward in evolution. Already I have remedied weaknesses and enhanced strengths in my patients. I can enrich memory, enhance intellect, heighten concentration, and alter any subject's moods. Making Homo sapiens increasingly superior is my life's work, and soon I'll have all the money I need to continue into undreamed-of realms.”