The House of Thunder (37 page)

“Yeah. The KGB managed to find out who worked at Milestone, and it investigated everyone’s background. You seemed the most likely target, for you were having serious doubts about the morality of weapons research. You had started on that road immediately after earning your doctorate, when you were only twenty-six, before you were really old enough to have developed a sophisticated system of values. As you grew older, you also grew concerned about your work and its impact on future generations. Doubts surfaced. You expressed them to your fellow workers, and you even took a month-long leave of absence to consider your position, during which time you apparently reached no conclusions, because you returned to work, still doubting.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you might as well be talking about a total stranger,” Susan said, regarding him suspiciously. “Why can’t I remember any of this now that you’re telling me about it?”

“I’ll explain in a moment,” he said. “We’re about to be stopped.”

They reached the bottom of the long hill and turned a bend. There was a mile-long straightaway ahead, and there seemed to be a roadblock straddling the center of it.

“What’s that?” Susan asked anxiously.

“A security checkpoint.”

“Is this where you turn me over to them? Is this where the game gets nasty again?” she asked, still having trouble believing that he was on her side.

He glanced at her, frowning. “Give me a chance, okay? Just give me a chance. We’re leaving a highly restricted military zone, and we have to pass through security.” He fished two sets of papers out of a coat pocket while he drove with one hand. “Slouch down and pretend to be asleep.”

She did as he said, watching the brightly lighted checkpoint—two huts, a gate between them—through slitted eyes. Then she closed her eyes and let her mouth sag open as if she were sleeping deeply.

“Not a word out of you.”

“All right,” she said.

“No matter what happens—not a word.”

McGee slowed the car, stopped, and wound down the windows.

Susan heard booted feet approaching.

The guard spoke, and McGee answered. Not in English. Susan was so startled to hear them speaking in a foreign language that she almost opened her eyes. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him why she must feign sleep when he possessed papers that would get them through the checkpoint. He hadn’t wanted her to be required to talk to the guards; one word of English, and they would both be finished.

The wait was interminable, but at last she heard the power-operated gate rolling out of the way. The car moved.

She opened her eyes but didn’t dare glance back. “Where are we?” she asked McGee.

“You didn’t recognize the language?”

“I’m afraid maybe I did.”

“Russian,” he said.

She was speechless. She shook her head: no, no.

“Thirty-some miles from the Black Sea,” he said. “That’s where we’re headed. To the sea.”

“Inside the Soviet Union?
That’s not possible. That’s just crazy!”

“It’s true.”

“No,” she said, huddling against the passenger door. “It can’t be true. This is another setup.”

“No,” he said. “Hear me out.”

She had no choice but to hear him out. She wasn’t going to throw herself from a speeding car. And even if she could get out of the car without killing herself, she wouldn’t be able to run. She wouldn’t even be able to walk very far. The effect of the drugs had begun to fade, and she felt strength returning to her legs again, but she was nevertheless exhausted, virtually helpless.

Besides, maybe McGee was telling the truth this time. She wouldn’t want to bet her life on it. But maybe.

He said, “KGB agents kidnapped you while you were on your vacation in Oregon.”

“There never was a car accident, then?”

“No. That was just part of the program we designed to support the Willawauk charade. In reality, you were snatched in Oregon and smuggled out of the U.S. on a diplomatic flight.”

She frowned. “Why can’t I remember that?”

“You were sedated throughout the trip to Moscow.”

“But I should at least remember being kidnapped,” she insisted.

“All memories of that event were carefully scrubbed from your mind with certain chemical and hypnotic techniques—”

“Brainwashing.”

“Yes. It was necessary to remove the memory of the kidnapping in order that the Willawauk program would seem like reality to you.”

She had dozens of questions about Willawauk and about this “program” to which he repeatedly referred, but she restrained herself and allowed him to tell it in his own way.

“In Moscow, you were first taken to a KGB detention facility, a truly nasty place at Lubyianka Prison. When you failed to respond to questioning and to the standard array of psychological trickery, they got rougher with you. They didn’t beat you or anything like that. No thumbscrews. But in some ways, it was worse than physical torture. They used a variety of unpleasant drugs on you, stuff with extremely dangerous side effects, very physically and mentally debilitating crap that should
never
be used on a human being for
any
reason. Of course, it was all just standard KGB procedure for extracting information from a stubborn source. But as soon as they employed those methods, as soon as they tried to
force
answers from you, a strange thing happened. You lost all conscious memory of your work at Milestone, every last scrap of it, and only a gaping hole was left where those memories had been.”

“There’s still a gaping hole,” she said.

“Yes. Even drugged, even perfectly docile, you were unable to tell the KGB anything. They worked on you for five days, five very intense days, before they finally discovered what had happened.”

McGee stopped talking and cut the car’s speed in half as they approached a small village of about a hundred houses. This tiny village didn’t resemble Willawauk in any way whatsoever. It was very obviously not an American place. Except for a few scattered electric lights, it appeared as if it belonged in another century. Some of the houses had stone roofs, others had board and thatched roofs. All the structures were squat, with very small windows, drab and somber places. It looked medieval.

When they had passed through the town and were on the open road again, McGee put his foot down hard on the accelerator once more.

“You were about to tell me why I lost all my memories of Milestone,” Susan said.

“Yeah. Well, as it turns out, when anyone goes to work for the Milestone project, he must agree to undergo a series of highly sophisticated behavioral modification treatments that make it impossible for him to talk about his work with anyone outside of Milestone. If he won’t agree to undergo the treatment, then he doesn’t get the job. In addition, deep in their subconscious minds, all the employees of Milestone are fitted with cunningly engineered psychological mechanisms that can trigger memory blockages, memory blockages that prevent foreign agents from forcing vital information out of them. When someone tries to pry secret data out of a Milestone employee by means of torture or drugs or hypnosis, all of that employee’s conscious knowledge of his work drops instantly far, far down into his deep subconscious mind, behind an impenetrable block, where it cannot be squeezed out.”

Now she knew why she couldn’t even recall what her laboratory at Milestone had looked like. “All the memories are still there, inside me, somewhere.”

“Yes. When and if you get out of Russia, when you get back to the States, Milestone undoubtedly has some procedure for dissolving the block and bringing back your memory. And it’s probably a procedure that can only be carried out at Milestone, something involving you and the computer, perhaps a series of block-releasing code words that the computer will reveal only to you, and only after you’ve been positively identified to it by letting it scan your fingerprints. Of course, this is merely conjecture. We don’t really know how Milestone would restore your memory; if we knew, we’d have used the same technique. Instead, we had to resort to the Willawauk program in hopes of shattering the block with a brutal series of psychological shocks.”

The night flashed by them. The land was much flatter now than it had been back around Willawauk. There were fewer trees. A moon had risen, providing a ghostly radiance.

Susan slouched in her seat, both weary and tense, watching McGee’s face as he spoke, trying hard to detect any sign of deception, desperately hoping that he wasn’t just setting her up for another brutal psychological shock.

“A memory block can be based on any emotion—love, hate, fear—but the most effective is fear,” McGee said. “That was the inhibitor that Milestone used when creating your block. Fear. On a deep subconscious level, you are terrified of revealing anything whatsoever about Milestone, for they have used hypnotic suggestion and drugs to convince you that you will die horribly and painfully the moment that you make even the smallest revelation to foreign agents. A fear block is by far the most difficult to break; usually, getting through it is utterly impossible—especially when it’s as well implanted as your block is.”

“But you found a way.”

“Not me, personally. The KGB employs hordes of scientists who specialize in behavioral modification techniques—brainwashing and so forth—and a few of them think that a fear block
can
be demolished if the subject—that’s you, in this case—is confronted with a fear far greater than the one upon which the block is based. Now, it isn’t easy to find a fear that’s greater than the fear of death. With most of us, that’s numero uno. But the KGB had very thoroughly researched your life before they’d decided to snatch you, and when they looked through your dossier, they thought they saw your weak spot. They were looking for an event in your past that could be resurrected and reshaped into a living, breathing nightmare, into something you would fear more than death.”

“The House of Thunder,” she said numbly. “Ernest Harch.”

“Yes,” McGee said. “That was the key to the plan they put together. After studying you for some time, the KGB determined that you were an unusually well-ordered, efficient, rational person; they knew you abhorred disorder and sloppy thinking. In fact you seemed to be almost compulsively, obsessively ordered in every aspect of your life.”

“Obsessive? Yes,” she said, “I guess maybe 1 am. Or I
was.
”

“To the KGB, it appeared that the best way to make you come apart at the seams was to plunge you into a nightmare world in which
everything
gradually became more and more irrational, a world in which the dead could come back to life, in which nothing and no one was what it seemed to be. So they brought you to Willawauk, and they sealed off one wing of the behavioral research hospital located there, turned it into a stage for their elaborate charades. They intended to push you slowly toward a mental and/or an emotional collapse, culminating in a scene in the phony House of Thunder. They had a very nasty bit of business planned. Rape. Repeated rape and torture at the hands of the four ‘dead’ men.”

Susan shook her head, bewildered. “But forcing me into a mental and emotional collapse ... What good would that do them? Even if the fear block was broken in the process, I wouldn’t have been in any condition to provide them with the information they wanted. I’d have been a babbling fool ... or catatonic.”

“Not forever. A mental and emotional breakdown brought on by extreme
short-term
pressure is the easiest form of mental illness to cure,” McGee said. “As soon as they’d broken you, they would have removed your memory block by promising relief from terror in return for your total submission and cooperation. Then they’d have immediately begun to rehabilitate you, nursing you back to sanity, or at least to a semblance of it, to a state in which you could be questioned and in which you could be relied upon to provide accurate information.”

“But wait,” she said. “Wait a minute. Getting together the look-alikes, writing the script for the whole damned thing, working out all the contingencies, converting the wing of the hospital ... all of that must have taken a lot of time. I was only kidnapped a few weeks ago ... wasn’t I?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Wasn’t
I?
” she demanded.

“You’ve been inside the Soviet Union for more than a year,” McGee said.

“No. Oh, no. No, no, I can’t have been.”

“You have. Most of the time, you were on ice in Lubyianka, just sitting in a cell, waiting for something to happen. But you don’t remember that part of it. They erased all of that before bringing you to Willawauk.”

Her confusion gave way to white-hot anger.
“Erased?”
She sat up straight in her seat, her hands squeezed into fists. “You say it so casually. Erased. You talk as if I’m a goddamned tape recorder! Jesus Christ, I spent a year in a stinking prison, and then they stole that year from me, and then they put me through this thing with Harch and the others ...” Rage choked off her voice.

But she realized that she now believed him. Almost. She had almost no doubt at all that this was the truth.

“You have a right to be furious,” McGee said, glancing at her, his eyes unreadable in the glow from the dashboard. “But please don’t be angry with me. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to you then. I didn’t have anything to do with you until they finally brought you to Willawauk, and then I had to bide my time until there was a chance of breaking you out of there.”

They rode in silence for a minute, while Susan’s anger cooled from a boil to a simmer.

They came to the edge of the moonlit sea and turned south on a highway where, at last, there was other traffic, though not much. The other vehicles were mostly trucks.

Susan said, “Who the hell are you? How do you fit into this whole thing?”

“To understand that,” he said, “you’ll have to understand about Willawauk first.”