Andrew Britton - The Operative

Hunt liked that. He looked at the contented subject on the video monitor. When Trask recruited him, the billionaire had described bureaucrats as the monkey bars from which the rest of us swing.

“Sometimes monkeys get aggressive,” Trask had told him.

That was how he had come to the industrialist’s attention, a newspaper article about an unusually violent pursuit of a terror suspect into a mosque. The media had come down on him for ignoring the sanctuary of holy ground in pursuit of a terror suspect. He was forced to undergo sensitivity training. All that did was make him hate the sycophants even more, living under the umbrella of American freedom so they could undo it. The worldview he shared with Trask was why Hunt had agreed to be the industrialist’s inside man at the Bureau. In return, Trask had promised to give him what he wanted most.

America. Whole, safe, sane.

That prize would not come for free, of course. But then, it was supposed to hurt. A quote from Thomas Jefferson had stuck in his brain when he was still in high school, and it had become his bold personal motto, typed and carried on a slip of paper folded into his wallet: God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?… What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Today had been a costly beginning. The next event would carry a higher price tag in blood and treasure.

Hunt left to go clean himself up, get dinner, and take a nap. Dr. Gillani barely noticed that he was gone. She was observing the process carefully, watching Yasmin’s movements, listening to Dr. Samson’s prompts, paying special attention to the subject’s responses.

A normal sleep consisted of five stages. The first was a light sleep, in which the brain threw off waking agitation in the form of theta waves. Theta brain waves were also generated during states of high creativity and emotional excitement; they were the source of daydreams. It had been Dr. Gillani’s belief, during her studies at Universitat Heidelberg, that phobias, habits, and even mental illness could be treated by riding what she called “counter-instructions” into the brain on the peaks of those outgoing theta waves, almost like surfing, as she put it in her doctoral thesis.

Her paper was greeted with reactions ranging from cautious interest to condemnation. The sheer bulk of overwritten instructions was deemed too large to be simply slipped into the mind. But Dr. Gillani’s goal was not to assault, but to invade, like a Trojan horse. To relax the subject and have him or her take the new instructions right to the part of the brain that was least defended, the home of the most pleasant thoughts.

Mild hypnosis simulated stage one sleep, stimulated theta production. The voice kept the subject locked in that phase, relaxed but only nominally asleep, never allowing him or her to go to stage two. Together, the subject and the voice went to an idyllic spot. There, the voice walked the subject through new instructions. It introduced the subject to the marble, which was his or her real-world connection to the hypnotic suggestion. In the case of “cures,” as they had done with Jacob Trask’s daughter, no personal contact was necessary. The marble was sufficient to keep the suggestion alive, an object small enough to be carried, to be inconspicuous, to keep the owner attached to the commands they carried inside their head. In the case of “phased actions,” the rules were different. A phone call from the control voice, from Dr. Samson-a fellow student in Germany-would direct the individual to the marble and return him or her to the Trojan instructions.

Though relatively straightforward, this was a delicate procedure. Pushing any individual too hard, too fast, in a direction that did not seem natural would cause the process to derail entirely and they would have to begin again-but with new, subconscious barriers against intrusion.

There was also the likely potential of leaving subjects “unglued,” an informal, more descriptive word she preferred over the technical terminology. Should subjects not receive the full series of treatments, it left them deeply in tune with their darker “Jekyll” side and out of touch with their two or three other, more passive character personas. People “worked” because their various characters performed together in harmony. But subjects, having exercised and strengthened these mental pathways, could easily access and give preference to their dominant, more negative character at will, with very little instigation, and the other parts of their personality did not have the means or power to break free from the dominant character’s almighty grasp.

As was the case early in Dr. Gillani’s studies with a local German author, whom she referred to in her paper as patient 8R. He was insistently curious about her cerebral process and wanted to personally experience the effects of her, at that time, mind-regression techniques. Making him aware of the “bad idea” quotient of his request, Dr. Gillani reluctantly agreed to give him a private demonstration and she arranged to meet 8R off campus, at his home across the river in Dossenheim.

During his first consenting hypnosis session with Dr. Gillani, she accidentally accessed and provoked 8R’s heavily charged creative side, his dominant, darkest nature, to the point where it was necessary for Dr. Gillani to leave the room, then completely exit the house for a few minutes to simply remove her presence from the enraged subject. Patient 8R believed he was a ten-year-old boy, not in present times, who had injured his younger sister and was being punished by his father, a role Dr. Gillani played in his mind, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to be harmed by him again. Of course, 8R no longer realized he had the strength of a grown man and was lashing out like a wild child.

Against her better judgment, Dr. Gillani returned inside to fully awaken and disengage the subject, who remained still somewhat unrepressed after she did so. Agreeing to meet again at a later date for successive sessions to correct her oversights, 8R was temporarily released back into his everyday routine. Dr. Gillani never heard back from patient 8R.

Several weeks later Dr. Gillani learned that 8R had perfunctorily punched his way through his bathroom door to get at his mother and didn’t stop until her skull was as fractured as the plywood barrier. While Dr. Gillani had always been secretly, scientifically curious to see the consequences of leaving someone divided and unchecked, it ultimately became a necessary operating procedure for her to restrain patients, to hold them against their will if necessary, and she privately vowed to never again leave a patient unfinished. Unglued.

Like the subject in Baltimore, Yasmin had to be done right. Compared to those others, however, they had less time and more instructions to convey.

The scientist watched intently. Dr. Samson had guided Yasmin through the palace with gentle nudges. The movement had to be her own choice; otherwise, her brain would sense that it was being manipulated. Now Samson needed to get her to a bookmark, a place where they could bed her, put her briefly into a REM sleep, during which she would be given a control word. In case something went wrong, the word would take her back there instantly.

Dr. Gillani leaned toward the microphone connected to her colleague’s headphones.

“Emile, try to jump her.”

“All right,” Dr. Samson replied. He spoke to Yasmin. “What do you see inside the tower?”

“A great many stairs,” Yasmin told him.