Lewis Perdue - Perfect killer

Predictably, Gabriel found Laura LaHaye's office on the third floor of the inner ring with ankle-deep carpet and designer lighting. He opened the polished solid-mahogany door and found himself face-to-face with LaHaye, bent over the reception desk in conversation with a uniformed woman sitting behind it.

LaHaye looked up. "Dan!" She tried unsuccessfully to hide her annoyance. "We were rearranging my schedule to accommodate your unexpected visit." She stepped from behind the desk and extended her hand.

"Sorry." Gabriel shook her cold, dry hand. "I can come back another time if that's better."

LaHaye shook her head. "No. No, that's not necessary. Jenna's used to the dynamic state of my schedule." LaHaye nodded toward the tall, blond woman behind the desk. Gabriel noted she wore the rank of an Army chief warrant officer.

"Thank you," Gabriel said to the receptionist, and to LaHaye, who had already turned and headed for her office. Gabriel followed her.

Bright sunlight flooded into an office sized like a handball court, filled with highly polished dark wood furnishings and carpeted with plush navy-blue pile embossed with the U.S. Army seal. The Stars and Stripes, along with other service and regimental flags, stood behind her massive desk. Expensively framed photos covered the walls, all with LaHaye alongside presidents, senators, congressmen, and a scattering of world leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and a lot of military brass Gabriel recognized as mediocre soldiers and superb political manipulators.

A conference room table dominated the corner to his right. LaHaye made straight for a sofa in the left corner by the windows.

"Have a seat." She directed him to a chair facing the window glare and sat on the sofa. Gabriel seated himself at the nearest chair instead, facing away from the glare.

"What can I help you with?"

"I was in town tying up the loose ends, briefing the new Academy superintendent, that sort of thing."

"I read about it in the Post," she said. "Quite a talk you gave to the House Armed Services Committee." Gabriel detected political envy in her voice. "The General is fortunate to have you on his team." She might be envious and annoyed, but she knew when to kiss a politically important arse. "You'd have quite a career in politics if you set your mind to it."

He shook his head. "Only the General could drag me back into politics."

"So what can I do for the next Secretary of Defense?"

Gabriel found LaHaye's remarks pretentious and off-putting but figured he'd play along.

"The excellent briefing you and Dr. McGovern gave in Napa made quite an impression on me."

LaHaye smiled at the compliment.

"The more I struggle with budget projections, the more I have grown to appreciate the significance of your work."

"Bang for buck," she said.

"It's always bang for buck," he agreed. "And because Project Enduring Valor promises to reshape the military's future, I'd like to know a little more about it-you know, some of the history, how it came about-you know what a history buff I am."

She nodded enthusiastically. "I'm a big fan of your most recent book." She pointed to a set of shelves near the door. Gabriel quickly spotted the red-and-gold-foil dust cover of his latest book on American Special Forces operations beginning with Revolutionary War guerrilla tactics. He also noted the raw ambition on LaHaye's face, no doubt sizing up her role in one of his future books.

"So, how did it begin?" he asked again. "Who got the idea? It would make a great new book." Gabriel waited for the pieces to shift beneath her gaze, for the blocks of ego to topple her caution.

"Would you like coffee or something else to drink?" she said, reaching for the phone on the end table beside the sofa.

"Please."

After she hung up, she gave him a big ass-kissing smile.

"You're very perceptive," LaHaye said. "Dr. Frank Harper started it all."

"I remember him," Gabriel said. "The doctor who got Braxton back on his feet."

"We owe Frank a heavy debt of gratitude. Think of what the future would look like had the fates clipped the General's cord back then."

In the ensuing silence, the muffled corrugated hiss of a commercial jet on final approach to Reagan National Airport filtered in. When it faded, the distinctive thwack of a Blackhawk chopper thumped persistently against the window.

LaHaye broke the silence. "Enduring Valor's genesis began in the late 1930s when Frank trained as a neurosurgeon. Back then, opening up the cranium led to death as often as not. Like many aspiring physicians interested in the nervous system, Frank learned about Phineas Gage in med school. But unlike most of them, the implications obsessed him."

"Gage? Who's that?"

"A twenty-five-year-old railroad construction foreman transformed by an industrial accident in 1848. Gage's employers, coworkers, friends, and family unanimously praised him as an intelligent, responsible, honest, polite, disciplined-moral-man. Then late one hot summer afternoon in Vermont, Gage made a near-fatal mistake using a four-foot steel pike to tamp explosives into a drilled rock hale. The powder exploded, driving the steel pike into his left cheek, through his eye socket, and the frontal lobes before shooting out the top of his head."

A polite knock came at the door.

"Come in," LaHaye answered, and moments later the blond warrant officer entered the room, all six-foot-plus of her, carrying a tray with a coffee carafe, cups, saucers, sugar and cream. She was a big woman who carried herself with a strong physical assurance. Gabriel was ambivalent about lowering physical standards to allow women in certain military units. They were fine for fighter pilots and other positions where they were unlikely to be called upon to perform with any degree of raw physical strength. But, he thought, as the warrant officer placed the coffee tray on the table between him and LaHaye, he'd certainly feel comfortable having this one covering his backside.

"I'll take it from here, Jenna," LaHaye said of the tray.

"Sir," the warrant officer said then retreated to the reception area.

LaHaye sat down and sipped at her cup before continuing.

"After having the steel pike blasted through his head, Phineas Gage recovered, remarkable given the state of medical care at the time. After his recovery, doctors found his intelligence unaffected and no physical incapacitation other than losing his left eye. But the steel pike changed his entire personality. Instead of the former Sunday-school teacher, the physically healed body housed a profane, venal, violent brute with no selfcontrol or sense of responsibility. Call it self-control or free will, Gage had become a victim of his new biological configuration. The ‘bad' Gage had evicted the 'good' Gage."

She took another sip, then held the saucer and cup in her left hand. "Gage fascinated Frank Harper, who had treated more than his share of head wounds, so he kept a notebook containing the names and serial numbers of the patients he treated along with fairly precise descriptions of the wounds and treatment. The War Department funded him to follow up on these men, to interview friends, family, and work associates on personalities before the war and after.

"He found many unchanged." She gazed out the window. "But he also found some startling differences in those who had specific wounds in the frontal lobes. Some had become violent like Gage and wound up in jail." LaHaye turned back toward Gabriel. "I know of at least two cases where Harper's notes and medical records and testimony kept men from being executed for murders they committed.

"'Harper's work prompted the Army to fund a major research effort and essentially gave Harper a recently vacated POW camp in Mississippi. From about 1947 and well into the 1960s, Harper's people brought in patients for study and sent out teams to prisons and mental hospitals to treat those who were confined and unable to travel."