Luthecker (29 page)

“Have you begun to shown him the video yet?” Brown asked, the blunt nature of authority audible in his voice.

Lansky took off his glasses, rubbed his sixty-three year old face before running his hand over the shiny bald dome of his head, which was long absent of any hair, before answering.

The videos were the only things that mattered to Brown, and Lansky knew that men like him were never patient, never interested in the details. Like most men created by the military industrial complex, the only thing he was interested in was “immediate, actionable intelligence”.

“Not yet.” He finally answered, knowing he would now have to explain himself.

“And why not?”

“Because we’d like to have a better understanding of how his brain works, before we actually put it to work.”

“I already know that he can find Waldo way before the other kids do.” Brown snapped. “From my experience, that’s not how you go about understanding how his brain works. You need to be more aggressive in your analysis. You need to press him. You need to put his abilities to the test, and look for inconsistencies. You need to find his breaking point. Otherwise, he’ll find yours.”

“And potentially destroy him in the process.” Lansky countered.

“He’s tougher than you give him credit for.”

“Perhaps if we could put him in a different environment.” Lax began.

“You requested this environment, and I allowed it.” Brown cut him short. “In my opinion, you’ve made him quite comfortable. Too comfortable to be of any value.”

“Respectfully sir, that’s not what I mean.”

Brown looked back and forth between the two men. “Gentlemen, don’t let him fool you. This is for your protection. You do not want to be in the room alone with this man. He can accelerate your life to the point where you no longer know who you are. He makes you very susceptible to his suggestion. He’s capable of destroying everything that you believe, and he can do so in an instant. I’ve seen this happen more than once. Trust me when I tell you he is extremely dangerous.”

“Understood sir.” Lansky lied. He really didn’t understand what Brown was talking about at all. It made no sense. It was more the ramblings of someone deeply paranoid, not uncommon from Lansky’s experience with those who had gained enormous amount of power through the use of force and manipulation of others. It was their own psychological machinations coming back to haunt them. In Lansky’s mind Brown certainly qualified as a candidate for this psychological condition.

The subject was acknowledged to be a unique specimen, extremely intelligent and perceptive, and even if he was some kind of sociopath, what Brown described simply wasn’t possible. Lansky felt that he could be far more successful in working with the patient if he were allowed to actually sit across from the man, and get a better sense for who he is. It’s how he, and most other psychologists, had always worked. It didn’t matter if it was Charles Manson sitting across from him, and this was not a question of legality. He saw no danger here, other than that of potentially crossing Brown. He was well aware of the fact that the Head of Coalition Properties set the rules and signed the paychecks.

“If you feel the subject is that dangerous, then we will work within the parameters you set.” Lansky agreed. He chose to phrase his next statement carefully. “But one thing you must understand about us sir, is that we are scientists, and men of medicine. We don’t make use of…interrogation techniques. We find that the techniques themselves pollute the data.” Lansky held his breath. He had challenged Brown’s very background, and was wary of the man’s reputation.

Brown’s eyes flickered momentarily with anger, and the room suddenly got tense. The Colonel looked as if he would tear into Lansky, and Lansky shifted in his chair nervously in response. But then the anger seemed to dissipate as he looked back and forth between the two men, realizing that in a way, Lansky was correct. These men were not hardened soldiers. They were academics. They must be motivated in such a way as to appeal to the vanity of their intellect as well as their sense of value. The reason he brought them on in the first place was to avoid a repeat scenario that had cost him David Lloyd, one of his most effective interrogators. He had to show at least some patience with their choice of evaluation. At the same time, however, he had to make sure they knew who was in charge.

“Do you know what the mitigating element that differentiates how you go about finding answers, and how I do, is exactly?” He asked, a sincere sounding question that was clearly booby-trapped.

Both men were smart enough not to answer.

“Time.” Brown stated, answering his own question. “You go about your business as if you have an infinite amount of it. It’s the most basic flaw of academia. And the reason you work for me, and not the other way around, is that I know that this is not the case. I know that time, is the one thing in this world that we never have enough of.”

Brown stood up from the table.

“So let me assure you gentlemen, what I know to be the facts: One: he’s smarter than you. That means you have to be tougher than him. Two: We have very, very little time. We need his abilities working for us and we need them now. And three: Your expertise came highly recommended, and that’s why I let you do things your way. So far I am unimpressed. So I’m going to politely ask that you show him the first fucking video, not tomorrow, not next week, but today, and come back to me, within twenty-four hours, with some real answers about what the hell he sees, and how the hell he sees it. Otherwise, we do things my way, and you gentlemen “retire.” Is that understood?”

• • •

Alex sat back on the dark brown couch of his holding cell.

After leaving the police precinct, his two captors had put a black hood over his head, driven around in circles throughout the city for approximately fifty-seven minutes, before depositing him here. They had kept the black hood on him the whole time.

The Los Angeles City streets were designed as a grid-work of right angles, and Alex had counted exactly eleven left turns, and ten right turns, which meant in summation that they had simply turned left from the precinct and headed straight down Alvarado Boulevard. He had felt the stop and go momentum of the transport vehicle, the same 2006 Chevy Suburban he had been in previously, he could easily tell by the smell, and had counted exactly thirty-three dead stops and three rolling ones. Eleven honked horns, but none of them within three car lengths of their vehicle, easily surmised by the Doppler effect. Other than a brief drive on the highway, where the vibration and sound caused by the engine rpm indicated the vehicle was moving at fifty-three miles per hour for a seven-minute time frame, they had averaged less than fifteen miles per hour.

He knew that the purpose of the drill was to make Alex believe that they had traveled a considerable distance to their new destination. He knew in fact that they were only five blocks south of the Metro Precinct, and judging from the number of floors the elevator they escorted him into ascended, fifty-six by his count, derived by average high-rise elevator car speed multiplied by time between doors clanking shut and the ding signifying arrival at the destination floor, they were inside the only building with fifty stories or more within a five block radius of the police precinct, the seventy-five story tall steel and black glass structure with the Coalition Properties logo splashed across the top of the building. So at least he knew where he was, he thought to himself.

The accommodations they had locked him in were quite comfortable, the walls painted with a combination of terra-cotta sand and white, soothing colors, the purpose being to create the illusion of normalcy and safety. The decor had all the trappings of a luxury one-bedroom apartment, with the large overstuffed sectional couch, 50’ flat screen television, and silk sheets on a tempur-pedic mattress in the bedroom. The stainless steel full kitchen was a bit of a farce, as they cooked for him, anything he might request.

Unknown to them, the reality of the matter was that this environment made Alex very uncomfortable. He never watched television, so he wasn’t about to watch
their
television, although he was encouraged to, his captors informing him with excitement that he had access to over one hundred channels. All the better to analyze his viewing habits and create a profile, he knew. They were buffoons, he thought, projecting their rough beliefs of expected human behavior as opposed to simply paying attention to the details and allowing the answers to reveal themselves. He was used to living with very little in the form of opulence, a Spartan yet disciplined existence, only knowing and needing the minimal comfort provided by storage sheds, abandoned garages, basements, even occasionally the underneath of a freeway overpass. The concept of luxury had no meaning to him, and on the rare occasion he happened to view an active television screen it gave him considerable headaches. The one thing that he did enjoy, the scratched and worn records of classical music he played on the Magnavox player, they didn’t know about, and he would never share with them.

He knew there were cameras and audio recording equipment throughout the unit, hidden in the walls and ceilings, even in the bathroom. There was no move or sound that he could make without them recording it for analysis. He remembered many conversations with Master Winn and his friends about the rising level of surveillance society in general, and how it had been carefully introduced into the system of existence layer by layer, not so much by a conscious directive, but, like most things oppressive, driven by a collective mindset of fear and what scientists would call “function creep”, the inability to foresee the long term effects of the patchwork created by countless short term solutions. He knew that the level of observation he was experiencing now, if the current fear-based algorithm for security in society did not change and was allowed to continue on its current path, would become the accepted norm for the bulk of the population before too long. It had already been experimented with, being first introduced as a form of entertainment, even going so far as to reward the meticulously observed with money and fame for allowing the world to watch the most basic and banal of human behavior.

He stopped thinking about the mathematical possibilities of surveillance patterns and wondered how his friends were doing. Eliminating for the sake of argument any other interference possibilities, they should reach New York City tomorrow, he calculated. He missed them, and felt that he had let down the only people he had ever cared for. More than anything, he wanted to restore a sense of order to the chaos that he had introduced into their lives, the altering of their life patterns that would ultimately manifest as their destiny. He vowed that, when the time was right, he would escape this place, find them, and somehow make things right, even though they had no idea that anything was even wrong.

He had up until this point cooperated with the scientists, let them run their predictable tests and ask their predictable questions. Since his captors had dumped him in this room, he had had absolutely no contact with any other human being. He knew that this was by design, because the man he spoke to on the phone when he was captured, the one who was in charge, “suspect Zero” in Alex’s world, did not understand what had happened between Alex and the interrogator three years ago. Because of this “suspect Zero” feared Alex, and wanted to know the source of his “abilities,” and in turn exploit them for his own use. It was a common trait among men who viewed themselves as separate and above others, to fear those whom they did not understand and either attempt to destroy or exploit them, particularly among those who sought power.

Isolation was a common tactic of interrogation, and despite the comfort of his cage, Alex knew that this was exactly what it was meant to be: an interrogation. Over time, isolation usually had considerable negative effects on people. He knew his captors thought it would increase the pressure. They couldn’t be more wrong. For Alex, it allowed him to
think
. And the pressure, which he could calculate by observing the ever-decreasing radius of the circular nature shown to be consistent with their questions, was clearly on
them
.

He knew that he would have to cooperate, at least in appearance, long enough for his friends to get back to Los Angeles with their package.
Four days
, he told himself. Four days, and the hope that nothing would go wrong for them. Then he could begin to turn things around, he thought. Then, he vowed, he would pick his captors apart.

“Good afternoon, Alex.”
An electronic voice boomed from the holding cell speakers, seemingly from every corner of the room. The words were mechanized, the result of a digital scrambler, most of the tone, inflection, and emotion removed. He was unsure if the slight English accent was added.

Alex stayed on the couch, unmoving, his eyes closed, listening. Waiting.

“How are you? Are you comfortable? Is there anything you need?”

Alex opened his eyes. He’d been asked on several occasions by the other two voices he had so far been able to distinguish these exact same questions. But never in this order, all three at once, and with this exact cadence. Cadence was something the scrambler could not anticipate and therefore could not hide completely. People spoke in habitual rhythms, and this one, however slight in difference, was new.

“I’m going to call you number three.” Alex stated with no emotion.

Inside the observation booth, Doctor Siobhan Parker hit the mute button, and turned to her two colleagues, Doctor’s Lax and Lansky.

“Did you tell him I would be joining the observation team?”

Parker was in her late-thirties, tall, lingerie-model slim, with red hair, and breasts augmented to a perfect C cup that would make a twenty-year old envious. A graduate student working on her Doctorial thesis, she was Doctor Lax’ research assistant.

“No.” Lax shook his head. “He just- He just does that. We haven’t told him anything. He’s just very perceptive. It’s harmless.”