Rasputin's Shadow

  “With microwaves?”

  He scrunched his face. “It’s very complicated and, honestly, you’d need PhDs in math and electrical engineering to understand it in any meaningful way. But basically, my discovery was that multiple alternating cavity and dielectric tubes combined with heavily customized magnetrons can create a targeted field of microwaves at stable wavelengths that can be fine-tuned precisely to control the vibrations in the inner ear so as to entrain the brain through its entire range of frequencies.”

  This was the “basically” version.

  He shrugged. “An anthropologist at Yale recently proposed the idea that our susceptibility to entrainment is due to natural selection,” he added. “Those of our ancestors who could achieve a state in which they didn’t feel fear or pain, but were instead united in a collective identity . . . they were more likely to survive against grassland predators—and against other tribes.”

  “Sounds a lot like Communism,” I remarked. “And we all know how that turned out.”

  Sokolov smiled grimly. Then he added, without a shadow of pride in his voice, “But this susceptibility to entrainment has a very dark side. My machine can do everything from put you to sleep to make you kill your children.”

  A cold nail slid down my spine.

  He couldn’t have said it any more simply than that.

  I could see why everybody wanted him. Having access to that kind of technology—especially if you were the only one who possessed it—would give you immeasurable power over both your own people and your enemies.

  Aparo asked, “What about the man who came to your apartment Monday morning? How’d you manage to overpower him? What kind of Jedi mind trick did you use on him?”

  Sokolov didn’t seem to get the reference. He looked a bit confused, then said, “I had put some monaural beats on a CD. Basic, but effective. I kept it ready for just that kind of emergency, in case anyone ever came looking for me.”

  “What does it do?” Aparo asked.

  “It makes you confused. Dizzy. Nauseous. You lose focus. Makes you amenable to suggestion. To answering questions truthfully.”

  “But it didn’t affect you?” he asked.

  “Like I said, it’s more basic. Much less potent than what’s in the van. I know what it does and how it does it, and I’d trained myself to resist its effect.”

  Aparo just said, “Wow.”

  I remembered the neighbor and his suddenly aggressive dog. “A neighbor said his dog attacked him at around that time. Said it had never happened before.”

  “Animals react differently from us. And when they get scared, some of them attack.”

  I wondered how many other neighbors had been affected by the brief burst.

  “Apart from the earmuffs,” I asked, “is there any way to protect against what you’ve got in the van? Anything that can block it?”

  “Not really. And if you’re too close to it and especially if you’re in its direct line of sight, even the ear guards can’t block out the more aggressive frequencies. The only way is to be standing behind enough insulation to stop the microwaves from reaching you. We’re talking at least an inch of iron or several feet of concrete or even a screen of very fine wire mesh to disrupt the waves. The mesh is actually the most effective, but it has to be very fine to disrupt the wavelength. They use it widely these days to block cell-phone reception.”

  Aparo asked, “What about jamming it? Like with a cell-phone-signal jammer.”

  “It might work if the jammer is powerful enough and broad enough to block out all frequencies,” Sokolov said. “The different settings have different frequencies, so you’d need to kill the full range of signals to make sure nothing gets through.”

  “What range are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Depends on the power source. In the right conditions, it could reach over half a mile with full line of sight. But ultimately, you could say the range is limitless. Think of how a cell network provides seamless coverage for your cell phone. Theoretically, the same thing could be done with this. If you can get a phone signal, this can reach you too.”

  I felt like I’d been dropped on a bed of nails. “Are you saying you could link it to a network of cell-phone towers?”

  He nodded. “Theoretically, yes. You couldn’t just plug my version into one, though. I don’t know how network control centers are set up. It would take some figuring out, but, basically, it’s doable.”

  “Jesus.”

  The amount of damage that one psychopath could do with this technology at his command was staggering. You could take out a whole city with it. Maybe even more than that.

  I looked at the faces around me and could only state the obvious. “We need to stop him.”

  66

  My relentless little nag was kicking and screaming inside my head, insisting we were missing something.

  I turned to Larisa. “Why isn’t he in touch with your guys? If only to say ‘mission accomplished.’ Why has he gone dark?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t trust our setup at the consulate. Maybe he thinks he can do a better job at getting the device out of the country.”

  “Maybe, but . . . why rebuild it in the SUV once it was dismantled?” I asked. “Why not document Sokolov taking it apart, film him doing it using any smart phone, then pack it all up in some crates and ship it out? Easier than trying to smuggle a car out with all that stuff in it. And why test it now?” The most obvious answer was troubling. “He’s planning to use it. Here. Soon.” I turned to Sokolov. “Tell me again. You said he was asking you about range, power.”

  Sokolov nodded. “He wanted to know how strong it was. If it could go through walls or glass, or reach a basement.”

  I asked, “And? Can it?”

  Sokolov shrugged. “It’s microwaves. Like I said before, if a phone signal can get through, so can this.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. It was all sinking in with alarming clarity. “He’s gonna use it. That’s why he wanted to set it up in a clean car. That’s why he’s asking about what it can get through.”

  “That’s not what he was tasked with,” Larisa said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Come on. We’re not at war. And using something like this, here—that’s terrorism. That’s an act of war.”

  “Maybe he’s been tasked by elements within the Kremlin or in the intelligence services who have a different agenda,” I countered. “Or maybe he’s decided to go rogue and work freelance. I can think of several countries and groups who’d love nothing more than to unleash this here. And they’d pay handsomely for it.”

  “He’s an agent of the state,” she insisted.

  “You’re saying he can’t be bought?”

  She didn’t have an answer.

  “You need to call your people,” I told her. “Find out if he’s still dark. And if he is, let them know what we’re thinking. Tell them they need to do all they can to help us shut him down. Warn them about the consequences of him using it. Ask them if they really want to start a war.”

  Larisa pulled out her phone and hit her speed dial.

  ***

  KOSCHEY PULLED OUT OF the Hertz lot at Newark Airport in a silver Dodge minivan. Within minutes, he was back on I-95, heading south.

  It didn’t take him long to move the bulky equipment out of the Suburban and into the people carrier. He’d just told the overworked and harassed car-rental attendant that he needed to swap his stuff over from the old car to the new one, and did so in a quiet corner of the lot without attracting any undue attention. To any passing onlooker, it would have looked like he was a record producer moving some studio gear around, or a computer geek ferrying around some servers.

  He’d need to connect the power cable to the engine, but he would do that later. Then he’d do one last test to make sure he’d done it right, but that was easy enough to accomplish.

  There would be plenty of potential guinea pigs en route.

>   ***

  LARISA HUNG UP AND looked at me, grim-faced.

  “Koschey’s still dark,” she said. “No one’s heard from him. Not even at the Center.”

  “As far as you know,” I remarked.

  “My feeling is, there’s no plan.”

  I asked, “Would they tell you if there was?”

  “I have no way of being sure,” she said.

  I fumed. “If he’s gone, there’s nothing we can do about it now. But if he’s not gone, if he’s still around—then my gut says he’s planning to use it.” I looked at Larisa. “You tell me. You really think he’s on his own?”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “Then we can worry about the geopolitical implications later. Right now, we need to find him and stop him.”

  “How?” Aparo asked. “What are we going to do? Get Homeland Security to raise the threat level to red and check every black SUV in the country? Assuming he hasn’t moved it into some other vehicle?” He turned to Sokolov. “He can do that, right? Now that you’ve done it once, he can do it again?”

  Sokolov nodded. “Yes. In fact, that was part of the exercise. To make sure it could be done quickly. Which it can; it’s just a matter of putting the right plugs in the right sockets. The only fixed connection to the car is for the power supply, which is just one cable.”

  “Which convinces me even more that that’s what he’s up to,” I said.

  I could see the problems we’d be facing in getting other agencies to react to this.

  “We have another problem,” I added. “We’ll need to convince the suits that this is real. Which isn’t going to be easy.”

  “My guys know it’s real,” Larisa offered. “I need to call my handler at Langley. They can help track Koschey down.”

  Which brought up another problem. “Do they know we have Sokolov here?”

  “I had to tell them.”

  I tightened up. “I’m amazed they haven’t swarmed in here already to take him off our hands.”

  “They will,” she said, though her tone didn’t seem thrilled at it. “Any minute now, I imagine.”

  My insides were roiling.

  I couldn’t let that happen. We might need him. And I didn’t want him to end up under their roof. But I had more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.

  Aparo said, “The threat’s still too vague to act on. We need to hone it down.”

  The possibilities I was picturing were endless, and each new one seemed more terrifying to imagine than the last.

  “He could use it anywhere,” I said. “A concert at the Garden. A big sports event in a packed stadium. Rockefeller Center. What are the big events in town this weekend?”

  “He could go for Wall Street,” Aparo added. “The New York Stock Exchange. A hit like that would crash the markets big-time.”

  Then I thought that if this was going to be a terror strike, there was a far more crippling set of targets he could go for. “The Capitol,” I suggested. “The White House.”

  Sokolov’s attention perked up. “He asked me about bulletproof glass,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He asked me if it could go through it. Something about three-inch glass.”

  “Blast-proof. The kind they use in major government buildings in DC,” I said.

  I could already see it. A packed session on Capitol Hill—then, out of the blue, senators and congressmen start ripping one another’s eyes out with security officers shooting indiscriminately, the whole thing broadcast live on C-SPAN.

  Or even worse.

  A Secret Service detail going haywire during a press conference on the White House lawn and gunning down everyone in sight, including the president of the United States.

  “I need to call someone,” I said. “We can’t just do nothing.”

  “Who?” Aparo asked.

  I thought about it, then said, “Everett.”

  Will Everett was an SAC at our DC field office and ran its counterterrorism division. We’d known each other for a few years and worked well together. I needed someone with a bit of an imagination for this. Someone who knew me and knew I wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. Someone who wouldn’t think I was stoned when I told him what was going on.

  As I reached for my phone, I wasn’t even sure I could be fully open with Everett. I thought it might be better if I sounded him out first. Just let him know something was in play, could be nothing, could be serious. And play it by ear depending on his reaction.

  The conversation ended up being much shorter than I anticipated. He was having a busy day. A lot of liaising with the Secret Service and DC police.

  The White House Correspondents Dinner was taking place in less than three hours’ time.

  67

  For a psychopath who was out to strike at the heart of America’s identity—an identity defined by freedom of expression, meritocracy, and a free press’s access to the highest levels of state—I couldn’t think of a more significant target than the White House Correspondents Dinner. Especially when this target came with guaranteed maximum media exposure.

  They call it the nerd prom, hashtag and all, which is appropriate if you consider George Clooney and Sofía Vergara to be nerds. More than two and a half thousand of the nation’s most influential people—politicians, Hollywood celebrities, journalists, business leaders, and Supreme Court justices, among others—would be packed into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton for an evening of high-octane glamour that had all the glitz of the Oscars but without the interminable running time, the false modesty, or the embarrassment of cut-short acceptance speeches.

  And not even the Oscars could boast the president of the United States as its guest of honor.

  The gala had been broadcast live on C-SPAN for years, but in the last few years, with politics in America more polarized than ever and political humor more pointed than ever, it had become a huge mainstream event. Multiple entertainment outlets on television and online would be covering it due to its high-wattage celebrity host and attendees, who were all there as guests of the Association’s members.

  The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was too potent a target for Koschey to pass up, even at such short notice.

  He’d have plenty of other opportunities where the president would be present, of course. Welcoming speeches for foreign dignitaries on the White House lawn, cultural events at the Kennedy Center, major state functions—there was something big going on every week in the capital. But this one bested them all. Any attack on the president would be disastrous enough, but an attack that struck at the heart of not only the world’s press, but of the entertainment industry—and that also hit some of the most outspoken and influential voices in America—would be any terrorist’s perfect storm. Not to mention the implicit reprisal it would be for the 2011 dinner, which would always be remembered as part of the narrative that led to the killing, one day later, of bin Laden by SEAL Team Six.

  It was tight, but if Koschey was going to do something, this felt like one hell of a night to do it.

  “We’ve got to get down there,” I told them, then turned to Larisa and gestured at Sokolov. “And he’s coming with us.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “So am I.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. I raised a stern finger. “You can’t give your guys a heads-up. I don’t have time to lock horns with any welcoming party when we hit DC.”

  “There won’t be one,” she said. “You’ve got my word on that.”

  68

  I looked out the window of our Bureau chopper and watched, with mounting anxiety, as the Statue of Liberty glided by in the late-afternoon light.

  The president was scheduled to arrive at the Hilton in a little over two hours, and we’d be stuck in here and belted to our seats for more than half that time. It didn’t help that I knew that Koschey probably already had his plan all sorted out, whereas in our case, I wasn’t at all sure how we were going to handle this.

  For starters,
I couldn’t see how my talking to the Secret Service about this was going to work out, even with Everett there as my character reference. What was I going to tell them? “I have this hunch that there’s a clear and present threat from one man, but we have no description, name, or prints to give you. Oh, and he’s going to use some kind of microwave transmitter to turn you all into killers and have one of you gun down the president.”

  That was going to be a fun conversation.

  Not only could I see them not believing me, I could picture them detaining me for questioning, wondering what the hell I was playing at and what motives I had for making such an outlandish claim.

  I wasn’t even sure we should tell them about what was going on, given that it was all based on a hunch. Then again, we couldn’t not tell them. Not with what was at stake. Worst case, nothing would happen and they’d think I’m ripe for a pink slip and a straightjacket. Best case, we save the leader of the free world. No contest. But the more I thought it through, the more I realized that we were probably going to be on our own. They weren’t going to give it the attention it deserved.

  In a perverse way, deep down, I was hoping Koschey would be there, trying to pull this off. Despite the huge risk, despite my fear that the night could turn out to be a disaster of epic proportions for our country, at least we knew what he was up to and had a chance to take him down. If I was wrong and he wasn’t going to be there, if he wasn’t planning what I thought he was planning, then we would have no idea where or when he, or whoever he delivered the technology to, would surface again and use it. It could be in a day, a week, a year. . . . Could be anywhere. We’d be clueless. And the disaster we would face in that uncertain future would be far more likely to succeed since we would be completely unprepared for it, and because of that, its outcome could be far worse. Far worse because it could also be much bigger. At least at the correspondents dinner, Koschey wouldn’t be able to hook it up to a whole network of cell towers. Or at least I hoped he wouldn’t be able to. But that would be a real possibility in the not-too-distant future, as Sokolov had confirmed. Which was another reason I was hoping we’d have a chance to take him down right away.