The Syndrome

Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t suggesting—”

“What about my sister?” Adrie

Shapiro closed his eyes for several seconds, then opened them. “The point I was trying to make is that what you’re doing—”

“‘Doing’?” Adrie

“Exactly,” Shapiro said. “And my point is: that could be a dangerous thing to do.”

The three of them were quiet for a moment. Finally, McBride said, “I want to stop whoever did this to me from doing it to anyone else.”

Shapiro nodded slowly. Turned to Adrie

Adrie

Shapiro reached across the table for McBride’s medical file and, opening it, began to leaf slowly through its pages. After a while, he looked up and said, “I’d like to talk to your doctor… this man, Shaw.” Adrie

“I’m not sure,” Adrie

Shapiro smiled, almost sheepishly. “I want to be sure that you are who you say you are—and that what you say happened, happened.”

“You’ve got the file,” Adrie

“‘The file,’“ Shapiro repeated with a soft chuckle. “The three of us are sitting here, talking about counterfeiting human beings—and you’re surprised that I should want to verify the contents of a manila folder?”

In the end, Adrie

Shapiro made the call from a cell-phone in the kitchen. They could hear him talking softly, but not well enough to understand what was being said. After a minute or two, he returned to the living room, and sat down beside them.

“So?” McBride asked. “What did he say?”

Shapiro shook his head. “I wasn’t able to reach him.”

“But—”

“I spoke with his wife…”

Adrie

“She was distraught. She said her husband was struck by a car outside the hospital last night. The police are looking for the driver.”

Though the three of them were sitting on the floor, McBride felt his stomach drop, as if he were in a plane, and the plane had flown into an air pocket. “Will he be all right?”

Shapiro looked at them. “No.”

Chapter 35

McBride replenished the wood stove and stacked wood outside as the old scientist cooked di

“Most people think it was a response to what the communists were doing in Central Europe and Korea. There was a show trial involving a priest named Mindzenty, and lots of talk of ‘brainwashing.’ But the truth is, the program began long before that.”

“‘The program’?” Adrie

Shapiro frowned. “That’s what we called it among ourselves. But whatever the name—and it had a lot of names—it began in Europe during the Second World War, when the OSS was searching for a ‘truth drug’ they could use in interrogations.”

Pouring himself a glass of wine, the scientist explained that the project expanded after the war, with funding from the newly created CIA. By 1955, more than 125 experiments were under way in some of the country’s best universities and worst prisons. Still other research was carried out in mental institutions, and in “civilian settings” using “unwitting volunteers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” McBride asked.

“It means we set up cameras in whorehouses, and tested drugs on the johns—without their knowledge,” Shapiro replied. “It means that we used drug addicts like Kleenex—and homosexuals, too. Communists. Perverts. Hoodlums.” He paused, and added with a smile, “Liberals and Dodger fans.” Then he turned serious again, and went on to explain that in the climate of the times—which is to say, amid the permafrost of the Cold War—America’s cultural conservatism was such that “transgressive personalities” were regarded as “fair game.” “We didn’t need ‘informed consent,’“ Shapiro pointed out, “because our research was classified. It was in the ‘national interest’—which made it, and us, exempt from normal constraints.”

“So it was easy to hide,” Adrie

“We didn’t ‘hide’ anything—it was secret. And while some of us had ethical concerns about testing drugs and medical procedures on unwitting subjects… well, those concerns became irrelevant when you realized you were dealing with the enemy.”

“I thought the Soviet Union was the enemy,” McBride remarked.

“Of course. But the Cold War was as much a domestic jihad as it was an international one. It was a war for the American Way—which, I can assure you, did not (at least not at that time) include gays, lunatics, junkies or… si

“What kind of research are we talking about?” McBride asked.

The old man hesitated, thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, as much to himself as his guests, “it’s hardly secret anymore. There were hearings twenty years ago. Books and law-suits.”

“Right. So what kind of research are we talking about?” McBride repeated.

“Drugs and hypnosis, telepathy and psychic driving. Remote viewing. Aversive conditioning—degradation and pain.”

“‘Degradation and pain’?” Adrie

“How to induce it, endure it, use it—how to measure it,” Shapiro replied. “Not that the pain experiments were particularly productive.”

“Why not?” McBride wondered.

The scientist sighed. “We had difficulty finding reputable psychologists to do the research. And those we did find weren’t as objective as we’d have liked.”

McBride looked puzzled. “How so?”

“The studies kept getting mixed up with sadism—just as the drug experiments got mixed up with sex. In fact, it all got mixed up with sex. And that colored the results.”

“You mentioned ‘psychic driving,’“ Adrie

Shapiro shifted uncomfortably on his cushion. “Yes.”

“Well… ?”

The retired CIA man considered the question. Finally, he replied, “‘Psychic driving’ refers to… how should I put it? Terminal experiments in which the subject is given relatively large doses of a psychedelic drug and placed in a dark and sealed environment… where he… or she… is exposed to a continuous loop of recorded messages.”

“‘A sealed environment’?” Adrie

“We used morgue drawers,” Shapiro explained.

McBride gaped, even as he tried to formulate the question on his mind. “When you say ‘terminal experiments’—”

“No one died,” Shapiro assured him. “But the subjects weren’t expected to recover. And most of them didn’t.”

“So we’re talking about—”

“Six hundred micrograms of LSD—daily,” Shapiro said. “For sixty to one-hundred-eight days. In darkness.”

Adrie

Shapiro looked her in the eye, and deliberately misunderstood the question. “As I recall, we catheterized the subject, fed her intravenously, and gave her a colostomy to facilitate things.”

“Jesus Christ,” McBride muttered.