The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller Read online

  He knew nothing about nuclear weapons. He taught something far more sinister, which was the poetry of the mind: how to manipulate moods and change ideas, and how to gain control over the seat of consciousness. His work was against Moslem belief, but it was also useful to the Islamic Republic, so it was not only tolerated, but lavishly rewarded—to his cost, as would shortly become apparent.

  He looked out across the small lecture hall. Only half of its seats were filled by this extremely important group of attendees. There were guards on all the doors. The hall itself had been swept for surveillance devices just minutes before he was to begin this critical talk.

  One group of attendees were skilled police officers and organizational experts, the men who would one day soon govern the West, what might be left of it. The others were medical personnel who would manage the mind control program that was going to place the Islamic Republic and the Persian nation where it belonged: at the center of the world.

  To wet his parched throat, Ibrahim took a sip of water. Meanwhile, a satellite overhead watched his car. In four different safe houses, four men waited, preparing, cleaning their guns, watching their encrypted cell phones for instructions.

  Ibrahim began the speech of a lifetime—in fact, the last speech of his lifetime.

  “We have learned how to control the human being by controlling his consciousness. Understand, please, what a mind is—nothing more than the dance of electrons among the neurons, refereed, if you will, by the chemical bath that surrounds them and modulates their behavior. To an extent, it’s possible to change the mind chemically. Introduce a tranquilizer, the subject becomes more calm. A stimulant does the opposite. There are many quite powerful drugs, with profound effects.”

  Some of these people used such drugs every day. Davood Ghorbani of the Revolutionary Guard, for example, was an interrogator with a great mastery of the mind-altering pharmacopoeia.

  “But drugs have their definite limitations. They can alter the way the brain functions, but they cannot add an idea to a man’s mind.” He paused. He spoke what he believed were the two most important words ever uttered by a human being. Lowering his voice, leaning into the microphone, he said, “We can.”

  Again, he paused. He looked out across his audience. They were rapt, sitting forward, eager.

  “It isn’t a matter of whispering thoughts into the mind, not precisely that, but rather to make it appear to the target that the fulfillment of our policy and his own wishes are the same thing.” He took a couple of breaths, then continued. “We have discovered that by altering the electrical currents in a certain part of the brain called the claustrum, we can change thought, and very profoundly.”

  He did not speak of the true origin of the knowledge, and certainly not of the fact that the Americans had gotten it first and were also developing it, or that it involved the implantation of magnetically sensitive microchips into the brain. But how far along were the U.S. experts? Could they be ready to implant the Iranian leadership?

  He had just received word that an example of an American implant was on its way to Tehran right now, removed from the head of a White House flunky by a master espionage agent.

  The great difficulty was that Iran’s new and very secret ally was reluctant to simply give them the technology. The reason for this was unclear, but then again, so was almost everything about this strange ally.

  He completed his explanation of how the devices worked. It wasn’t only that tiny pulses were delivered to the claustrum, but that they were programmed in complex patterns that would entrain the neurons in such a way that the subject would react to outside signals as if they were his own thoughts.

  “So, in conclusion, I think that you can see the great power of this technology. It is the future of the Persian people and of our republic, and it is also the future of the world.”

  It was time to ask for questions, always an uneasy moment. Some of the people here were connected to very high levels of the leadership, even the Supreme Leader, and it was never entirely clear where questions might be coming from or what they might actually mean. He smiled, and requested them.

  At once, hands were raised. Ghorbani was first.

  Politely, he came to his feet.

  “How can the changing of one mind lead to the changing of the world?”

  Of course, it was the question. He had wondered himself, until the explanation of just what to do had come from the hidden ally. Not even these people, among the highest of the high, knew of it—only he himself, the Supreme Leader, and Mohammed Wahidi of MISIRI—the acronym for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence—and he knew only the outlines, not the details of how it would be executed.

  He took a breath. “We have made a thorough study of both the American and Russian land-based missile systems. Both are fully operational, and both have significant safeguards against accidental or unapproved firing of the missiles.”

  Ghorbani frowned. “I don’t understand. Why does this matter?”

  “If the great powers engaged in a nuclear exchange, they would no longer be great powers.”

  The silence was absolute.

  “Let me show you a tape.” He turned on his projector. The test subject, a prisoner of the revolution, lay strapped to a table. A neurosurgeon masked in white inserted a long silver probe into an opening that had been drilled in his skull.

  “This is an electromagnetic pulser. It works like an implant, but obviously it’s more crude. The tape was made last year, before we had implantable devices. Like an implant, this device can deliver very slight streams of electrons to different areas of the brain. In this case, it is going to deliver to the claustrum a very specific pulse that will cause the subject to believe something that he knows for certain to be true is not true.”

  He was also the neurosurgeon on the film. He watched himself say, “Ali, can you hear me?”

  The prisoner responded in the affirmative.

  He said to his audience, “On the film I will shortly apply current to the claustrum. First, I will use another instrument, a sonic hammer, to knock him out.” He chuckled. “It is a very gentle hammer. It turns out that there are sounds that can induce unconsciousness. Really, more than that—they can turn off the claustrum. To the subject, it is as if time itself ceases to exist.”

  Ali didn’t close his eyes, but they began to stare fixedly. On the film, Ibrahim said, “Ali?” There was no response. “Ali!” Nothing. He took a needle and slid it into the subject’s cheek. There was no reaction.

  “He is not asleep. Instead, his entire self—all he knows of himself—has been turned off. He is completely unaware. Except for the claustrum, though, his brain is fully functional. Now, watch what happens.”

  On the film, he saw himself manipulating the probe. “What I am doing is adjusting the various frequencies to deliver a very specific thought into Ali’s brain.”

  “But how is this possible? How do you know these frequencies?”

  The question came from one of the police officials. Of the people in this room, only Ghorbani might know the answer to that question. How he longed to tell them of Aeon, of the Wire, and of the power that this marvelous new alliance was conferring on the Islamic Republic. Instead, he said, “There has been a long study, and it’s still continuing. Actually, it’s most of what I do. We analyze the thoughts of test subjects, then create frequencies that will duplicate these patterns in other brains. For example, the thought that I am going to introduce into Ali’s brain was originally derived from my own. I was the test subject, lying for hours in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine until we had recorded every electronic nuance of the thought that my brain was producing.” He watched the film for a moment longer. “Here,” he said, stopping the action for a moment. “The pulser is now operative. Ali is receiving the thought that his wife is not in America anymore. That she is in Iran, in custody. That unless he declares support for the revolution, she will be executed at once. Now, he knows for certain that this cannot be
true. He spoke with her on a secure line in the American embassy just a short time before we picked him up. She is in America, and he knows this for certain. But watch.”

  On the film, he withdrew the probe. Ali blinked. At first, he was confused. Then an expression of horror crossed his face. He sat up and cried out, “The Islamic Republic is the will of God! God is great, God is great!” Then he burst into tears and covered his face with his hands.

  Ibrahim turned off the tape.

  The silence in the room was again profound. All of these people were advanced in their understanding of his work, but they had never seen this. Until now, nobody had. But they understood the implications; he could see that from their rapt attention. The slight smile that had appeared on Ghorbani’s face particularly pleased him. One day, this ferocious revolutionary, an expert in the arts of secrecy and government by compulsion, would be the head of the American Protectorate, governor of the United States.

  One of the women present, Nadja Parandi, raised a hand. She was a skilled neurologist and, since the recent advances, an expert on brain implants.

  “Professor, thank you for taking my question.”

  “I am honored, Dr. Parandi. God willing, you won’t stump me.”

  There was a ripple of laughter. In the West, Iran was portrayed as a slave state for women. Ask this one, though. An able, loyal, and brilliant woman had a place in the modern Iran.

  “I understand that most here will be government officials in the West after we have taken over. What I don’t understand is how in practical fact this will be done. It’s all well and good to show us how a man can be controlled under ideal conditions. But the Kremlin and the White House are hardly ideal conditions.”

  She sat down and folded her arms.

  Ibrahim was concerned by her question. If he appeared to be holding anything back, these powerful people would be furious. But he could not tell the whole truth. In fact, he did not know the whole truth.

  He drew his thoughts together very carefully. If he said too much, Wahidi would be on him like a tiger. If he said too little, these people would come to distrust him. Someone, at some point, would have his head.

  “The weak links in both missile systems are the national leaders. I think we all know that.”

  “Respectfully, Professor, I submit that Vladimir Putin cannot be successfully subjected to this mind control technique, or any such technique.”

  “I would agree, but we only need one of them, not both. The American is our target.” He was careful not to say “President Greene,” because the situation was more complex than that.

  “Very well—so I thought. What of the practicalities? How do we implant him?”

  She had assumed that it was Greene, which was what he had hoped would happen. Even among these trusted people, there had to be a level of concealment.

  “We do have a program in place. It will lead in the direction we desire.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Islamic Republic, may Allah defend it, will become the most powerful nation in the world.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. May I know when?”

  She took her seat. Her face was totally devoid of expression. Unreadable. Before the treaty, the West had believed that Iran intended to build a vast nuclear arsenal, but Iran already had all the nuclear weapons that it needed—enough to destroy Israel once the United States could no longer defend it. The strike would be so quick and unexpected that Israel would not be able to return fire.

  After he was done, he strolled across the campus, enjoying the stillness beneath the yew trees. It was a familiar sort of afternoon in Tehran—airless, the campus possessed of a silence that always seemed to him to reflect his own deep loneliness.

  On the surface, he was a devout man, careful in his observances—but that was only the surface. Truthfully, like most educated people, he was an atheist. But he was also a patriot, deeply in love with Persia, its poetry and art and ideas, and the grandeur of its long journey across time. How little the English understood of a civilization so ancient, and the Americans, those grinning, immeasurably powerful children, bullies of the world—they understood, quite simply, nothing.

  He reached the car park and went to his Toyota Avalon, sparkling blue and still smelling crisply inside of its newness. The revolution spared no expense for him, and he enjoyed the material advantages that came with his work. As he walked, alerts went to four cell phones in different parts of Tehran, and four operatives checked their weapons, put on their helmets, and went to their motorcycles. But Ibrahim knew nothing of them.

  When he had first heard of the new technology and how it might be used, in the large office of Mohammed Wahidi of MISIRI, he had almost laughed aloud, it seemed so impossible.

  “You cannot,” he had said. “To get in there—the White House—it would be difficult even if you weren’t brown.”

  Wahidi had simply stared at him in silence, which was most disconcerting.

  “You are a loyal man,” he finally said. “Loyal and, from your papers we have read, one of the best-informed neuroscientists in Persia.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So you do the neuroscience and let us do the tradecraft. Best that you not even ask about it.”

  “No, I can understand that.”

  Wahidi had then leaned forward, radiating menace. If ever there existed a predator in human form, it was this man.

  Wahidi had told him, then, the greatest secret of all, the one that he must never reveal. The awesome secret that, to any Persian, would have been profoundly inspiring: They had in their wisdom—in their infinite wisdom, the wisdom of gods—surveyed the nations of the world. They had seen and rejected them all, but for one: beloved Persia. They had seen that the Persians should be masters of the world.

  They.

  He got in the car and turned it on, listening to the quiet hum of the engine coming to life. Such a car as this could not be built in Iran—not yet, but that would come. It would all come.

  As he drove toward the city center, the four motorcycles converged on his route, moving through the traffic with easy efficiency.

  This evening, Ibrahim planned to attend a reading of new poetry. The revolution watched the poetry movement very carefully. There was protest in it, but it was also true that the very soul of the revolution—of Persia herself—was there.

  He turned on the radio, then lit up one of the wonderful American cigarettes it was his privilege to smoke: a Camel, richly flavored and powerful. Iranian cigarettes were much milder, and being steadily made more so by the government, in the interest of health, he assumed.

  But health was for tomorrow. Either he would live or he wouldn’t. In any case, this was his last carton. Next week, he would stop.

  The narrow streets of the old city were, as always, choked with traffic. Thus it was that he failed to notice the fact that motorcycles had come up on both sides of his car. Perhaps it was also a bit of arrogance, his having been educated at MIT and Cambridge. He’d had the chance to stay in the West, but the revolution had drawn him home, that and the call of Persia herself, the sorrowing, glorious nation that was the true center not only of the human past, but of mankind’s future.

  These thoughts, half-formed, were drifting through his mind when the snarl of a motorcycle engine finally intruded into the cool, quiet interior of the Avalon.

  Many people in Tehran had bodyguards. Many had armored cars. On the theory that such things would only draw attention to him, he’d been given neither.

  Seeing the two motorcycles, he knew at once that he was in peril. Frantically, he hunted for the button on the steering wheel that would activate his cell phone.

  Then he saw the motorcyclist on the driver’s side, anonymous in his gleaming black helmet, slip a hand into his leather jacket. Ibrahim jammed on the gas. The car burst forward—but struck a lorry, causing its cargo of onions to come cascading out over his hood.

  His desperate attempt to get out of the trap hadn’t mattered,
though. He had been dead before his car struck the truck. His body remained behind the wheel, sitting stiffly, eyes open, face strangely rapt. He looked like a judge officiating at a complicated trial.

  In the driver’s-side window there was a neat hole, and on his temple a steady runnel of blood. By the time the furious driver of the truck had come storming back to confront the fool who had rammed him, Dr. Josefi’s collar and the arm of his shirt had turned dark red. The soaked sleeve clung to his skin, outlining his muscular arm. He had been trained in martial arts. He had been trained in defensive driving. He had been trained to drop down below the line of the window at the first sign of trouble.

  He had not, however, been trained to never be surprised.

  The motorcyclists were gone, absorbed in the twisting streets and the unending stream of traffic. They would go on about their business as soldiers in the enormous Western espionage system that wound through Tehran, an ever-changing tangle of suspicions and discoveries.

  From Paris to Berlin to London to Langley, Virginia, the news had already been flashed: Dr. Ibrahim Josefi, an important nuclear engineer with an as-yet-unknown brief, was dead. The Iranian nuclear program—the one running off treaty—had been set back yet again—how far they would determine as soon as Josefi’s exact role became known.

  They would never find out, would never understand the breathtaking peril he had represented—which was greater than even he knew. In fact, his work was part of a much larger plan, one that no human being would support, no matter how extreme his or her views. Not Josefi, not Ghorbani—none of them.

  Iran’s new ally was like that—far more clever than any human being could ever be.

  A fool had completed his fool’s errand, as had the fools who had killed him. The real plan, terrible beyond human understanding, now began to unfold in earnest.