Tool of the Trade Read online

  It was a mutual interest in hypnosis that brought Valerie and me together. We happened to sit next to each other at a lecture on the anesthetic uses of hypnotism and found out we were in the same department We meshed.

  MIT reserves the winter break, New Year’s Day to early February, for IAP, Independent Activities Period. (Everything that changes my life has three initials.) We decided to work with biofeedback, then fashionable, to see whether a willing subject could put himself into a deeper hypnagogic state by monitoring his own physiological parameters.

  As it turns out, I am not a good subject for hypnosis, not being particularly artistic or imaginative or reflective. Valerie was all three—a moody fantasizing artist/musician—and after a week of practice, mutual conditioning, I could put her into a deep trance with a word and a touch. I myself could barely manage a light trance after ten minutes of monotonic reassurance, which was not reflection on her ability as a hypnotist. I couldn’t get as deep as she did even when I used illegally acquired barbiturates.

  Unsurprisingly, we also experimented a bit with the effect of grass, hash, and LSD on hypnosis—perhaps I was a little old for that sort of thing, but she wasn’t, and it was the sixties—and there was no consistent result, though we did collect some amusing experiences. (Like the day I delivered a lecture to a hall full of thoughtful blue lizards.)

  Valerie had started out majoring in electrical engineering, and although she switched to psych, she never did lose her love for gadgets. I like machines, too, but don’t have her talent or creativity. It was her initial fiddling that eventually led to the device that ultimately so complicated our lives.

  She had gotten hold of a picoammeter, a machine that measures electrical currents down to a fraction of a trillionth of an ampere. On a dry day you can make the needle move from across the room by running a comb through your hair.

  We had both progressed far enough in biofeedback that it was easy for us to isolate our alpha and theta waves by a special kind of “relaxed concentration” that was obviously related to the hypnagogic state. We normally did this with the help of a commercial “brainwave monitor” that used a headband with two electrodes, and an earphone connected to a black box that was some kind of a signal generator working with a couple of bandpass filters that isolated the alpha and theta waves. You would sit quietly in a dark room with the earphone on while the signal generator gave off a soft, high-pitched whine. Once you relaxed the right way—a “way” that can’t really be described in words—the signal would start to warble, which meant you were in the alpha or theta state. At first it took ten or twenty minutes to find the right way to feel; eventually it was a matter of seconds.

  There was no way to fiddle with the sealed machine (it belonged to the Institute, anyhow) so Valerie set about cobbling together one of our own. That way she could experiment to her heart’s content.

  That’s where the picoammeter came in. One of the odd things you can do with biofeedback is to alter at will the electrical conductivity of your skin. We had it set up so that the picoammeter measured a microscopic current across the back of your hand. You made a mental effort (or not-effort; it required relaxation) to slow the current down, to increase the resistance, and the picoammeter would reward you, through a signal generator, with a musical tone that rose in pitch as the resistance increased. We both tried it in a normal relaxed state first, and then while hypnotized.

  I should add that this was long after IAP was over; I’d known Valerie for more than a year. We saw each other socially as well as in the context of this unofficial research—“socially” in a sixties sense, including offhand sexual intimacy. I can imagine what would happen to one of my assistant professors today in that situation, more or less openly sleeping with a student still enrolled in his department.

  That is relevant to what happened. The first run-through, I was subject and Valerie was the hypnotist. The results were not impressive; under hypnosis the note rose perhaps a half tone higher than it did in a normal state, the meter showing it wavering around 450 hertz (from a base tone of A/440). When we switched, the results were astounding.

  Unhypnotized, Valerie could push the tone up to around 500. But when I put my hand on her cheek and said “Sleep now”—our combination—the tone started to rise very rapidly, covering several octaves in seconds, and winding up as inaudible ultrasound. The meter showed a steady 28,430 hertz.

  If I were more of a scientist, I suppose I might have called off the experiment right there, and then taken the equipment apart to find the glitch. What the steady reading implied was that Valerie was able to control the conductivity of her skin to an impossible degree of fineness—or that the signal generator was busted, much more likely. After it hadn’t changed for about a half minute, I told Valerie what was happening.

  “Interesting,” she mumbled. It wasn’t the voice she normally had under hypnosis, which was quite clear and alert. I asked her whether she could make it go higher, and she said she was trying.

  It didn’t add up. The reason we’d rigged the picoammeter with an audible output was to make it easier to use the biofeedback “talent,” which works best with the eyes closed, as does hypnosis. But human beings aren’t able to hear sounds pitched above about 15,000 to 20,000 hertz. (I didn’t remember the exact numbers at the time, though I did know that I was myself deaf to any sound above 4,000 hertz, because of ear damage in childhood, the first winter of the Nazi siege.)

  That she was exactly controlling a sound she couldn’t possibly hear was enough of a mystery. The mystery was doubled by an astounding change in her trance behavior.

  Everybody knows that people under hypnosis can’t be compelled to do things that are morally repugnant to them, or liable to cause harm. They will either ignore the command or come out of the trance. Valerie and I were occasionally playful with this, or experimental, using an absurd command to create a sort of “half-in/half-out” semitrance. While your brain wrestled with the unexecutable command, you were neither quite hypnotized nor quite normal, a curious feeling.

  After a minute of not being able to get a reasonable response from her, I said, “Why don’t you strip off all your clothes and go running down Memorial Drive”—and she raised her eyes up at me, apparently out of trance.

  “What did you say?” she asked me slowly. I repeated the command, smiling, but she didn’t seem amused. She shook her head, brow knit, then stood and stepped out of her sandals, unsnapped her halter and let it fall, and proceeded to roll down her tight jeans and underwear. I thought she was joking, though it was uncharacteristically bold behavior, since the corridor was well populated and the door to the lab had a small window at eye level.

  When she’d unrolled the jeans as far as her knees, I laughed and said, “Okay, stop it.”

  She gasped and stood bolt upright, and then crouched in a reflex posture of modesty, her right hand covering her pubic triangle while her left tried to pull up the jeans, without much success. Finally she duckwalked to behind a lab table, where she couldn’t be seen from the outside, and finished the job, blushing and angry. She asked me what the hell was going on.

  I described what had happened without attempting to interpret it. She gave me a lighthearted scolding and then puzzled it out: She did have a streak of sexual exhibitionism that she normally kept in check; my suggestion that she flaunt her charms to a few thousand strangers gave her permission to do what her subconscious had desired since puberty. Plus wanting to hurt her prudish father and other such traditional stuff.

  I’m no Freudian now and I wasn’t one then. To be fair, Valerie might have come up with an explanation closer to the truth if I had not withheld one bit of information—that her behavior had returned to normal as soon as I’d said “Stop it.” Secrecy is of course a reflex with me, and this looked like something that was worth hiding.

  Our researches wandered into other, not especially productive, directions, and eventually fizzled out when her course of study and legitimate research, in pursuit
of her doctorate, became too demanding. But I held on to the signal generator and pursued my own little project. I kept no written records. I never advertised for subjects, but instead used as guinea pigs the students who’d been hired as subjects for my research about resistance to language acquisition. Sometime in the course of each session I would turn on the sound generator, and ask them to do something absurd. If they were puzzled by the request, I would laugh and correct myself.

  It turns out that 28,430 hertz is some sort of “characteristic frequency” for most of the population. I could legitimately ask all of my subjects to take a hearing exam, and indeed most of the people for whom the ultrasonic whine was ineffective turned out to have hearing loss in the high frequencies, as I did. The two who seemed to have normal hearing may have been “deaf’ ultrasonically; there was no way to test for that.

  What happened was not hypnosis. I’m not sure it’s even related, except that Valerie had to be in a hypnagogic state to trigger the runaway biofeedback phenomenon that isolated the frequency. You can’t hypnotize someone and tell him to jump off a cliff. I can turn on my machine and ask you to jump off a cliff smiling, and you’ll do it.

  CHAPTER THREE: JACOB

  The CIA had been keeping an eye on Professor Nicholas Foley since the fall of ’78, when a low-echelon American Officer KCB agent came over to our side with an interesting list—thirty men and women who had graduated from “Rivertown,” an ersatz American village/training camp in the middle of Azerbaijan. A few of them we’d long since arrested and deported (they’d come to America in the fifties), but a baker’s dozen were still here, apparently living out normal American lives. All of them at least middle-aged.

  Foley was an interesting case in that he was a fairly prominent person, well respected in his field, which was the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and education. That’s not as narrow as it might seem at first: Foreign language is the classic huge failure of modern American education, and anybody who’s working on ways to make language learning easier or faster or more palatable to students does get attention. Foley was working on it at a very basic level, trying to psych out patterns of resistance to language learning among older children and young adults.

  And in his spare time he was a Soviet spy.

  We tailed him and bugged him for a couple of years without getting anything. In fact, we were about to double back—find out how an innocent man’s name had gotten on the list—when he accidentally played right into our hands. He did a dead drop of a list of people who might be “turned,” and the pickup was one of our own double agents. (The only one, actually, attached to this small office.) There was nothing on the list to identify him, of course, but she’d staked out the pickup site with a hidden video camera.

  She made a Xerox copy of the list and passed it on to her KGB higher-up. In some best-of-all-possible worlds, we would have assigned tails to everybody on that list. But there are too few agents and too many lists.

  Lists. My life is hemmed in by lists and charts, piles of dusty journals and stacks of computer disks. I’m John Jacob Bailey, a senior analyst for the CIA, head of a very small section that covers Boston and its environs. Cambridge is pretty much home to me, since I got my first Russian degree at Harvard. I should have kept at it to the doctorate; now I’d be living a fairly exciting life as an academic. Instead I quit after the master’s (Soviet Affairs, Georgetown, ’68) and went straight into the State Department and the CIA. Where I didn’t go was Vietnam, which claimed many of my contemporaries.

  It wasn’t just draft-dodging. I guess I was caught up in the Allen Dulles/Kennedy-era romantic notions about espionage. Envisioned myself going to exotic places, doing mysterious things, risking life and personal honor to keep the Big Dominos from dropping. I didn’t foresee spending the rest of my life immured in the Harvard and MIT libraries, translating and summarizing Soviet journals and magazines. Soviet academese is just as opaque and boring as the American variety, and their journalism makes U.S. News & World Report look positively effervescent.

  So when we do find an actual spy, everybody in the section gets somewhat wired. It would have been fun just to keep watching him, maybe push him a little bit, but we don’t really have any autonomy in such matters. We had to send a report to the Foreign Resources Division at Langley, and they sent back the expected reply: Wait.

  It turned out to be a fruitful wait, though. A couple of months later I got a padded envelope through Federal Express. It contained one sheet of paper, which was just what we needed to make Nicholas Foley turn.

  His office hours at MIT were from ten to twelve on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we knew. I went to meet him at noon on Tuesday.

  The door was wide open, Foley engrossed in a book, feet up on his desk. The wall that wasn’t solid books had dozens of framed watercolors, which I knew were his wife’s work. (I had earlier come upon the interesting and not-too-odd coincidence that she and I had studied watercolors with the same person, five years apart, at the Cambridge Adult Education Center. She was better than I.) The place looked lived-in but scrupulously neat.

  He didn’t look too much like the file photo, which was a two-year-old candid shot of him mowing the lawn. With his professor’s uniform—shapeless corduroy suit—he was impressive in a bearish, avuncular way. He was a big man with a paunch, but he moved with grace and precision. Unfashionably long hair, blond shot through with white, and a silky full beard.

  “Dr. Foley,” I said, “sorry to barge in on you like this, but we have a student in common, a woman I’m having a problem with. Could we talk?” I dropped a note in front of him that said, “Let’s talk outside,” in Russian.

  He stared at the note for a moment and then looked at me over his bifocals. “Of course. Are you free for lunch?” He rolled the note into a tiny ball as we agreed on a restaurant, and dropped it into his pocket.

  Neither of us said anything further until we were out of the building, walking toward Kendall Square. When he spoke, I could hardly hear his whispered Russian over the traffic noise: “—This is a first. Is it something urgent?”

  “Possibly. Interesting, at any rate.” I guided him toward a bus-stop bench and asked him to sit. Then I opened the padded envelope and handed it to him.

  His expression never changed. He glanced at the short document, looked at me once, and then reread it.

  Under an NKVD letterhead, typed in uneven Cyrillic capitals: “SPIES AND COLLABORATORS EXECUTED IN MONTH OF DECEMBER 1941” followed by a list of thirty-four names. There was a red circle around the names of his mother and father.

  He put it back in the envelope and returned it to me. “You aren’t who I thought you were.”

  “No,” I said. “State Department.”

  He smiled wryly at that. “Sure. State.” After a moment: “So what are you going to do?”

  “The next move is yours, actually.” I sat down next to him; the plastic windbreak gave us a pocket of privacy on the busy sidewalk. “You are an agent for the KGB. I’ve just shown you proof that they killed your parents. So?”

  He smiled and took off his glasses and started to polish them with a handkerchief. “What is your name?”

  “You can call me Jake or Jacob.”

  “Jacob. Thank you. Let me see.” He put the glasses back on and blinked at me with an unreadable expression. “I’m trying to gather my, thoughts. This is rather much to absorb.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Yes. Thank you.” He stared intently at the wind sculpture over the subway entrance. “Let me first dispose of the obvious. Anyone can find an old typewriter with Cyrillic characters—in Boston, anyhow. And the CIA—I mean the ‘State Department’—is no doubt capable of printing stationery with an NKVD seal.”

  “I can assure you that—”

  “No.” He held up a finger, still staring across the street. “I’m not saying I disbelieve you. Not about the document. Just acknowledging technicalities, for my own… predisposition toward completeness.r />
  “Second, more important. This document is most of a half century old. I hope you don’t take it as a lack of filial piety if I tell you that I am not greatly moved by it. Nor surprised.” He shifted around to look squarely at me. “I am no fool, Jacob. I’ve studied this period with some intensity; Soviet and German sources as well as American. No… what would surprise me would be proof that my parents had survived. For thirty years or more I’ve known that if they had somehow lived through the siege of Leningrad, they would have been killed during the Stalinist purges.”

  “You know this, and yet you work for them?”

  “The Stalinists?” He smiled ironically. “In the beginning there was the Cheka. The Cheka begat the OGPU. The OGPU begat the NKVD, which begat the NKGB, which begat the MGB, which begat the KGB. Actually, it’s more complicated than that But you get my point. The KBG is not the organization that arrested and executed my parents.”

  “It is their successor.”

  “To about the same degree that your CIA is the successor to the Tory spies of King George. Things have changed rapidly in Russia since the War.”

  Two arguing women stepped in front of us to wait for the bus. I gestured, and we both got up and walked on down the street We fell in behind a man walking a fast Doberman and let him stride out of earshot.

  “I’m flattered that you’ve gone to such evident trouble over me,” he said, “but I’m also puzzled. You must know that I’m not actually a KGB agent.”

  I managed not to laugh. “Really.”

  “Not in any real sense. Tell me, what have I done that you could take to a court of law?”

  “If I told you, I’d be compromising my sources,” I said. This wasn’t going according to plan. “But do you deny that you were born in Russia, trained by the MGB in a Soviet camp called Rivertown, and illegally inserted into this country with false documents? Do you?”

  “In 1953 I did immigrate here without proper papers. I was a child, though.”