The President's Henchman (21 page)

Her face twisted in pain. She was unable to answer.

“Do you see any more trouble tags?” Todd asked. “Anyone you can name?”

“You,” she snapped.

She might as well have slapped Todd. It was all he could do to maintain control.

“You’re going to rest now,” he said. “You’re falling, falling, falling asleep. As you fall, each of the tags you had on you, all of your troubles, they’re falling away, too.”

He clicked off the television. The room became completely dark.

“When you wake up,” his disembodied voice said, “you will be free from your concerns. You will be rested and refreshed. But your subconscious will continue its debate: Who do you want to be, Nanette, Chana, or someone entirely new? Sleep well, my dear.”

Finishing the session with that endearment was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d saved this woman’s life, re-created her in the image
she’d
wanted, made her famous and affluent. All he’d asked in return was her gratitude. Her love. Occasionally, her body.

Yet she’d said
he
was one of the problems in her life.

How dare she?

He recognized his self-pity and repressed it with contempt.

He would not be weak.
Never
be weak again. He left Chana’s house. There was no place he could work out at that hour. No place to shred his muscles against the stubborn resistance of heavy weights. A battle perfectly symbolic of his struggle against a mindless world.

He’d have to run. Run until his legs burned and his lungs were on fire.

Or he found another outlet for his rage.

Sweetie attended 8:00 a.m. Mass at St. Al’s on North Capitol at Eye Street near North Capitol. Most parishioners attended the ten o’clock Gospel Choir Mass, but Sweetie preferred to worship more simply. Just her, a priest, and the Lord would have been fine. She received Holy Communion and felt as close to a state of grace as she could imagine.

That was why, after returning home, she didn’t pop her landlord one when he said, “Hey, great legs!”

Sweetie was sitting on Putnam Shady’s front steps, tying the laces of her running shoes, getting ready to run the Mall. The lawyer was strolling up the sidewalk carrying a copy of the
Washington Post
and a paper bag from a place called Lox o’ Luck. He was dressed in the kind of sweat clothes in which people never worked up a sweat. He wasn’t badly out of shape but for a relatively young guy his gut was getting soft. He seated himself next to Sweetie.

“Care for a schmeer?” he asked, opening the bag and tilting it toward Sweetie. “Grab a bagel; there’re plastic knives for the cream cheese.”

“Not before I run.”

“After then. Just ring the bell.” He started to get up.

“What kind of law do you do?” Sweetie asked.

“What kind of law do you need?” Shady asked, sitting down again.

“Not me. A friend.”

“Okay, your friend.”

“He needs someone who can chew the backside off a senator who might be in the mood to give him some trouble.”

Shady recalled the references Sweetie had given him: the president and her husband. He’d thought it was a joke, and not a bad one. After all, what could you do, call the White House and ask for the president? Explain that you wanted to get her take on somebody looking to move into your basement apartment.

But then he remembered Ms. Sweeney’s telling him she was a private investigator — and so, famously, was James J. McGill. The inference was easy.

“You really work with the president’s husband?”

“Lying is a sin,” Sweetie told him.

“Yeah, and we’re all sinners.”

“Me somewhat less than others.”

He looked at her legs again. “Sorry to hear that.” When she gave him a frown, he hurried on. “I advocate for the high-tech industry.”

“You’re a lobbyist.”

“Uh-huh. But I know a bulldog litigator or two. Is this for Mr. McGill?”

“No names for now,” Sweetie said.

“Okay. I can still refer someone. Like I said, just ring the bell.”

Shady got up and took his keys out, started up the steps.

Sweetie finished tying her shoes and got to her feet, ready to start her run. Before she did, she looked up at Shady. He had his key in the front door but hadn’t gone in. He was staring at her legs once more. His imagination working overtime. Her state of grace receded.

“Keep it up, you could be in trouble.”

The lawyer raised his eyes. “How do you feel about spanking?”

“Some people need it.”

Shady grinned. As if that was exactly what he had hoped to hear.

Damon Todd decided he had to kill James J. McGill.

He hadn’t been able to find anyone else to absorb his anger all night long. Not even after he’d offered himself as a target in high-crime areas. It was ridiculous. Washington had a harrowing reputation for inner-city crime, but he hadn’t been able to find a jaywalker, much less a felon.

He ascribed the problem to himself. He looked like someone you didn’t fuck with: obviously strong and visibly pissed off. That fool on the Georgetown campus had to have been blinded by the fact that he’d held a gun. But the more alert predators, they knew. They’d chosen to find easier pickings.

Which left Todd so frustrated he wanted to howl at the moon. Only the sky was overcast that night. That was when it came to him that there was a specific person he
had
to kill. McGill.

That overprivileged prick wasn’t going to go away. Perhaps it had been a miscalculation on Todd’s part to have Chana offer McGill money. A former cop, McGill had to see the $20,000 as a bribe. Whether the bribe was too big or too small, Todd couldn’t say.

Maybe the amount was irrelevant. The son of a bitch might be a do-gooder. An
honest
former cop. What were the odds? With his rotten luck, too damn good. If Chana didn’t go to see McGill, he’d come to her. And Todd wouldn’t be able to give Chana the intense therapy she needed if he had to keep looking over his shoulder for the meddlesome McGill.

Todd had spent most of the night jogging around. Not nearly enough exertion for him. So he decided to run the Mall until he was exhausted. He entered the area from New Jersey Avenue, SE. He skirted the Capitol complex and ran north to Constitution Avenue and turned left. His path would carry him just south of the White House. There’d be no getting at McGill there. But the note McGill had sent to Chana’s house gave his business address on P Street. That was a location that would bear looking into … as would the woman running toward him.

To his eye, she looked exactly like the blonde in that old TV commercial for Apple computers. The takeoff on Orwell’s
1984.
The one where the woman in track clothes smashes the giant image of Big Brother with a sledgehammer. Talk about his kind of woman.

He gave her a polite nod as she approached, thinking if she smiled, he’d turn around and run with her. He should have known better. The look
she
gave him, it made him think she was a cop. If he tried the slightest move … hell, maybe she had a hammer on her.

Well, there were two other women in D.C. besides Chana Lochlan who would take him in. In fact, he was staying with one of them, a publicist for local sports heroes. She’d been happy to see him. Love him. Welcome him into her bed. True, she was one of his subjects. Acting on implanted suggestions to hold him dear. But there was nothing like a sure thing.

It’d been twenty years since Damon Todd had sex with a woman he hadn’t hypnotized first.

“So is this guy Svengali or what?” the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency asked Daryl Cheveyo.

The field officer had shepherded Damon Todd’s proposal through several layers of bureaucratic review. Now he was speaking to the CIA’s number two man in the DD’s office.

“There’s nothing B-movie about this, sir,” Cheveyo answered. “It’s not legal or even ethical, but from what we’ve read and seen, it works. And it could have at least one important application for us.”

“Run it by me again,” the deputy director said.

The man wasn’t inattentive; he was bone tired. The Agency was very busy trying to figure out what was going on down in Cuba. Lots of people were sleeping in their offices, but not for very long at any one time.

“The medical term is dissociative identity disorder, DID,” Cheveyo began. “It used to be called multiple personality disorder.”

“Sybil,” the deputy director said. “Sorry. Don’t mean to be flip. I have a tendency to crack wise when I’m groggy. Please continue.”

“Yes, sir. As a mental process, dissociation spans a broad spectrum. Most of us experience it in a mild way every day. We daydream; we lose ourselves in a movie; we get absorbed by a book. In doing these things we become detached from the world around us. The reasons for such commonplace dissociation are mundane.”

“You’re bored listening to some numbnuts give a windy speech, you space out,” the deputy director said.

Cheveyo smiled. “Exactly. At the serious end of the continuum, if you’re a small child being abused in some horrific way, your mind might find a more dramatic way to ease the pain. Repeated dissociation can lead to the creation of one or more alternate personalities to carry the load. Someone tougher. Or indifferent. Or even
deserving
of suffering.”

“That’s predominantly where this problem originates, abused kids?”

The deputy director had pictures of three grandchildren on his credenza.

“Yes, sir. Current estimates are that 99 percent of all people with DID suffered repeated severe abuse — physical, sexual, or emotional — before the age of nine. When it is physically impossible to escape such torture, a child often turns to the last avenue of retreat: He goes away in his mind. He hides from reality in order to endure it.”

“Miserable bastards,” the deputy director muttered.

The abusive adults, Cheveyo understood him to mean. Most of whom had been abused themselves. But there was no time to get into that.

“As a means of defense,” Cheveyo went on, “dissociation is highly effective. So much so that dissociative escape can become a conditioned reflex. A practiced child may use it automatically anytime he feels threatened, whether the threat is real or not.”

The deputy director sighed and rubbed his tired face.

“Please tell me we’re not dealing with someone who has abused children.”

“No, sir. My concern is that Dr. Todd may have suffered emotional trauma himself. His personality doesn’t seem entirely integrated and cohesive, at least from casual observation.”

“But he still has something to offer that may interest us?”

“Yes, sir. Standard practice in treating DID sufferers is to use therapeutic counseling, medication, hypnotherapy, and other adjunctive therapies to bring the patient back to his root, or true, personality. This regimen has a good success rate.”

“But that’s not what Todd does?”

“No, sir. Dr. Todd has reasoned that the root personality had to be essentially flawed, weak if nothing else, not to have physically escaped the untenable living conditions. So he has created a program of what he calls ‘crafted personalities.’”

“He’s playing God? Deciding who or what people should be?”

“No, sir. He endeavors to elicit from his subjects the kind of person each of
them
would most like to be … Then he helps them to become those people.”

The deputy director raised his eyebrows. “And he’s succeeded in doing that?”

“So he claims. He says a number of his unidentified subjects have reached positions of some significance.”

“If they’re unidentified, they could also be fictional. He could claim to have created half the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, couldn’t he?”

Funny that the deputy director’s should mention singing, Cheveyo thought.

“Sir, with the press of business, you may not have noticed the erratic public behavior of two prominent persons in town the past few days.” Cheveyo recounted “Lady Godiva’s” ride on the Mall and Congressman Fleming’s fatal aria in the House of Representatives.

“That was this man Todd’s work?”

“He won’t admit to it, given Congressman Papandreou’s fatal heart attack, but the two people behaving strangely match the profiles of two of Dr. Todd’s anonymous patients.”

The deputy director took a moment to absorb this information.

“And what does he propose to offer us?”

“His technique for crafting new personalities.”

“Which he hasn’t told you so far.”

“No, sir. But he claims he could work with covert operatives. Contrive new personalities for them that they could enter at will, the way an abused child can automatically shift personalities to escape pain.”

The deputy director finally saw where things were going.

“An agent who could do that could shift to a personality who didn’t know what his primary personality’s assignment was. He could never give himself away. The information he carried would stay locked up in his head.”

Cheveyo said, “It would likely be safe from physical torture. Whether it could withstand psychological assaults and the use of drugs is an open question.”

“Still, it’d give us quite a leg up on where we are now. So what’s your reservation?”

“As I’ve said, sir, it’s mostly the man himself. I don’t trust him. But there’s also the question of using research that has no legitimate foundation. Dr. Todd has done his work under the radar for the very good reason that no reputable institution would ever have approved it. Using only Congressman Fleming as an example. He sang light opera in college, but he wasn’t going to make anyone forget Pavarotti. To get him to go from good to great, and not have any awareness of it, Todd must have …” That was when it truly hit Cheveyo. “Todd must have led Fleming in a direction of Fleming’s choosing but crafted the personality so that it was completely hidden from his consciousness. It’s clear that Dr. Todd has manipulated his subjects in ways of which they are unaware and to which they could not have given their consent. If it got out that we used such research, it would look very bad for us.”

The deputy director said, “The sonofabitch is proving himself to us. He didn’t kidnap any of his subjects, did he? Didn’t do anything that would remind people of Josef Mengele?”

“Not so far as I know.” The hesitation was clear in Cheveyo’s voice.

“And if he worked for us, it would be under conditions we would control. There’d be no chance of Todd’s playing practical jokes on people. And if he doesn’t go public with what he’s done, and we don’t tell, nobody should be embarrassed by anything.”