‘POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS IS ONE OF THE GREAT SCARS OF OUR age,’ Åke Lund tells the audience in his soft, lilting accent. ‘Which is why we are fortunate to have with us our next distinguished speaker …’
The professor of clinical neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute has wild, chalk-white hair. He’s in his mid-sixties, a two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
The applause continues as I take my place at the podium. My water glass is charged. A technician checks the mike is working and gives me a thumbs-up.
I turn to check the title slide on the laptop is also displayed onscreen. ‘The Ripple-Effects of Trauma – New Treatments’, along with my name, in letters twenty centimeters high.
My talk is about the secondary effects of PTSD – how they act as a contagion upon those close to the primary; not about our returning veterans, but on their families: wives, husbands, children. I will speak about the phenomenon that led Hope, after months of living with my combat trauma, to become infected by it herself, without revealing the twist that has made it, for me, so tragic and personal.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor to be here today. I am enormously grateful for the opportunity to be—’
My attention is drawn to the face of a man in the second row.
As I lean forward, my hand knocks the glass onto the laptop. The imagery flickers and dies, the glass smashes, I try to pick up the pieces and cut my finger.
The technician rushes back onstage, followed by a very flustered-looking Lund. He leans past me to speak into the mike. ‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, please, let’s take a short break while we get things back online.’
I scan the auditorium, but the man I saw has gone.
I need air.
I take a Kleenex from my pocket, wrap it around the cut, and follow the emergency exit signs down a long hallway, which takes me to a loading bay. Two delivery drivers are smoking and talking amid piles of empty cardboard boxes, plastic packaging and several giant waste collection bins. Neither pays me the slightest attention.
The door opens. It’s the professor, a picture of concern. ‘Doctor Cain? I am sorry. Perhaps it would be better if we were to reschedule your presentation for tomorrow.’ He sees the wound on my hand. ‘Maybe you are in need of medical attention. We have an excellent—’
‘Thank you, Åke. It’s just a cut. I need a few moments. I’ll be fine.’
‘Of course. Will you be all right to resume your speech in, shall we say –’ he glances at his watch, ‘– an hour? Two?’
‘An hour would be perfect.’
Moments later, alone with my thoughts again, I hear the door open.
I hadn’t imagined it. Standing two meters from me is Stanislaw Koori, the man who trained Duke Gapes to remote view.
According to the file at the Army Research Laboratory, Koori was in his mid- to late sixties when he trialed the HITS helmet, which makes him seventy-five-odd now.
His accent still has a twist of Mitteleuropa, but is like nothing I’ve ever heard.
He reaches into his jacket, takes out a silver cigarette case and lights up an unfiltered cigarette, examining me with reptilian eyes.
When the Stanford Research Institute started the remote viewing program in the early seventies, on the back of all that CIA secrecy and money, Koori was one of a handful of psychics recruited to test the ‘psi’ phenomenon – whether we have powers that might be described as extraordinary: clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition and, strangest of all, psychokinesis, the ability to move, bend and break objects with the power of the mind.
Stani had come to the CIA’s attention at some LA psi salons and spoon-bending parties. He had demonstrated an ability to score highly in all of these areas, which persuaded the Agency to throw more money at it because US Intelligence believed the Soviets were even deeper into psi than it was.
He drops the butt and grinds it beneath a brown-and-white brogue. ‘There’s no magic in roaming time and space. Boredom is the viewer’s principal enemy. So when they asked if I’d like to test some kind of headgear that allows another person to see what the psychic sees, I was curious to know whether such a thing might be possible, even though it was clear to me the only person who believed in the project, at that stage, was the scientist himself.’
‘Kaufmann?’
‘His method of mining the data in which nature’s memory is held is one of the greatest achievements of all time. Suffice to say, after a year or so of working on it, as the evidence began to build that this thing might actually work, I thought it would be wise to …’
He hesitates.
‘Drop off the map?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Some people call it retirement. I’ve never had much of a liking for excessive, Draconian secrecy, of which our government is so fond.’
‘Then why are you here?’
He produces a sheet of paper and slowly unfolds it to reveal, in thick blue marker pen, a circle containing an eight-pointed star.
A month or so ago, while painting in his studio above San Francisco Bay, he spontaneously sketched this symbol in the bottom right corner of the canvas.
He hadn’t remote viewed for many years, he says, but the reflex action that produced this was more than familiar to him. Back in the day, remote viewers used to call them ‘ideograms’.
When the ideogram came through – sometimes it could be a squiggle, sometimes something more defined – the viewer and the monitor knew that the viewer was on the signal line, connected. That data from the target was about to come through.
‘Three days later, I was in my apartment. It was evening, and I was getting ready to eat. I got a vivid picture in my mind of this same symbol, and did what I should have done the first time: I sat, quietly composed myself, and began to jot down all my impressions of the target – like I used to do.’
What came to him were images, feelings, of something hot, very hot, like an oven or a furnace. And the number 22.
He let Google do the rest. The V-22 Osprey flashed up, and the location of the crash. Then he found my booking at the conference.
Koori lives on the West Coast. He doesn’t concern himself with current affairs much, but my name was familiar to him from the news generated by my encounter in the tower with the man he knew wasn’t Matt Voss. He’d trained Duke Gapes, after all.
‘I’ve felt nothing but guilt about that boy since I quit the program.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I knew they’d replace me with him, and that they’d turn our little tech demonstrator into something big, bad and operational.’
I say nothing.
He lights another cigarette and sucks in a lungful of smoke.
‘The first-generation helmet that Kaufmann built really wasn’t much to write home about. It used a classical computer in its bid to connect the hardware to …’
He pauses again.
‘Kaufmann had this dumb-ass scientific name for it – he called it holosphere.’ He brushes back what’s left of his hair.
‘Anyhow, it didn’t work too good, but well enough for Abnarth to give him more funding to develop an improved model.’
I ask if he and Abnarth ever met.
‘My, yes,’ he says. ‘The Senator was in and out of our lab all the time. More so when I told Kaufmann that something had changed with the integration of the quantum computer.’
‘Changed?’
‘It was trying to communicate with me.’
‘But we’re talking about a machine—’
‘No, Colonel. We’re talking about a channel via which the world of matter connects to the world of the immaterial.’
A breeze blows up through the loading bay.
Misty said her sister got calls from Duke while he was on the run. The idea was dismissed because of Lou’s Alzheimer’s.
But I now know they came at the point Duke was set to move from the HITS lab to the Canyon.
He told her he’d been in communication with his father, even though his father had been dead for years.
The suits who’d grilled Gapes and Offutt after the Grid’s meltdown even had a name for it: Reachback.
No wonder he’d told his mother he was scared.
I check my watch. I’m back on stage in five minutes.
‘And that’s when you quit?’
‘I know how this goes. I worked for the CIA and the military in the seventies. I retired. They brought me back to train a new generation of viewers after 9/11. I could see from Abnarth and Kaufmann’s fixation that the art of remote viewing – my art – was about to become a science. I knew I had to quit before I got in so deep they’d never let me go.’
He reaches into his jacket. I think he’s going for his cigarette case again, but he produces a small artist’s sketchbook and flicks through it. Each page is filled with numbers, strange runes and symbols, but prominent amongst them are my initials, as well as renditions – in all colors and sizes – of the circle with the eight-pointed star.
‘Native Americans wrote nothing down. Their ideas, their dreams and fears were communicated from one generation to the next through signs and symbols. The number eight represents balance and harmony. The circle represents protection. The star represents knowledge, particularly about things to come.’
He pauses.
‘I guess you must know this now. They called it the Hope Symbol.’
Symbols. What Mo and I also know as Jungian archetypes. Deep subconscious messaging. After the talk, but before I leave the hotel for the City Hall ferry terminal, I sit in my room, kill the TV news, which is beginning to obsess about the forthcoming conference, and Google ‘ankh’.
It was held by the early Christians as a symbol of eternal faith. The crucifix, which spoke of torture and death, was not adopted by the Church until the second or third centuries. The loop at the top of the ankh represented the soul, the cross below it the state of death. Together, they came to symbolize reincarnation.
The uppermost layer of Panel 4 had depicted my life and Hope’s in the most intimate detail. The layer beneath had consisted of that single image of the scan – our baby girl.
But Gapes had layered the entire cabin with meaning.
Panel 4 had held another kind of meaning – spiritual meaning.
Not birth, though. Rebirth.
Why?
Much of what Koori had said resonated in me.
Along with the voice in my head seconds before the V-22 began its death-roll – her voice.
The cell-memory therapy session with Mo, in which I had heard her talking to me. In which she had directed me to the night Jack had died and to my memories of our time at the beach.
And, yesterday, the girl on the peace march.
The ankh hadn’t been the only treasure on that old piece of leather: the Hope Symbol had been there too.
Jack hadn’t simply turned up at the Five Pines by accident.
He had sought out Pam and Hope.
And the tree of life? Did it mean that somewhere deep inside of him, Miracle Mac – who’d had the power to protect his friends and see the future – knew that at some point I would wander into Hope’s life too?