Chapter 24

Frankfurt

11:50 am GMT, 1:50 pm Local

The departure platform was one level down. Monica figured the man who called himself Erich Rohm would guess she’d be heading there, boarding a train bound for some destination that would get her incrementally closer to New York. Despite the pain in his groin, he would go through the same mental process she did, study the various timetables, eventually narrow the choice down to two. Paris or Amsterdam. And eventually he would select the latter, simply because it left the soonest: just eleven minutes from now.

Her first instinct was to hide in the tiny lavatory until just before the doors closed, a tactic that had not worked well the last time she’d tried it. Also, because Frankfurt Main was an air and rail hub serving all of Europe, trains didn’t just make quick stops as they rolled through. Many remained at the platform for a long while allowing as many passengers as possible to board, whether they were headed toward Brussels or Munich or Nuremberg. Or Amsterdam, by way of Cologne. That meant she was a duck on the pond until the doors closed and the wheels started turning.

At a sundries shop that sold magazines and souvenirs she purchased a black sweatshirt with the word Deutschland emblazoned on the front in Germanic Fraktur lettering. She yanked off the tags and pulled it on over her head, then capped off the look with a baseball hat with a red, black, and yellow flag on the front. No sunglasses, although she did spot a cheap yellow pair left over from last autumn’s Oktoberfest in Munich. She liked them, but figured they’d make her stand out in this indoor crowd. She checked her look in a mirror, felt confident she would blend in and attract neither the attention of the police nor the man named Rohm.

As she limped toward the escalator that would take her down to the railway platform, she passed a crowded cocktail lounge packed with travelers enjoying lunch and a beer. They all seemed to be watching the newscaster on the giant television mounted near the ceiling, a split screen with the right half showing flashing lights and wild commotion inside the Frankfurt airport terminal. Far worse, the left half showed a still frame of a woman who appeared to have just left the baby changing station in Terminal One. A caption at the bottom of the screen read: Möglicher Verdächtiger bei Mord am Flughafen identifiziert.

Monica’s German was almost nil, but her panic returned as she realized her face—grainy and dark as it was—was already out in the news media. Every police officer in the country probably had a bulletin, which explained their heavy presence here at the station.

She tugged the bill of her cap further down over her forehead and kept moving. She riveted her eyes to the floor, except for an occasional nervous glance around the platform. Her train was already standing at the edge of Platform 3, the doors wide open, waiting for passengers to climb aboard. She inserted her ticket into the turnstile and edged through, then took one last glance over her shoulder as she made a beeline for the nearest second-class car.

The Cold War that dominated the last century’s political mindset indisputably created an almost Strangelovian paranoia which, in turn, led to the development of knee-jerk government programs that served little purpose other than ratcheting up suspicion and fear. And, ultimately, they wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Rattled by the discovery in the 1970s of a Russian program to weaponize the human mind, the American intelligence community devised a parallel project to study and identify a full spectrum of heretofore discounted paranormal experiences. Funded by monies funneled through the CIA and DIA, the venture dabbled in neuropsychic transmission, extrasensory mind control, and remote viewing influences. In applicable terms, the clandestine enterprise probed the alleged abilities of select individuals who claimed they could “see” events, locations, or images from a great distance. Within months, investigators at the newly founded Project MINDGAZE reported startling success in their para-psychic research and, at the direction of their intelligence community overlords, began to foster creative approaches through which they could apply their findings to covert operations, both theoretical and practical.

Over the years, close to one billion dollars were invested in the venture. The program’s truest devotees claimed incredible results, although no one outside the inner circle was permitted to see the evaluations and analyses. Since taxpayer dollars were involved, clandestine as they might have been, a team of Congressional bean counters was engaged to investigate the investigators—and analyze their findings. Many of the amazing results were debunked by these outside auditors, MINDGAZE was stripped of its funding, and the entire thing was folded into an obscure entity overseen by the National Security Council. A fraction of its original size, the project continued to explore the power of the human mind and paranormal perception, with limited success. Once again, independent researchers were brought in and, after a thorough probe that cost millions more, they concluded the data was neither compelling nor reliable enough to be used for any sort of military or intelligence actions. The recommendation was that the entire program be scrapped.

Officially, it was. Unofficially, MINDGAZE was integrated—through a series of shell companies and dummy corporations—into the Greenwich Global Group. In the early years the rejuvenated operation produced results that were interesting but not spectacular, which meant that each year the doctors in charge of its longevity were forced to justify their existence. Each year the G3’s executive board voiced renewed skepticism that the program’s eight-million-dollar annual budget was a wise allocation of finances, and each year it reluctantly renewed its funding on the last day of December.

Then Phythian came along.

The doctors and researchers at The Farm conducted multiple MRIs and SPECT scans, which showed that parts of his brain were lit up in ways that defied description. They floated all sorts of theories and pseudo-scientific lingo that might explain his innate abilities, all of which tested way off the charts. Gone were results that were just slightly above the random odds of chance. Phythian aced everything that was thrown at him, beginning with guessing four different shapes—square, circle, star, diamond—on the reverse side of a deck of cards. Perfect score. The experiments then graduated to standard playing cards: fifty-two out of fifty-two, each and every time. Next came random images of horses, trees, billboards, automobiles. One hundred percent.

The researchers were ecstatic almost to the point of orgasm. Not just because they finally had found the test subject they’d been seeking for decades; they also now had reason to ask—demand—that their annual funding be doubled. They also found something both peculiar and fortuitous during their experiments: Phythian’s success relied entirely on the presence of another human mind. He was able to “visualize” an image or a concept only if it first was filtered through another person’s brain, which he then quickly “hacked.” A deck of the same cards without a researcher present was useless.

The true breakthrough came when the program shifted from passive remote viewing to active mind control. Whether it was the result of his being submerged in the icy quarry all those years ago or some other unexplained event, Phythian proved himself to be adroit not only at reading minds, but pushing thoughts into them, as well. The incident with Dr. Segal on the BART train in San Francisco was the lynchpin of this new realization and, within weeks of his arrival at The Farm, the euphoric scientists determined their new research subject was the star pupil they’d been waiting for since the project began all those years ago.

Months of government-funded training allowed Phythian to sharpen his skills to such an edge that, at the train station at Frankfurt Airport, he almost knew what Monica was going to do before she did it. Same thing with Hazan, whom he’d met years ago and had already established a lasting extrasensory shortcut. That was what terrified the Greenwich Global Group more than anything: his flawless capacity to know what anyone within a thousand-yard reach was thinking, if he put his mind to it. The closer his physical proximity to the target, the better the “connection”—which, he now knew, was why the G3 had made sure there were almost infinite degrees of separation between themselves and the handful of operatives who were directly involved with planting the bomb in his airplane six years ago.

In any event, it was this close proximity—Monica had been standing no more than thirty yards away from him on the platform—that had turned her brain into easy pickings. Eitan Hazan, too.