General Elijiah Grazier sat in the overstuffed office chair to the left of my desk. The general, a two-star, almost slouched, his right leg crossed over his left; the creases on his trousers were taking a beating in the process. His black shoes, however, had a perfect spit-polish.
Grazier’s skin had a light-brown tone. Flecks of gray had invaded the close-cropped hair at his temples. The general’s expression was anything but happy as he slowly flipped the pages of the latest report on Prisoner Alpha.
“This doesn’t show much progress, Tim.” Grazier looked up from the last page.
I’d known Eli Grazier for close to twenty years now. His understanding of science and his willingness to integrate it into combat doctrine had led him to a unique position as the JCS liaison with DARPA and a whole host of “black” projects.
But there was another aspect of his personality. Like so many successful high-ranking military officers, Eli demonstrated traits common to psychopathy: he was charismatic, confident, fearless, ruthless, and extremely focused. These traits—when moderated and rationally utilized by the individual—produced an extremely productive military officer. Assuming I could have talked him into taking the PCL-R—the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised—or the PPI—the Psychopathic Personality Inventory—the man would have scored a zero on guilt, remorse, and empathy.
Once you understood that about Eli—and realized he understood it about himself—he wasn’t that bad of a human being. I respected him, enjoyed his company, and never forgot who or what he was.
“Eli? You were expecting . . . what? That she’d just cascade, wake up one morning, and declare, ‘I’m Jane Doe Smith from Paducah, and I’ve been faking all along. I’m really a Chinese spy. This is the name of my handler, and here’s his address in San Francisco.’ It doesn’t work that way. Not with the level of apparent dissociative behavior we think Alpha exhibits. When it comes to her diagnosis—”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re off the map. I know.” He leaned forward and tossed the report onto the corner of my desk. When he flopped back, his foot was jerking repetitively as an expression of irritation. “What about that electrical doohickey she built?”
“That’s a precise word if ever I’ve heard one.”
Grazier gave me a wide grin. “Sorry, I just knew I was talking to an ex-Marine.”
“General, there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.”
“So I’ve been told.” The grin faded. “She’s a loose end, Colonel. I can tell you, a damn fly couldn’t have gotten into that lab where we caught her unless it was scanned five times in the process.”
I gave Grazier an expressive shrug. “My best call is that she’s honestly ignorant of who she is and has no memory beyond that day at Los Alamos. Since she’s been here, she hasn’t made a single slip. Not one. We’ve had cameras on her every moment, including remote sensors to monitor heart rate, respiration, eye movement, pupil dilation, and skin temperature. We’ve seen no measurable reaction at the random mention of handlers, agencies, or oatmeal for that matter. Sometimes she’ll cue on CNN or BBC news programs, and we’ve tied those arousals to mentions of parts of Europe, but not to specific countries. The same with North Africa, Central America, Greece, and Italy—which shouldn’t be a surprise given her printing style and preference for Romance languages.
“And here’s another oddity: She struggled with numbers, but now that she’s figured them out, she’ll light up over an equation. The same with a chemistry diagram, or physics illustration, but not over the terms to describe them.”
“I don’t understand.” Grazier laced his fingers over his knee.
“We don’t either. If we insert the words—boson, quark, electron, uranium, argon, force, erg, particle, fission, nuclear, etc.—she’s been oblivious until recently.”
“What’s changed?”
“Eli, she’s watched enough television that she’s learning the scientific terminology. My staff and I have discussed providing her with a couple of scientific texts, just to see what reaction we get.”
“And why haven’t you?”
I pressed my steepled fingers to my lips. “Call it a hunch.”
“A hunch about what?”
“I’m not sure we should be giving her those tools just yet.”
“Tools? That’s an interesting word to use.”
I pointed toward the monitor that displayed Prisoner Alpha’s room and the table with the doohickey. “General, that piece of equipment she’s built? We don’t know what it is or what it does. All we can tell you is that it seems to project two electromagnetic fields out of either end when it’s plugged in. On occasion, she’ll turn it on. Then, with a great deal of precision, she’ll spend an hour or two tapping a wire on part of that exposed coil. We know from our instruments that the electromagnetic fields fluctuate.”
“You told me it wasn’t a radio.”
“A radio has to have certain components like an antenna, tuning coil, speakers, and so forth. This thing Alpha built has none.”
“So,” Grazier mused, “she remains an idiot savant?”
“We call it savant syndrome these days. As for myself, I’m not even sure I want to go with ‘Not Otherwise Specified.’”
“Since the DSM-5, you can’t take the NOS cop out.”
I considered my words carefully. “Screw the DSM-5! I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy who likes NOS. But, General, my gut says that she’s as competent and mentally composed as you or I.” Pausing for effect, I added, “She excels on the ‘culture-free tests’ we use for special populations.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
I threw my arms up. “Eli, I’ve been in this business for decades . . . seen just about everything. She’s not giving off the tells I’d expect to see in her posture, expression, eye contact, or behavior. I’ve worked with traumatized people with suppressed memory; I know the signs, the subtle quirks. She’s not giving me any. Her brain morphology and functioning are completely normal. Physiologically, her arousals are normal. She just cues to stimuli that we can’t fit into a pattern yet.”
“Then what the hell is she doing in there, watching TV all day and doodling on her pads?”
“My guess, Eli?” I paused to take in his reaction. “She’s studying us and taking notes. If you’d get me that linguist I’ve requested for months—”
“Oh, bullshit! She’s playing you, Tim. Now, I admit, you’re one of the smartest guys I’ve ever run into. But maybe that’s what she’s banking on. If that’s the case, I’m even more impressed by the lady.”
“How’s that?”
“Because if she can play you, how much more brilliant does that make her? Face it: She’s a spy. One so important that her handlers tried to kill her rather take the chance she’d talk.”
“Then why fake a disorder?”
“Maybe that was the protocol in case she got caught. She studied the DSM thoroughly, knowing exactly what to manifest so we’d diagnose her with a severe disorder. When she was rated using the Global Assessment of Functioning, she knew how to manipulate us into scoring her down in the twenties. Tim, you’ve been in the trenches. Even nuts who know the system beat the GAF scale all the time. They’ll tell a clinician just what he needs to hear so that he’ll score them a nice competent eighty and let them walk.”
My gaze fixed on the little model Ducati on the corner of my desk. “I’d say it’s more like she just stepped into this world from somewhere else.”
“Just in from Mars, or Outer Bumfuckistan?” Grazier leaned forward, pointing a finger. “The only problem with that, Doc, is that you’re grasping at straws. It’s a really small world, and there are no lost tribes of attractive white people out there. And second, bucolic hicks from the highlands don’t just appear inside locked-down high-security labs. They don’t build clever electric gizmos out of spare parts. Nor do unidentifiable agents seek to murder them in parking garages.”
“We’re missing something, Eli.”
“Give her the physics book. Let’s see what happens.”
I arched my “this-is-a-bad-idea” eyebrow.
“Just do it, Doc. I take full responsibility.”
Did I tell you that people who demonstrate psychopathic traits lie with incredible facility?