Flyin’ East, Man?
Michael
"Doctor, I'm sorry I didn't get in touch yesterday I I wanted to keep my powder dry after my initial interview with Dr. West, so let me give you the layout the human terrain, as it were. He was very evasive. I read your readout of your call with him on Monday, he didn't give me much more than that. I was trying to kind of press him on more information on DeFreeze just so we had it, you know, for our operation. It seemed to be the best way to kind of get into talking about things so he gave me the basics.
He said that DeFreeze has a history of petty crime, drug and gun offenses. He is, or was, a family man, or is a frustrated family man, but in the late 60s found himself on the wrong end of a whole bunch of deals. Now he was an LAPD snitch, DeFreeze, so this must be where his sort of relationship with law enforcement started. He was getting basically sweet parole deals from the D.A. down in LA because he was giving information on these petty drug and gun crimes. By 1969 he had surpassed his previous activities and actually used his weapon in the course of a robbery and it was a bank robbery or an attempted bank robbery. DeFreeze got shot, got sent to Vacaville and West said that he was one of many test subjects that were part of the program that the Agency was running up in Vacaville at the prison.
West says that's where Westbrook came in the idea that they were going to use drugs and conditioning to bring criminals, career criminals like DeFreeze, into a place where they could be reintegrated into society; again just standard sort of bleeding edge, CIA Phoenix Program-type stuff. Now Westbrook has this Black Pride thing he tried to get to instill in DeFreeze and other prisoners, with the Black Cultural Association, so West told me that his working theory is that the seven-headed serpent and all of the SLA garbage—not the maoism but the possibly tainted stuff, he thinks that came from one of the kids, one of the Maoist kids, the Peking House ones.
So the whole time I could tell he was obfuscating, lying, being very evasive; he gave me these little dribs and drabs of information, so I said I would want to have a follow-up interview today. West said he was going out of town for a speaking engagement, for law enforcement. He didn't give me many more details than that, so today I went back to the office, hypnotized his secretary and went into the office to check out his files. I didn't buy any of it so I wanted to get more information. I've got some documents that I xeroxed—I felt a little bit like Daniel Ellsberg—but I'm going to telefax them up to you because my particular expertise doesn't stretch to the stuff I found in the files, but I've kind of put it into three quick bullet points for your perusal."
The Violence Center that he has been planning, the one that the uproar ended up scuttling. West envisioned it not really as a reconditioning center but a data processing clearinghouse. So in other words he would bring people in, interview them, quantify them, use the Math to basically you know put together a huge database of Black crime—or American crime, what have you. Now I've got some of the documents here and it's obvious—and this is where I can't help—he's got computers working on this stuff and there's a lot of technical jargon in here I don't understand so I will telefax this up to you. Like I said, some elements are esmological but most of them have to do with using computers to predict crime.
He was obfuscating on who worked on these volunteers up in Vacaville. He said drugs and conditioning were involved. I find out that he has brought two—and this was in the underground press, but they didn't get it quite right—he brought on two Boston-based psychosurgeons to work on these volunteers up in Vacaville. Their names are Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin, they've written books—I''ll send you all the bibliographical information you can check it out—but Jolly brought Ervin out to UCLA in '72 (possibly as a reward for this work or a means for him to work more intensely with these subjects) so Ervin's in town.
I went through his correspondence. Jolly is very very good friends with three men who have promised to save his program if the feds cut funding. Do you want to guess who those three men are?
"No," says Marshall. "Tell me."
"Ronald Reagan, Reagan's Chief of Staff Ed Meese, and California's Health and Welfare secretary Earl Brian. All three of these men want to use the Violence Center in California, avoid all federal entanglements, and it's clear from these letters that they are willing to do this secretly. They really believe that West and his team can reprogram Black criminals that West and his team of psychosurgeons can do that."
Marshall asks, "Could you tell from what you saw how to what degree this was being financed by the Project, our Project?"
Merrick says, "I have to imagine, I mean the computer equipment alone would have to be project supplied, right? I mean again I don't know enough about computers to be able to talk about this in any real way but just the fact that I can't understand it tells me that it must be some sort of advanced technology. When he told you he wasn't doing this for the CWG or for the Project I think it may have seemed like the truth to him because he's skated through the last 20 years of his career getting funding from the federal government in every possible way. The Agency certainly could have been used as a cutout to supply the funding for all this stuff. But you know West is—or at least is now, I don't know if he will be after this—but he is a Sandman so he know he's he knows what it takes to be able to requisition and request advanced material."
"So my question is why was he hiding the psychosurgery? Because we're obviously both Sandmen. I'm familiar with brain hacking, I know what it involves. Why leave that out? So that seems to me to be the salient element of his obfuscation
Marshall: "But also why isn't he concerned that what's happening with the Hearst girl will get back to him?
Merrick: "He's really not is he and that makes me... I really think that you should get somebody with some technical expertise to look at these documents. Like I said I'm going to telefax them up, but I feel like in there may be some of the answers because if the computer technology is somehow working with the psychosurgery we could be looking at something here, you know what I mean?"
And of course that gets Marshall thinking about Operation WISHING WELL and about the chip in Charley's head and you know all of the advanced CWG stuff that was happening before we broke them up. Marshall considers sending Merrick to trail Jolly on his trip to talk to law enforcement, but Merrick didn't check Jolly's secretary's book for any travel information (he's not an especially trained black-bagger, after all.)
We didn't have Jocasta kill Jolly because he was on the "medium" list of CWG folks to keep an eye on and to potentially disrupt (and in fact Jocasta did just that thing, with her leaks to the underground press) but not kill... yet.
—
So to get these technical documents (at least the computer end of them) from Jolly's Violence Center interpreted, I'd like Marshall to give me a Savoir-Faire (Project SANDMAN)-16 roll; while the Continuity Working Group has been largely purged from sensitive spots in Granite Peak thanks to URIEL's hard work the past 4-5 months, especially among the highly-technical sections, it would do Marshall good to suss out who in the advancing computing research areas at GP can be trusted. Also, the WISHING WELL-related "operation" that Roger undertook under the influence of his new "loa"... that's something Marshall can definitely look into more deeply, and may even come out of that Savoir-Faire roll. As far as the neuro-implant material in these documents is concerned, that's a Physician-16 roll.
Brant
Savior-Faire.
>> SUCCESS by 2
Physician.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Michael
(I'll start with the Physician crit.)
Marshall goes deep into the Violence Center/Jolly West's neurosurgery material overnight on Friday/Saturday while he waits to hear back from his deep moles at Granite Peak. Again, West is no surgeon, but Drs. Mark and Ervin are, and after very quickly familiarizing himself with their 1970 book Violence and the Brain sent over from Berkeley ILL by Sophie, Marshall looks over the clinical information contained in Jolly West's UCLA office files. Some of it has to do with Mark and Ervin's work in Boston with severely disturbed patients with a history of violent acting-out: epileptics and those with severe brain damage. In their experiments, areas of the brain associated with violence were identified through EEG feedback from electrical brain stimulation, then once the areas were identified, a chemical-coated electrode was stereotactically introduced to the area and a low level of current introduced. Mark and Ervin's work was successful but the necessary treatment equipment was cumbersome, the surgery dangerous and time-consuming, and most of their patients in Boston in the '50s and '60s ended up being clinically treated with lobotomies after the experimental electrode treatment.
But Marshall sees in Mark and Ervin's stumbling neurosurgical work an awareness that with further data, a deeper understanding of the brain, and a cybernetic control system, that behavior could be expanded past the mere control of a patient's "fight-or-flight" impulses. Moreover, with high-pass radio signals, such control could be made wireless, meaning there'd be no need for the patient to be hooked physically to the medical controls, rendering the implants much less cumbersome to the patient. The mind-machine interface necessary for such intricate control was clearly decades in the future, Mark and Ervin concede, but the potential is there for anyone with the 20-30 years (and experimental human subjects) to perfect it.
Which brings us to the computer side of things. By daybreak Saturday, Marshall's people at the Peak have come back with further information on bleeding-edge computer-aided Brain Hacking within the project. Of course within the INDIGO files we have more details on Charley's recording chip, taking high-density visual and audio input from the brain's sensory-processing centers and feeding them to a future-tech storage medium implanted in the patient. But what about using this brain-computer technology for behavioral control, the kind of work Mark and Ervin and West were theoretically selling to Governor Reagan? Well, anyone looking to do that kind of work would need the WISHING WELL tech, and know how to deploy a mind-machine interface. That means, essentially, OZYMANDIAS, given all the work on the experimental subjects at Vacaville happened back in '70s and '71. There are no notes in our seized CWG files on Vacaville per se, but they could've been destroyed well before ALLOCHTHON/URIEL's purge of the CWG.
Jolly's computer-esque esmological flowcharts on violent actions and reactions, social programming and social sanction, where do they fit in? Marshall considers the overlap points of the brain interface and advanced computer storage and flowchart-style behavior analysis. If OZYMANDIAS's brain chips could store months of audio and video data, why couldn't they also contain detailed programming, based on typical responses to situations: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Like that Kubrick movie, a hardened criminal with no conscience could become as docile as a lamb... until a radio signal fed new operating data into the control chip. You would have on your hands remote servants (or, indeed, assassins) who were more versatile than post-hypnotic subjects because you wouldn't need to spend the time in person giving them new instructions. Just encode the data, send out a high-frequency radio signal, and boom, your lamb becomes a lion.
Whatever happened with Cinque and the other folks at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville back in '70 and '71, one thing is clear: if Marshall wants more information on the nature of the "treatment" Cinque and his cohort received at Vacaville, he's going to need to talk to someone who was actually there. And with Jolly "out of town," that leaves fellow Phoenix Program alum and erstwhile Black Power papa Colston Westbrook over at the Linguistics department at Berkeley. Of course, he's been in hiding ever since Cinque put him on his "Uncle Tom death list," "an enemy to be shot on sight," but Marshall has loads of ways of finding where he's hiding out: law enforcement contacts, Agency contacts, SCANATE, etc.
Brant
Is Westbrook known to Marshall as a Sandman? Or is he "merely" a Company asset? Regardless, yes, Marshall would like to know where Westbrook is these days so that he (Marshall) can pay him a visit. What's my best way of pulling that information?
Michael
Merely Company; Donna has no record of him as a trained Sandman and he's only appeared in any of the Jolly West documents as a dupe, a cutout, a talented linguist and "programmer" but not one with NLP capability. Whether or not West might have used Westbrook as a vector for actual Project source-code-laden memetics in unclear from the West files, but it could easily be done. Jolly's personally more of an NLP guy than a memetics guy but again, CWG had the resources back in '70 and '71 to use Westbrook as a memetic carrier easily, especially if Westbrook had any residual sincere belief in "Black Power." How sincere Westbrook is, you're not sure but in the press since the Hearst kidnapping he has definitely laid the "Cinque is my brother" jive on a little thick.
Three options as Marshall sees it to find Westbrook:
Press reports have indicated that SFPD and the FBI have hooked Westbrook up with protective custody as a material witness and the victim of death threats from Cinque and the SLA. So Marshall could pull some law enforcement strings to get the safehouse information; Legal Enforcement Powers 3 would do that with Hypnotism erasing Marshall's trail. He could do this on Saturday easily, head over to either the Federal building or SFPD's SLA task force headquarters.
Certainly it's a possibility the Agency has its own tabs on him given how easily he could expose the entire Vacaville project (or at least the Agency's end of it). And if Marshall doesn't want to go through SFPD/FBI, the CIA contacts might allow for some more information on what the non-SANDMAN Agency has in their files about Westbrook. Might take a little longer than option 1 given Marshall would need to make phone calls to Langley etc.
Pat Price. He's already been "working" the Hearst case but hasn't been able to give anything of value to law enforcement (which seems noteworthy to Marshall given his past "hit" rate). The advantage here is getting Pat to look for Westbrook avoids all law enforcement entanglement but of course what Pat sees with his remote viewing might not be temporally or spatially relevant, given his powers. Or some combination of these!
Brant
Oh, Pat Price, easy choice.
Michael
(Okay, we'll have Russ and Hal call Pat in on a Saturday and head into SRI. I'll kick this off tomorrow morning.)
When Marshall gets to the SCANATE offices at SRI in Menlo Park bright and early on Saturday morning, Pat's there on his lonesome; Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff didn't even bother to come in. Ordinarily, Marshall might think Hal is off somewhere gallivanting around on the backroads of Northern California, but Hal's famous love of fast cars and motorcycles has dropped off considerably since Uri Geller's "motorcycle accident" a month or so ago. He's in the same old break room where Mitch first met the rest of the team and felt something in the wires of SRI. The offices have a desolate, unoccupied feeling on this late April weekend; given now how the nearby Augmentation Research Center project's been scuttled, this entire wing of the SRI offices is pretty dead. Pat Price sits at the round formica table with a Styrofoam cup of instant coffee, a Winston in his right hand, and a cheap tin ashtray. He's reading the Chronicle and puts his paper down when Marshall walks in.
"Mornin', Doc. I haven't seen you in an age. Expected to see you at Uri's all-star funeral—you know, in the news clips on the teevee—but as far as I can tell I didn't see you amongst the loyal bereaved in Tel Aviv," he says mordantly and, Marshall can tell with his ability to read body language and intonation, no lack of irony. Pat was never a fan of Uri's. "So. Hal and Russ say you've got something for me that can't wait until Monday?"
Brant
Marshall snaps a photograph of Westbrook out of his blazer pocket. “Yes. Find this man.” He hands him the photo.
Michael
(For the lolz, it's got to be this photo (minus caption of course))
Pat takes a draw off the cigarette, puts it down, and looks at the photo. "Oh yeah, I've seen this guy in the papers and on teevee. The guy who worked with the SLA kids in prison. You know SFPD and the feds came up here to find someone who could find Patty and her pals, right?" Pat leaves what happened when that occurred unspoken, for now.
"So we're dispensing with the usual 'put Pat in the isolation booth and give him a bunch of coordinates' rigamarole now too? That's good. Better to cut to the chase." Marshall can tell that Pat is trying to please him, keeping things loose, but Marshall can also tell the old ex-cop is a little tense.
Pat sits still, closes his eyes with the photo clutched in his hand, spends about 20 to 30 seconds concentrating, then puts down the photo. He looks right in Marshall's eyes. "University Village in Albany. Grad student housing for Cal. The name on the register and the buzzer is Ngumbo, N-G-U-M-B-O. The apartment's a mess, there's clothes and dirty dishes and shit all over the place." Pat pauses. "He's there with his wife and infant son. There's luggage in the living room, half-full. They've either just come back from somewhere or are getting ready to move. The vibes were tense. I didn't see anyone else on the door or in the building lobby, no PD or campus security." Pat cocks an eyebrow and picks up his cigarette.
Brant
In response to Pat commenting on Marshall dispensing with the usual protocols, Marshall says: “We are past that now, Mr. Price. You are playing the game.” After Pat gives him the information, Marshall thanks him politely, takes the photo, and calls Sophie.
Michael
"Livermore," Sophie says. She's in on a Saturday as Marshall has asked of all URIEL North personnel.
Brant
“Sophie, I need you to come with me to meet someone. Not field work. I’ll explain on the way. Be ready in 30.” Marshall is going to swing by Livermore to pick up Sophie and bring her with him; he figures he needs someone familiar with linguistics, which he is not.
Michael
Sophie hops in when Marshall arrives at Livermore, all business, a leather satchel over her shoulder. "Marshall. What's the situation?"
Brant
“A side project,” Marshall says, smoking, one hand on the wheel. “This thing with DeFreeze keeps nagging at me … I cannot discern if what is going on is simply one of our … predecessor operation’s experiments slipping the leash, or if he’s been compromised in some way that is, ah, more problematic. All signs so far point to DeFreeze’s time in the pen, but the only person who would have any intel on that is this man.” He tosses her Westbrook’s photo.
“Strange character. We knew each other — vaguely — in Vietnam. He’s a linguist. And mercenary. I want to find out what he knows but I suspect … I suspect — that his specialities lie outside my wheelhouse. So I turn to you.” He glances at her for a moment, taking his eyes off the road. “I’ll get us in, we’ll play it all very mundane, Company business. But I will be relying on you to help me figure out the right questions to ask. Understood?”
Michael
"Understood. So he's not one of ours but he does belong to the Company, then? I've been keeping up with his... rather outrageous statements in the press on DeFreeze and Hearst. I'm not familiar with his academic work but it seems that may have all been a smokescreen anyway, for his work up at the prison hospital. If he does have any authentic facility with linguistics, even if not a trained Sandman, he may have some innate resistance to The Language. Nothing like Project training, of course, but some measurable quotient."
"I can certainly talk shop with him to some extent on linguistics, sociology. Is our cover CIA then? Poking around after the SLA, making sure he stays schtum about the Vacaville business?"
Brant
“Yes — we’re just Company men — sorry, you know what I mean — asking some questions. He’s smart. He’s reading the news. He’ll put two and two together. Plus going in, a man and a woman, that will help put him at ease.”
Michael
(awesome, loving the pacing here)
(Marshall getting shit done competently is good TV)
(it's all walk-and-talks, baby)
(also, shades of the Xanten/Keiner interrogations! oh my heart, it seems so long ago but it was only a year this month )
"Understood. Just like old times at the Barn, then." Sophie manages a sincere smile, remembering who she was just a year ago, interrogating Johann Xanten. If Marshall fills her in with the full Westbrook dossier to read on the way over to Albany, she'll merely add, "He could be receptive to a woman's approach, I concur. The young white female undergrads he brought to his prisoners at Vacaville... well, I think he fancies himself a bit of a pimp, wouldn't you agree?" Sophie also says, "As far as the technical angle, the linguistics, the programming, the sincerity of his Black Power beliefs, if he was the carrier for a Project or more accurately a CWG meme, we should be able to elicit it out of him fairly easily: me with linguistics and sociology, you with his personal psychology."
Brant
OK, once at University Village, Marshall will head up to Westbrook's apartment. He has a "I BELONG HERE" glyph in his pocket but he's not wearing it. Once at the door, assuming nothing stops him, he'll knock politely.
Michael
Want to give me a Hearing-16 check?
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Brant
(dang sophie)
Michael
You both hear urgent speech from behind the door, a man and a woman, in a foreign language that neither Marshall nor Sophie can translate. However, Sophie rapidly signs to Marshall, "African language. Bantu group, Zone A, central-southern Africa."
An interior door inside the apartment slams loudly and Sophie and Marshall can both hear a lock being opened on the other side of the apartment door. The frantic eye and face of Colston Westbrook, appears in the door crack to peek at his visitors; the chain on his door is still latched. Marshall and Sophie both register that Westbrook has a Colt M1911 pistol in his hand, held partially behind his back. He sees Marshall and Sophie, a flash of recognition on his face at seeing Marshall. His eyes, wide with fear, relax momentarily, as he shuts the door again to unhook the chain and open the door for the two of them.
"You scared the motherfuckin' shit out of us, Doc," Westbrook says incongruously, his vocal tone completely in Black English mode as he invites Marshall and Sophie into this messy, chaotic one-bedroom student apartment. Laundry lines in the corner have cloth diapers hanging from them; a baby crying can be heard down a short hallway with a bathroom on one side and presumably the one bedroom, door closed, on the other.
Westbrook's wearing wrinkled, unwashed clothing and clearly hasn't bathed in a few days; the whole house, in fact, is thick with unpleasant odors. Marshall registers one of the suitcases Pat Price remote viewed on the living room floor; it has a BAL tag on it for Baltimore/Washington International Airport, the date on it Monday April 8, and a return SFO tag for Monday April 15. A push-button Bell phone sits on a low glass coffee-table, a new-fangled audiocassette answering machine attached, its red light blinking.
"Sit, sit, man. Ma'am," Westbrook says to Sophie by way of perfunctory introduction, clearing off space on the dirty student couch for his Agency visitors. Westbrook grabs a chair from the breakfast nook and straddles it, informal rap-session-style. Sophie lets Marshall take the lead in the opening gambit with Westbrook. The gun is still in Westbrook's hand, trigger discipline respected.
Brant
Marshall, hands behind his back, looks around like he always does when he enters someone's home: like he's idly wandering a museum gallery. At Westbrook's invitation, he takes a seat and crosses his legs. When he speaks, it's with a different cadence than Sophie has heard from him before. A casualness, an informality. Even his register sounds different. "This thing with the Hearst girl got you flyin' East, man?" he says.
Michael
"Went out to visit my people—my mama—for Easter, out in Pennsylvania. Me and Eposi and the baby," Colston says. "It let me cool things off here. And then the day I fly back, Cinque and his pet honkies knock over that bank. The Hearst girl, a trigger-woman. Unreal." Colston sighs.
Brant
"Unreal. Yeah, it is unreal, isn't it? Unreal enough that our bosses," he nods over at Sophie, "sent us here to check on you. Well, to check on things. There's some concern — what with all the media attention — about where this'll all lead." He lets that hang in the air for a second, then: "We're rolling up Jolly for his involvement in all this."
Michael
"West? Oh no, he's a good man... and he's in like a tick with Reagan's people." There's a look that crosses Colston's face—a grimace, one tinged with doom—that Marshall and Sophie can see a mile off. "The Vacaville project allowed us to do so much in terms of surveillance and control, it seems a shame to let a bunch of white wannabe Maoists spoil it for the Company." "Two people are dead, and that's a shame, but think of the dozens of young Afro-American men we cured of violent impulses at Vacaville! That's got to count for something... for Dr. West, I mean." Sophie takes the opportunity to interject in a flat, broad, middle-American accent. She sounds almost disinterested in Colston's pleading for Jolly. "The 'success rate' of the Vacaville project does us no good if Cinque is out there accusing you of being an agent of the United States government, drawing attention to what's been done. The underground press is already all over your program." Sophie taps on the arm of the couch. "You did a piss-poor job covering your tracks, Mister Westbrook, and you talk too much."
Psychology-21, please?
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 13
Michael
Colston looks to Marshall silently, as if to ask for his help or at least advocacy; the two "hip" deep cover CIA agents against this by-the-book bean-counter—and what's more, a woman—presumably from Langley. It's not that he's totally dumb and falling for a good cop/bad cop routine, but Colston obviously has surmised that Marshall's "cover" since leaving 'Nam—guru, lifestyle coach, friend of celebrities—is as much a Company assignment as his visiting Black prisoners and instilling them with Black Pride. How could she ever understand what Marshall and he are up to here in California, the subtleties of it all! Marshall is pretty sure that on some level, Colston has begun to believe his own hype and to go "native" in this university milieu.
Brant
“Colton, look — it’s been a bad year for guys like us. This line of work. Congress up our ass now, all these ‘new school’ types questioning the work we did in ‘Nam. I get it. My colleague here has been reviewing your work — your work and Jolly’s — trying to pin down what went wrong with Cinque. If you can help us with that, y’know, some insight into what was going on there — well, that would go a long way with her people back in DC.”
Michael
(d'oh, I was running off an old version of Sophie's character sheet, never mind, a 3 on a Hearing check is a 3)
>> SUCCESS by 7
roll
Dice GolemAPP — 03/28/2024 3:02 PM
Michael
“Colton, look — it’s been a bad year for guys like us. This line of work. Congress up our ass now, all these ‘new school’ types questioning the work we did in ‘Nam. I get it. My colleague here has been reviewing your work — your work and Jolly’s — trying to pin down what went wrong with Cinque. If you can help us with that, y’know, some insight into what was going on there — well, that would go a long way with her people back in DC.”
Fast-Talk-21 to get Colston's mouth going.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 13
Michael
"All right." The jive-talking academic provocateur is gone; the serious professional CIA contract agent is in. Colston dispenses with the personality and attitude he's been putting on. "I'm going to assume neither of you have a solid, detailed handle on what went on at the California Medical Facility in '70 and '71. I know a lot of those documents got purged by order of Director Colby last year; you know, Operations CHAOS, MK-ULTRA, MK-SEARCH. The simplest summary is that Agency resources were used for a long-term behavior-modification program proposed by Dr. West in conjunction with Dr. Earl Brian, the California Secretary of Health. All this stuff has been 'exposed' in the hippie rags, and none of them, nor anyone in DC, have done boo about it," Colston says dismissively.
"The precise nature of the corrective process before I got hold of the experimental subjects, I'm not familiar with; the parameters varied from subject to subject. I took these patients on after they'd been treated with various drugs—Anectine and Prolixin primarily— and behavior modification techniques. My job was to inculcate civic and familial responsibility in these brothers using a wide-array set of Black Pride routines; again, customized to the individual subject's psychological profile and treatment plan. It was demanding work; I'm no clinical psychiatrist but I did have a certain cultural and linguistic familiarity that gave me an 'in' with the subjects. I believe you fellows in psychiatry call it 'transference.'"
(Colston has more to say, about the program into 1972 when the Black Cultural Association got involved, but before I go further, Marshall can give me a Pharmacy-16 roll about those drugs Colston listed.)
Brant
>> SUCCESS BY 7
Marshall raises an eyebrow but says nothing. He drapes an arm along the back of the sofa.
Michael
Anectine (Suxamethonium chloride) is an ultra-powerful muscle relaxant often used in conjunction with ECT and in other kinds of trauma care (intubation, etc.) to permit quick-action, brief-duration, intense muscle paralyzation so that a patient's reflexive muscle movements do not reject said invasive or emergency treatment. The drug only lasts a few minutes but it literally does cause a near-total loss of touch sensation and motility throughout the body.
Prolixin (Fluphenazine) is a much longer-duration anti-psychotic used on the most serious schizophrenics. Its side effects on a non-schizophrenic patient would be profound: it would result in unipolar mental and physical depression, involuntary body movements, insomnia, nausea, and loads of restlessness. Men pacing out of their skin because they feel like their skin is crawling, twitching, their stomachs always just this side of vomiting. A very unpleasant time.
The combination of these drugs, used off-label as part of a program of behavior modification, Marshall realizes, would be profoundly disorienting. The Prolixin would have a man jittery as a speed-freak but with little to no ability to escape the compulsive movements, constant nausea, unending mental and physical restlessness. And on the flip side, using Anectine on a "well" patient would be akin to that thing the Agency used to use on Charlie in-country, the old "water cure": an excruciating 2-3 minutes just barely this side of suffocating under pouring water on a wet towel, or, a bit like being locked in a straitjacket where nearly all the patient's senses were... oh my God. That Jack London book, the torture device that they put the protagonist in at Alcatraz. Anectine is essentially a pharmaceutical version of The Jacket. Combine that with longer-term dosages of the Prolixin and you could have a man begging for deliverance in no time.
Colston continues, "We processed a few dozen of these brothers over about 22 months, and we had a pretty good hit rate recidivism-wise; way better than comparable political re-education programs in South Vietnam. The doctors... they continued to use the medical techniques; I lobbied to be given a cohort that hadn't gotten the drug or behavioral treatments to see what I could do on my own; the program heads refused."
"So I proposed a subproject, the Black Cultural Association. It was designed to kill two birds with one stone: It allowed us to keep a close eye on politically-active white Berkeley undergrads, and at the same time gave our new proud Black men connections with the 'Outside,' where they could lead by example in the community, get the white liberals on our side. The Reagan people thought it was good PR too, and if we could get some state-level COINTELPRO going on radical or even liberal students, so much the better. It wasn't meant as a substitute for my instruction and work with the brothers, more of a supplement to it."
Brant
"Tell me about the doctors," Marshall says abruptly, without any fanfare, reverting to his normal speaking voice. "The doctors who persisted with the anti-psychotics."
Michael
Colston, having assumed he'd continue by talking about the young Berkeley kids and Vietnam vets who turned Cinque radical, is thrown by this interest. "What is there to say? They were Agency-vetted and affiliated, I assumed that they were working off the old MK-ULTRA playbook with this program of drugs, that it had been perfected over the past 20 years."
"They were all psychopharmacologists, then," Sophie asks.
Colston turns to Sophie with a near-scowl on his face. "I'd assume so. Or generalists who would monitor the drug-administration process."
Sophie reaches into her satchel and pulls out a folded piece of canary-yellow photocopy paper. "You mentioned the 'hippie rags' before. This flyer is from a protest last year at UCLA by the 'Coalition Against Psychosurgery and Human Experimentation, SDS,' Sophie says with undisguised mocking distaste. Quote, 'One of the projects for Center [for Violence] research is called “Violence Prediction and Brain Waves.” The description of this project states that the SURGICAL REMOVAL OF PARTS OF THE BRAIN,' that's in all-capital letters, 'has been somewhat successful in controlling violent behavior in epileptics.' And so on and so forth." Colston says, "Paranoid hippie rumors, ma'am. Our program worked in Vacaville's S-Wing, the surgical wing, because it had the best medical facilities in the complex. And of course, this is a maximum-security mental hospital, the state's top such facility; of course there were ECT and surgical patients having procedures done. But did any of my subjects come to me lobotomized, or with big-ass scars on their skulls? Definitely not."
(Detect Lies-23 roll made secretly for Marshall vs. Colston's IQ.)
Marshall can easily tell that Colston is lying here. He has been since Sophie asked him whether the CIA doctors were all psychopharmacologists.
"Besides, those kind of rumors served our purposes well; nothing makes a leftist look more like a crazy kook to the average family of Nixon voters in Orange County than suggesting the CIA is putting mind control electrodes in Black people's brains." Colston smiles, but it's an uneasy smile. Having to defend what happened at Vacaville to other CIA officials has him discomfited.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 13
"Sorry, Colton, can you just clarify something for me? I admit I'm not as familiar with the file as my colleague here. But was Cinque -- DeFreeze -- was he one of yours? Or was he a participant in this whole," he waves a hand in the air, "medical narcotic experiment?"
Michael
"Well, both. The doctors got him mentally and psychologically prepared for my rap with their treatments. Cinque was... well, he was my finest achievement. Turned him from a violent thug into a conscientious, proud, culturally-aware Black man, ready to finally be a husband to his wife and father to his children upon his release."
"Here's the one thing we didn't count on," Colston says, pointing at Sophie and, by extension, her mention of the SDS, "the college kids."
"You ask me, Cinque got reprogrammed by those BCA kids, especially Willie Wolfe, that little fuckin' weasel." Colston breaks into a cruel, girlish mockery of Willie's voice, accent, and affect: "'Oh please Professor Westbrook, we have to talk revolution with the politically-conscious brothers.' Give me a break. Three months earlier? That little shit was a straight-up milquetoast liberal. He got radicalized at some point. I'm guessing it was the bitche--- the women. Or the veterans who started tagging along on prison visits with them, talkin' 'bout My Lai and shit." Colston has code-switched back into his "righteous Afro-American academic" schtick; Marshall can tell it's a reliable psychological crutch for Westbrook when he's feeling flustered, nervous, or overwhelmed.
"I'm fuckin' embarrassed my work got undone by a bunch of college kids, if you want me to confess here. Yes ma'am, I am taunting him in the newspapers, because Cinque attached to me at Vacaville. He craved a father figure, especially a Black one. I wanted to get him to surrender, or, failing that, to come looking for me."
There's a pause. Sophie looks quickly to Marshall for tacit approval to say something to Colston.
Brant
Marshall tacitly approves.
Michael
"It seems to me," Sophie says quite evenly and without affect, "that none of your work succeeded at all."
Colston stares blankly, with quiet rage, at Sophie.
Sophie holds up her hands in mock supplication. "I mean, it certainly sounds like our doctors had some success in preparing these subjects for reprogramming. But Mr. DeFreeze's adventures with your former white students over the past four months... that would appear to disprove any assertions you could make about success in reducing 'recidivism.' DeFreeze was a petty criminal before his escape. Now, he's on the front page of newspapers worldwide. The things you taught him in order to be proud of his race—the seven precepts of Kwanzaa, that sort of thing—they've ended up as central tenets of Symbionese ideology. The very heads of the snake."
Marshall can tell what Sophie's going for here; an attempt to get Westbrook defensive, to talk about how and with what memetics (if applicable) he reprogrammed DeFreeze.
(Will give Marshall an opportunity to join in on this avenue if he wants. Regardless Marshall will get a chance to join in with Sophie on a "discovering a meme" roll depending on how this goes.)
Brant
Marshall, adopting a sort of good -cop role, says: “Regardless of who is to blame, if anyone — we need to pin down, precisely, what happened with DeFreeze, specifically. So far he’s the outlier here, none of his fellow program participants have engaged in anything like this. He’s sui generis. What do we need to know, Colton? Do you really think my time,” there’s a weight to the way Marshall says “my time,” “is best spent chasing down some disaffected liberal grad students? I will, if you think that’s where the path leads. But if we wind up at the end of that path and it curves back around to you …”
Michael
Given the generous opportunity to blame someone else for this debacle, and despite his own beliefs that what the SLA is doing is great (despite a couple of civilians having died) because it discredits the radical left in the eyes of middle America, Colston sees that Marshall is giving him some form of an "out" here, and lowers his eyes to the ground, submissively.
"Two things here. First of all, I never witnessed the results of surgery being done on my subjects. But did I have suspicions? Sure."
This is a very different line than just a couple of minutes earlier in the conversation, and this time Marshall can tell, from the weak, timid tone of Colston's voice, he's telling the truth now.
"West had Drs. Mark and Ervin from Boston come to Vacaville, really long-term. At first I figured it was meant as a 'gotcha' by West to them, sort of a 'hey, look what we can do with just isolation techniques and drugs, maybe you should stop trying to crack a brother's head open.' But now, I wonder. They were here off and on for upwards of eight months in 1970-71, supposedly doing work on a paper on Vacaville. Could the subjects' brains have gotten that... clean with non-invasive techniques alone? But again, I didn't see cranial scars, shaved heads, I didn't see any physical signs of lobectomies or lobotomies on DeFreeze or anyone else I worked with." Sophie twists uncomfortably in her seat with the repeated mention of scars, but she knows, as well as Marshall does, that if we're talking advanced brain hacking technology from SANDMAN/OZYMANDIAS, even three or so years ago, the scarring could be very unobtrusive to a mundane observer, especially if Mark, Ervin, or SANDMAN docs were just implanting the prisoners with small future-microchips/receivers like the ones in Charley's head. Colston was looking for evidence of brain surgery an effective 20-30 years in technology behind SANDMAN.
"Okay, second. Not every element of my scripts for reprogramming was prepared by me." This confession, Marshall can tell, wounds Westbrook's ego profoundly. "I got some... verbiage given to me, but it was all Agency-vetted! Louis [Jolly West] gave it to me personally! I still have some of the typesheets in the bedroom if you want to check them out. I was allowed to improvise—do my own jazz—but there were phrases and cadences Jolly wanted in there. I wasn't sure if it was like experimental post-hypnotic suggestion nonsense or not, but what did it harm me if I used them? But I used that script on everyone, not just DeFreeze, and I know you're looking for something unique to Cinque. I can't think of anything I did differently with him other than give him more attention than the others because... well," he sniffs away a tear, "I identified with the brother. If by doing that, I set him up for this kind of chaos... shit. That was not my intention."
A combination of Sophie's hard-case interrogation and Marshall's friendly you'd better confess now before things get worse and the stress of worrying about his former prize pupil coming back to shoot him at the behest of Willie Wolfe has partially broken this man, Marshall can tell. Marshall guesses Mr. Westbrook started this slow-motion process of breaking apart in Vietnam while working Phoenix. Westbrook's psychology is bare to Marshall now; actual racial and social idealism in a CIA operative. Tsk. Marshall guesses if there are memetics in that script in the bedroom, West picked Westbrook as a vector just for this kind of emotionality and racial sensitivity, to improve the memetic transmission.
Lastly, Sophie defers to Marshall at this point; she too can sense where Westbrook is at and figures more browbeating is not going to help the two of you land this witness.
Brant
“Well, Colt … thanks for that.” Marshall stands to go. “We may have some follow up, so don’t make yourself too scarce.” Marshall will gesture for Sophie to give Colton her “card” for Livermore. “If you think of anything, call her. If you hear from DeFreeze — or anyone you think is with DeFreeze — you call her. You understand?”
Michael
"Yes, yes I do. Hold on, I'll get you those notes." He dashes off suddenly to the bedroom, leaving the pistol on the arm of the armchair he's been sitting in.
Sophie rapidly signs to Marshall while Colston is in the bedroom, "He definitely injected someone else's memes. He's cracking up. Surgeons are the key."
Brant
Marshall takes the papers from Colton once he returns. He nods at the gun. “Discipline, man. There are children around.”
He leaves. Once in his car with Sophie, he starts driving but says nothing for a little while. Then: “OK, let’s storyboard a bit. Correct me on what details I’m getting wrong. It’s fours years ago. Jolly West, working with a CWG portfolio, is project managing — loosely — a CIA/MK-ULTRA human test trial involving radical behavioral modification. They select Black convicts as their test pool. As part of this experiment, West brings in Westbrook. Westbrook adopts a sort of therapist-instructor role with a group of these Black convicts, among them DeFreeze. He does not know, because he cannot know, that some or perhaps all of these convicts have been subjected to experimental advanced neuro-surgerical techniques. Sorry, Soph.” He gets in the highway.
“So Westford is working with these men and West and his team are presumably watching Westford, seeing what happens and occasionally providing him with prompts or code-phrases, perhaps glyphs, perhaps just the Language. To see what happens. And somewhere along the way, Westford — or some of his white grad students — or a combination of the two — infects DeFreeze with a meme. A meme or some other kind of ontological infection. But why Hearst? Why the robbery? And then there’s Bierce, and this whole thing with the Bohemians. The medication they were using, the side effects … it made me think of that Jack London story, while Westford was talking … I don’t even remember when I read that. Must’ve been when I was a kid. So if they were doing to DeFreeze and the others what they were doing to the protagonist in The Star Rover, maybe these men went into a sort of trance state … astrally projected like Charley does. Or maybe it opened their psyches to the noosphere and something slipped in. Maybe DeFreeze isn’t even DeFreeze.”
Michael
Sophie listens intently at the first bit, the recap of what we know so far. "That all sounds right to me. My thought now, and I'll know more once we look through these for memetics," she says, holding up Westbrook's typewritten pages, "is that yes, CWG supplied the surgeons and the memes. Cinque and Westbrook have a... unique emotional and memetic connection. Cinque is extremely receptive. He even let Westbrook rename him; that's a powerful linguistic act. If Cinque's got resilient memetics in him, he's more vulnerable to further memetic influence. Memes are supposed to be ephemeral, right? Infect, influence, dissolve. Westbrook delivered too well, and it's obviously affected his sanity. Another black mark for Jolly and the CWG, I suppose."
"One question before I move on. What do we reckon is the nature of the surgery? Is it remote viewing like Charley's chip? Remote control using computer technology, behavioral flowcharts like the ones Jolly was studying? Was the surgery meant to make a subject more pliable to memetics? To multiple sets of beliefs and identities? All these things seem within the reach of the Project and the CWG; there are possible echoes of the cheval prorgram and the Renshaw Method here."
"As for your theorizing on connections to the reality war, that's a very good set of questions. I have this... esmological feeling that the Mansa concert somehow played a role here. It's right around when Cinque had escaped from prison, like he and the proto-SLA had been maneuvered into position. Patricia Hearst studying art at Berkeley and discovering Sterling and Martìnez, yes, that too; the similarity between The Star-Rover and the Vacaville business, a very conspicuous coincidence... Marshall, don't these feel to you like backward ripples from some irruption?"
Brant
“It does. It definitely does.” Marshall says, then says nothing until they reach Livermore, where he drops Sophie off.
(I need to mull some angles over but have nothing more at this precise moment.)
Michael
(I fuckin love Holmes and Watson Marshall and Sophie)