“You’ve tried it?”

“Of course,” Shapiro replied. “I’ve tried everything.” He paused, and then went on. “After an hour or so in the tank, it’s impossible to say where your skin ends and the water begins. You just… dissolve.” He nodded at the cup in front of Adrienne. “Like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. And when that happens, the subject becomes… malleable.”

McBride listened in fascinated disbelief, while Adrienne stared at the former spook, imagining her sister floating in the blackout tank.

“After a protracted period—”

“What’s ‘protracted’?” McBride demanded.

“A day. A week. A month,” Shapiro told him. “The point is that, after a while, the subject’s identity begins to disintegrate. It’s like a near death experience, with all the senses shutting down—or seeming to. You can imagine: once you’re in the tank, there’s nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell, no sense of touch. No sense of time. If you think losing your mind is unsettling, try losing your body.” Shapiro paused, and a thin smile curled above his chin. “Even so, some people find the experience… enlightening.”

“And others?” Adrienne asked.

The old man shrugged. “Others don’t.”

McBride leaned forward: “Then what?”

Shapiro gave him a sidelong glance. “Then? Well, then you take it to the next level.”

“Which is what?”

“‘Intensification.’ Once the subject’s identity is broken down, he’s basically a tabula rasa. It’s a relatively simple matter to imprint whatever ‘memories’ you like.”

“How?” McBride asked.

“We’d create scenarios compatible with his psychological profile, and turn them into films. The subject would watch the films in tandem with a subliminal stream of audiograms.”

“Like in a theater,” Adrienne suggested.

Shapiro chuckled. “No,” he said, “it’s more engaging than that. He’d wear a special helmet, one that’s fitted with speakers and jacks. Audio in, audio out—that sort of thing. Then we’d plug him in and…”

“What?”

“Well, from the subject’s perspective, it’s like sitting six feet away from a sixty-two-inch television screen, watching 3-D images in binaural sound. It’s a very involving experience and that’s just the conscious part of it all. Add hypnosis and drugs and… it’s a lot like shaping clay. Soft clay.”

“Drugs,” Adrienne said. She flashed on that little vial in Nikki’s computer: Placebo #1. “What kind of drugs?”

Shapiro made a face. “Pyschedelics of every description. We had a great deal of success with a drug from Ecuador called burrandaga. And with Ketamine—more commonly used as an animal tranquilizer. Both of them cause a sort of dissociative amnesia.”

“Ketamine,” Adrienne said. “Isn’t that one of the date rape drugs?”

“Precisely,” Shapiro said. “It would be very effective for that purpose for the same reason it was effective for our purposes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you wanted to ‘take advantage of someone,’ as we used to say, ketamine has the effect of disconnecting a person from her body. Whatever happens seems to be occurring in another dimension. And these events fail to take hold in the memory.”

“There’s a built-in amnesiac effect?”

“Precisely. Afterwards, the rape—or whatever—it’s as if it never happened. Subjects never remembered being in the tank, or the helmet, or being bombarded with ‘new memories.’”

“So you’d have this person in this helmet. And what would… what would the person be looking at?” McBride asked.

“Men in hoods,” Adrienne muttered. “Satanists.”

Shapiro gave her a peculiar look, then turned to answer McBride’s question. “It would depend.”

“On what?” McBride demanded.

“On what you wanted him to remember—and what you wanted him to forget.”

McBride sipped his tea, and found that it was cold. “How long would this take?” he asked.

Shapiro shook his head. “Hard to say. If you’re tweaking the subject’s identity, that’s one thing. If you’re building someone from the ground up—that’s quite another.”

“‘Tweaking the identity,’“ Adrienne repeated, her voice heavy with a mix of wonder and incredulity.

“Right.” Shapiro rearranged his legs on the cushion. “I’m curious,” he said, shifting gears in the conversation. “What was your relationship with—” he turned toward McBride “—with this young woman’s sister?”

“I was her therapist,” McBride said.

“And she came to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“And, as it turned out, both of you had a prosthesis… ?”

“Right.”

Shapiro frowned. “How can you be sure of that? Did she have a CAT scan or—”

“My sister was cremated,” Adrienne explained. “I found the implant in her ashes.”

The scientist blanched. “Christ,” he muttered. Then he changed the subject, or seemed to. “Tell me something,” he said, turning to McBride. “Did you leave your apartment often?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you were practicing as a therapist—did you get out much? Or did you stay at home?”

McBride’s shoulders rose and fell. “I guess I stayed pretty close to home.”

“I’ll bet,” Shapiro told him.

“Why?”

“Because I think it’s very likely that there was a monitoring site in your building. The apartment across the hall—”

“—or next door,” Adrienne suggested.

“Upstairs, or on the floor below… the point is: they’d have wanted a way to reinforce the signal. And one of the consequences would be that once you were out of range, you’d begin to feel uncomfortable—unless you were on medication. Were you taking medication?”

“No,” McBride said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I just watched television.” He cleared his throat. “But what you’re telling me is that people can be turned into puppets and zombies—”

“Automatons,” Adrienne interjected.

Shapiro nodded. “Colloquially speaking, yes.”

Adrienne looked away, tears in her eyes.

“So you could do whatever you wanted with them,” McBride continued. “Make them laugh or cry, walk in front of a car—”

“—or give them a childhood that wasn’t their own,” Adrienne suggested.

Shapiro heaved a sigh. Turned his palms toward the ceiling. “Yeah.” He drew a sharp breath, reached out toward the flower arrangement and tapped his fingernail against the arching blade of grass. Exhaled. “Look,” he said, “I’m full of remorse for my part in this research. And I’m sorry if what I did has touched your lives. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You can help us understand,” Adrienne said.

“Can I?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I want to know who did this,” Adrienne told him.

Shapiro inclined his head. “Of course you do. But why? You say it’s because you want to ‘understand’—but I suspect it’s because you want revenge.”

“Look,” McBride said, “you can call it whatever you like, but… “ He paused. A low-pressure front was moving through his head—at least, that’s what it felt like—and if he didn’t wait for it to pass, he’d go off like a flashbulb in Shapiro’s face. Because what he really wanted to do was take this born-again Buddhist, with his pared down life and his cute little cups of tea, and knock the hell out of him. Instead, he said, “I’m a wreck.”

“What!?” Shapiro was startled by the remark, and Adrienne, too, seemed taken aback.

“I’m sitting here with you in this very nice house, drinking tea,” McBride told him, “and I may seem fine. ‘No blood, no foul!’ Right? Wrong. I’m a walking shipwreck—no shit. Whoever did this… whoever did this took everything from me. My childhood. My parents. My self. I’ll never be the same. They took every memory I ever had, subverted every dream, and wasted I don’t know how many years of my life. Even now, when I try to think about it, it’s a blank. It’s all a blank until she came through the door, yelling about how she was going to sue me.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “Which is just a way of saying: I’ve lost a couple of things… and I’m not talking about books and furniture and clothes.”