NEW YORK, NEW YORK
“Hello, Yasmin.”
The soft voice, speaking Arabic, came from all around her. The soft voice, speaking Arabic, came from all around her. There were probably speakers nearby.
Clever, she had to admit. The blinding light her captors had turned on forced her to close her eyes, to pay attention.
“As you may have realized, there is a marble in the pocket of your blouse,” the voice went on. “We will release your left wrist from the restraint. You are then going to remove the marble and hold it in your left hand. You will close your fingers tightly around it. You are to squeeze the marble. If you relax your hand, my voice will be replaced with a less pleasant sound and we will have to begin again. Do you understand?”
“I do,” she said. For now, this was one of those plan-three responses to captivity: in the absence of any other option, pretend to cooperate.
There was a low hum and a snap. Her restraints were electromagnetic. Her left wrist had just been released. She reached for the marble and placed it in her left hand.
“You are not to speak unless a question is asked. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The light will be dimmed. You will keep your eyes closed.”
The bright red-orange hue of her eyelids darkened to a burnt sienna and then to deep brown.
“We are going to give you a series of instructions. If you fail to obey any of them, we will know.”
There was a long pause. When the voice returned, it was softer. Nearer, as though there were headphones a few centimeters from her ears.
“You are to tell us the first thing that comes to your mind,” the voice said. “Do not open your eyes. Do not think about your answer. Give us an immediate response. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause. When she heard the voice again, it was a little softer, a little nearer.
“Imagine that you are lying someplace. Where are you?”
“On a beach,” she replied.
“Imagine you turn to your left. What do you see?”
“The ocean.”
“What color is the water?”
“Blue.”
“Clear?”
“Yes.”
“Calm?”
“Yes.”
“What do you smell?”
“Salt in the air.”
“What else?”
“A moldy piece of wood.”
“Where is it?”
“At my feet. From a boat. An old boat.”
“Is it near the water?”
“Yes. Partly buried in the sand.”
“You turn to your right. What do you see?”
“A cliff.”
“Look up the cliff. What do you see?”
“A fortress.”
“Is it yours?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine you are standing beside it. What do you see?”
“A great wooden door.”
“Is it windy?”
“Yes. Up here.”
“Are the skies clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“Do you wish to enter?”
“Yes.”
“What do you say?”
“ ‘Guard, let me in.’ ”
“The guard asks, ‘Who are you?’ What do you answer?”
“I tell him that I am Princess Yasmin,” she said.
“You enter,” the voice told her. “What do you see directly in front of you?”
“My father.” She smiled. “The king.”
“He embraces you. How do you feel?”
“Wonderful.”
“What does he say to you?”
“ ‘Did you enjoy the beach?’ ”
“What do you tell him?”
“ ‘Very much, Father…’ ”
Two men and a woman were watching Yasmin on a monitor. The forty-two-inch LED screen sat on a glass-topped desk against a bare wall. A third man sat in a converted bathroom at the far end of the room. He was watching the same image on a laptop. A translation program was running the exhange in English along the left side of the screen with just a two-second delay. The room they were in was less than 300 square feet, with white walls and a bank of windows that looked out on the Hudson River thirty-six floors below. The glass was double thick as a buffer against street noise from the West Side Highway. The room on the laptop was a third that size, with only a gurney and an attendant. The big man was standing off in the shadows, well behind the gurney.
One of the men, Franklin May, was assistant director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence. He did not know who the subject really was; a volunteer from NYU, born in New Delhi, raped as a child, he was told. The other, Alexander Hunt, was assistant director of the New York field office. He knew exactly who was on the table. May was sipping black coffee, and Hunt stood beside him with his arms crossed.
“The disassociation is working perfectly,” the woman said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“How can you tell?” asked May. He was short, balding, and was dressed in a black Brooks Brothers suit with a tightly knotted red tie. His whisper was like a rasp. “It’s been less than two minutes.”
“You witnessed the point at which she actually joined the altered reality,” the woman said. “When she spoke of the board and the smell. It was the first time she took the initiative to elaborate and explain. He kept talking to her to see if she would expand on it, go further into that reality. But the wood, stuck in the sand, was a dead end, so he moved her away from it. But she was there.”
“Not to doubt your expertise, Doctor, but you got that from her talking about a board?”
“And her expressions,” the woman said with a trace of annoyance. “It isn’t just one nexus that informs us of success, but many. You saw the way she went on to personalize the princess as herself?”
“Okay-”
“All people have repressed desires,” the woman went on. “Family, society, our jobs, our financial status do that to us. When we go deep enough into our psyche and are given not just the freedom to express those desires but also a command to do so, people invariably, willingly submit. It is liberating. The id welcomes that freedom. It’s only a question of how long it takes. Someone in this woman’s situation-an impoverished, lonely childhood-is particularly susceptible. You see her hand, the one with the marble?”
The man said he did.
“Despite our orders, she relaxed her grip. She forgot that because of the very strong reality we impressed upon her. She abrogated her responsibility because of the power of the vision she’s creating for herself.”
“You told her you’d start again if she did that.”
“That was to emphasize how important it was,” the woman said. “Yet she still succumbed. That’s another way we know the hypnosis is working.”
“And yet the marble will remind her of this session.”
“It will do much more than that,” the woman told him. “It will keep her in the session, functioning outwardly as her old self, but inwardly focused on that object. It is called cognitive sublimation.” “So there is no ‘less pleasant sound,’ I think your associate called it?”
“Oh yes,” the woman said. “There is definitely a less pleasant sound. It’s not something you want to hear.”
May continued to peer into the adjoining room. The voice of Dr. Emile Samson, the moderator of the session, had already taken this Indian rani from the courtyard to the palace itself.
“How do you know she’s not faking?” May asked.
“Because we have seen virtually this same pattern in all the subjects who have come through here,” the woman replied.
The woman, Dr. Ayesha Gillani, had been introduced to May as the “brilliant hypnotherapist” who had treated Jacob Trask’s bipolar daughter in Atlanta. Trask was so impressed that he’d hired her to work in Xana, his psyops R amp; D division. It was named after a fairytale character Trask remembered from a childhood storybook, a nymph who was the keeper of a great treasure.
“It’s remarkable, Frank,” the other man said. Special Agent Hunt was in his early thirties. Square shouldered and six foot one, he was wearing a button-down white shirt, sleeves rolled up, knotted black tie pulled to one side at the neck.
May nodded in agreement. “And when you’re finished with the process, in two days, this woman’s traumatic memories will be gone.”
“That is correct,” said Dr. Gillani.
“We’ve proven it numerous times,” said Hunt. He laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “But that’s not the beauty of it. We can turn the Gillani Technique into a goddamn assembly line at Guantanamo Bay, send those miserable SOBs back home to spy for us.”
May shook his head. “It is amazing, and I’d back it in a New York minute. But I don’t see how I’ll ever get the director to go along with it.”
“Why? Congress? The ACLU?”
“For starters, but also Brenneman,” May said. “He’s not going to want to leave office under an indictment from the Justice Department for torturing detainees.”
Hunt laughed. “Torture? Christ, everyone will be thrilled that we’re finally going to clear out Gitmo! Hell, we can turn it into a petting zoo for the Cubans, win the hearts and minds of those poor people.”
The assistant director regarded his subordinate with a curious, wary expression. “The zoo I like. The rest of it is admirable, and some of the assistant directors may want to keep it going at a low burn. But I can’t see Cluzot going along with it. Hell, you’ve got her strapped down-”
“In case she has a post-traumatic episode,” Hunt lied. The woman was a killer. They had to keep her bound in case she slipped from their control.
“And if she does? And hurts herself in our custody, goes out one of these windows?”
“We’ll board them,” Hunt said. His eyes were hard, fixed on the other man. “Give us more time. We weren’t expecting you. We can clean this up, Frank.”
“Alex, look. I see the merits of the process. I do.”
“It’s not costing us anything!”
“That’s part of the problem and the main reason I came down early. A lot of people in D.C. don’t want Trask crossing from the military to the Feds. That’s too much influence in one place. Cluzot is being pressured to demonopolize, to sever ties like that.” May’s eyes were sympathetic. “You’re doing great work here, the three of you. Hell of an achievement. Beats all hell out of waterboarding. But frankly, speaking personally now, this is more CIA than FBI.”
“I’m really not sure I follow that reasoning,” Hunt replied. His voice was taut. His hand was still on his superior’s shoulder. “One, protect the United States from terrorist attack. Two, protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage. Three, protect the United States against-”
“I know the charter-”
“Cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes. Four, combat transnational-national criminal organizations and enterprises. Five, freakin’ upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI’s mission.”
May slowly shrugged off Hunt’s hand. His voice was still quiet, but there was an agitated little wire somewhere inside it. “You forgot the most important. These activities must have a proper purpose and may not undermine activities protected by the Constitution of the United States.”
“I haven’t forgotten it,” Hunt said. “It just doesn’t apply to scum who want to kill us.”
The men regarded one another. May shook his head. “I will recommend to the director that he communicate to Mr. Trask that the Bureau was extremely impressed by the remarkable work of the Xana team, and Dr. Gillani in particular,” he said. “But I will also strongly suggest that we do not add this procedure to our field operations.”
“You’ll sink us,” Hunt said.
“I’m sorry.” He looked back at the monitor. Yasmin Rassin was smiling. She was rolling the marble lightly between thumb and index finger. “Has the marble become something else in her little fantasy?”
“Yes,” Dr. Gillani replied, apparently unmoved by the conversation that had taken place behind her. “She is being told that it is the world, her world. I will soon go back inside and take it from her. To get it back, she will have to do as she is told in the next session.”
“Will she sleep like this from now until then?”
“This is not sleep, but a sensitized waking state, and no. When my colleague, Dr. Samson, brings her out of this, she will remember having the marble in her pocket and waiting for something to happen. Her wrist will be restrained, and she will be hungry, thirsty, and tired. I will feed her, and she will be allowed to sleep. Then we will begin again.”
“Fascinating,” May said. He finished his coffee, then turned and offered Hunt his hand. “You’ve done an excellent job here, and I’ll be sure to highlight that in my report.”
“Thank you,” Hunt replied, without enthusiasm. “Well, let’s get you over to Penn Station so I can go back to the office to close out the file. I’ll walk you to the subway.”
May thanked Dr. Gillani. She responded with a little smile but did not look back or leave her post.
“She’s watching for facial signals and muscular reactions along her body,” Hunt explained. “It’s being recorded, but this way she can give Dr. Samson instructions.”
“I see.”
The men were silent as they left the corner penthouse and walked to the elevator. Dr. Gillani had rented two of the ten apartments on the floor, using Trask’s money. She had her hypnotherapy practice in one-this one-and lived in the other next door.
May checked his cell phone on the way down. The assistant director held the phone straight in front of him. If there were overhead cameras in the elevator, they would not be able to see the screen.
The iPhone was not equipped with encryption software, so messages were either oblique or coded with “words of the day.” This was a simple substitution dictionary physically downloaded via USB each morning and overwritten the following morning. The user had to check any unclear words manually so that anyone scanning the Wi-Fi signal would not be able to intercept the dictionary.
“Damn,” he said.
Hunt looked at him. He didn’t have to ask what it was about. “Update?”
“Yeah.”
The door opened, and they crossed the lobby in silence. A few people moved around them, some tenants taking their dogs for a walk, deliverymen arriving with dinner for others. A few were sitting in the chairs along the walls, working on laptops. May had admired the maritime murals when he entered an hour before. He didn’t notice them now.
“Two agents were killed at the hotel,” May said when they were outside. “By another agent.”
“Obviously an impostor,” Hunt said.
They walked east, turned north on Washington Street. Hunt walked slightly apart from May, to his left. He was still decrypting the message as they passed the dark edifice of One Western Union International Plaza, which was also on the left. To the right was the deep, sloping entranceway to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A block ahead, a footbridge over the tunnel ramp led to the subway entrance.
The building had a large overhang supported by columns. A homeless man was huddled against the locked doors of the twenty-story black tower. While May was concentrating on the phone, Hunt stopped and walked over to the older African American, who was huddled in a worn blanket. There were no security cameras under here. They were all on the street, watching the street. Hunt had avoided them by walking close to the building. All they would show was May.
Hunt kicked the man hard in the face with the bottom of his shoe. The homeless man yelped. May looked over.
“Alex! What are you-”
“Goddamn beggar!” Hunt snarled. He stomped on the cheek of the fallen man.
May shoved his phone in his pocket as he ran over. He bear-hugged the bigger man, but Hunt was ready for him. He was expecting him.
Hunt gave May a hard elbow to the chest, breaking the hold, then turned. He swung hard at the man’s face, catching him against his left ear. He threw an uppercut to his jaw, then jabbed his nose. May staggered back against the black tile wall. Hunt had taken pains to hit him square, never punching down, so it would look like a shorter man-which the homeless person was-had hit him. While May sucked blood up his nose, Hunt drove his knuckles repeatedly into his windpipe. Then he scratched his eyes, his cheeks, his neck as he went down.
He had to make it look like a scrap.
When May hit the sidewalk, Hunt pulled an old boot from the dazed beggar, slipped his fist inside, and pounded the heel hard, repeatedly, into May’s face. Then he put the boot, covered with blood, back on the homeless man, bent over May, grabbed his ears, and drove his head hard into the concrete.
Brain tissue clung to the pavement. May was no longer breathing.
Hunt glanced behind him to make sure no one was walking by. The street was empty. He had been down this road often enough to know that dog walkers preferred Battery Park across the street. Except for people coming in from the subway-and there were few this time of night-the street was largely untraveled. Even if anyone came by, the darkness beside the office building was thick. Because of the high fence beside the tunnel entrance, the street was invisible from the buildings across the way on Trinity Place.
Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he fished May’s wallet from his inside jacket pocket and tucked it in the bundle of garments that was the homeless man.
“Wha-”
“Shut up, pig,” Hunt said to the groggy man.
Then he took off May’s big college ring and punched the man again, leaving an impression on his jaw. He hit him several times in the side of the head, until blood oozed from his ear. Then he wiped his prints off and put the ring back on May’s dead finger. The cops would conclude that there had been an attempted mugging, a struggle, and mutual assured destruction.
Hunt walked to the street and made a final check. No one was around. He walked quickly back to his building.
You had to make a visit now, he thought angrily.
They’d needed the cover of a legitimate FBI project to justify Hunt’s presence. But they also needed a little more time to finish. May had not recognized Yasmin Rassin, but then he did not know Veil was not on her way to Pakistan as planned. When he learned that back at his office, when he saw her photograph, he would have put things together.
And then there was this latest news. Of all the goddamn luck, to have someone “made” at the hotel. The man at the hotel wasn’t real FBI; he was a Saudi medical student at Johns Hopkins. Unlike the “Indian rani,” he had actually volunteered to be part of Gillani’s bogus trauma mitigation studies. Still, that would put the Bureau in Baltimore under all kinds of scrutiny. If they found the kid, he would remember nothing, but they would learn from e-mails that he had been to New York, that he had been here.
All they needed was another day. Hopefully, the kid would return to his daily life and would remain hidden for that long.
Hunt walked through the revolving door at One West. He looked at the concierge and shook his head. “Text, text, text.”
“Sir?”
“My friend,” Hunt said. “I got tired of waiting. Pointed to the subway. He can find it himself.”
“I don’t blame you.” The doorman smiled. “It’s the same with my kids.”
“Hey, how are they?”
“Good, sir. Thank you for asking.”
Hunt smiled until he passed the reception desk. He liked the young man as far as that went, but he couldn’t worry about anything but the mission right now. All he wanted was the doorman’s good will and something resembling an alibi. Even if the police called him in as part of their investigation, they wouldn’t have cause to arrest him in time. Not before the second part of the operation put everything else in the city-in the nation-on hold.
He took the penthouse elevator and returned to the laboratory. He was not about to let a premature review of the FBI’s investment in the Xana project jeopardize the program, not when they were so close to realizing their goal.
“Is everything all right?” Dr. Gillani asked when he stepped up behind her.
“It’s been taken care of,” he assured her.
“Functionaries,” she said disdainfully. “It is their job to collect enough small minds to stop larger ones.”
Hunt liked that. He looked at the contented subject on the video monitor. When Trask recruited him, the billionaire had described bureaucrats as the monkey bars from which the rest of us swing.
“Sometimes monkeys get aggressive,” Trask had told him.
That was how he had come to the industrialist’s attention, a newspaper article about an unusually violent pursuit of a terror suspect into a mosque. The media had come down on him for ignoring the sanctuary of holy ground in pursuit of a terror suspect. He was forced to undergo sensitivity training. All that did was make him hate the sycophants even more, living under the umbrella of American freedom so they could undo it. The worldview he shared with Trask was why Hunt had agreed to be the industrialist’s inside man at the Bureau. In return, Trask had promised to give him what he wanted most.
America. Whole, safe, sane.
That prize would not come for free, of course. But then, it was supposed to hurt. A quote from Thomas Jefferson had stuck in his brain when he was still in high school, and it had become his bold personal motto, typed and carried on a slip of paper folded into his wallet: God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?… What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
Today had been a costly beginning. The next event would carry a higher price tag in blood and treasure.
Hunt left to go clean himself up, get dinner, and take a nap. Dr. Gillani barely noticed that he was gone. She was observing the process carefully, watching Yasmin’s movements, listening to Dr. Samson’s prompts, paying special attention to the subject’s responses.
A normal sleep consisted of five stages. The first was a light sleep, in which the brain threw off waking agitation in the form of theta waves. Theta brain waves were also generated during states of high creativity and emotional excitement; they were the source of daydreams. It had been Dr. Gillani’s belief, during her studies at Universitat Heidelberg, that phobias, habits, and even mental illness could be treated by riding what she called “counter-instructions” into the brain on the peaks of those outgoing theta waves, almost like surfing, as she put it in her doctoral thesis.
Her paper was greeted with reactions ranging from cautious interest to condemnation. The sheer bulk of overwritten instructions was deemed too large to be simply slipped into the mind. But Dr. Gillani’s goal was not to assault, but to invade, like a Trojan horse. To relax the subject and have him or her take the new instructions right to the part of the brain that was least defended, the home of the most pleasant thoughts.
Mild hypnosis simulated stage one sleep, stimulated theta production. The voice kept the subject locked in that phase, relaxed but only nominally asleep, never allowing him or her to go to stage two. Together, the subject and the voice went to an idyllic spot. There, the voice walked the subject through new instructions. It introduced the subject to the marble, which was his or her real-world connection to the hypnotic suggestion. In the case of “cures,” as they had done with Jacob Trask’s daughter, no personal contact was necessary. The marble was sufficient to keep the suggestion alive, an object small enough to be carried, to be inconspicuous, to keep the owner attached to the commands they carried inside their head. In the case of “phased actions,” the rules were different. A phone call from the control voice, from Dr. Samson-a fellow student in Germany-would direct the individual to the marble and return him or her to the Trojan instructions.
Though relatively straightforward, this was a delicate procedure. Pushing any individual too hard, too fast, in a direction that did not seem natural would cause the process to derail entirely and they would have to begin again-but with new, subconscious barriers against intrusion.
There was also the likely potential of leaving subjects “unglued,” an informal, more descriptive word she preferred over the technical terminology. Should subjects not receive the full series of treatments, it left them deeply in tune with their darker “Jekyll” side and out of touch with their two or three other, more passive character personas. People “worked” because their various characters performed together in harmony. But subjects, having exercised and strengthened these mental pathways, could easily access and give preference to their dominant, more negative character at will, with very little instigation, and the other parts of their personality did not have the means or power to break free from the dominant character’s almighty grasp.
As was the case early in Dr. Gillani’s studies with a local German author, whom she referred to in her paper as patient 8R. He was insistently curious about her cerebral process and wanted to personally experience the effects of her, at that time, mind-regression techniques. Making him aware of the “bad idea” quotient of his request, Dr. Gillani reluctantly agreed to give him a private demonstration and she arranged to meet 8R off campus, at his home across the river in Dossenheim.
During his first consenting hypnosis session with Dr. Gillani, she accidentally accessed and provoked 8R’s heavily charged creative side, his dominant, darkest nature, to the point where it was necessary for Dr. Gillani to leave the room, then completely exit the house for a few minutes to simply remove her presence from the enraged subject. Patient 8R believed he was a ten-year-old boy, not in present times, who had injured his younger sister and was being punished by his father, a role Dr. Gillani played in his mind, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to be harmed by him again. Of course, 8R no longer realized he had the strength of a grown man and was lashing out like a wild child.
Against her better judgment, Dr. Gillani returned inside to fully awaken and disengage the subject, who remained still somewhat unrepressed after she did so. Agreeing to meet again at a later date for successive sessions to correct her oversights, 8R was temporarily released back into his everyday routine. Dr. Gillani never heard back from patient 8R.
Several weeks later Dr. Gillani learned that 8R had perfunctorily punched his way through his bathroom door to get at his mother and didn’t stop until her skull was as fractured as the plywood barrier. While Dr. Gillani had always been secretly, scientifically curious to see the consequences of leaving someone divided and unchecked, it ultimately became a necessary operating procedure for her to restrain patients, to hold them against their will if necessary, and she privately vowed to never again leave a patient unfinished. Unglued.
Like the subject in Baltimore, Yasmin had to be done right. Compared to those others, however, they had less time and more instructions to convey.
The scientist watched intently. Dr. Samson had guided Yasmin through the palace with gentle nudges. The movement had to be her own choice; otherwise, her brain would sense that it was being manipulated. Now Samson needed to get her to a bookmark, a place where they could bed her, put her briefly into a REM sleep, during which she would be given a control word. In case something went wrong, the word would take her back there instantly.
Dr. Gillani leaned toward the microphone connected to her colleague’s headphones.
“Emile, try to jump her.”
“All right,” Dr. Samson replied. He spoke to Yasmin. “What do you see inside the tower?”
“A great many stairs,” Yasmin told him.
“You don’t need to climb them,” the voice told her.
“Oh?”
“You’re a princess, remember?”
“Yes…”
“In a fairy tale,” he coaxed. “A magical fairy tale.”
“Oh yes.”
“Just go there,” he told her. “Think of the top of the tower.”
The young woman was silent for several moments. “I see! It worked. I’m there now.”
“Very well done. Look around. What do you see?”
“A beautiful room with white furniture. A dresser. A bed with a gossamer canopy. A full-length mirror. I see pictures of my parents framed in gold.”
Dr. Gillani told him, “Take her to the marble first.”
“All right.” To Yasmin he said, “Go to the dresser.”
“Can I cross the rug? It seems so fragile.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to go around it,” she said. “It’s such a lovely design. I want to admire it.”
“Go ahead.”
The scientists watched as she smiled, as her eyes moved beneath her lids.
“Are you still looking at the rug?” Dr. Samson asked.
“Yes.”
“Look ahead of you now. What do you see?”
“I’m at the dresser. So many lovely things on top.”
“Tell me about them.”
“There is a brush with a silver handle. A hand mirror. A jewelry box-”
“Open it.” The voice waited a moment. “What do you see?”
“Necklaces. Rings. Jewels.”
“Do you see a bracelet?”
“No-”
“Are you certain?”
“I don’t see it.”
The voice hesitated. “Do you see a watch?”
“Let me look. Yes, there is a watch.”
“Very good. Take it out and put it on.”
“All right.”
The voice waited again. “Is it on?”
“Yes. It sparkles in the sunlight.”
“There is a marble in your hand,” the voice went on. “Do you feel it?”
“I do.”
“It will sparkle, too.”
“Let me see.” Her wrist moved up. She admired the object through closed eyes. “It’s so… mysterious.”
“Put it on the face of the watch.”
Yasmin frowned slightly. “I don’t understand.”
“Be careful,” Dr. Gillani warned. “You mustn’t confuse her.” That would take Yasmin to a problem-solving corner of the brain. We should have gone to the bed first, she thought. But connection to the marble was a bigger prize, would cut the need for a bookmark and an hour of sleep from the process.
“The marble is like a little sun, is it not?” Dr. Samson asked.
A smile played across Yasmin’s lips. “Yellow… gleaming.” The smile stayed. “Yes.”
Dr. Gillani exhaled. Her colleague had kept Yasmin in the illusion.
“If you take that little sun and place it on top of the crystal, it will stay there.”
“It will?”
“Yes. The light of both will merge into something beautiful, something worthy of a princess, something you will like very, very much. Don’t release it when you put it there. Continue to hold it so you can feel its warmth.”
“All right,” Yasmin said.
Dr. Gillani pressed a button on the console in front of her. The magnetic strap around Yasmin’s right hand was released. She watched as Yasmin moved her wrist to the marble, held it there.
“Oh, yes!” Yasmin said. “I am holding the sun!”
Until she relaxed, Dr. Gillani did not realize how tightly her shoulders had been tensed. The rest of the process should go relatively quickly now. Dr. Samson would suggest that Yasmin change into something regal and would lead her to the closet. There, as she went through the gowns, she would find a chest. In that chest would be the items she would need for the mission. They would be made an anachronistic part of her fantasy, one in which-with Dr. Samson’s guidance-she would come to believe the palace was under attack.
Yasmin would defend it.
To the death.