Read Online Catnip by J.S. Frankel - Free Book Online Page B

and seeing myself in a mirror.” She turned
her head away and her voice got low and started to shake. “But I
know what I look like now. I’m a freak.”
    Farrell didn’t bother to offer his opinion.
Harry didn’t know what to do…and finally he got up, went over to
her side, and put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re not a freak,”
he said softly. “You’re not.”
    The sound of Farrell’s cellphone interrupted
things. He opened it up and spoke quietly into it. “We have
something,” he said after hanging up and his mood brightened
considerably. “Interpol just gave us details. Someone’s come in,
and he may be able to help us.”
    Two seconds later, a knock sounded at the
door. Farrell opened it and ushered the visitor in. Tall and
rail-thin with a hatchet face and dark brown hair, he appeared to
be in his mid-fifties, and wore a cheap-looking suit and vest with
an antique watch hanging out of the vest pocket. The two men
quietly spoke to each other and then Farrell turned around and
pointed to his guest.
    “Harry, Anastasia, this is Oleg, our
contact,” he said. “He used to work for the KGB years back. He was
a doctor for them, defected to our side, and that’s all you have to
know for now.”
    Harry was confused. “So what makes you think
she’s a spy?”
    Farrell didn’t bother looking at him. He kept
his gaze focused on the prisoner. “What I told you before makes
sense. She has a Russian name, she can remember details, and she’s
obviously been programmed to do something. Don’t get fooled just
because she’s a girl.” Then he waved at the other man. “Do what you
have to do.”
    The former KGB agent didn’t speak right away.
“This…may not work,” he said after hesitating a moment. “I’m not
sure…”
    “Get on with it!”
    Oleg asked Anastasia to sit on the cot. Harry
moved aside, and Oleg repositioned the chair across from Anastasia,
took the watch out, and let it dangle from his hand. He waved it
back and forth in front of her face, muttering softly in his native
language. She continued to stare at the pendulum, her eyes growing
glassier by the second.
    Harry remembered the old hypnosis tricks he’d
seen on television. This is so much BS , he thought…but after
observing the action, he soon realized this was no joke. Her head
soon sagged and she seemed to be asleep.
    Oleg put away the watch fob and turned to
face the FBI agent. He spoke English reasonably well with only a
slight accent and a few grammatical mistakes. “This is something I
learned many years ago. I am doctor, but often we trained
agents who had been drugged beforehand and used hypnosis to implant
memory blocks and triggers to open them. Please be patient.”
    He spoke softly to Anastasia in his native
language. She kept her head down, didn’t say anything for a moment,
and then words came out in a halting monotone, accented and quiet.
Harry gasped—it was true—she was Russian! Even though he
didn’t like Farrell, he had to admit the man’s instincts had been
correct.
    The questioning continued, and the word Nyet came up a number of times. Harry knew what it meant. It
was Russian for no and it meant to him, if to no one else, that she
didn’t know who’d done this to her.
    After five minutes, Anastasia’s body started
to shake, and then she fell silent. The ex-spy took out the watch
fob again, tilted her chin up, and began the procedure all over
again. She gradually stopped shaking, and after five minutes he
snapped his fingers and she woke up, blinking rapidly. Farrell
asked impatiently, “Well?”
    Oleg looked at him and stated flatly, “She is
definitely Russian, from region near Siberia. I know that accent
from people I trained with. That is all she could tell me about her
origins. She has no memory of family, where she went to
school…nothing.”
    “What about her mutation?” Farrell pressed.
“Does she know who did this to her?”
    The ex-KGB man shook his head. “She remembers
being in