Game Changer (14 page)

20

Kevin Quinn loaded the merc’s
body into the trunk of the Tesla in a daze. He then managed to stumble back to the
shack with the large rucksack that contained the mercs’ cache of weaponry and
supplies.

He entered the structure and laid
on his back on the deteriorating gray floorboards in one dark corner,
struggling for some semblance of equilibrium. He closed his eyes, his mind
still reeling, struck by how fitting it was to be in a dark, rotting structure
contemplating his own mind, one that had suddenly taken on these same
characteristics.

If the second mercenary arrived
back from his mission a few hours early, Quinn would be toast, but he couldn’t
bring himself to care.

He had Googled himself on the
merc’s phone as Coffey had suggested and verified what his former boss had
said: he
was
listed as having been a
guest instructor for the SEALS in Coronado during the week of Davinroy’s retreat.
It was always possible the Web entries for this had been doctored, but why?

If Coffey had been right about this,
could the rest of his claims be true as well? Quinn was terrified by what an
examination of his past might reveal. Even the thought of exploring this
further sent a shiver down his spine.

But such an examination could
not be avoided, no matter how scared he was. He took a deep breath, closed his
eyes even tighter, and thought back to his first date with Nicole, their first
kiss. The first time they had made love.

His breath caught in his throat
as his worst fears were immediately realized: he was drawing an absolute blank.
He had a memory of what an extraordinary woman she had been, and how very much
he had loved her. But in the abstract. There were no
specific
memories to support these overarching ones.

Which was impossible. Yes, many
men weren’t good at remembering anniversaries and birthdays, or what their
spouse was wearing on their first date, but there wasn’t a one who didn’t
remember his first date with his future wife, or their first kiss.

And what about Hailey? He
thought back to the pregnancy. Nothing.

He tried to recall how they had
decided on the name
Hailey
. Again, nothing.

He had absolutely no
recollection of her conception. Of Nicole’s pregnancy.
Nothing
.

So everything Coffey had claimed
was true. He had never married. There was no Nicole, no Hailey. And no torture
and murder, even though the memory of both continued to be stubbornly
persistent, as much a part of him as his arm. He had been driven so
single-mindedly to revenge that, if not for Coffey, would he ever have realized
that the existence of his wife and daughter didn’t hold up to a more
comprehensive scrutiny?

Were
any
of his memories accurate?

Nothing could be as
disorienting, as
devastating
, as
learning that the most powerful, life-changing memories you’ve ever had were
unreal, imaginary. If you couldn’t trust a memory this profound, this visceral,
what could you trust?

He had been driven to desperation.
He had tried to kill an innocent man!

This new perspective explained
so much. How the president had managed to drug him so easily. How tunnel
entrances could be hidden inside closets for decades without a single guest, a
single rowdy kid, having discovered one.

This explained why his
recollections were so spotty. He could remember Davinroy’s horrific words with
almost photographic detail, every one of them scorched into his mind. But
images
were hazy, undefined. He couldn’t
recall the hidden structure in the Catskills he had stumbled upon, or how he
had managed to gain entry. And how could he have been inside long enough to see
the president delivering killing blows to his wife without moving to stop him
much sooner?

And while the president could be
many things, duplicitous, narcissistic, self-serving, and wrong-headed, it had
always seemed surreal to Quinn that he had transformed into such a caricature
of a psychopathic villain. The more he considered what he thought had happened,
the more flaws he found in the logic of the situation.

This also explained why no one
had given him the benefit of the doubt. Because he didn’t deserve it.

So how had this happened? It
could be that the memory erasure drug he remembered receiving was real, but
delivered by someone else in a different setting. Perhaps when he had thrown
off the effects his wires had gotten crossed, somehow converting a nightmare
starring an imaginary wife into an indelible memory.

Or he could be stark, raving,
mad? How would he know otherwise? In fact, how could he know
anything
? His entire sense of self was
shaken to his very core. Was his name really Kevin Quinn? Impossible to know.

He believed he was sane and that
his memories of everything but the torture and murder were accurate. But there
was no way to be certain. Sleepers believed their dreams were real until they
awoke. Schizophrenics had absolute belief in their delusions.

Quinn could well be psychotic,
imagining that he was in a shack, imagining a fly drone, imagining his recent
conversation with Coffey. He could be a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient, whose
brain had temporarily come to life to create random memories. His time on the
run and on this mountain seemed quite extensive, but experiments had shown
dreams could impart the illusion of duration, even when they were seconds long.
The mind played tricks on itself.

It was possible Quinn had come
into existence that very instant, but with a full set of memories. He couldn’t
know otherwise. Not for certain. This was a far-out conjecture made by
philosophers and re-explored by a stoner friend of his who was higher than Mt.
Everest at the time.

It was also possible that Quinn was
the only thing in existence, that everything else was just an illusion. Again, this
conjecture, no matter how ridiculous it seemed, could not be disproved.

Quinn might think there were billions
of other beings on Earth and that he had interacted with many thousands, but
what if this was all just his own overactive imagination? What if he was a god,
the only being in existence, and had constructed the entire universe in his own
mind to alleviate boredom?

Rene Descartes had famously
concluded that it was impossible to know for certain if the input coming in
through his senses, or anything he
thought
he knew, was real. It could all be an illusion, and he would have no way of
knowing it. He then took this question one step further: could he even be
certain that
he
existed?

Descartes realized that the
answer to this question was
yes
. The
act of pondering if he existed or not,
required
him to exist. This was, in fact, the
only
thing he could be certain of.

Cogito ergo sum
, he had famously written.
I think, therefore I am
. Or more accurately,
I am thinking, therefore I must exist
.

Quinn shook his head to clear it.
This thought process was getting him nowhere. His confidence about the nature
of his reality had been shattered to its core, but he had to find a piece of
wreckage and cling to it while the sea of confusion raged around him.

He removed the small blue canister
now containing a fly drone from his pocket. It could well be yet another
figment of his imagination. But even so, he decided he had to go forward under
the assumption that it truly existed. That the incident with Davinroy at the
retreat had not been real, but everything he had experienced since was. To
believe anything else would quickly lead to paralysis and madness.

It was time to quit reeling from
these profound revelations and get back to the business of living, of
surviving.

He rose from the floor and moved
to an illuminated section of the room. He took a careful inventory of the
contents of the gray rucksack he had taken from the trunk of the Tesla. It
contained everything his heart could possibly desire, except for his key fob
cloner, which he would retrieve as soon as he put the other mercenary down.

He ignored all doubts about his
grip on reality and thought about next moves for several minutes, replaying
everything that had happened in his mind. First, he decided, he had a duty to
warn the woman who was to be the next victim of the unseen puppet master. He
removed the phone he had taken from his captor and searched for the bio of
Rachel Howard. How did she play in?

“Who are you, Ms. Howard?” he
mumbled to himself, but a moment later he found her bio and added, “or should I
say,
Professor
Howard.”

He was stunned as he finished
reading her bio. Among other things, Rachel Howard was considered one of the
world’s foremost experts on the neurobiology of human memory. Incredible. This
couldn’t just be a coincidence. An expert in memory, just when he could use one
of these the most.

He had planned to contact her,
probably in person, and tell her what he knew, make sure she was as protected
as possible. But now his interest in meeting her was considerably more urgent.

He found the Russian’s
instructions to the two men, which were quite simple, and supported what his
prisoner had told him. Their orders were to go to Cambridge and kill Professor Rachel
Howard, esteemed chair of Harvard’s neuroscience department, as soon as their
boss was about to arrive to retrieve Quinn. They were also told they didn’t
need to worry about making it look like an accident. Finally, 302 had made it
clear that he didn’t have her under surveillance. Since she made no effort to
keep her whereabouts secret, and in fact published her daily schedule
online,
he was confident they could find
her on their own.

Quinn decided this must mean
that neither standard surveillance measures
nor
fly drones were in play. This was a relief. The rucksack had contained
equipment designed to detect standard bugs and tracking devices, but his
instincts told him the fly technology would be invisible to such equipment. But
these fly drones would be expensive and likely a precious resource. Using one
to surveil the president and then deploying it to stick to Quinn—literally—was
one thing. Using one to surveil a sitting duck like Rachel Howard was another.

Quinn had listened to the car
radio during his drive here the night before. Since the story of his attack on
the president hadn’t broken, Davinroy must have decided to bury it so he could
tidy things up. Quinn suspected this would continue for another day or so, but
he would know for sure the moment he turned on the radio once again.

Regardless, his strategy was now
clear. He would wait here to ambush the second mercenary upon his return,
hitting him with a tranquilizer dart. Then he would zip-tie them each around
the trunk of a slender tree in the woods. They would survive, as promised, but
that didn’t mean he had to make it easy on them.

After this he would don his
trusty baseball cap, make a quick stop at a retail store to shore up his
disguise, and have a tiny steel canister couriered to Cris Coffey. Finally, he
would pay his respects to a certain neuroscience expert at Harvard University.
A woman with an impeccable reputation who had somehow managed to show up at the
top of a mercenary’s hit list.

21

ABC News

Up-to-the-Minute Report

Online Coverage of Breaking News
From Around the World

Monday, June 2

Chicago, Illinois: The storied Hamza mosque was burned to
the ground late this morning in what authorities believe to be a terrorist
attack, killing all of those inside. The current number of fatalities in the
attack is unknown, but authorities believe it could be over two hundred,
including the mosque’s Imam, Azim Jafari, an outspoken leader well known for
his criticism of Islamic extremism and his calls to end violence.
 

While authorities have only begun their investigation, a
spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a brief
statement, indicating that Jafari had been meeting with Muslims from around the
country who shared his vision of peace and tolerance. It is believed that one
or more extremists were able to infiltrate this gathering and set off a highly
combustible gas.

So far, no terrorist group has taken credit for this
massacre. The DHS spokesman had no knowledge of motive, but speculation is that
this was carried out by extremists to silence those in the Muslim community who
were critical of a radicalized interpretation of the religion, and who had the
courage to speak out against those they believed were trying to hijack an
otherwise peaceful faith.

While details of the events of this morning are still
emerging, it is believed that DHS was alerted to a possible terrorist attack on
the mosque, and was able to have the surrounding area evacuated before the fire
and explosion. A DHS team on-site was in the process of attempting to contact
the leader of this small group of terrorist infiltrators, to negotiate a
peaceful resolution, when the mosque mushroomed into flames.

President Davinroy could not be reached for immediate
comment, but his spokesman said he would be addressing the nation shortly. He
added that the president is heartbroken over this heinous act of extremism that
took so many good people, including Azim Jafari, a courageous man who died
defending his ideals. Although unconfirmed, there have been rumors that the
president will award Jafari a posthumous medal for his leadership and
contributions to peace.

Azim Jafari grew up in San Diego, California, having . . .

22

Once
Rachel Howard’s graduate class had concluded, ten minutes after its scheduled
end, she had spent the entire day working with Jason Balazs‎,
one of the top professors in Harvard’s mathematics
department. She had been collaborating with him for weeks to refine an algorithm
that could make sense of billions of patterns of neuronal connections in the
brain, which explained why she was so burnt out and why her brain seemed to
hurt, even though she knew better than anyone that there were no pain receptors
in this all-important organ.

She had an excellent grasp of advanced mathematics,
but Balazs was so beyond her she had to strain to her limits to understand even
the rudiments of the mathematical models he was able to develop.

And she was starving. It wasn’t quite six thirty at night,
but while the muscles burned the highest quantity of all-purpose fuel, nothing
burned through glucose more prodigiously than the three-pound dynamo between
her ears, which had been running in fifth gear since late that morning.
 

She had ordered takeout from her favorite Thai restaurant,
Siam Nara, which was only minutes away from her small colonial home in Waltham,
Massachusetts.

Waltham was about seven miles west of Harvard’s main campus,
a distance that routinely took her between twenty-five and thirty minutes to
cover. She didn’t really mind the commute, and was thankful she was one of only
a few people to rate a parking space right outside the neuroscience building
that housed her office and labs.

Her home in Waltham was small, but after her divorce four years
earlier from Ron Williams they had sold the Cambridge residence, and she was a
woman of simple needs. The homes surrounding Cambridge had become ever more
pricey over the years, and she couldn’t justify buying a new one on a single salary.

She would have liked to blame her husband for their marital
difficulties, if it weren’t for the stubborn fact that it was all her fault. The
truth was that she was too involved with her work—far more so than he was.
Neuroscience was all-consuming to her, and she would rather be uncovering the
secrets of this realm than going to movies or parties, or doing any of the
myriad other activities that couples did together.

When she had decided she didn’t want to take time out for
motherhood, ignoring instincts screaming for her to reproduce, this was the
straw that broke the marriage’s back. Ron had wanted badly to be a father, and she
knew he would be remarkable in this role.

He had been a good man, and she had been a good woman, but
this didn’t always mean things were destined to work out. She had been
twenty-nine at the time, dazzling the neuroscience world with work heralded by
all as brilliant and paradigm-shifting, first as a post-doc and then for two
years as an associate professor.

She didn’t divorce her husband because she had grown to hate
him, but because she still loved him very much. Ron had been twenty-eight, and severing
their marriage when she did was the most merciful thing she could do, giving
him plenty of time to find and marry a partner who wanted kids as much as he
did.

Two years earlier, he had done just this. At the age of
thirty he had married a twenty-six year old, and she was currently pregnant
with their second child. Rachel couldn’t be happier for him.

Human beings were inscrutable things, and far less in
conscious control of their decisions and behavior than anyone realized. Freud
observed that many of his patients had no conscious knowledge of why they
behaved the way they did, leading him to compare consciousness to the tip of an
iceberg, with many of the true drivers of a person’s thoughts and behaviors
lurking below, hidden from even their own view.

And Freud, prophetic as he was, was only scratching the
surface of the profound reality of this analogy. Rachel had studied
neuroscience far too long and hard to spend unnecessary energy beating up on herself
or regretting the course her life had taken. Human beings behaved the way they
behaved, decided the way they decided, driven by an amalgam of genes and
impulses and evolution and instincts and drives and mysterious unconscious
controllers that fooled the conscience into believing it was in charge.

But Rachel Howard-Williams—now just Rachel Howard—knew
better. The illusion of free will was flawless, but her species had far less of
it than any would ever be able to truly accept.

Despite this unfortunate
course correction in her life, Rachel
had a cheerful disposition by nature and had decided
she would likely remain single for the rest of her life, although she would
date when she could. After all, she knew better than anyone the psychological
importance of companionship, social bonds, touch, and sexual intimacy.

Rachel pulled into her favorite Thai restaurant and parked
her car, a black Acura that was a hybrid between an undersized SUV and an oversized
sedan. She was a regular at Siam Nara and was greeted warmly by several of the
staff when she entered, which she decided either represented a great extension
of her social web, or was pathetic and depressing, depending on the day she was
having.

A few minutes later she left with her prize, crab rangoon
and pad thai, which gave off a warmth and aroma that easily penetrated its
paper prison, ratcheting up her hunger even further. She drove a few blocks
before stopping at a red light, lost in thought, the radio on to provide
background noise.

There was a faint thumping sound from the back of the SUV,
behind the second row of beige leather seats. In a sedan, this is where the
trunk would have been, but in her sedan-SUV hybrid it was a flat platform that
served the same purpose, enclosed by a sleek hatchback.

She listened for a few seconds. There it was again, barely
loud enough to hear. It almost sounded like someone was gently punching the
soft leather back of one of the seats. She turned off the radio, intrigued and
alert, and studied the back of the car in her rearview mirror. What car
malfunction could possibly make this sound?

As she watched, a man’s head rose above the second row of
seats, the rest of his body still concealed behind them. Rachel gasped and jumped
so forcefully that her seatbelt automatically tightened up against her, pinning
her in place, before relaxing once again.

But her heart didn’t relax. After almost bursting through
her chest it was still pumping furiously at more than twice its normal rate,
and Rachel found that she could no longer breathe.

This intruder in her car was so out of her realm of
experience she couldn’t have been more terrified and disoriented had a school
of piranha fallen from the sky.

She had no idea how this man had gotten inside. And she had
no idea what he wanted.

But she had little doubt that her life was now in serious
danger.