Neuropath (11 page)

Sam led him through a carpeted warren of workstations, some completely dark, others illuminated by kooky screen-savers. Something like shock accompanied his first glimpse of Agent Atta. She stood in a glass-enclosed conference area, talking to a tall black man in a stylish suit. It seemed hard to believe that just this morning she'd swept into his office bearing madness. Special Agent-in-Charge, Shelley Atta, destroyer of worlds…

Thomas paused in the gloom.

'Logan still hasn't called in,' Atta was saying. 'She doesn't have a clue what's going on.'

A tingle always accompanied eavesdropping, as though words could be bedrooms. He and Sam both froze in their tracks, intent on the conversation they had stumbled onto.

'What's her story, anyway?' the black man asked. 'Who'd she fuck to get sent up so quickly?'

'You mean you haven't hear—'

A vacuum hummed to life from the back of the office. Cleaning staff.

Thomas turned and saw Sam pale-faced and motionless at his side. It was always like this. No matter how much he reminded himself that the lives about him were every bit as impacted as his own, he found himself faintly astonished whenever he confronted that complexity. Of course Sam had skeptics and detractors—enemies even. Of course she had made one sketchy decision too many. Everyone was in the same boat. They just lacked the eyes to see past themselves.

'
Fuck
,' she whispered.

'Don't read too much into it.'

'Into what?' Her voice cracked. 'Having my reputation dragged through the mud?'

Thomas pulled her aside.

'People gossip. It's just part of being human. Some think it's the evolutionary key to our intelligence.' He fell silent, feeling slightly abashed. Nora had always laughed at his habit of thinking that knowledge could see people through difficult moments. A pensive moment passed. 'Who's that Atta's talking to, anyway?'

'Dean Heaney. Our DoJ advisor.'

'Do they know each other? Are they old friends?'

'No.'

He knew he was doing it again, but he couldn't stop himself. 'Well, there you go. The more slight the acquaintance, the more likely the person hearing accusations of deficiency will attribute those deficiencies to the accuser.'

'Really?' Sam said in a strange tone.

'Really,' Thomas replied, even though he knew he'd somehow caused more harm than good. Why? Why were facts so helpless in the face of pain? 'They call it trait transference.'

Sam stared at him angrily. A tear rolled down her left cheek. 'And what if they're true?' she asked.

'What if what's true?'

'The accusations,' she said, turning on her heel.

'Sam!' he called, following her. 'Sam, I didn't me—'

'
Bible?'
someone incredulously cried. Agent Atta. Sam stopped and whirled.

'Bible!' Atta bellowed from behind him. '
Freeze
, asshole!'

Thomas stopped in his tracks.

'Hands up. Over your head.'

Thomas did as he was told, too stunned to feel anything, let alone think.

'Now turn slowly.'

'Shelley?' Sam shouted. 'He's here to help!'

'Help? I don't think so.'

Thomas had turned as she said this, but his protest was quashed by the sight of Agent Atta's gun levelled at his chest. A red dot swayed across the breast of his sport jacket. A wave of heat flashed through him. Terror.

'Th-this is insane,' he croaked.

'I'm afraid your professional opinion means squat around here, professor. You're suffering something of a credibility crisis.'

'Shelley!' Sam cried.

In the dark Agent Atta's look was hard and handsome in the way of solid women. Something in her eyes told Thomas that she enjoyed pointing her gun. 'Your professor friend,' she said to Sam, 'has been what you might call less than forthcoming. It seems that while we were interviewing him in his office this morning, our SUB was sleeping off a hangover in his house.' She paused for an instant to let the significance of this sink in. 'Gerard's over at his place now. The Evidence Response Team is en route.'

Sam approached her boss warily, casting a searching look at Thomas as she did so. The DoJ advisor, Dean Heaney, sat on the corner of an unoccupied desk just behind Agent Atta. He smiled as though watching a skirmish between family members he equally despised.

'Ask him,' Atta said to the junior agent.

'Is it true?' Sam said rigidly, her look somewhere between stunned and devastated. Very unprofessional.

'Yeah,' he said.

'That's why you rushed home this morning.'

'I
wanted
to tell you, it was just that—'

All at once her demeanor became hard and cynical-professional. For some reason Thomas found this almost as disconcerting as Agent Atta's gun.

'Wanted?' she said. 'Then why didn't you?'

Where did you go? Sam?

'I'm not sure.'

'This guy's a psychology professor?' Dean Heaney chortled from behind. 'Remind me not to send my kids to Columbia.'

Between the gun, the accusations, and Sam, Thomas felt he might have a heart attack. 'He was my best friend for eighteen years,' he said hotly. '
Eighteen years!
What did you expect me to do?'

'The right thing,' Agent Atta said.

'And handing him over to the Feds is always the right thing, is it? Talk about fucking credibility crises. No. I had to know for sure.'

Agent Atta pulled out her handcuffs.

'Tell me honestly, Agent Atta,' Thomas said quickly. 'If the Feds were after someone you loved, how quickly would you roll over?'

The question seemed to catch her off guard. She glanced nervously at Sam.

'Careful,' Heaney said. 'It could be a Jedi mind trick.'

'What do you think, Samantha?' Atta asked.

The sudden, irrational fear that Agent Atta was about to execute him seized Thomas.
Gun-gun-real-gun
! reeled through his panicked thoughts.

'I think we need him,' Sam said hastily. 'He
knows
what Cassidy's doing, Shelley. And he thinks he knows why. He's given us a motive—a
real
motive, for Christ's sake.'

'A motive?'

'Better than anything those NCAVC jokers have come up with. Better by far.'

Atta's large, chocolate eyes lingered on Thomas for a moment. 'Speak,' she said.

'It's a long story,' Thomas replied.

Atta holstered her Glock. 'Then you ride with me,' she said.

CHAPTER SIX

August 17th, 7.01 p.m.

Thomas felt a flare of embarrassment when he saw the vehicles congregated in front of his house: two Peekskill cruisers, a couple of unmarked cars, and a black van probably belonging to the Evidence Response Unit. Flashing lights splashed comic-book colors across the white siding. Contrails roped the sky above, fading into violet fans as night tightened its grip. They had driven to the very edge of daylight.

Shelley ran her car onto his lawn and pulled it into park. 'Look, professor, you're not out of the woods yet,' she said, staring at him intently. 'As it stands, we could charge you with obstruction, harboring a fugitive, maybe even accessory after the fact. You're too smart to think we'd nail you, but you're also too smart not to know how these things go. Anything can happen.'

'Don't bother with th—'

'Hear me out,' Atta interrupted. 'Now you've taken responsibility for your foolishness—which is a rare thing in this business. I've dealt with so many assholes that I sometimes feel more like a proctologist than special agent. You're not an asshole… I can see that.'

'So you believe me?' Thomas had spent most of the drive giving her an abbreviated account of what he'd told Sam earlier, about Skeat's class in Princeton, about the Argument—and of course, Nora. The entire time Atta had simply stared at the road, only rarely glancing at him to let him know she listened. Otherwise, he felt as though he were arguing the virtues of water to a stone.

'I believe yours is the most plausible interpretation of this madness I've heard. Don't get me wrong. I think all that stuff about the semantic apocalypse is bullshit, plain and simple. But the question is one of whether Cassidy believes it.'

'You'd make a good psychologist, Agent Atta.'

Atta actually smiled. 'Men do tend to shrink in my company,' she quipped. She shouldered open her door, saying, 'Now let's see how you do as an investigator, professor.'

There was something matronly and more than a little condescending about her demeanor, but Thomas decided that he liked Shelley Atta. She radiated stability, something he desperately needed given all that had happened, never mind the fact that he was about to help the authorities ransack his house… his
home
.

Could the day become any more nightmarish?

'Tommy!' he heard someone cry as he crossed his lawn. Mia, leaning over the railing of his porch. Ripley and Frankie were crowded at his side, Ripley tall enough to imitate Mia's lean, Frankie gripping the wrought iron spindles with a convict's resignation. They both looked terrified.

Ignoring Agent Atta's angry call, he trotted over to them, doing his best to look more sheepish than stunned. The fact that neither of them said anything brought his heart to his throat.

'So what did we have for dinner?' he asked lamely.

'Are you under rest?' Frankie asked, wide eyed. His face seemed impossibly round in the clicking lights—and defenceless, utterly defenceless.

'He doesn't have handcuffs on,' Ripley said, her tone of sisterly reprimand as forced as Thomas's. 'I told you he wouldn't have handcuffs on.'

As though to confirm the fact, Thomas reached up to place a hand against each of their cheeks. He did his best to chuckle and smile. 'Exciting, huh?' he said glancing back over his shoulder. He managed to resist an apologetic look at Mia.

'They have
guns
,' Frankie said.

'They're not going to shoot Bart, are they?' Ripley blurted.

'They're the
good
guys,' Thomas explained. He could feel his parental instincts roil, spin with urges to protect, to mislead, to reassure. A father was supposed to be a bulwark, someone who turned aside worldly intrusions, and yet here he was, feeding his children lame apologies. 'Just like the movies…'

'Then where are the bad guys?' Ripley asked.

'Far away,' Thomas said. 'Daddy's just helping them find… directions.'

Agent Atta's voice fell hard across the evening air. '
Professor?'
Frankie fairly jumped.

'Look,' Thomas said, caressing each of their cheeks with his thumbs. 'I won't be long. You two just hang tight and I'll come get you in no time, okay?'

But both of them were staring at the shadowy woman behind him. 'Why's she hollering at you, Dad?' Frankie asked in a small voice. His eyes had the look of having crawled across the first of many scary facts. Their home had been cracked open. Could the world be big enough to break anything?

Rather than answer, he looked to Mia. 'Would you mind? At least until…' He gestured helplessly to the surrounding commotion. He glimpsed Agent Atta waiting impatiently beside the bushes that flanked his porch.

'Sure thing,' Mia said with an understanding blink.

'C'mon, kids. Let's go see if your house is on the news. You could be famous!'

Thomas was almost overwhelmed by a feeling of invasion when he stepped inside. Strangers, everywhere he looked, going through the pockets of his home. Two uniformed cops were in his kitchen, leaning against his counter and apparently shooting the breeze. Sam, Gerard, and Dean Heaney stood in an expectant cluster in his living room. Behind them, two women wearing Evidence Response Team jackets seemed to be scanning his carpet.

'Well, Gerard?' Agent Atta asked.

The agent looked at Thomas for a sour moment. 'Still sweeping,' he said to his SAC, 'but other than kiddie porn on the computer'—he graced Thomas with a contemptuous wink—'I don't think we'll find anything.'

Thomas grinned his best fuck-you grin. Scarcely a month passed without some story of some reform-minded political figure arrested on child pornography charges. Just the previous week Thomas had found a leaflet in his department mailbox accusing the government of 'politically motivated cyber-planting'.

'Why would Cassidy come here?' Sam asked, frowning. 'He must have known we'd show up sooner or later.'

'Could be he was simply being sociable,' Atta replied, staring from point to point around the living room, looking for all the world like a disgusted interior decorator. 'Could be he wasn't…' She turned to Thomas. 'You said you passed out around 2.30 or so last night?'

Thomas shrugged. 'That's when I
think
I pass—'

'So he had the run of the place for about five hours, then.'

'Could've done anything,' Gerard said.
To you or your kids
, his expression added.

Thomas felt faint. This was not his home. These people were not hunting his best friend.

'I want you to do a walk through, professor,' Atta said, 'check to see if anything is amiss—you know, out of place. Whatever game Cassidy is playing, he seems to think you're an important player. Gerard, Logan, you give him a hand. Make sure he's thorough.'

'You gotta nice dump, here,' Gerard said as they stepped into the den—what used to be Nora's workout room. 'Here's your copy of the warrant, by the way.' He slapped a document against his chest.

Thomas glared at him, trying to decide whether his hostility was real or procedural. 'It's not signed,' he said, scanning the document.

'We'll get our janitor to sign it tomorrow.'

Thomas looked to Sam, who simply shrugged.
You brought this on yourself
, her look said.

He found himself clutching the paper, as though it were the only shred of whatever it was that would see him through this. Here he was, standing in his den, helping strangers turn his life inside out. The room seemed smaller for some reason, the ceiling dingier. Cobwebs hung like bells in the corners. A peculiar shame suffused him—not that of secrets exposed so much as that of recognition: his home was simply one of millions, little more than a shell, dressed to give the pathetic illusion of individuality.

Just another monkey
, Neil would say,
hiding in your hole
.

'Hockey fan, huh?' Gerard said, glancing at a vintage Bruins jersey Thomas had pinned to the wall.

'You're not?'

'Too Canadian.'

'What's wrong with Canadians?'

'They're just Americans who think they're better than Americans.'

Thomas snorted. 'As opposed to what? Americans who thi—'

'You should know I almost shot your dog,' Gerard interrupted, gesturing to Bart on the fold-out couch. Thomas wasn't sure whether he'd ever met someone who oozed quite so much
I-don't-give-a-shit
. It was all an act, of course, the sign of someone preoccupied by dominance hierarchies. Classic Freudian compensation. Gerard so regularly communicated his power because he was so uncertain of it.

'Why would you shoot my dog?' Thomas asked.

'Too friendly. I never trust anything too friendly.'

'What? He hump your leg or something?'

Only Sam laughed. 'Big dog, Gerard. You'd be wearing diapers for weeks.'

Thomas found himself glancing at her in thanks, then looked ruefully at his sad old dog. Bart yawned, and then, as though to prove Sam right, rolled over and showed his belly—among other things.

'
Bart
,' Thomas said.

'Gawddamn,' Gerard said, his look appreciative. 'That dog deserves his own website.'

'Ignore him,' Sam said, shaking her head at her partner. 'Do you see anything, professor? Anything out of place?'

'Www,' Gerard cackled, 'dog-got-a-bone.' Evidently he found himself quite hilarious.

'I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be looking for,' Thomas admitted. 'Are you?'

'I'm not sure about anything any more,' Sam replied.

'Or how about,' Gerard continued, 'www.canine.com? You get it, Logan?
Kay-nine
. Look at it. That's gotta be nine inches in dog years!'

'Have you been smoking crack?' Sam asked, nevertheless smiling. 'Nine inches in dog years,' she repeated to Thomas. Then, as though all bound in the same wires of tension, the three of them burst out laughing.

Madness, Thomas found himself thinking. Everyday life was madness.

'Bart!' Thomas cried. 'You're distracting the special agent!'

As though finally shamed by their laughter, Bart whined and rolled off the mattress. He trotted from the room.

Thomas wiped tears from his eyes.

'It's good to clean the pipes,' Sam said from his side. 'Especially after a day like today.'

'Remarkable animal,' Gerard said, shaking his head.

'C'mon,' Sam called, following Bart out the door, 'let's at least pretend we're looking for wild geese.'

Thomas lingered behind to take one last look. A strange vertigo haunted the room, like the delayed reaction to a near miss on the freeway. He had a drunken memory of Neil disappearing through the doorway. Not his friend Neil, but the Neil looming behind the frame of Cynthia Powski's final porn. Neil the shadow. Neil the knife.

'So he had the run of the place…'

Thomas found Agents Logan and Gerard in his office. Sam was studying his giant satellite poster of the Earth on the far wall, framed by high-resolution whorls and continental land masses.

'Space buff?' she asked.

He suddenly felt embarrassed by how juvenile it looked. 'When I was a kid,' he explained. 'I put it up to cover the tacky panelling more than anything else.'

'Still, nice picture,' Sam said, as though she understood the wonder of such things.

'No tits,' Gerard chimed, leaning back to peak behind a bookcase.

Despite their earlier laughter, something about their carefree attitude sparked resentment in Thomas. Then he realized: when you lost a trail, you followed a search pattern, which was little more than a systematic attempt to squeeze dumb luck out of an indifferent world. For the human mind there was precious little difference between looking for something unknown and looking for nothing.

So they were going through the motions. Same as him.

He walked over to the oak desk that he and Nora had spent a laborious summer refinishing. Everything seemed to be where he'd left it. A stack of draft course outlines. Sticky notes with meaningless reminders. He turned on his desk light—the green glass one Neil had given him for Christmas years ago in college. What he saw punched the breath from his lungs.

'Sam,' he said numbly.

'Nine inches in dog years,' she was saying in a
you-take-the-cake
tone.

'Sam,' he repeated. 'Come here.'

He pointed to the light.

'What about it?'

'That wasn't there before.'

'Shelley!' Sam shouted. 'You're going to want to look at this!'

In a blue marker all but invisible against the green glass when the light was off, someone had written

www.semanticapocalypse.com

Not someone.
Neil
.

There could be no doubt, Thomas realized with horror.

He was part of the game.

He stood by woodenly as Sam sat at his desk and fired up his computer.

You already have Nora
, was all he could think.
Just leave me alone
.

Within moments, his office was crowded with people, and Thomas was numbly explaining how he found the web address. Atta had Gerard chase all the newcomers except Dean Heaney from the room, then call someone named Lamar at 'CI'.

'And tell him to keep it under his hat,' she snapped. Gerard nodded, frowning in concentration.

'Got it!' Sam cried.

They all crowded around the flat panel. Gerard muttered on his palmtop behind them.

A small black window had opened in the centre of the screen. No, not entirely black. Grey shapes—
moving
shapes. Legs scissoring across…

'Low-res webcast,' Sam said.

'Realtime?' Agent Atta asked.

'Impossible to tell.'

They saw booted feet kicking something.

'Is that a hand?' Dean Heaney asked. 'Someone dead?'

A bright flash, as though a floor lamp had been rolled around. A glimpse of a prostrate body. Shining blood? Then…

'Fuck me,' Sam muttered.

It was over. Whatever it was Neil had broadcast, it was over.

Special Agent-in-Charge Shelley Atta turned to Thomas with baleful eyes.
Your fault
, her look muttered.