Triggers (12 page)

But the one that caught teenage Ranjip’s attention most of all was about pioneering Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, performing in 1934 what came to be known as “the Montreal procedure.” By touching electrodes to particular parts of his patients’ brains, Penfield could apparently reliably elicit specific memories. A phrase from that Heritage Minute—“I can smell burnt toast!” uttered by a female patient in astonishment when Penfield identified the source of her ongoing seizures—became a catchphrase in Canada, and Ranjip had been so fascinated by that little film, he’d ended up choosing memory research for his career.

All of this came to Susan Dawson as she waited in Professor Singh’s lab for Darryl and Dr. Griffin to get there. As soon as they arrived, she asked, “What’s the tally?”

Darryl showed her the list of names. “Nineteen, including you, me, Prospector, Dr. Griffin, Professor Singh here, and—” He looked at the other man in the room. “You’re Private Adams, right?”

“That’s me,” said Kadeem.

Darryl nodded. “We checked and double-checked: that’s everybody. Your runner—Orrin Gillett—was the only borderline case, as it happens; if he’s affected, the total is twenty.”

Susan frowned and turned to Professor Singh. “Do you see any rhyme or reason to the linkages we’ve already uncovered? Anything like, oh, say, you’re linked to the person who was closest to you, whether or not in line of sight? Or you’re linked to—I don’t know—the person who’s closest to you in age, or something?”

Singh shrugged; it seemed, Susan noted, to be his favorite gesture. “I’ve been looking for correlations, but none leap out. Certainly, it’s not
simply distance. The attending surgeons were much closer to the president than Private Adams was, for instance. And if distance were the factor, the links would be reciprocal:
A
linked to
B,
and
B
to
A.”

“So,” said Mark Griffin, standing up—he was a good ten inches taller than Susan, and he clearly wanted the advantage his imposing stature gave him—“once we isolate all the people on this list, we can end the lockdown and let everyone else come and go as they please, right?”

Susan looked up at him—and hated that she had to do that. But she supposed one didn’t get to be the head of a major hospital without learning a few power-game tricks. “Until we’ve actually identified who is reading President Jerrison’s memories, I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Agent Dawson,” said Griffin, “the record will show that Luther Terry Memorial Hospital immediately complied with your lockdown request. Our staff have been fully cooperative. However, this cannot go on indefinitely; if necessary I’ll call your superior. I believe that would be Director Hexley, no?” Susan had to give him his due: he was good at this; he’d prepared for the confrontation. “This is a hospital. We provide emergency services to a wide area, as well as extensive outpatient care. We can’t remain closed. And, my God, after what’s happened today, people here have a right to go to their homes, be with their loved ones, and try to find some way to get on with their lives.”

“They also have a right to have their national-security interests protected,” Susan said.

“Perhaps so. But you can’t keep
everyone
locked up, and we have to start letting new patients in. We’ve already had one near tragedy, Agent Dawson: a patient who would have been easily saved here was almost lost
en route
to Bethesda, when her ambulance was diverted there. And we’re extraordinarily lucky that no one was hurt in the explosion at the White House, but we have to be prepared to treat casualties if another bomb goes off here in DC.”

“I hear you, Dr. Griffin. Now, you hear me: we’ll try to get this done quickly; we’ll interview everyone on the list until we find out who is linked to the president. But I’m not letting you unlock the doors until we do, understand?”

Before Griffin could answer, Susan’s BlackBerry rang; her ringtone was the theme music from
Inside the Beltway.
“Dawson, go!”

“Hello,” said a male voice. “My name is Dario Sosso. I’m an FBI agent and I’m out at Reagan.”

“Yes?” said Susan eagerly.

“We got him.”

She blew out air. As Secret Service agent-in-charge of the presidential detail, she’d been getting continual updates about the situation at the Lincoln Memorial. Dirk Jenks’s absence had been noted, and she’d ordered him found and detained. Jenks, after all, was supposed to have checked the elevator at the Lincoln Memorial before Jerrison arrived; he might well have been an accomplice of Danbury. And it had been Jenks who had started the elevator when Danbury had gone off-script and tried to escape—apparently getting just the result he’d hoped for, bringing Danbury plummeting to his death.

“Thanks,” Susan said. “That he ran is proof enough that he was involved, but let me know if he reveals anything under interrogation, please.”

“Will do,” said the FBI agent. Susan terminated the call, looked at the people in the president’s hospital room, and suddenly found she couldn’t meet Darryl Hudkins’s gaze. One rogue Secret Service agent was bad enough. But two constituted a conspiracy. And it was anyone’s guess how big the conspiracy was.

SUSAN
enlisted Professor Singh to help her interview the other potentially linked people: he’d speak individually to half of the remaining group, and she’d take the other half. They could have gotten through everyone even more quickly if she had the other Secret Service agents do interviews, too, but she didn’t know who among them she could trust. But Singh, who she recalled had enough psychology courses under his belt to know how to effectively question people, had no secrets from her, and she could access his memories of each interview once it was done; it was almost as good as being in two places at one time.

Susan’s next interviewee was a young woman named Rachel Cohen, who worked in accounts receivable here at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital; she’d happened to be on the fourth floor, passing directly above Singh’s lab, when the memory-linking effect occurred.

“I don’t understand,” Rachel said, sounding quite distraught. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’re all still trying to get a handle on it,” Susan said. “It was an accident.”

“But it’s…God, it’s
freaky.
I mean, I wasn’t aware that anything was wrong until just now.”

“It seems the foreign memories don’t come to mind unless something triggers them, or unless you actually think about them. Some people knew at once that they’d been affected; others, like you, didn’t know until they were asked about it.”

Rachel shook her head in dismay. “But now that you
have
asked me about it, I can’t stop recalling things he knows.”

“He?” said Susan, leaning forward. “Do you know his name?”

“Sure. It’s Orrin.”

The chances of there being two Orrins around struck Susan as pretty slim, but: “Orrin what?”

“Gillett.”

Susan hoped she was keeping her face from showing distaste; Orrin Gillett was the lawyer who’d tried to run at the beginning of the lockdown. She asked Rachel a few questions about Gillett, just to be sure: the names of his law partners, which law school he’d gone to, and so on, and then she verified the answers on the law firm’s website.

“How—how long is this…this pairing…going to last?” Rachel asked, when Susan was done.

“I honestly have no idea.”

Rachel shook her head again. “This is
so
strange. God, it feels weird. I mean, he’s a man, you know? I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to be a man instead of a woman.”

“Maybe when this is all over, you’ll write a book about it,” Susan offered.

Rachel seemed to consider this. “Maybe I will, at that. It’s…it’s fascinating.” And then, after a moment, almost to herself, it seemed, she added,
“He’s
fascinating.”

“Okay,” said Susan. “Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Cohen. We’re still keeping people here at the hospital for a while, but please give me your cell number, so I can find you easily again if I need you.”

Rachel dictated it, then left Singh’s office. Just as she did so, Susan’s earpiece buzzed. “Hudkins to Dawson.”

“Go ahead, Darryl,” Susan said.

“We’ve located nineteen of the twenty people,” said the voice in her ear. “But one seems to have gotten out of the building before you initiated the lockdown.”

“Shit,” said Susan. “Who?”

“Bessie Stilwell, a woman who was visiting her son. And
I’m
the one reading her—which is strange, I gotta say. She’s visiting from Pascagoula, Mississippi—at least, that’s what I recall.”

“Do you know who she’s linked to?”

“No. And I’m not sure where she’s gone; I’m trying to recall it, but it hasn’t come to me yet. I just went to see her son, Michael Stilwell, but he’s pretty much out of it; he had a major heart attack. He’s got no idea where she might have gone today.”

“If you’re linked to her, why can’t you just recall it?”

“I asked Singh about that. His guess is that it’s because she’s elderly—she’s eighty-seven, her son said. Bessie has trouble recalling things herself; she’s not senile, or anything, just
old.
Singh thinks it may clear up for me; he suspects I might re-index her memories as time goes on, using my younger brain. But at the moment, well, let’s say I now know how my grandma feels when she’s struggling to recall something. It’s frustrating.”

“What hotel is she staying at?”

“She isn’t. She’s staying at her son’s place. I’ve got the address, and will get the DC police to stake it out.”

Susan didn’t want to become paranoid—and she’d known Darryl for four years now—but it
was
suspicious that he was both claiming
not
to be linked to Jerrison
and
was having trouble corroborating that he was linked to someone else. Still: “Copy,” Susan said. “But find her. Oh, and Rachel Cohen is linked to Orrin Gillett—can you tell Singh to add that to his chart? And I guess I better speak to Gillett now; might as well do this in some kind of order. Can you get him and bring him to 312? I’ve got him locked up in 424.”

“Copy,” said Darryl.

•   •   •

RACHEL
Cohen was fascinated by Orrin Gillett, the man she was linked to. A lawyer—and a rich one, at that. Certainly a good start! And he was handsome, too, if his own memories of his driver’s license and passport photos were anything to go by. Not that he thought of himself as handsome—but the photos showed a man who
was:
lots of light brown hair, a great face, and beautiful brown eyes behind round rimless glasses. Still, Rachel wanted to see for herself, and—

And another memory of his came to her, one of a black Secret Service agent with a shaved head coming to get him, and—yes, yes—and bringing him down here, and—

And the memory must be of only a minute or two ago, because here they came, coming down this corridor, and—

And Orrin Gillett was
hot.
She found herself saying an ebullient “Hi!” to him, like she was greeting an old friend—and, in a way, she supposed she was.

He looked at her, startled, but then smiled a terrific open-mouth smile at her. “Hello,” he said. “Nice day.” She had a strange feeling that his voice didn’t sound quite right—which, she suddenly realized, was the same feeling she had when she heard recordings of her own voice; he remembered his voice as he himself heard it, resonating in his sinus cavities. “Do I know you?” he added.

“No,” said Rachel. “But I know you.”

His tone was affable but baffled. “I don’t understand.”

Rachel nodded toward the door of the office Agent Dawson was using. “You will.”

Rachel knew she should get back to her desk, but work here had slowed to a crawl because most of the staff was still shell-shocked by the assassination attempt and the destruction of the White House; people were just sitting at their desks staring into space, or softly crying, or endlessly chatting to others, trying to make sense of it all.

Rather than heading down the corridor, Rachel instead took a seat in a little waiting alcove just past the room Agent Dawson was using. If
her own experience was anything to judge by, Orrin Gillett would be coming out again in twenty minutes or so.

Whenever Rachel was considering doing business with a new company, she ran a simple test. She put the company name and the word “sucks” into Google. Every giant corporation had its detractors: “Microsoft sucks” yielded 285,000 hits, “FedEx sucks” produced 568,000, and “Disney sucks” served up a whopping two million pages. But for local businesses or obscure web companies, she’d found it a useful barometer.

Likewise, whenever she was interested in dating someone, she’d do a quick search on his name and the word “asshole”: “Devan Hooley asshole” had helped her dodge a major bullet!

But now, in this particular case, she had something even better than Google. There was no doubt that Orrin Gillett was attractive. And he seemed like a nice guy: he had a warm, friendly smile, and teeth that either hadn’t seen a lot of coffee, cola, or tobacco, or had been whitened, and—

And, yes, whitened. The Zoom! process, to be precise. Cost him six hundred bucks.

But he hadn’t been a smoker since high school, he didn’t like carbonated beverages, and his coffee intake was pretty average. But he
had
been treated with tetracycline as a kid, and it had left his teeth a pale tan, and he’d been self-conscious about it for years. And so he’d had the problem corrected.

Rachel thought about
my girlfriend,
but no memory came to her. And then—well, he
was
pretty buff, and impeccably dressed to boot!—she thought about
my boyfriend.
But the only memories that came were of her own exes, the most recent of which had left her life—or, at least, her bed—ten months ago.

And speaking of exes—ah.

Melinda.

And Valerie.

And Jennifer.

And Franca.

And Ann-Marie.

And that bitch Naomi.

She thought about them, but—

No, that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t think about them collectively; she had to pick one, and think about just her. Say, Valerie.