Triggers

Chapter 11

Once he’d left nurse Janis Falconi, Eric Redekop went by his office and got his Bose noise-canceling headphones. He’d originally bought them for long flights, but now used them at the hospital when he needed to sleep. Eric liked to sleep on his side, and he’d thought there’d be no comfortable way to wear the headphones when doing so, but the hospital had a supply of donut-shaped pillows for people with broken tailbones or hemorrhoids to sit on, and he’d found that the hole nicely accommodated the large earpiece.

He headed down to the staff sleep room on the first floor, turned the headphones on, turned off the lights in the room, and lay down on one of the cots. He’d hoped to fall right to sleep, but…

But being here, on his side, in a semifetal position, made him think of…

…of lying next to a man like this, turned away from him, trying to pretend the man wasn’t there, and—

And it was Tony Falconi, Janis’s husband. She lay like this every night, trying to ignore him, hoping he wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t initiate the ninety seconds of pounding away that was his idea of sex, wouldn’t leave her unfulfilled.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. He did not want to know any of this. He had no idea what the hell was going on, but—

But there had to be a rational explanation.

He was so tired—the surgery on the president had been grueling.

The headphones were doing their job—eliminating the actual background noise of the hospital. But the background noise of Janis Falconi’s memories continued unabated, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to shut them out.

Susan Dawson had to sit down. She’d known Gordon Danbury for years. He’d been a military sharpshooter in Afghanistan, and, upon his return to the States, had decided to try his luck with the Secret Service. That meant taking the ten-week Criminal Investigator Training Program at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, followed by the seventeen-week Special Agent Training Course at the James J. Rowley Training Center, just outside DC.

Susan had first met Danbury at Rowley; active agents spent two weeks every two months there honing their skills. He’d seemed like a nice enough guy although he didn’t drink. Still, he was buff with a great face. Or, she supposed, he’d had a great face; apparently, he’d landed on it when he fell in the elevator shaft, which was why it took so long for anyone to recognize him.

She looked over at Agent Michaelis; he’d known Danbury, too. He was shaking his head slowly back and forth as if he couldn’t believe the news.

President Jerrison was lying flat on his back, tubes going into his arm from drip bags, a small oxygen feed tucked into his nostrils. “Danbury,” Jerrison said. “I don’t think I knew him.”

“You wouldn’t normally have run into him, sir,” Susan said. “He was one of the sharpshooters deployed on the roof of the White House.”

“The bomb,” Jerrison said.

Susan nodded. “Yes, it seems likely he was the one who planted it. He’d have had easy access to the White House roof—although how he got a large metallic device through security to get up there, I don’t know.” She listened to her earpiece again, then: “Anyway, they’re sending investigators to his house; see what they can find.”

They were all silent for a time, until Agent Michaelis spoke. “This is crazy.”

Susan thought he was referring to Danbury. “Yeah. You think you know a guy…”

“Not that,” said Michaelis, “although that’s crazy, too. I mean this memory stuff.”

“Are you experiencing any outside memories?” Susan asked.

“Me?” said Michaelis. “No.”

“Professor Singh’s memories are coming more easily for me all the time,” Susan said. “His phone number, his employment history. I even think, if I thought about it hard enough, that I could speak a little Punjabi—not to mention some bad Canadian French.” She paused. “Why would the president and I have been affected and not you? We were all pretty close together. You were just outside the O.R., right?”

“Yeah,” said Michaelis.

“Did you leave that area at any point?”

“No. Well, no, except to go the washroom. In fact, that’s where I was when the lights went out.”

“And you stayed there through the blackout?”

“Sure. It didn’t last long.”

“No, it didn’t,” said Susan. “I’m no scientist, but—”

“The blackout?” said the president.

“Um, yes, sir. There was an EMP when the bomb went off at the White House—same as what happened in Chicago and Philadelphia.” She turned to Michaelis. “How far was the washroom from the O.R.?”

“Halfway down the corridor. Maybe fifty feet.”

“Did anybody take your place outside the operating-room door?”

“No. I signaled Dougherty, who was on my right, and Rosenbaum, on my left, that I was going off station for a moment; they had line of sight to each other, so…”

Susan nodded, then: “Singh’s lab was more or less above the operating room. So the effect probably was limited in radius—and you’d stepped outside it at the crucial moment.”

Singh came into the room, accompanied, coincidentally, by Agent Dougherty, whom Michaelis had just mentioned.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Susan said to Singh. “I can even access your most recent memories, including new ones since the power surge.”

“Really?” said Singh.

“Yes. I know all about what just went down between you and Private Adams.”

“Fascinating,” Singh said. “That means it wasn’t a dumping of memories—you didn’t just get a copy of my memories transferred to you when the power surge hit; you’re still somehow connected to me on an ongoing basis.” He frowned, clearly thinking about this.

“Anyway, it’s interesting what Private Adams said to you just now,” Susan said. She gestured to indicate it was all right for Singh to move closer to the president.

“Thank you,” Singh said, coming further into the room. “Mr. President, those gentlemen you recall playing basketball with: you said one of them was named Lamarr. Please think about him, and see if you can conjure up anything else about him.”

Seth’s eyebrows rose. “Oh. Um. Sure, Lamarr. Lamarr…um…” The president seemed to hesitate, then: “Lamarr Brown.”

“And his skin color?”

He took a moment to breathe, then. “He’s…oh, well, um, okay. Yes, he’s black. I’ve got a mental picture of him now, kind of. Black…short hair…gold earring…a scar above his right eye.”

“His right eye?”

“Sorry, my right; his left.”

“Private Adams described the same man, and added another detail. Something about Lamarr’s smile.”

The president frowned, concentrating. “Big gap between his two front teeth.” He paused. “But…but I don’t…I’ve never met…”

“No, you haven’t. And you don’t play basketball, either.” Singh tried to inject a little levity. “It’s not actually true that white men can’t jump, but you, a particular white man, can’t, because of your foot injury, isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“And when you first recalled these men, you saw them as white,” said Singh. “Now you see them as black.”

“Um, yes.”

“My patient upstairs, as you’ve doubtless guessed, is African-American. And, unlike you, he knows all three of the gentlemen—who also are African-American.”

Seth said nothing.

Singh went on. “With due respect, Mr. President, let us not dance around the issue. If I ask you to picture a man—any man, an average man—you picture a white face, no doubt. It might interest you to know that a goodly number of African-Americans, not to mention Sikhs like myself, picture white faces, too: many of us are acutely aware that we are a minority in our neighborhoods and workplaces. Your default person is white, but my patient on the floor above grew up in South Central Los Angeles, an almost exclusively black community, and his default person is black.”

“So?” said the president, sounding, Susan thought, perhaps slightly uncomfortable.

“The point,” said Singh, “is that in storing memories of people, we store only how they differ from our default. You said one of the men was fat—and my patient described him the same way. But then you volunteered that the other two were thin, which might mean scrawny, which is why I asked you to clarify. If these people were notably thin, that detail might have been stored: scrawny is noteworthy; normal is not. Likewise, for my patient, his friends’ skin color was not noteworthy. And when you are reading his memories, all you have access to is what he’s actually stored: distinctive features, such as the gap between Lamarr’s teeth, or the scar above his eye, interesting items of clothing, and so on. And out of those paltry cues, your mind confabulated the rest of the image.”

“Confabulated?”

“Sorry, Mr. President. It means to fill in a gap in memory with a fabrication that the brain believes is true. See, people think that human memory is like computer memory: that somewhere in your head is a hard drive, or video recorder, or something, with a flawless, highly detailed record of everything you’ve seen and done. But that’s just not true. Rather, your brain stores a few details that will allow it to build a memory up when you try to recall it.”

“Okay,” Susan said, looking at Singh. “And you’re linked to this Lucius Jono fellow, right—and he might be the one linked to the president?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your most recent memory of him?”

“It’s hard to say,” said Singh. “No, wait—wait. He is—or quite recently was—down in the cafeteria, eating…um, a bacon cheeseburger and onion rings.” He paused. “So that’s what bacon tastes like! Anyway, it’s got to be a recent memory; he’s talking about the destruction of the White House and the electromagnetic pulse.”

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m going to go speak to him. If we’re lucky, the circle only contains five people.”

The president said something, but Susan couldn’t make it out. She moved closer. “I’m sorry, sir?”

He tried again. “We haven’t had much luck so far today.”

She looked out the large windows and saw smoke in the sky. “No, sir, we haven’t.”

Secret Service agent Manny Cheung hadn’t recognized Gordon Danbury after his fall in the elevator shaft; it was, as the female agent who had first looked at his body on the roof of the elevator had said, not a pretty sight. But Danbury’s fingerprints had been intact, and running them had quickly turned up his identity. Cheung had known “Gordo”—as he was called—pretty well, or so he’d thought, although he’d never been to his house.

That was being rectified now. Although the Secret Service protected the president, it was the FBI that investigated attacks on him. But the two FBI agents dispatched to Danbury’s home had asked Cheung to join them since he’d been familiar with the deceased. Gordo lived an hour’s drive southwest of DC, in Fredericksburg, Virginia—far enough away that his place hadn’t been affected by the electromagnetic pulse.

It didn’t take long to find what they were looking for. Danbury had an old Gateway desktop computer, with a squarish matte-finish LCD monitor, an aspect ratio that was hard to get these days; both were connected to a UPS box. He’d left them on, with a Microsoft Word document open on the screen. The document said:

Cheung glanced around; there was no sign of a printer. “He expected to die today,” he said. “And he knew we’d find this.”

The FBI agents were both white, but one was stocky and the other thin. The stocky one said, “But he ran.”

“If he hadn’t, he’d have been gunned down,” said Cheung. “Sure, Gordo was a sharpshooter, but he’d have been facing a swarm of armed Secret Service agents; they’d have had no trouble taking him out, and he had to know that. Once he shot the president, he knew he’d be neutralized.”

“Did you know he was religious?” asked the thin FBI man, whose name was Smith, as he pointed at the glowing words.

“No,” said Cheung. “Never heard him mention it.”

“ ‘Praise be to God,’ ” Smith said. “Odd way to phrase it.”

Cheung frowned, then gestured at the computer. “May I?”

“Just a minute,” said the heavier agent, Kranz. He took a series of photos of the computer as they’d found it and dusted the keyboard for prints, on the off chance that the note hadn’t actually been typed up by Danbury.

“Okay,” Kranz said when he was done. “But don’t change or close the file.”

“No, no.” Cheung looked at the screen. The document name, showing in the title bar, was “Mom”—and since it had a name, he must have saved the file at least once. He brought up Word’s file menu, which listed recently opened documents at the bottom, and he noted which folder “Mom” was in. He then hit the Windows and E keys simultaneously to bring up Windows Explorer, navigated to that folder, and found “Backup of Mom.” “An older version of the file,” he said to the two FBI men, “prior to the last save.” He clicked on it, and it opened.

“Looks the same,” said Smith, then, “Oh!”

Oh, indeed, thought Cheung. There was a difference: one single word, the very last word in the file. Instead of ending with “Praise be to God,” in his earlier draft, Gordon Danbury of the United States Secret Service had written, “Praise be to Allah.”