Triggers

Chapter 22

The interviews with the affected people continued; several more “Can Read” and “Is Read By” squares had been filled in on Singh’s grid. Susan was back in Singh’s office, this time interviewing a woman named Maria Ramirez. She was twenty-seven with black hair tumbling down her back, and she was wearing a loose-fitting top.

“By this point, I imagine you’ve heard some of the gossip that’s going around,” Susan said to Maria, who was seated on the convex side of the kidney-shaped desk. “All that stuff about memories being shared. Are you sharing anyone’s memories, do you think?”

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” said Maria.

Susan’s heart skipped a beat. “You won’t get in trouble,” she replied. “I promise you. We simply want to identify who’s linked to who, that’s all. It’s not your fault this happened.”

Maria seemed to consider this. “What if I say I’m not linked to anyone?”

“You’d be the first person inside the sphere who wasn’t,” Susan said. She let Maria digest this. Better that she decide on her own not to lie than that Susan accuse her of being a liar; that would just make her more defensive.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Maria said.

Susan nodded. “None of us did.”

“You’re affected, too?” Maria asked, but then she answered her own question. “Sí. You are. You can read the memories of someone here. A scientist named Singh.”

Susan sat up straighter. Only Prospector and a few others should have known that. “Maria, who are you linked to?”

“I know I know things I shouldn’t. Secret things; secure things. National-security things. I swear to you that I haven’t shared them with anyone.”

Bingo! “That’s fine,” Susan said, encouragingly. “I’m sure the president is very grateful for that.”

“Poor Señor Jerrison,” Maria said. “All that blood spilling everywhere.” She shook her head. “It was awful.”

“Yes, it was,” said Susan. “Maria, thank you for being honest about this. Of course, others will be interested in what you know. I’ll assign you protection; we won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Gracias,” said Maria, sounding distracted. She was looking not at Susan, but past her. Susan didn’t have to turn around to know that there was nothing but a bookcase behind her; she had Singh’s vivid memories of this place. Maria’s voice was full of wonder. “Watching that man squeeze the president’s heart…”

Susan nodded, recalling it herself from her vantage point in the observation gallery. “That was incredible, wasn’t it?” But then her eyebrows shot up. “You remember that?”

“Well, he remembers it.”

Susan was amazed. She knew Jerrison had had a near-death experience, and those did sometimes involve seeing oneself from outside the body, usually from up above. But those were hallucinations, she’d always thought: a mind that knew it was dying imagining what was happening to the body that contained it. And yet she’d been with Griffin when he’d briefed Prospector about his brush with death—and Griffin hadn’t mentioned the manual stimulation of the heart. Could it be that Jerrison really had, somehow, departed his body and seen Eric Redekop at work?

“If you are going to assign protection to me,” Maria said, “it might as well be him.”

“Who?” said Susan, baffled. “The president?”

“What?” replied Maria. “No, no. Him. Darryl Hudkins.”

Oh, Christ. “Is that who you’re reading?”

“Sí, of course. I know he knows all sorts of secret things—I guess that’s why they call it the Secret Service. But, like I said, I promise you I haven’t told any of them to anyone.”

Susan was disappointed—but then her heart started beating quickly again. “Maria, I want you to understand something. I’m the Secret Service agent-in-charge here. I’m Darryl’s superior, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“No, think about it. Ask yourself if that’s true.”

She narrowed her brown eyes for a moment, then: “Yes, okay, it’s true.” She smiled ever so slightly. “He thinks you’re a good boss.”

“Good, fine,” said Susan. “Now, I’m going to ask you another question, and I want you to think very, very carefully about it. Your answer is extremely important.”

Maria nodded.

“Okay. Here’s the question. Did Agent Hudkins have anything at all to do with the attempt on President Jerrison’s life?”

Maria narrowed her eyes again then shook her head. “No.”

“Are you sure? Are you positive?”

“Sí. He had nothing to do with it, but—oh!”

“Yes? Yes?”

“It was an inside job, wasn’t it? Another agent—Gordo Danbury—he did it, sí?”

“I can’t confirm or deny anything at this point. These are national-security matters.”

“Darryl can’t believe Gordo did it. And—oh! He’s been wondering if you’re involved.”

“Me?” Susan was momentarily shocked, but she supposed his suspicion was as natural as her own. “No, I’m not. And you’re totally sure Darryl isn’t either, right?”

“I’m sure,” said Maria.

Susan nodded; she could use an ally—someone she could trust—and Darryl was now the only other agent she could be sure of. “Okay, thank you,” Susan said.

“Can I go home now?” Maria asked.

“I’m afraid not. But soon, I hope.”

“Good. Because I can’t wait to tell my husband the news.”

“About the president being shot?” asked Susan, surprised. “Or about the White House?” Surely everyone outside the hospital knew about those things by now.

“No, no. My news. Our news.”

“Which is?”

Maria smiled broadly. “That it’s a girl.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Our baby. I was here for an ultrasound today.”

“You’re pregnant?” asked Susan.

“Four months.”

Susan surged to her feet and ran down the corridor to Singh’s lab.

“All right,” said Ranjip Singh, writing on the whiteboard in his lab. “Mark Griffin, the hospital CEO, can read Maria Ramirez. Of course, Griffin’s been running around all day—hasn’t had much time to probe her memories; he didn’t even know she was pregnant until I just asked him about it.”

Singh continued. “Maria herself can read Agent Darryl Hudkins.” He filled in the appropriate squares.

“I spent hours modeling the linkages,” Singh added, “looking for a pattern to them—and I kept rejecting one my computer kept spitting out, because it seemed to have two nodes in one. But now that I know about the unborn baby, it makes sense. The linkage pattern of who is linked to whom is an artifact of the sequence of laser firings I’d programmed into my equipment: the paths of the beams traced out the pattern of connections. Not every pulse resulted in a link, and we’re not exactly sure of where everyone was deployed within the building when the linkages occurred. Still, here’s what I propose.” He erased the X in the name field of the twenty-first column and wrote in Baby Girl Ramirez. “Based on the beam paths, Maria’s unborn baby is linked to Rachel Cohen, although what, if anything, a fetus could make of Ms. Cohen’s memories, I have no idea. The baby girl probably lacks the referents to confabulate the cues Ms. Cohen is providing into anything meaningful…which I suspect is all to the good. Our Ms. Cohen is rather wanton; she formed a liaison with that lawyer, Orrin Gillett, with unseemly haste.”

“ ‘Wanton’?” said Susan, smiling at the choice of word. “Horny as all get-out, I’d say. But, yeah.”

“And now, as for the rest,” said Singh. “I spoke to Josh Latimer, the intended kidney recipient. He kept insisting he wasn’t detecting any foreign memories. He could be lying; he could be the one linked to President Jerrison. But my guess is that he’s telling the truth about this, as he sees it. The beam paths suggest he’s not linked to Jerrison, but rather to the unborn baby, whose memories are simply not remarkable enough for him to have noticed.” He wrote in those connections. “Which means it’s down to three possibilities.” He pointed at the names above the three remaining blank squares in the Can Read row. “This person, this person, or this person—one of them is reading the president.”