The Murderer's Memories

by T. S. Nichols

  “We need to ask Cole some questions about the memories that we’re trying to eradicate, and then we need to do a brain scan. We can then use those pieces of information to target only the desired memories, leaving all the other memories intact.”

  “Okay,” Cole consented as they all walked toward the compound, “but you know that we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “We’re going to move as quickly as we can, Cole,” Fergus assured him. “The preliminary testing can be done in less than two hours. We’re all on the same side here. Nobody wants to stop another terrorist attack more than I do.” Fergus shook his bald head back and forth as he spoke. Cole could hear real emotion in his voice. “It’s disgusting what they did, killing all those innocent people, all those children.”

  They reached the building. Fergus’s two silent associates walked in front of them and held the doors open as Fergus, Cole, and Dr. Tyson walked in.

  The inside of the building was as fancy as the inside of the SUV had been, only on a much grander scale. Cole felt like he was walking into an exclusive country club. He could hardly believe that they were performing complex medical procedures there. Then again, this wasn’t where they did ordinary memory transfers. This was a place where only certain very select people had certain very special memories transferred into their brains.

  Fergus continued to walk at a brisk pace through the near-empty building. Cole and Dr. Tyson followed, with Fergus’s two associates behind them. They were walking fast enough that Cole barely had any time to take everything in. He saw only a few people milling about. “Why is the place so empty?” he asked Fergus.

  “We sent a few people home before your arrival. We wanted as little distraction as possible. I made your case our top priority. Everyone who is still here has a specific job to do to help us stop the next terrorist attack. That being said, this place is rarely crowded. We intentionally left significant room for growth. But that’s neither here nor there. You should be focused on your job, don’t you think?” Fergus pushed through some doors and led the procession down a long hallway.

  “So how does the procedure work?” Dr. Tyson asked next.

  Fergus laughed without breaking his stride. “I’m afraid that’s a business secret.” Fergus spoke to Dr. Tyson without turning to look at her. “I’ve brought you here to help you avert another vile terrorist attack, not to share valuable intellectual property. In fact, Dr. Tyson, I’m not sure that you needed to come at all. You’re not going to be able to witness much of the procedure.”

  “But I need to see what you do to Cole. I need to make sure—” Dr. Tyson hesitated.

  Fergus finally stopped walking. He turned toward Dr. Tyson. “You need to make sure that we don’t hurt him,” Fergus finished her sentence for her. Then he glanced over at Cole. “You think we would do anything to destroy the magnificent petri dish you’ve created inside this man’s head?” Fergus shook his head. “Not if we can help it, we won’t, especially now that we’ve begun working together.” Cole didn’t bother to tell Fergus that this was a one-time thing. He wasn’t sure Fergus would believe him anyway.

  They began walking again. Eventually they came to a door. Fergus pushed it open. Inside was what looked like a suite at a luxury hotel, with elegant furniture and original art hung on the walls, or at least some of the walls. The far wall appeared to be one giant pane of glass overlooking the ocean. Cole stared at it, trying to decipher where they might be, based on the view and how long they’d been in the van.

  “Do you like the ocean, Dr. Tyson?” Fergus said. “If not, the wall is programmable. You can select any view you wish.” Fergus walked over to a small box on the room’s marble desk. “Forest?” He pushed a button and the view changed from the ocean to a stream running through a dense green wood. “Field?” He did it again. The view changed again. The wall was no more than a gigantic television set, but it appeared marvelously real. “I turn the controls over to you because this is where you are going to wait for us.”

  “That’s not fair,” Dr. Tyson objected.

  “The procedure will only take a few hours. You’ll be perfectly comfortable here. People who are accustomed to extremely high living standards have found their wait here incredibly pleasant.”

  “You have my word that I won’t steal any of your information. I’ll sign a document, a contract, a nondisclosure agreement.” Dr. Tyson tried to stay firm but Cole could hear a bit of panic in her voice. She looked over at him. “He might need me.”

  Fergus gave her a pitying look. “We’re professionals here, Dr. Tyson. I think we can handle this. However, if we think that you are needed to assist us, we will come get you. Are you comfortable with that, Cole?”

  Cole looked at them both. He wasn’t comfortable with anything that was happening. He wanted to object to all of it. At the same time, he still wasn’t ready to consider Dr. Tyson the protector that she seemed to think she was. He looked at her. “I’ll do what I have to do,” he said.

  “That’s my boy,” Fergus said with a wide grin.

  “Then can I have a moment with him first?” Dr. Tyson asked.

  Fergus looked at his watch. “Two minutes,” he said, and the three men stepped out of the room, leaving Cole and Dr. Tyson alone together.

  As soon as the door closed, Dr. Tyson turned to Cole and whispered, “You need to be careful when you come out of the procedure. The memories that you are trying to free are dangerous. Everyone reacts differently to specific memories. A memory that makes one person sad or melancholy might make another person happy. What is a funny memory to one person might make another person angry. If I could be with you, I could help direct you when you wake up. You are dealing with memories that turned someone into a suicide bomber. There is no telling what they might do to you.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” said Cole, telling the truth.

  “You should be,” warned Dr. Tyson. “What are you worried about?”

  Cole had no intention of answering her question honestly. “I’m only worried that I won’t crack this puzzle in time to stop the next bombing.” With that, he turned away from Dr. Tyson and walked toward the door. It was locked from the outside. Cole knocked on it. Fergus answered.

  “Thirty seconds early,” he said with admiration. Cole stepped out into the hallway, and Fergus closed and locked the door again.

  Chapter 20

  TWO DAYS AND TWELVE HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  “No,” Cole shouted. “I’ve changed my mind. We don’t need to do this. I can find the memories on my own.” He tried to sit up, but the two large men pushed him back down again, pinning him to the operating table.

  “What do you think we’re going to do to you, Cole?” Fergus asked. “I’m not fucking with you here. How many times do I have to remind you that we’re the good guys? I’m starting to think that I want to stop the next terrorist attack more than you do.”

  “No,” Cole shouted again. “That’s enough. Let me up. There’s another way.” He tried to push his way free from the grip of the large men.

  “Don’t get scared now. You’ve already been through the worst of it.”

  Cole had already been through more than two hours of testing. It had started with them placing him in some sort of scanner so that they could monitor his brain activity while they proceeded to ask him a series of questions. Once they sat him down, a nurse, a large man with large hands, stepped up behind him, and Cole felt a strong pinch at the base of his neck. He looked back and, as far as he could tell, they were running some sort of tube from a large, square machine straight into his neck. The nurse began fiddling with the tube and Cole could feel it moving beneath his skin. “Should I be sedated for this?” Cole asked.

  The doctor overseeing the procedure shook his head. “It’s one of the kinks we’re trying to work out. The problem is that sedation impacts the overall efficacy of the procedure.”

  Suddenly, Cole felt a sharp and intense pain at the base of his skull. “What the
fuck are you doing?” Cole asked as he felt one of his eyes begin to spasm.

  “It’s not dangerous,” the doctor informed him, “and the pain will recede quickly. He’s simply inserting this tube into part of your brain. Luckily for you, you already have pathways he can follow from all of your other procedures.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said, grimacing, “but I’m always asleep for those.”

  “The pain will be over soon,” the doctor told him.

  “What does the tube do?” Cole asked.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you.” The nurse stopped moving the tube, and the pain stopped too. “There we go,” said the doctor with satisfaction.

  Then the doctor began to ask him questions. It was all fine at first. Cole realized that they were asking baseline questions to establish what the brain scan was supposed to look like. These were followed by more specific questions. At first, they were about Cole’s own memories from when he was a boy to high school and beyond. These questions weren’t as easy for Cole as they would have been for most people, because he often had trouble differentiating his own memories from those of the murder victims whose cases he’d solved. “It’s okay,” the doctor said, as if he was reading Cole’s mind. “You can talk about other people’s memories. Just don’t talk about Ivan’s.”

  Cole wondered how this doctor, whom he had never seen before, knew so much about him already. What he didn’t know was that the doctor considered Cole to be one of his greatest patients. This doctor had been studying Cole for almost as long as Dr. Tyson had. In fact, he had given Dr. Tyson a few of the most expedient techniques that she had used over the years to try to keep Cole sane.

  The doctor continued to take notes as Cole answered the questions and different parts of his brain lit up on the scanner. It was still all okay. Cole was still comfortable with everything that was going on. Then things began to turn on him.

  “Now,” the doctor said, staring at the brain scan machine, “I need you to describe some of Ivan’s memories for me.”

  That’s when Cole began to change his mind. With each memory he described, he became more and more hesitant to let these memories go. He tried to bury the feeling. He had a job to do. Besides, he didn’t want Dr. Tyson to be right about his addiction. But she wasn’t right. He didn’t want to save Ivan’s memories because he was addicted to them. He wanted to save them because Ivan deserved for them to be saved. His life didn’t deserve to be swept away so that Cole could remember the memories of a white upper-class terrorist.

  Cole didn’t say anything. He felt duty bound to go forward. “You seem distracted,” the doctor told him. “I know it’s difficult, but try to ignore the distractions. Instead, focus only on the memories that we are going to erase.” He spoke in a calm and soothing voice. “Any noise in the test and we run the risk of erasing a memory that we would like to keep.” So Cole focused on Ivan’s memories, on the baseball and the construction work and Ivan’s youthful memories of Puerto Rico and his evenings nursing beers at the Daily Bread and so much more—the hunger, the desire, the dreams, the failures, and the victories. Cole remembered memory after memory. He remembered almost all of them. But without saying anything, he kept a couple of them to himself.

  “I believe that we’re done here,” the doctor eventually said. “We can move on to the next phase of the procedure.” The doctor motioned to the nurse with the large hands, who stepped behind Cole again and, with a few deft movements, removed the tube from his brain. The removal hurt more than anything else Cole had ever felt but it was quick and then it was over.

  A moment later Fergus came into the room. “How did it go?” Fergus asked the doctor.

  “Well,” responded the doctor. “It’s nice working with someone with so much mental control.”

  “That’s good.” Fergus turned toward Cole “How did it go?” Fergus asked Cole, his tone much lighter.

  “I’m okay,” Cole answered him with a nod.

  “We’ve got to move you. We have about half an hour of prep before we’re ready to start erasing memories. We can’t put you in the normal waiting rooms. There’s too much stimulation. We have some bare rooms downstairs. We won’t lock you in, but if you want this to work, we suggest that you don’t leave your room.” So they brought Cole downstairs and left him there with his thoughts for half an hour while they prepped the final procedure.

  It wasn’t until they brought him back upstairs and prepared to inject whatever memory bleach they had created into his brain that Cole decided definitively that he no longer wanted to go through with it.

  “No,” Cole screamed again. “I changed my mind. You can’t do this.” He fought with all his strength, pushing back against the men literally holding him down.

  “Let him up,” Fergus finally ordered. The men let Cole’s arms and shoulders go. He could already feel the places where he would have bruises the next day. The room they were in looked much like a traditional operating room, but even brighter and even more sterile. Fergus was watching them from a viewing window set above the room. He stared down at them from on high and gave his orders through a microphone. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Cole?” he asked. His voice was amplified in the operating room like the voice of God. “You don’t seem that concerned about how little time we have.”

  Cole got off the operating table and looked up at Fergus. “We don’t need to do this. I can find the memories. I know I can.”

  Fergus shook his head. “If you could find the fucking memories without my help, you would have found them by now. What’s the goddamn holdup?”

  “I’m not going through with this,” was Cole’s only reply.

  “Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t make you,” the God voice came through the speakers as Fergus stared down at Cole with a vicious look on his face.

  “We can’t just erase his memories,” Cole finally said. “He’s not to blame here. He’s a victim. We don’t have the right.”

  “Are you honestly going to put the lives of who knows how many people at risk so that you can save the memories of some Puerto Rican day laborer?”

  “He’s a human being, Fergus. He deserves better than this.”

  “He’s dead, Cole.”

  “We don’t even know if this plan will work. It might be different if we did. But we can’t take the chance if we’re not sure.”

  “I deal in memories that have value, Cole. They’re memories of unique and extraordinary lives. The memory that we are erasing from your brain has no value. It is no different from the millions of other memories that have been lost over time and no different from the thousands of memories of the poor and weak that vanish every day when the bodies that hold them die. I’m not risking it. You asked me to do a job for you and I plan on doing it. No fucking Puerto Rican day laborer is going to stop me.”

  “No.” Cole shook his head. For some reason, he still believed he had the power to stop what was going to happen next.

  “Strap him down,” Fergus ordered through the operating room’s speakers. Cole could swear that he heard the words echo as they bounced off the walls. A moment later, the four hands were on him again. He tried to struggle. It was no use. They lifted him off the ground and laid him back on the operating table, kicking and screaming.

  The word “no” bled over and over again from his lips. The two men held him down on the table. The doctor came back over and pulled leather straps from beneath the padded top. “I’m terribly sorry about this, Cole,” he said. “But I think you’re going to agree, in the end, that it was the right thing to do.” One by one, the doctor strapped down each of Cole’s arms and then his legs. Finally he moved toward Cole’s head. “It would be so much easier if you wouldn’t fight.” He pulled out two more leather straps. The two men, no longer needed to hold Cole’s arms and legs, now strapped tightly to the operating table, pinned Cole’s head down. The doctor pulled the first strap across Cole’s forehead and tightened it. Then he took the second strap and pulled it loosel
y across Cole’s neck, leaving enough room so that it would be impossible for him to choke himself. “I’ve always admired you,” the doctor said. Once the straps were secured, the other two men stepped away from the operating table. “You’re a real hero,” the doctor continued. “I’m proud that I have the opportunity to help you be a hero this time.”

  “Don’t do it,” Cole pleaded. “Don’t listen to Fergus. These memories, they’re not nothing. They are profound and beautiful, and they are worth keeping.”

  “Stand him up,” the doctor ordered. The two men stepped back toward the operating table. They lifted the entire table up into the air, or at least the top portion that Cole was strapped to, and then locked it into the operating room floor so that Cole was now upright, his arms and legs splayed out beside him like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Cole could barely move his head, but he could move his eyes enough to look up at the viewing room. The room was empty. Fergus had left before the procedure had even taken place.

  “You’re going to feel another pinch,” the doctor said to Cole with his ever-soothing tone of voice, “very similar to last time.” A moment later, Cole felt the pinch at the base of his neck. It wasn’t similar to last time, though. The pain was far worse, though only a small portion of it was physical.

  Cole began to cry. “I’m sorry, Ivan,” he whispered, knowing full well that he was only talking to himself.

  Chapter 21

  TWO DAYS AND THIRTEEN HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  Bernard still hadn’t gone through with it when he heard the people entering the room outside his cell. He cursed himself as he heard them come in, cursed his own cowardice. He had developed a plan, but it was more gruesome than he had been emotionally ready for. He thought the needles in his arms were long enough to go in through his eye and reach the back of his skull. He would have to be quick and he would have to be accurate. He knew that there was a good chance that, even if he did everything right, some of his memories might remain intact, and those might be the exact memories he didn’t want anyone else to have. He was counting on the fact that, if he was able to get the needle to pierce them, his impaired memories simply wouldn’t be marketable anymore. Nobody buys a dented Maserati.