Triggers

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Good question,” Singh said. He consulted a PC on a worktable. “Huh,” he said, and then, “Hmmm.”

  “Yes?” said Susan.

  Ranjip moved to his apparatus, a padded chair and a geodesic sphere two feet in diameter. “Well,” he said, “this equipment can edit memories, but the effective field is normally constrained to the interior of this sphere. According to the diagnostics, what happened, it seems—and this certainly was unanticipated—was that during the electromagnetic pulse, the field expanded while maintaining its spherical shape. It got to be about thirty-two feet in diameter, so presumably everyone in that sphere was affected.”

  “That’s a radius of sixteen feet,” Susan said. “Enough to reach up to the fourth floor and down to the second, no?”

  “Exactly,” said Singh.

  Susan considered. “The president was there.” She pointed down and to her left. “And I was right next door in the observation gallery.” She pointed directly to her left. She turned to Singh. “Are you sure the field didn’t get any bigger than that? And you’re sure no one outside that radius could have been affected?”

  “We’re not sure of much,” Singh replied. “But the field size is directly proportional to the power used to generate it, and the equipment recorded the magnitude of the surge in its syslog file. Assuming we’re right, and it’s my equipment that caused all this, then, yes, I’d say the effect was limited to people in that bubble.”

  “I can’t keep the hundreds of people in this hospital locked up indefinitely,” said Susan.

  “Given the size of the bubble, it shouldn’t be more than one or two dozen who were affected,” replied Singh. “Anyone who was on the lobby level or below, or on five or above, probably isn’t affected. And anyone on two, three, or four who was more than a couple of rooms away from here probably wasn’t, either.”

  “Assuming nobody has moved to a different floor,” said Susan.

  “Ah, right,” replied Ranjip.

  “Still, it does narrow the list of suspects,” Susan said.

  “Suspects for what?” Kadeem asked. But then he looked at Susan and nodded. “Ah. For who’s reading the president’s memories. Guess you gotta find that dude soon, huh, Sue?”

  CHAPTER 14

  DARRYL Hudkins and Mark Griffin sat in the security office at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital, along with Deanna Axen, the hospital’s director of security. They were in front of a bank of twelve flatscreen monitors, arranged in three rows of four. Eleven of the monitors were doing what they normally did: cycling through the endless array of security cameras secreted inside the hospital and on its grounds, including the plaza connecting to the Foggy Bottom metro station on the south side of the triangular building. But the twelfth—the lower-right one—was showing footage from just before and just after the lights went out. Darryl and Dr. Griffin were making a list of who was within the critical radius of Singh’s machine at the key moment, starting with those in the operating room. It was almost impossible for Darryl to distinguish the members of the surgical team; nothing but their eyes were visible. Griffin, who knew them all to one degree or another, fared better, and Darryl wrote down the names:

  President Seth Jerrison

  Lead surgeon Dr. Eric Redekop

  Surgeon Dr. Lucius Jono

  Cardiac specialist Dr. David January

  Anesthesiologist Dr. Christine Lee

  Surgical nurse Ann January

  Secret Service agent Darryl Hudkins

  Next, they looked at footage from the corridor outside the O.R. The two patients who had been vacated to make room for Jerrison were there, as well as a nurse who had been tending to them. Griffin identified them as:

  Intended kidney recipient Josh Latimer

  Intended kidney donor Dora Hennessey

  Nurse Janis Falconi

  Security guard Ivan Tarasov

  They then turned their attention to the third floor, starting with the observation gallery above the O.R.:

  Hospital CEO Dr. Mark Griffin

  Secret Service agent-in-charge Susan Dawson

  And next door, in Singh’s lab:

  Ranjip Singh, Ph.D.

  Private Kadeem Adams

  They continued on, identifying others on the third and fourth floors, including some visitors to the hospital. They were aided by the records kept by the security checkpoint in the lobby, where IDs were examined and recorded. It took a while to compare the hundreds of faces that had gone through the various entrances to the faces spotted near Singh’s equipment, but finally they had completed their list of all those who had likely been affected. As it happened, only Susan and Darryl from the Secret Service detail were within the sphere; the rest of the agents on-site had been further north or south in the corridor on two, or down on one, guarding the building’s entrances.

  Darryl spoke into his sleeve. “Hudkins to Dawson. Sue, we’re done here.”

  “Great,” said Susan. “Come on up to Singh’s lab. It’s room 324.”

  “‘PRAISE be to Allah,’” said Manny Cheung, reading from the computer screen in Gordo Danbury’s house.

  “Danbury must have been a plant,” said Smith, the skinny one of the two FBI agents.

  “But he’d been with the Secret Service for two years,” Cheung said.

  Smith nodded. “They’re nothing if not patient.”

  “No one has claimed responsibility for the White House bombing yet,” said Cheung, “but it was the same type of device they intercepted at L-A-X—so it’s probably al-Sajada.”

  Kranz, the other FBI agent, looked at him. “But how would they recruit an all-American boy like Danbury?” They had gone over Danbury’s personnel file before coming here; he’d been born in Lawrence, Kansas, and had earned school letters in baseball and track.

  “He was ex-army,” Cheung said. “Stationed in Afghanistan. He could have been compromised there.”

  “They probably promised him seventy-two virgins,” sneered Smith.

  “He wouldn’t be the first soldier they’d turned,” said Cheung. “Lots of grunts feel disenchanted with the US and wonder what we’re doing there. Give them enough drugs and money, maybe some women, and…” He gestured at the screen. “But whatever Danbury thought he was going to receive in heaven was presumably contingent on him taking out Jerrison. He probably planted the bomb on the White House roof during his last shift up there, with the timer set to blow up the building shortly after Jerrison was scheduled to finish his speech.”

  “That would have been pretty fucking demoralizing,” Smith said, “on top of all the demoralizing kicks in the balls they’ve already given us. Jerrison gives a speech about how we’re going to win the war on terror and—boom!—he’s killed as the White House blows up. Classic al-Sajada.”

  “Yeah,” said Kranz. “But when Jerrison decided to move his speech to the Lincoln Memorial…”

  Cheung nodded. “With the bomb’s timer already set, and no clearance for him to go back up on the roof until his next shift on Sunday, Gordo must have been scrambling for a Plan B. But as a sharpshooter, he figured he could take Jerrison out while he was giving the speech. He might have thought it was even better, a one-two punch: Jerrison assassinated during his speech about the war on terror, and an hour later the White House is destroyed.”

  Danbury’s house was small. Kranz was nosing around, looking on the bookshelves, which, from what Cheung could see, contained mostly military nonfiction and Tom Clancy novels.

  Smith nodded, then said, “I guess when Danbury heard that agent calling out that Jerrison was still alive, Danbury must have realized he wasn’t going to be a martyr—his mission to take out the president was a failure. He probably hadn’t even planned an escape route at the Lincoln Memorial; he was all set to go out in a blaze of glory. Guy like that, a crack shot, probably never even occurred to him that Jerrison would survive.”

  “I suppose,” said Cheung. “But when Jerrison did survive, Gordo panicked and ran—hoping to get away and
find another way to earn his heavenly virgins.”

  “But now that fucker is in hell,” said Smith.

  Cheung found himself a chair, dropped into it, and looked out the window, out at the changed world. “Aren’t we all?”

  THE year Ranjip Singh’s family had moved from Delhi to Toronto, US television, which spilled over the border into Canada, was filled with “Bicentennial Minutes,” celebrating America’s past.

  Years later, Canada started its own series of similar television spots called “Heritage Minutes.” Singh fondly remembered several of them, including Canadian Joe Shuster creating Superman, paleontologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell discovering dinosaur bones in Alberta, Marshall McLuhan electrifying his students at U of T with a lecture during which he coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” and a moving monologue by an actress portraying Emily Murphy, the first woman magistrate in all of the British Empire, who fought for the rights of Canadian women to be recognized as persons under the law.

  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.

  CHAPTER 15

  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.”