The Memory Collector

by Meg Gardiner

  “Why the ruse?” Jo said.

  “Riva said she couldn’t meet with you in person. She said it was impossible. But you needed to think you were talking to her.”

  “Didn’t that sound weak to you?”

  “It sounded off the wall.”

  “What does she look like?” Jo said.

  “Skinny. Young, of course. Pretty, I guess, in a sharp way. Tense.”

  “Chicana, Asian, African-American?”

  “No, white as meringue. Dresses like Vogue. The Corporate Harpies issue.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I got flustered. It was just so weird. I didn’t know if I could pull it off. She said if I didn’t want to do it, she’d find somebody else. Somebody who wanted to keep their job.”

  “Did Riva give you instructions?”

  “Play along. Don’t mention my name, or hers. Said you’d presume I was her. I didn’t have to lie. And that’s what happened. I never confirmed for you who I was. You just assumed.”

  Still a lie. “What were you supposed to tell me?”

  “That we couldn’t release Kanan’s confidential employment history. That we didn’t know where he was. That there was nothing we could help you with.”

  “And what’s the truth?”

  Fischer gripped her Pepsi cup as though she wanted to throttle it. “Ian Kanan is a scary guy. A ghost who slips in and out of the office. Doesn’t talk to people. Doesn’t do meetings or the company picnic.”

  “And what does he do?”

  “At Chira-Sayf there’s computer security, and there’s building security—rent-a-cops, same as the rest of the business park. And then there’s Ian Kanan. He’s off the charts. He is not a guy I want to run up against.”

  “Why did he go to South Africa last week?” Jo said.

  “I don’t know. But he wasn’t going in to prep for a bigwigs’ summit this time.”

  “Chira-Sayf has a lab in South Africa, doesn’t it?”

  Fischer shook her head. “Did. They shut it down.”

  Jo took out a notebook and pen. “What did the lab do?”

  Fischer pushed her cup away. “Experimental. It was offshore to avoid U.S. law.”

  “What were they working on?” Jo said.

  “It was over my head. Research. Government contracts, good works. You know, helping African business. But . . .” She looked around the restaurant and back at Jo. “They shut it down real suddenly.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. But folks were upset. Around the office, people’s auras got real spiky.”

  Jo’s pen was poised above the notebook. She set it down. “Sure.”

  Fischer fanned herself with her hands. “I’m probably throwing off sparks. If you could see my aura, you’d get a fire extinguisher.” She attempted a smile. “Yours is light purple.”

  “Okay.”

  Fischer took her napkin and blew her nose. “People with lighter shades of purple are refining their spiritual nature. Are you actively working on that?”

  “Ms. Fischer—”

  “Ruth. Please.”

  “Ruth, what happened when Chira-Sayf shut down the South African lab?”

  “Chaotic auras from some of the people. The engineers were ticked off. The execs got dark. You know, tense.”

  “Riva?”

  “Red flares.” Her narrow eyes briefly widened. “She’s a soul sucker.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Her essence is askew. She disrespects people. She always thinks people are out to get her. Typical Silicon Valley. She’s a queen bee, but she’s jealous and empty. She wants to suck the spirit out of other people because she’s empty herself.” Fischer leaned across the table. “I’ll tell you something else. She’s way too interested in Ian Kanan.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s got a yellow aura, by the way. It flares above him.”

  “Don’t worry about describing his aura.”

  “But it’s different from everybody else’s. Chira-Sayf executives, they think they’re so hot. Real self-important. And paranoid. As if Hewlett-Packard is going to send a death squad crashing through the windows.”

  “But?”

  “But Ian, his aura is serious. He carries himself like he’s the real deal. Like he knows about life and death in the real world.” She picked at the chicken. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile.”

  “Why do you say Calder is too interested in him?” Jo said.

  “Always making sure she gets to talk to him. Leaving her office door open when she knows he’s around. Wearing perfume. Which goes badly with her crimson aura, let me tell you.”

  “She’s interested in him romantically?” Jo said.

  “Maybe. Maybe she’s just trying to keep him on her side. I don’t know what power struggles go on in the corporate hierarchy. Except”—she glanced around again—“maybe she figured if she couldn’t have the cute one, she’d get the powerful one.”

  “Hold on. Are you saying Kanan turned down her advances, so she had an affair with one of the top executives?”

  Fischer shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Jo wrote in her notebook. When she looked up, Fischer’s face was pale.

  “What?” Jo said.

  “I’m sorry. I feel like a real clod for leading you on.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fischer’s puffy eyes narrowed further, like coin slots in a vending machine. “There’s something else, about the Johannesburg lab. Nobody’s supposed to talk about it. But one of our employees is missing.”

  Jo’s eyebrows rose. “Who?”

  “Chuck Lesniak. He left Johannesburg but hasn’t come home.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “His last e-mail was a good-bye from the Jo’burg office a week ago. Said he was heading to London for R&R, and that he’d see us all back in Santa Clara this week. Except he didn’t show up. He missed his flight from London.”

  “What’s the company say?”

  “Nothing. Zero.”

  Jo clicked her pen. “How do you spell his name?”

  “L-E-S-N-I-A-K. You think this relates to Ian’s disappearance? I mean, two guys from the same company. In one week.”

  “It may be coincidence. But I have my doubts.”

  Jo’s phone rang. It was Rick Simioni, the neurologist.

  “I’ve got Ron Gingrich’s MRI results. You need to see them.”

  “On my way.”

  14

  The hallway of the ranch house was musty and dim. The men pulled the woman by the arms toward the darkened bedroom doorway. She dug her heels into the shiny carpet.

  “Stop it,” the big one said.

  But the panic corkscrewed through her again. “Let me go.”

  The big man, Murdock, was bald, with no neck and sloping shoulders. His palm was clammy. Gold bracelets nestled among black hairs on his thick arms.

  She tried to squirm free. “Let me go and I’ll pay you. Take me to the bank. I’ll empty my account.”

  They reached the bedroom door. Inside was a bed with a ratty mattress and a pillow covered with brown stains. The windows were boarded over. She clamped her teeth and pressed her hands against the doorjamb. The thought of going back in there for one more hour, much less one more day, was intolerable.

  “Give it up, or I’ll have to cuff your hands behind your back again.” Murdock’s voice sounded wet. He had tiny teeth and glistening pink gums. “If you fight or even scream, you know who’ll pay. So save your breath. It won’t get you out, just get your family hurt.”

  The young man, the one called Vance, stuck his nose in her face. “Yeah. This is baby Gitmo, bitch. Consider yourself an enemy combatant.”

  In the kitchen, rap music pounded from the stereo, and the dog barked. The sound of both was deep and angry. Vance pried her fingers loose from the jamb and shoved her through the door with a hard slap on the butt.

  She spun, fists up, ready to fight if Vance came at her,
if he tried to throw her down on the bed. He stood silhouetted in the doorway.

  “Frisk her,” Murdock said. “Make sure she didn’t hide the phone on her.”

  Vance swaggered into the bedroom with the exaggerated, rolling gait of a gangbanger. Why this skinny white boy thought he was star-ring in 8 Mile she didn’t know, but the phrase desperately overcompensating popped into her head.

  He spun her around. “Spread ’em.”

  She put her hands against the wall, spread her feet, and bit back her revulsion as Vance ran his hands up her legs. They’d done this every time they brought her back to the room, and each time Vance let his hands wander farther across her. His fingers lingered for a second on her crotch before moving on. Her face heated.

  Finally he backed away. “She’s clean.”

  “Behave,” Murdock said. He pointed to a brown paper bag on the floor in the corner. “And get changed. What you’re wearing doesn’t smell too fresh anymore.”

  “And that ain’t ladylike,” Vance said.

  They slammed the door and locked it from the outside. She sagged against the wall, head back.

  None of this made sense. Why had they taken her?

  “Stop kidding yourself,” she muttered.

  It made perfect sense. She was here because of Chira-Sayf, and Alec, and the work the company was doing in South Africa. She was here because of Ian and the overseas trip he’d taken the previous week.

  She was being held as a pawn in some corporate battle that had gone beyond sales projections and industrial espionage. This was about Slick.

  A knot the size of a golf ball lodged in her throat. Tears welled in her eyes. She’d seen their faces and heard their names. That was a bad omen for her future.

  Then she breathed. She couldn’t fall apart. Fall apart and she was sure to lose whatever game they were playing with her. She had to hold it together and think of a way out of here. Now that they’d finally uncuffed her, she finally had a chance.

  But how? The door to the room was cheap and hollow. Given enough time, she could probably kick a hole in it. But if she did, Murdock would carry out his threat to harm her family.

  “Parents, kids, pets, all fair game,” he had warned her.

  She didn’t know where she was. When they grabbed her, they’d bound her hands with plastic handcuffs and blindfolded her. But she knew they’d driven south, and now at frequent intervals she could hear a locomotive. It had to be the Caltrain, which meant they were on the Peninsula.

  The room was close and smelled of mold and damp. This place was a cheap old tract house, with cheap old windows built high into the walls. What kind of architectural dumbass had decided, back in the sixties, that it would be stylish to put the windows in a kid’s bedroom five feet off the ground? It made the room feel like . . .

  Like a cell.

  She laughed bitterly. Focus, will you?

  She climbed on the bed and pushed aside the venetian blinds. The window was boarded up from the outside. The glass was cracked in a cheap aluminum frame. She unlatched it. The frame stuck and complained, but she managed to slide the window open about two feet. Wide enough to slip through, if she could get the plywood off.

  She pressed her palms to the wood. It was dry and warm. She pushed but it didn’t budge.

  She steadied herself on the creaking springs of the bed frame and shoved again. No luck. Unless she managed to beam a claw hammer into the room, she’d never get the board off.

  “Wouldn’t that be slick,” she muttered.

  Slick.

  Ian had told her about it. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be so clued in about Chira-Sayf’s big project, much less to talk about it, even in the parking lot outside the company’s H.Q.

  “Alec’s worried,” he’d said.

  But if Alec had been worried, Ian had been livid. His face had set in blank rage, pale behind the freckles and chilly blue eyes.

  “Something backfired. Slick doesn’t work as advertised. Alec’s shutting the project down.” He looked at her. “This doesn’t leave this car.”

  “Of course not,” she said, feeling alarmed. Ian Kanan did not take his work outside the office, ever. Did not talk to others at Chira-Sayf about office scuttlebutt or product development or anything except Raiders football and close personal protection. He compartmentalized.

  But he knew that something had gone haywire with Slick. Chira-Sayf’s killer app had somehow turned on the company.

  “Alec’s pulling the plug. The military’s never going to get it.” He stared out the windshield. “There’s a fight brewing.”

  “Between?” she said. “Are they dragging you into it?”

  “If they do, they’ll regret it. Because I’ll take care of things.”

  And when Ian took care of things, the results weren’t pretty.

  The nails in the boards wouldn’t budge. She wiped her palms on her pants. Maybe she could split the plywood. It was dry and brittle. She ran her fingers over the board until she found a chip in the wood, about a quarter of an inch wide.

  The window faced the street. Maybe she could shove something through the chip in the wood and send a message. Wave a flag. Somehow.

  How could she alert a passerby? She didn’t have any I.D. They’d taken her purse, cell phone, car and house keys. They’d taken her jewelry. Even her wedding ring, the thieving bastards. And they’d shoved her in this stinking bedroom.

  She turned to the brown paper bag. Inside were the clothes Murdock had provided in his strange burst of generosity—a turtleneck sweater, wool slacks, blouse, a designer sweatshirt. She got the sweatshirt from the stack. She could pull the string from the hood and use it somehow.

  Wait. She turned up the hem of the sweatshirt. There was a dry cleaning label inside.

  CALDER.

  Her heart rate bumped up. Talk about waving a flag.

  Then a weird suspicion came over her. She got the slacks and looked inside the waistband. Again she saw the dry cleaning label. She got the blouse. Same.

  These clothes virtually begged for somebody to identify her. Somebody, for instance, dragging a body out of the mud flats on the bay.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and tore the hem of the blouse with her teeth. She ripped out the tag on a long strip of fabric, like a nurse preparing a field dressing, and got to work.

  Jo walked into radiology feeling that something was on her heels, waiting for the opportunity to bite her. Lieutenant Tang was in the hallway talking on the phone, looking unsettled and grim. She jerked her head at a doorway and murmured, “Go on in.”

  The room was cool and hushed, illuminated by X-rays in light boxes and MRI images on the radiologist’s computer screen. Bone art. Soul stripped bare, to neurons and gray matter. Rick Simioni was standing by the desk, wearing his white coat over a dress shirt of Egyptian cotton as rich as cream.

  “Rick,” she said.

  When he looked at her, the light from the computer screen gave his face an eerie, hollow look.

  Dr. Chakrabarti, the radiologist, gave Jo a prim nod and pointed at the screen with a pen. “Mr. Gingrich’s MRI.”

  The images on the screen were repetitive and disconcerting, like Warhol’s grayscale death montages. The three of them stared.

  What was that?

  Jo slowed her breathing. Training and experience had taught her to hold part of herself back when seeing the evidence of a catastrophic diagnosis. She pulled her emotions safely off the ground, tucked them away, close enough for empathy but not so close that she’d get sucked into the patient’s tragedy.

  And nothing that happened to the human body could surprise her.

  So she thought. But though she stood rooted to the floor in front of the computer screen, she wanted to run away.

  The same black threads that had chewed through Ian Kanan’s brain were advancing through Ron Gingrich’s, doing—what? Growing, or eating their way through his medial temporal lobes.


  “You’re sure it’s not an imaging artifact?” Jo said.

  The fluorescent tubes in the light boxes hummed like bug zappers. Simioni crossed his arms and stared at the screen. Chakrabarti hadn’t looked away. It was as if the Warhol images were hypnotizing him.

  “It’s not an imaging error,” Chakrabarti said. “The same thing emerges on both sets of MRIs. I don’t know what it is.”

  Jo looked at Simioni. “Rick?”

  Simioni focused on the screen. “A natural neurotoxin? A tropical parasite? Something they both came in contact with on the airplane?”

  “An industrial pollutant?” she said. “A contaminant from high-tech manufacturing?”

  “That’s an interesting possibility.”

  “Kanan works for a nanotechnology company.”

  Both men turned to her. Simioni said, “Really?”

  “Really.”

  With a knock, Amy Tang opened the door and stuck her head in. “Got something going on at the marina. It may relate. I’m heading over.”

  Jo nodded, and Tang disappeared. Jo turned back to the MRI images.

  “Thoughts?” she said.

  Simioni turned pensive. “Nanotech is being investigated as a treatment for brain tumors. Treating brain cancers is notoriously difficult, because many anticancer drugs consist of molecules too large to cross the blood-brain barrier and reach the tumor site. The barrier keeps most agents out. Only very small substances can breach it.”

  “Are nanoparticles small enough?”

  “Some are. But nanoparticle chemotherapy is problematic. If the wrong agents cross the barrier they can cause serious brain infections, which are tenacious and difficult to treat. And some nanoparticles deliver anticancer drugs but don’t target only tumors—they accumulate in surrounding healthy tissue.”

  “You’re saying nanoparticles can be a Trojan horse,” Jo said. “They could slip past the brain’s natural defenses and cause havoc.”

  “Precisely.”

  All three of them stared at the images on the screen.

  Simioni pointed at the images of Gingrich’s brain. “What could cross the blood-brain barrier and lodge so specifically in this one area, I’m not sure.”