“I think they’re hooked in to his optical nerves. Like a tap on a phone.” She traced back down the wires to the spherical body. “They sent an image of whatever his eyes saw up to this. It’s a processor of some sort, maybe a quantum computer built out of biological components. It interprets the optic signals and decides what to do. If it sees something it likes, it sends signals to the pleasure centers.”
“Through these other six wires?”
“Through those, yes.”
“When you say it sees something it likes—what does that mean?”
“That it’s programmed. That it scans everything its host sees. And if it sees a trigger—something buried in an ad or a label—it reacts. You’ve heard of the EURion constellation?”
Carver shook his head.
“It was a tripwire embedded in European paper currency, a long time ago. It was supposed to look like the constellation Orion. You wouldn’t notice it with the naked eye, because it didn’t stand out. But if a counterfeiter tried to scan a bill, the scanner would see the constellation and shut down. We think there’s something like that embedded into advertisements, hidden on billboards.”
“And if this thing—this quantum computer—comes across a trigger like that, what does it do?”
“It makes you want whatever you’re looking at. It makes you fall in love with it. You think there will always be a hole in your heart unless you have it. It aches, but at the same time, it feels so good, you can’t bear to turn away.”
She laid all the pages in front of him. They were glossy enough that from an angle, they reflected the fire. To see them again he had to lean over. He looked at each: first the spidery glow of the MRIs, and then the sharp, computer-generated topography assembled by the electron microscope.
Then he looked up at her.
If he’d just passed her on the sidewalk, he wouldn’t have marked her as someone who picked the labels off her wine before she drank it, who used a security guard to order her takeout because she was afraid to use a telephone. She didn’t look like a woman who talked earnestly about tiny machines that grew in your head, about things that spread roots through your brain and tapped in to your eyes to tell you how to think. And maybe she wasn’t that woman. Perhaps there was another reason she needed him to believe this story.
“I’m not making this up, Ross.”
He nodded at the folder in her lap. She’d only given him three documents, but there were dozens more inside it.
“You told me those were your scans,” he said. He touched his finger to his temple. “Right in here, you said—that’s why you left New York, why you came here.”
She reached for the wine bottle and refilled her glass, then tilted the bottle toward him. He nodded and she poured for him.
“A lot happened, after I found it,” she said. “I told you I was married?”
“Yes.”
“My husband disappeared. Not like you’re thinking. It wasn’t the cliché, where he stepped out for cigarettes, for a carton of milk. I knew where he was—he was in the condo. Just sitting there, fading away. I could see what was left of him. But he’d stopped seeing me.”
Carver drank some of the wine. It would hurt, he thought—to be loved so well and then forgotten. Most everyone he knew had a story like that. Maybe they had all become invisible to each other, but that wasn’t any excuse.
“By then,” Mia said, “I was waking up. I was fighting it but he wasn’t. I tried to help him, tried to make him see. But he wouldn’t let go. He said I was crazy. A paranoid schizophrenic. He’d say I was unfit to be a doctor, unfit to be a mother. And then he’d tell me not to stand in front of the television when he was watching. And then, eventually, he really did leave.”
Carver used the base of his wineglass to point at the three documents on the rug.
“Did you show him these?”
“I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I was afraid of them—and I didn’t trust him.”
“But you trust me?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He had no answer for that. Twenty minutes ago, he’d broken into her apartment, carrying a gun. He looked at the tear in her jeans and thought of the way she’d fallen on her knees into the broken glass, her hands in front of her face. He understood, of course, that he’d been using his gun every day whether he drew it or not. People knew it was there, and that changed everything. It might skew everything they told him. That was part of the bargain.
“You were telling me about your husband.”
“There wasn’t any more to it—I asked too much of him, and he left. After that, it would’ve been easy to fall into it. To wander into Times Square and stand there gawking with everyone else. Look at the lit signs, the window displays. Pick a glowcard off the sidewalk and stand there drooling. But I fought it. I knew I had one too, like James. I thought it’d be easier to fight it if I could see it.”
She turned back the folder’s cover and handed him the first page. It was a three-dimensional image of a brain. Mia’s brain. She had manipulated the scan somehow, so that the brain matter was nearly transparent, like cloudy glass. The things growing inside of her were blue and violet, like arcing electricity. There were three spheres lodged in her hypothalamus. Their wiry legs twisted around each other, spreading through the dark space inside her skull, the tangled roots of weeds.
“It’s why you won’t go out, unless you have to,” Carver said. “Why you peel the labels off everything, why you won’t look at a phone.”
She nodded.
“I thought maybe if I took away what they wanted to see, I could starve them out. That they’d die off, like vines in a drought,” she said. She pointed at the three pale-violet bodies in the image. “But they don’t go away. They dig into the cortex, and wait, watching signals flash past. They never sleep, even when I do—they can see what I dream.”
He thought of the flies in Patrick Wong’s apartment, their lidless, opaque eyes watching from the walls and the ceiling.
“Why did you come here?”
“Because of the scans,” she said. “That’s how they found me.”
“They?”
“I’d rented time on an MRI at Sloan Kettering, to scan myself. When I saw what I had, I ran out. I didn’t bother to reset the machine—I left the coil tuned to find these,” Mia said.
She took the page from his lap and put it back into its folder.
“Was that a mistake, to not reset it?”
“It depends on how you look at it. What I’d done wasn’t a normal way to set up an MRI. It wouldn’t have happened by accident. And the next man who used the machine saw the settings and happened to know what they meant.”
“A coincidence?”
“Yes, but not an unlikely one. If our movement was going to start anywhere, it would have been someplace like Sloan Kettering. There were people with the knowledge and the tools, and some of them were awake enough to watch. So when this man saw what I’d done, he checked the lab logs and found my name. And then he came looking for me.”
“He recruited you.”
“That’s right.”
“Who was he?”
“Another neurologist, one who’d woken up. I knew him as George—but it doesn’t matter. He’s probably dead now.”
“Because of this?”
She nodded, then finished the wine in her glass.
“He disappeared a week before they got Hadley.”
“What did he get you into?”
“A network,” she said. “There weren’t many of us to start with, and now I think I’m the only one.”
“This network—who was in it, and who were you working for?”
“We were doctors, working for ourselves,” she said. She looked him in the face, her dark eyes catching the firelight. “We weren’t afraid to remember the way the world used to be. To hope it might be like that again.”
“But you don’t know who they really were.”
; “I don’t,” she said. “I took a risk. I had to. You’ve seen it, how it is out there.”
“Yes.”
He’d seen it all his life, maybe. He’d seen the way it slowly built, one stone on top of another until the spires touched the sky and blotted out the sun. By now their shadows darkened everyone. It had been so incremental that he hadn’t understood. This wasn’t a city, but a tomb. Standing in the mailroom with a stack of glowcards, he’d thought every acquisition was as necessary as water or air. But with every finger swipe, he’d been losing what was most important. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken to anyone in his family, the last day he’d spent with a friend.
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” Mia said. “And you can’t fight it in the open. You can’t publish papers on it, or talk about it on the internet or the phones. You can’t go to the FDA or the CDC, or any of the research universities.”
“Why?”
“Because people who push just a little, who make a bit of noise—they might wake up like you. Smelling like burnt iron, their memories a mess. And if they push a little harder, they end up like Hadley.”
“You’ve seen other people who’ve had their memories erased?”
She shook her head.
“Not until Friday morning, when I found you. But I knew it could be done. George saw three cases in New York, and the symptoms you presented matched his files exactly, right down to the smell.”
“How well did you know George?”
“Face to face, it was just the one time,” she said. “It was too dangerous to meet any more than that. We had other ways to talk.”
“Dead drops,” Carver said. “Like the one at the lake.”
She looked up, but recovered quickly.
“You must be very good,” she said. “To have followed me like that, you’d have to be.”
“Jenner and I know our business.”
“And I don’t,” she said.
“That’s not —”
“Really, I don’t,” she said. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been playing at something else, but it’s not what I am, not what any of us were. George, too. I keep hoping he’ll turn up. That’ll he’ll tell me what to do.”
“That’s what you were doing tonight—checking for him.”
She nodded.
“He wasn’t in San Francisco, I don’t think. He sent me here, to run Hadley. I made sure she had money, and I kept her on the right track—I had more technical knowledge than she did, but she was better at getting close to people.”
“What about George?”
“If he needed something, he’d contact me through the dead drop, and I’d reach her through a different one.”
“He’d do it himself, or through someone else?”
“I don’t know. There was a sign if there was going to be a message—a piece of red cloth, tied to a rain gutter on the other side of the alley. If I saw that, then I’d go.”
“What if you needed to contact him?”
“I’d leave a crack in the curtains so the light came out,” Mia said. “Then a message the next night.”
“You know where they dumped Hadley, after she was killed?”
Mia nodded, slowly.
“So your mailbox might not be safe anymore. Did she know about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she know where you lived?” Carver asked. “Could she have given you up? You know when they did all that to her, they were asking questions.”
“No—god, no. We were careful.”
“Not careful enough. You went back.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Mia said. “I’ve been sitting here for weeks, waiting. Either to be killed, or for someone to pull me out. And there wasn’t any other choice. I can’t do this alone. I don’t even know how they got to her, so I have no idea what’s safe and what isn’t.”
“She wasn’t just a nightclub singer, was she?”
Mia raised her glass toward her lips, then saw it was empty. She set it down.
“She’d been a medical student. She found her way to George, somehow. Or he found her.”
“Did Johnny Wong kill her?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But you didn’t hear that name for the first time from me. You already knew about him, didn’t you?”
“I knew she was trying to find him.”
“Why?”
“We finally had a lead,” she said. “Years in the dark, and then we thought we had a way in.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s like what they said about J.F.K. You want to know who killed the president? List the world’s best marksmen, and then find out which ones were in Dallas. Making these devices would be incredibly hard. We guessed only a few scientists in a few labs could do it.”
“So you did your research, and then you made a list.”
She rose from her place on the rug, went into the kitchen, and pulled another bottle of wine from the rack. The corkscrew was still on the counter, and as she was twisting the handle, she looked at him and spoke quietly.
“It wasn’t a long list. And inside a year, we ruled everyone out, except for one man.”
When she’d extracted the cork, she came back to the fire and settled next to him again. He shook his head when she tilted the wine bottle toward his glass, but she filled her own.
“Who was he?”
“No one knew his real name. He called himself the Master.” She must have seen his eyebrow twitch upward. “Even in science there’s an underworld. Scientists who go rogue—mercenary types, who’ll set up a black market lab, or build you a bomb, or a missile program, or whatever it is you’ve got the money to pay for.”
“And what was the Master’s specialty?”
“Nanorobotics,” Mia said. “He had warrants in ten countries, his own page on the Interpol website. We finally tracked him down, in Mexico, but he wasn’t much help.”
“Then you ruled him out, too?”
“Not exactly. When we found him, he was dead. Shot through the temple. Suicide, or at least it was supposed to look like it. There was a gun next to him.”
“You were there, in Mexico?”
She shook her head.
“I got this from George. He was there. And he found something in the Master’s house that tied him to Johnny Wong.”
Carver stopped himself from leaning forward. He didn’t want to look too excited or too interested. Not while she was talking this much.
“What did George find?”
“A painting—a Bridget Laurent painting. One of the ones missing from the Legion of Honor. And everybody knows Johnny Wong was supposed to have been behind that.”
“That’s it?” Carver asked. “That’s all you had to connect them?”
“That’s all.”
“And so George sent you and Hadley here to try to do what Jenner and I, and the FBI, and the DEA haven’t been able to do. Find Johnny.”
“That’s right,” Mia said. “And I think Hadley found him.”
That thought sat between them for a while. Mia drank her wine, and Carver pictured Hadley’s body in the wet grass. Then something occurred to him and he looked up from the fire.
“If George is a fake name, then Mia Westcott’s a fake too,” Carver said. “Who are you?”
She leaned back, shaking her head. If there’d been any wine left in her glass, she would have spilled it. When she answered, she spoke as quickly as he’d ever heard her.
“I won’t tell you,” she said. “If you knew my name, you’d go across the hall and run a search for me on your computer. And that’d raise a red flag somewhere, wouldn’t it? My name, searched from this city. From this building. If they dug at all, they’d see you were the one looking. Don’t you think you’re already in their sights?”
“Then how can I believe any of this?” he asked. He touched the folder with the base of his glass. “Those are just pictures. Pictures, and a story.”
>
She came back to him, taking his hand from his knee and weaving her fingers into his. He didn’t pull away.
“If you can get me into a lab with an MRI,” she said. “I can show you.”
She was drawing him closer to say something else when his phone began to vibrate. When he took it out to read the text message, she quickly turned to look at the fire. He read it, and then put the phone away.
“You have to go,” Mia said.
“Jenner’s worried.”
“Then go talk to him,” Mia said. “Tell him whatever he needs to know. But promise me you’ll do it face to face. Not on the phone. Not by email.”
He nodded, and she took his hand again. She brought it to her lips and kissed his knuckles.
“Knock later,” she said. “If you want.”
19
INSTEAD OF GOING to his apartment, Carver went to the stairwell. Up until now, he’d been talking to Jenner freely on the phone, because it was a burner. But after his conversation with Mia, he was more concerned than ever that his apartment might be wired. She’d had unlimited access to it for an entire weekend, to say nothing of the crew who’d brought him home. So he took the stairs to the top floor, and then climbed the steel ladder to the roof. He unlatched the trapdoor with his left hand, then held on to the top rung and used the back of his head and his shoulders to lift the door open as he climbed through it. The sky above the city was black and orange with the remaining streetlights’ reflected glow.
He went to the balustrade at the roof’s edge and looked down the rain-swept street. Above Union Square, a police helicopter was descending through the opaque cloud cover, its searchlight igniting the sky until it broke into the clear air and the rain. He could feel the thump of its rotors as it began searching west along Post Street.
He took out the burner and called Jenner.
“You okay?” his partner asked.
“I’m up on the roof now.”
“Alone?”
“That’s right—listen, did you stay in the neighborhood?”
“I’m in Pinecrest Diner, grabbing a bite. I didn’t know —”
“Take your time,” Carver said. “Where’s your car?”
The Night Market Page 17