“Another question. You haven't asked about all that hap
pened at the Carey house. Would you like to be briefed or
can I assume from the swings of my mood that my brain has
already been picked clean?”
“Thank you,” Jared answered absently. “It's not necessary.”
“Screw you, Baker.”
“Sorry, Duncan. Inside joke. Where was I, by the way?”
“You were escaping from a psychiatric ward,” Peck an
swered dryly, “committing a murder in the process.”
Sonnenberg clucked his tongue. “Ah yes, Duncan. You
have had legal training, haven't you. Someone once wrote
that no poet has seen in nature the variety a lawyer sees in
the truth. We were discussing, in any case, whether or not I
had a master plan. The plain truth is that since I paroled my
self from St. Elizabeths, one thing rather led to another. First
there was a need to create a new me, and I thought I might
enjoy being a doctor this time. Something bearded, perhaps,
and faintly Viennese. A Viennese accent and beard are usu
ally all that is needed to set oneself up in the field of behav
ioral psychology. Still drifting, however, I drifted into my
local butcher shop, where I sought to purchase a rack of
lamb. The butcher was Ben Meister, who, speaking of
lawyers, thought he would enjoy that profession, although I can't think why. But a lifetime of carving flesh turned out to
be superb elementary training. Simulated regression—you
recall the technique—helped do the rest. He thought he was Louis Brandeis for the twelve months it took him to
prepare
for the bar examination. Benjamin is in a Melvin Belli phase
at the moment.
“Moving right along, Meister then defended a woman
named Melanie Laver, who was charged with manslaughter.
Unhappily, due to Meister's inexperience, to say nothing of
Melanie's guilt, he failed to win an acquittal. Nice woman, though. We contrived a satisfying alternative to ten years in a Massachusetts state prison.
Peck looked at his watch, then winked at Burleson. Son
nenberg saw it.
“May I continue, Duncan?” he admonished. “Here's your
quarry, 'fessing up to all at last, and you're being rudely
inattentive.”
“I'm terribly sorry, Marcus.” Peck affected a somber ex
pression and sat erect in his chair. “It's just that I've sat
through this scene in every grade B detective movie of the
thirties and forties. The protagonist pieces together all the
loose ends in a tiresome chronology and then points an ac
cusing finger at the surprise villain. Since there are few sur
prises here, Marcus, I wonder if we might vault ahead. To
the modern era, perhaps.”
“Well.” Sonnenberg sniffed. ”I suppose we needn't cata
logue all the Ben Meisters and Melanie Lavers. Or the Roger
Hersheys, the Howard Twilleys, and the Luther Dowlings.
That's your complete list, isn't it, Duncan? It was the cause
of your smirk to Edward a moment ago. Your wink was say
ing, ‘Let the old fool ramble on, never dreaming that we're
having these five people rounded up even as he prattles.’
Well, they're not at home, and you can't have them either.”
Peck flushed but held himself under control. He glanced
at the phone and restrained himself from rushing to it to ask
whether his roundup of Sonnenberg's known subjects was as
futile as Sonnenberg suggested. “Perhaps there are surprises
after all, Marcus. Please continue.” He needed time to re
arrange his thoughts.
“Along any particular avenue, Duncan?”
Duncan Peck shrugged. “I'm rather interested in the Chimera phenomenon, if you wouldn't mind.”
“Ah yes.” Sonnenberg picked up his thread. “It's instruc
tive, first, to understand how we got there. It was really a sort of on-the-job training. As we went through the Ben
Meisters and Melanie Lavers and on to the others, every new
technique, every success at radically altering a personality or developing a new talent, led to whole new areas of in
quiry. In some cases, we even succeeded in tapping genetic
memories. I'd been fascinated by the subject for some time.
I've always suspected that an ‘idiot savant,’ for example,
who can hear a Beethoven piece once and then play it fault
lessly without even a lesson, is actually displaying a skill
that was mastered in a prior generation by a biological an
tecedent. All of us, in fact, possess skills and aptitudes that were actually learned by blood forebears generations, even eons, ago and retained in the genetic blueprint of later gen
erations. A simpler example concerns animals. What we call
instinct in a dog is actually behavior that was learned for the
purpose of survival by an ancestor low on the evolutionary
scale. Dogs and idiot savants don't spend a great deal of
time thinking about what they can and cannot do. They just go ahead and do it. I simply began helping subjects to iden
tify those talents, to believe in them and to focus on them.
“We were well along this road, Duncan, identifying
deeply hidden knowledge and aptitudes, when we learned of
experiments elsewhere that permitted a quantum leap. Sev
eral research centers, notably Cal Tech, had successfully
taken memory-bearing brain tissue from one rat and injected
it into the brain of another rat. The first rat, in one experi
ment, would be taught to run a difficult maze or learn a
complicated feeding sequence, and then the tissue bearing
that knowledge would be directly transfused into the skull of another rat. It worked. The difficulty, of course, was that the donor rat either died or was left impaired, so Cal Tech never
got to try it on people.”
“You, I assume, had no such reluctance, Marcus.”
“Within certain limits, Duncan, but yes. In the past, I've restricted my experiments to terminally ill volunteers who,
in return for the donation of their brain tissue within hours of their anticipated deaths, lived out their days comfortably and
left handsome legacies to whomever they designated.
They're all still quite alive, you know. Beyond providing nu
trients to my rhododendrons out back, each is at this moment
sharing productively in another human consciousness.”
“Including Baker's, I gather.”
“Oh goodness, no,” Sonnenberg answered quickly. It
wouldn't do at all, he thought, to have Jared wondering if I'd squirted bits of someone else's neocortex into his head. He's
miffed enough already. “One does not create a Chimera,
Duncan, more's the pity. One must find a Chimera. As I as
sume you recall, I've been looking for one for almost forty years. Oh, the Chimera potential is common enough if you
know what you're looking for. Much more common than
multiple-personality disorders, which themselves are a dime
a dozen. First, it's a matter of understanding that a distinct
personality exists within the limbic system of every human
brain. Primordial man, basically. Something like old Bridey Murphy but far more elemental. The next step is to find the
right subject, an individual whose primordial or reptilian personality has slipped to the surface. What remains is to
discover whether this phenomenon can be isolated and con
trolled. There's the rub, I'm afraid. One produces some very
odd results along the way and far more failures than suc
cesses.”
“The failures, I assume, are also gracing your garden.”
“Not at all, Duncan. The procedure involves no danger to
life.” Sonnenberg reminded himself again that Baker was
listening. “It's only that the subject must be stable, balanced and emotionally healthy. Lord knows what you'd find if you
started digging into Edward here. Possibly nothing at all. Possibly, however, a great humanist and lover of mankind.
After all, the nobler instincts you've managed to breed out
of this surface creature must necessarily have found a home
in some remote lobe or other. Speaking of lobes, one must
also be certain, Duncan, that a chosen subject is not schizo
phrenic to any important degree, or all you'll end up with are
creatures of your subject's emotional needs. I'm afraid I've made that mistake at least once in the past.”
Duncan Peck leaned forward in his chair, deeply fasci
nated, his mind searching in several directions at once while
absorbing the information so freely offered by Sonnenberg.
Lunatic though he may be, Peck thought, he's far from fool
ish. Yet he's providing information that might be useful.
Why? To keep me here until his friends from the police ar
rive? Hardly. A show of credentials will turn them away with
even less inconvenience than Edward experienced with the Greenwich police. To detain us while his own people fly to
his aid and our extermination? Not his style. To play cat and
mouse? Obviously. But why? And as for these discourses
he's enjoying so much, they have a curious quality, some of
them. Almost as if he's speaking not so much to me but
to
...
whom else, Ivor? You said there are no recording de
vices, and I think I'll take you at your word. Nor have you
tried to elicit an incriminating admission from me, although
you've made several such admissions yourself. For whose
benefit, Ivor. Certainly not Edward's. Could Connor Harrigan be within earshot, Ivor? And Jared Baker?
“While you're being so generously discursive, Ivor—”
“Marcus.”
”—Marcus, I don't suppose you'd share with me how one goes about identifying a Jared Baker.”
“Actually, Duncan, we're running short of time,” Son
nenberg answered. “You'll be getting a phone call in a very
few minutes.”
Peck stood up and motioned Burleson to his feet. ”A dis
agreeable phone call, Marcus? I trust I'm not about to learn that the President of the United States is a former mechanic who once repaired your transmission.”
”I try never to diminish, Duncan. Only elevate. Where are
you off to, by the way?”
“I'm afraid I must rescind my early concern for your
woodwork, Marcus.”
“Charley?”
“peck thinks you're here, he hopes you're here, he thinks
sonnenberg is talking to you and harrigan more than him.”
Baker repeated Charley's message to Harrigan.
“Like the man said, lad''—Harrigan pointed to the shaft above the air conditioner—“we'll know when to leave. It sounds like things are about to get nasty.”
“Jared?” It was Sonnenberg's voice coming from the
speaker.
“Yeah?” Harrigan answered for him.
“They can't hear this speaker, Mr. Harrigan, although
they will when they reach the basement. Do two things for
me, please. First, make sure you haven't fiddled with the set
ting of the air conditioner. In fact, turn it up to its loudest set
ting. Next, go at once, but wait in the covered well at the end
of that shaft until it seems prudent to take your leave.”
“One more time, Doctor.” Baker spoke to the micro
phone. “Where are they?”
“To the park, Jared. And you, Mr. Harrigan. Off with you
both. Truth and justice await you there.”
“Report, Douglas.” Duncan Peck stood in the driveway,
Burleson at his side, addressing his man Peterson. Michael
Biaggi stood near, looking furtively into Peck's eyes for
some sign of what might have been said.
“Sonnenberg's people are all gone, sir. The five our men
tried to pick up, anyway. And they're all traveling light from
the look of their apartments. Most personal effects are still
there. I have a two-man team covering each location for
when they return.”
Peck turned to Burleson. ”A probably useless measure,
Edward, but leave them. If their homes are like this one, the remaining personal effects have been shed like the skin of a
snake. A pity. I'd almost have been tempted to bargain all
five for one Jared Baker.”
“We're also having a difficult time with the direction
finders, sir,” Peterson continued. “He's set up a series of sig
nal relays somehow. We've triangulated five different loca
tions as the signal source, and before we can check out one he switches to another. Some are very close. One's coming all the way from a boatyard down on the Sound.”