Game Changer (18 page)

27

Quinn made sure the opening in
the curtain they were peering through was even less conspicuous than before. “Any
reason for a student to track you down at home?” he asked hurriedly as the man
exited the car and shut the door loudly.

“No,” said Rachel. “But he
doesn’t have a gun or anything,” she noted hopefully as he walked casually
toward the door.

They both pulled their heads
back from the living room window as Regev rapped loudly on the front door, which
was in the next room over. Quinn caught Rachel’s eye and shook his head,
letting her know not to answer.

Quinn couldn’t imagine that this
man’s appearance minutes after they had arrived and disabled the bugs could be
random, despite the visit coming even sooner than he had expected. He had to
assume Regev was working for 302. But if he was here to kill Rachel, why such a
noisy approach? Why announce his presence?

If Quinn wasn’t with her, hadn’t
warned her, this would have worked. She’d be unclear why a student was visiting
her at home, but she’d invite him in, and he could dispatch her at his leisure.
He’d leave no witnesses and attract no undue attention.

But surely Regev must know the video
and audio feed had been disrupted, and had viewed the footage to see who was
responsible. Surely he now knew that a competent player was on the scene, and
Rachel would never fall for his obvious ruse.

Regev rapped sharply and
repeatedly on the door a second time, underscoring his clumsy approach. For the
Israeli to be proceeding this way he had to be a rank amateur.

Or a true professional
, thought Quinn in alarm.

Regev was a
decoy
, he realized. He was being loud on purpose to distract them from
the real danger. Quinn could see it in his mind’s eye, a second man breaking in
through the back door, masking the noise by timing it to his partner’s raps on
the door.

Quinn tackled Rachel and drove
her to the carpeting even before the logic of this realization had fully played
out. She gasped in shock as he rolled off her body and came up firing, piercing
the chest of the man who was just then entering the room from the back end, a
moment before the intruder could squeeze off his own shot.

The instant Regev heard gunfire
he dropped the innocent visitor act and shot at the door lock. Quinn jumped to
his feet and ran into the next room, to the front door, staying out of the line
of fire and waiting for Regev to burst through.

Only this never happened. The
shots at the door were another decoy. Regev had doubled back to the front window.
He shattered the glass with a single bullet and dived through into the teal
curtain. He extricated himself from the fabric in record time and began to
raise a gun while Quinn rushed back into the living room.

Rachel was between Quinn and the
assassin, but Quinn was forced to risk a shot to have any chance of saving her
life. The shot streaked by the Harvard professor, missing her by less than an
inch, and hit Regev in the chest, leaving a red bloom on his shirt. The force
of the shot slammed the Israeli’s head into the hard window frame. Small shards
of glass cut his head and face as he tumbled backwards out of the window and fell
several feet onto a bed of tulips.

Despite the darkness outside,
Quinn was able to verify that the man wasn’t moving. He raced to the back of
the house with his gun at the ready. It appeared that the strike force had
consisted of only two men, whom Quinn had taken out, but it paid to be sure. He
made his way quickly but cautiously through the rest of the house and minutes
later was satisfied that they were clear, at least for now.

Rachel Howard was stunned. Tears
streamed down her face as she stared in horror at the dead body in her living
room, the first man Quinn had shot. Gorge rose in her throat but she was
paralyzed and unable to look away.

“Come on!” shouted Quinn,
knowing he had to snap her out of it. “We have to go! Now!”

Rachel finally turned away from
the corpse and life began to return to her eyes. “Where?” she mumbled weakly.

“I don’t know. But your neighbor
must have heard the shots and is calling the cops, so we can’t stay.”

Rachel shook her head, still
more zombie than human. “She’s not home,” she whispered. “On vacation. I’m
putting out food for her cat until Monday.”

They still had to move, pronto,
but Quinn knew this was the exact break they needed. He had been having nothing
but bad luck lately, so maybe it was about time for the universe to balance the
scales. “I assume you believe me now that someone wants you dead?”

Rachel looked ill but managed to
nod.

“Do you trust that I’m here to
help you?”

She glanced back and forth between
Quinn and the body on her carpet. “Yes.”

“Then do exactly what I tell
you. Go to your neighbor’s house and sit tight. Don’t do anything to advertise
your presence. Don’t make any calls, don’t do
anything
. When the cops come pounding on the door, looking for
witnesses, don’t answer.”

“You aren’t going to stay with
me?”

“I need to lead the search away
from here,” he replied. “I’ll take your car somewhere else and work my way back
to your neighbor’s house some other way. Give me an hour or so. When you hear
me knock, let me in. I’ll knock three times. Then one time. Then four times.
That’ll be me.”

“You chose
Pi
as your secret code?” she said. “Really?”

Quinn smiled. “Well, not
all
of it,” he replied in amusement.
“Just the first three digits. Since you’re a scientist, I thought you’d like
that.”

Rachel nodded and blew out a
long breath. “Hurry back,” she said grimly.

28

Quinn drove as calmly as he
could away from Rachel’s house, removing the black baseball hat from the
rucksack beside him and placing it on his head. He parked six blocks from the
Waltham train station. He didn’t know if this ruse would work again, assuming
it had worked when he had tried it in Trenton, but it was worth a shot.

He had a cab pick him up a mile
from the station and drop him off several blocks away from the Thai restaurant
at which he had intercepted Rachel. The stolen Ford Fusion was still in the
lot. He drove to Rachel’s neighborhood and parked four blocks from her house,
making his way toward it cautiously on foot, invisible in the darkness, carrying
the heavy gray rucksack with him.

Homes appeared only
sporadically, the acres of distance between them the principal advantage of
buying in a part of town that time had forgotten rather than buying a more
modern tract home, larger but wedged together with others in tight bunches.

He had expected to see three or
four police cars in front of Rachel’s home, blue and red lights carving up the
night, but there were none. Her residence abutted a wooded hill on one side, leaving
her only a single neighbor forty yards away, but he thought it likely the sound
would have carried to at least a few other houses in the distance.

Just then he realized Regev’s
car was no longer in the driveway.

What in the world?

He returned to her home as stealthily
as he could and investigated.

The bodies were both gone.

Someone must have been waiting
for confirmation of the kill. When it wasn’t received, they had managed to
clean up after themselves
already
. Quinn
swallowed hard. What was he up against here?

The good news was that whoever
had retrieved the bodies had left, having no idea that their target was only
forty yards away. As scary as their competence was, this was at least reassuring.

He made his way to the
neighbor’s house and rapped out 3-1-4 on the door. Rachel was relieved to see
him, and handed him a hot mug of cocoa she had prepared for his return before
leading him into the basement. The glazed look in her eyes had disappeared and
she seemed to have recovered.
 

The neighbor, a retired schoolteacher
named Debbie Steele, had done a beautiful job converting the basement into a
much larger family room. The entire floor was covered in thick-pile beige
carpeting and a steel basement pole had been painted a pleasant white. Two
identical blue couches faced one another, each made of a comfortable fabric,
and each with a skirt that hung down from the bottom of the couch to the floor
to give it a more cozy look. Four throw pillows, two pink and two light blue,
adorned each couch, with short oak tables positioned at the ends of each. A
holographic television was set within a bookshelf that harbored photographs in wrought
iron frames along with various knickknacks.

Quinn and Rachel settled in on
opposite couches, facing each other, while Quinn described how someone had
cleaned up after themselves at her house.

“So what else do you know about
this Israeli?” he asked. “This Emil Regev?”

“
Eyal
,” she corrected. “
Eyal
Regev. There’s not much to tell. He showed up in my graduate class this
morning. A transfer from Johns Hopkins. Speaks great English.” Rachel paused
for a moment and her face fell. “Well, I guess I should use the past tense. He
spoke
great English.”

Quinn watched as she visibly
struggled to suppress the visceral memories of the gun battle and deaths and
remain dispassionate.

“He was tall and well built,” she
continued finally, composed and relatively upbeat once again. “And permanently
tanned. Very bright and thoughtful.”

“And an imposter. Not to mention
a killer.”

Debbie Steele’s cat, a beautiful
white Turkish Angora named Duke, had settled in next to Rachel Howard and
seemed to be as engaged in the conversation as she was.

“He stayed for a few minutes
after class to chat. The first two lectures in this course are big picture
discussions. We don’t really drill down to the neuronal or molecular level, nor
talk about specifics in the field. But when we spoke after class, he seemed
knowledgeable. Training a guy like that to fool someone like me for even a few
minutes is impressive.”

“Anything else you can remember
about him?”

“Not much. Just that I really
liked him. He had a lot of positive qualities. He had this air of confidence, a
great
intellect, and a great sense of
humor. He only had one tiny flaw as far as I can tell.”

“What’s that?”

“He tried to kill me!” she said emphatically, but with a smile to
indicate she had set Quinn up for this. “This is the sort of thing that can
make you reevaluate your opinion of someone.”

Quinn laughed. “No doubt,” he
said. “Even if you’re the forgiving type.”

Rachel held her smile for a
moment longer before it faded. “Okay,” she said, “now that I’m finding you more
believable, why don’t you tell me who you are. And how you came to be in my
car.”

Quinn sighed. “I’ll tell you
everything. Soon. But before I do, as I said before, I want you to give me an
overview on the subject of memory. Like you did with neuroscience in general.”

“Did anything I’ve already told
you help you understand why people might be after me?”

Quinn shook his head. “I’m
afraid not.”

“This exercise won’t either.”

He understood her frustration.
But he needed this to get a sense of how his story would come across to her and
for his own edification, so he felt this was the best way to proceed. Listening
to his instincts again, as Rachel herself had recommended. “Maybe so, but I
like to be thorough.”

“Can’t you be thorough after
you’ve told me more about what’s going on?”

“I promise, we can make this
quick.” He flashed his most disarming smile. “All I want to know is everything
that has ever been learned about human memory. Ever. In ten or fifteen
minutes.”

“Oh well, in that case . . . I
thought you would be asking for something difficult.”

Quinn laughed.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” said Rachel, taking a sip
of hot cocoa from the mug in her hand. “This will be very big picture. I won’t
get into the molecular mechanisms of memory, or where they are laid down in the
brain.
I won’t tell you
all the theories of memory at the chemical and neuronal level.
Too
complicated and involved for our quick overview.”

“Whatever you think makes sense.”

“The most important concept to know is that our minds don’t
reflect reality. There really is no objective reality but what our minds make
of the data coming in through our senses. Different wavelengths and configurations
of light hit our eyes, and our minds imbue meaning and reality. It’s just
light, but if it’s reflected from a naked supermodel, it might provoke lust, or
from a mass of writhing maggots, disgust. But these are simply our
interpretations, driven by wiring and evolution.”

Quinn nodded.

“For example,” she continued, “we
find oranges delicious and feces disgusting. But why? Do you think this is just
random?”

“I’m going to say, um . . . no,”
said Quinn.

“Way to be decisive,” said
Rachel in amusement. “Oranges contain energy we need, so our bodies and brains
evolved to respond positively to them. Fecal matter carries disease, so our
brains cause us to be disgusted by the light waves and odor molecules that emanate
from it. But the odor molecules that hit our olfactory receptors aren’t repugnant.
They aren’t anything. Our brains are just wired to respond to them with
revulsion. This property is in our minds, not the molecules themselves. Baby
koalas eat their mother’s feces to obtain bacteria they need to detoxify eucalyptus
leaves. To them, fecal matter smells and tastes as good as an orange does to
you.”

Quinn’s face curled up into a
picture of disgust, a further demonstration of the point she was making.

“So the
reality
of our world is dictated by our minds,” she continued. “And
this applies to our most heartfelt beliefs about ethics, politics, society—everything.
But back to our sensory input. Even if we pretend there really is an objective
reality to this information, our brains don’t present this objective reality to
us anyway, feeding us a highly edited version instead. Your brain tells you the
best story it can come up with, so you can navigate the environment and stay
alive long enough to reproduce, creating additional brains that operate in this
same way.”

“Can I assume you’ll provide an
example or two?”
 

“Sure,” said Rachel, rolling her
eyes, “an overview of everything known about human memory in ten minutes, with
examples.”

She paused and gathered her
thoughts. “You may know that everything you see comes into your retina, and
thus your brain, upside down, backwards, and two-dimensional. With a sizable blind
spot in the center. But you don’t see things this way. Your brain adjusts it
for you. It performs the treacherous math needed to put everything right-side up,
and takes a best guess as to what’s in the blind spot, filling it in for you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “But
here is something truly remarkable. Suppose I give you a pair of glasses that
flip the world you’re seeing now upside down. During the first few days of
wearing them, you’d be helpless. But if you kept wearing them, within a few
weeks your brain would lay down new pathways, re-map your input spatially, and
flip the world right-side up for you again. You’d be back in business.”

Quinn’s mouth fell open. “Someone
actually did this?” he said. “Wore upside-down glasses for a few weeks?”

Rachel grinned. “Multiple
someones. And if you then took the glasses
off
,
the world would look upside down to you again. Until you adjusted back.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Your brain takes all kinds of
liberties with visual information, processing it for maximum usefulness. Which
explains why there are so many optical illusions. Set things up just right, so the
mental gymnastics your mind uses to display the world without a blind spot and
in three dimensions work against you, and you can be easily fooled.”

Rachel paused. “The key point,
which I’ve made several times now, is that your brain isn’t about reality as
much as it’s about presenting you with the best possible narrative to explain
the inputs coming in. Memory is the same way. It helps us avoid danger and recall
the location of a watering hole. But it’s an approximation of reality, and
often not a very good one. People think memory works like a video recording.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Our memory isn’t nearly as reliable as
we think.”

“Is there a difference between
reliable
and
good?
”

Rachel nodded in approval. “I can’t believe you picked up on
that. Yes, I used the word reliable for a reason. To me, saying our memory
isn’t very good
just means that we
remember things poorly. But forgetting isn’t the biggest problem we have. When
you fail to remember, at least you
know
your memory is letting you down. I forgot the quadratic equation, or where I
put my car keys. You
know
you forgot.
But it’s worse when we remember things incorrectly. When we’re certain we
remember, but we’re dead wrong.”

Quinn was more intrigued than ever. Perhaps what he
experienced wasn’t as impossible as he thought. “How often is this the case?”

“More often than you’d think. A video record always stays
the same. But with memory, subsequent events color our recollections. I’m at a café
talking with a friend about my home when I witness a car crash. Two years later
my wires can easily become crossed. Even though I was at a café, my mind was
focused on my home, and I can conflate the two. Now I remember having seen the
crash while looking out from my living room window.”

Rachel finished the cocoa, now lukewarm, and set the mug
down on an end table beside her. “Shockingly,” she continued, “our recollections
can be unreliable even for events that are singular, traumatic, powerful. Events
you would bet your life you couldn’t possibly forget. In January of 1986, the
Space Shuttle
Challenger
exploded,
killing everyone inside. It was a news story that had a huge impact on the
national psyche. The day after it happened, two researchers at Emory University
handed out a questionnaire about the event to over a hundred students in their
psychology 101 class. Where were the students when they heard the tragic news?
Who were they with? What were they doing? That sort of thing.

“Two and a half years later they found these same students
and had them fill out the questionnaire a second time. When the researchers
compared the responses to those given previously, they were astonished. The
differences in the two accounts were often like night and day.

“When questioned the day after the event, one student
explained she had been in her dorm watching TV with her roommate when she heard
the news. She was so upset, she told a few others and then called her parents.
Less than three years later, she remembered it much differently. She first
learned the news in a religion class when she heard other students talk about
the explosion. She then went to her dorm, watched TV alone, and didn’t call
anyone.”

Quinn shook his head skeptically. “Sure, there are always
exceptions. But I’m sure most students remembered things accurately.”

“You would think so,” said Rachel with a smile. “But you’d
be wrong. When the researchers rated the accuracy of the students’
recollections, with respect to where they were and what they were doing, the
average score was less than fifty percent. A quarter of the students scored
zero
. But here is the most amazing,
maybe
frightening
thing: they were
all exceedingly confident they still remembered the aftermath of the tragedy
perfectly. Their memories were crisp, detailed . . . and absolutely wrong.
Turns out there isn’t much of a relationship between confidence in a memory and
the
accuracy
of this memory.”