Triggers (11 page)

“My wife. Why?”

“Did you tell her about the memory linkages?”

“Of course. It’s fascinating.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said. “We should keep this quiet.”

He gestured at his computer monitor, which was showing Twitter.

“You tweeted about this?”

“No, no. I just searched Twitter for ‘Luther Terry’ while I was talking to my wife, and those came up.”

Susan loomed in. There were several about Jerrison being brought here after the shooting and five about the lockdown. But there was also one that said, “Weird things going on at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital.” Another declared, “Memories being linked at Luther Terry Hosp in DC.” Someone else had chimed in with, “I’m at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital. Anybody know anything about telepathy?” Twitter was helpfully informing Ranjip that there were now four new tweets that matched his search. Instead of clicking on the link for those, though, he put in a new search: “LTMH.” Two tweets came up: One said, “Saw a woman freak at #LTMH, berating the surgeon who saved the prez. She must have been a Democrat.” And the other said, “Heard craziest story at LTMH just now about reading memories. Anybody else?”

“God damn it,” said Susan. “We should put a lid on contact with the outside world.”

But Ranjip shook his head. “There’s been a terrorist attack here in the city, Agent Dawson. People need to keep in touch. They need it on a human level; they need to know their loved ones, wherever they are, are well—and to let them know that they themselves are safe.”

Susan said nothing; there was no rule book, no protocol, for a situation like this.

“And, anyway,” continued Singh, “besides the hospital’s phone system, there are hundreds of cell phones here. Patients have them, and staff, too. And, of course, hundreds of laptops and iPads and the like, not to mention all the hospital’s computers. By the time you could confiscate them all, even if you could find legal grounds to do so, the whole world will know about the memory linkages. And if a bomb hits here—the terrorists must know where the president is, after all, and that he’s still
alive—you’ll want people to have as many ways to communicate as possible, in hopes that some will function after the EMP.”

“You’re right,” Susan said. Just then, the door to Singh’s office opened and in came Kadeem Adams. Susan knew him at once, although—

Well,
that
was interesting. There was no doubt that this was indeed Kadeem; he easily matched Ranjip’s memories of him. But she was now looking at him with her own trained agent’s eyes, and seeing details Ranjip had never noted. For starters, Ranjip had had no idea how tall Kadeem was, but Susan immediately pegged him at six-one; agents learned to take the measure of a man even when he was seated. She also noted he was wearing a T-shirt advertising Brickers, a rap group that Ranjip had apparently never heard of; that he had creased earlobes; and that he was a nail-biter.

A memory—her own—of one of her favorite writers flashed through her head:
You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.
But that was the
other
war; she knew, because Ranjip knew it, that Kadeem had actually been in Iraq.

“Kadeem Adams,” said Singh, “this is Agent Susan Dawson. As you know, she’s with the Secret Service.”

Kadeem shook his head. “All this shit that’s goin’ down. I can see it from your point of view—the president bleeding on the steps, you and him in the limo, you looking down on him on the operating table. Been one hell of a day.”

“Yes,” said Susan.

“And—well,
damn,
girl! You had a hell of night last night, too, didn’t you, Agent Dawson?” Susan felt herself blushing. Kadeem went on. “Although, given how well I now know you, maybe we should be on a first-name basis, don’t you think…Sue?”

Ranjip picked up a lined notepad. “I think we need to start writing this down. Agent Dawson is reading my memories. Kadeem, you’re reading Agent Dawson’s. And…” He paused.

“And?” said Kadeem.

Ranjip looked at Susan, asking permission with his eyes.

Susan thought about it, then said, “I don’t think I’m actually in a position to keep secrets from Kadeem.”

And as soon as she said it, Kadeem’s eyes went wide. “And—God!—the president is reading my memories.”

Susan knew there was no point denying it.

Kadeem looked at Ranjip. “I knew
somebody
was, from the questions you asked, guru, but…” He shook his head. “No shit! The president!” He smiled slightly. “Guess he knows now I didn’t vote for him.” He then looked at Ranjip. “What about you, guru? Who are you reading?”

“A doctor here named Lucius Jono,” said Ranjip—and he took a moment to jot this fact on the chart he was making.

“And he’s reading a real-estate agent named Nikki Van Hausen,” said Susan. She gestured for the pad and wrote the name down. “And Nikki’s reading Eric Redekop, who was the lead surgeon for the president. And Redekop is reading a nurse, Janis Falconi.” She wrote these names down, too. “The chain just keeps getting longer and longer—which raises the question of exactly how many people are affected. Agent Michaelis wasn’t—he was too far away from your equipment, it seems. But how many were?”

“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?”

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:

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:

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

And next door, in Singh’s lab:

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.