Triggers (15 page)

And it was
weird.
She’d never heard of anything like it. When pairs of particles are created simultaneously under the right circumstances, they can become linked in such a way that they continue to be connected no matter how far apart they become.

“Wow,” said Susan.

“Wow indeed,” said Ranjip. “Okay. Another topic—well, not really; it’s the same topic, but a different way of looking at it. Ready?”

Susan nodded.

“Spooky action at a distance,” Ranjip said.

Susan was startled that she knew this was something Einstein had said. And, yes, it
was
spooky. Change the spin of one entangled particle, and the spin of the other changes instantaneously; they are bound together in an almost magical way—again, no matter how far apart they get from each other.

“Got it,” said Susan, and then she surprised herself by asking a question. “But if it’s quantum entanglement, why aren’t the linkages symmetrical? I mean, if
A
can read
B,
why can’t
B
read
A?”

“The linkages probably
are
symmetrical,” Singh replied. “That is, either
A
or
B
could change any specific shared memory for both of them—the shared memories are entangled, and changes to them at one
location would change them at both. But symmetry doesn’t imply reciprocity.
A
and
B
have symmetrically shared memories that happen to have originally belonged to
A.
Meanwhile,
B
and
C
have symmetrically shared memories that happened to originally belong to
B.
And so on.”

“Ah,” said Susan. “I guess.”

“Okay,” said Singh. “New topic, sort of: Penrose and Hameroff.”

And that came to her, too: physicist Roger Penrose—a sometimes-collaborator with Stephen Hawking—and the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff had proposed that human consciousness was quantum mechanical in nature.

It was astonishing: to know something so complex and yet never have even
heard
of it before. It wasn’t like university lectures were running through her head at high speed, and it wasn’t like playing Trivial Pursuit, where she had to dig deeply to find the answers; these were things that Singh knew well, and so she knew them well, too, and they came effortlessly to mind as soon as he said the trigger words.

“Got it,” she said again.

“Okay, new topic: the design of my apparatus.”

And she now knew all about that, too: a device that used tuned lasers—which emitted photons, which were a type of particle that could indeed be entangled—to selectively excite neurons. His design actually
displaced
the photons that were already there and
substituted
new ones.

Then…

“Cytoskeleton.”

And:

“Microtubule.”

And:

“Bose-Einstein condensate.”

She shook her head, as if somehow that would get the pieces to sift out of the swirling jumble they were in and fall into place. And, after a moment, they did. “And this is legit?” Susan said at last.

“Well, it’s a legitimate theory,” replied Singh. “Penrose and Hameroff say the actual seat of consciousness, which, of course, must somehow
interact with memory, is not in the chemical synapses but rather in quantum effects in the microtubules of the cytoskeleton—the internal scaffolding—of brain cells. Their theory has its passionate advocates—and passionate detractors. But if we
are
dealing with quantum entanglement, that could explain why the linkages don’t weaken over distance.”

“And does it suggest how to break them?” asked Susan.

“Well, um, no—no, I don’t have a clue how to do that. Entanglement is a tricky thing, and normally it’s quite fragile. But I’ll keep trying to find the answer.”

“Do that,” Susan said.

“I will. What about you? Any progress?”

Susan shook her head. “I still don’t know who’s reading the president.”

“What are you going to do if you can’t identify who it is?” Singh asked.

Susan said nothing.

“You can’t keep all the people here prisoner indefinitely.”

Again: nothing.

“They’ve committed no crime!” said Singh.

“One of them has in his or her possession classified information.”

“Not deliberately.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.
Possession
of such information is a felony, and they’re all suspects.”

“You’d like to…” Singh began, and then, not able to give voice to it, he tried again: “You’d like to have them
disappear,
wouldn’t you?”

Susan lifted her eyebrows. “It’s an option.”

“They’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Professor Singh,” Susan said, “look at me. My job is to die for the president, if need be: my life instead of his. I didn’t vote for him, I don’t agree with most of his policies, I don’t even particularly
like
him, but none of that matters. We live in a system in which the president is more important than
anyone,
and this president has been compromised in a way that has to be contained or eliminated. In fact, even breaking the
link may not be enough. Yes, once it’s severed—if it ever is—the person may not be able to access new memories, but presumably they’ll still remember anything they’ve recalled while the link was intact, right?”

“I don’t know,” Singh said. “Honestly. No one has any experience with this.”

“Which means,” Susan said, “that we may indeed have to lock these people up indefinitely.”

“You can’t,” said Singh. “I’ll go public.”

“It’s not my call to make,” said Susan. “But don’t count on having that option. In fact…”

Singh narrowed his eyes. “Yes?”

“Your work may end up being classified. You have to recognize that you’ve developed the ultimate interrogation technique. Replicate the linking effect, but with only two people within the sphere. They’d each link to the other, right? An interrogator would know everything a prisoner knew—plans, names, dates, codes, whatever.”

“And vice versa, Agent Dawson. Don’t forget that.”

“Yes, you’d have to carefully choose your interrogator—make sure
he
doesn’t know anything vital…that is, if you ever expected to let the prisoner go free again.”

Singh had a shocked expression on his face, but Susan pressed ahead. “Let’s update the chart,” she said. The Sikh had redrawn his chart on the lab’s whiteboard. The grid had twenty columns and three rows; the rows were labeled “Name,” “Can Read,” and “Is Read By.”

Susan pointed to the column for Orrin Gillett. “Gillett can read Ivan Tarasov, a security guard.”

Singh filled in this information with a blue dry-erase marker.

“Ah,” said Singh. “I interviewed this Tarasov. He can read Dora Hennessey, who was here to donate a kidney to her father.” He wrote this in.

“Yes, I know who she is,” said Susan. “I interviewed Dora just before coming here. She’s able to read the memories of Ann January. Mrs. January is a surgical nurse, and—”

“Excuse me,” said Singh. “I’m sorry, but—are you sure?”

“Well, Dora didn’t tell me Ann’s exact job title,” Susan said, “but she’s
some
kind of nurse.”

“No, no. I mean, are you sure that Dora Hennessey is reading Ann January?”

“Oh, yes. No question.”

Singh pointed at a square on his whiteboard. “Because David January is reading Ann January, too. I just interviewed him.”

Susan came over to look at the board. “Husband and wife? Or brother and sister?” But before Singh could reply, she had the answer from his memory. “Husband and wife, right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s very strange,” said Susan.

“Indeed it is,” said Singh. “We haven’t had two people linked to the same person before, and…”

“Yes?” prodded Susan.

Singh looked frustrated. “Well, I thought I was making progress puzzling this out. But multiple linkages wouldn’t work with the kind of quantum entanglement we were just talking about; a double linkage would require a complex superposition that I should think would rapidly decohere.”

Susan was astonished that talk like this actually now made sense to her. She thought about Singh’s theory—not so much the details, but his level of confidence in it. He
had
been sure he was on the right track, and—

“He’s lying,” Susan said.

“What?” said Singh.

“He’s lying. This David January fellow is lying.”

“Why would he lie about who he’s linked to?” asked Singh. But then he got it: “Oh! The president!”

“Exactly,” said Susan. “I’m going to have a word with Mr. January myself.” She looked at Singh. “Cheer up, Ranjip. Maybe we’ll only have to eliminate one person.”

SUSAN
left Singh’s lab and walked the short distance to his office, sitting down behind his kidney-shaped desk. She pored over the handwritten notes Singh had made on David January: he was, it turned out, the doctor who had operated the defibrillator that had been used on Prospector, and he’d been married for twenty-three years now to Ann January, who was indeed a surgical nurse. Susan googled his name, just to see what would come up, and then checked up on his wife. She then called hospital security and asked them to locate David January and bring him to Singh’s office.

A few minutes later, Dr. January arrived, accompanied, to Susan’s surprise, by a security guard whose nameplate read “Tarasov”—he was the person being read by Orrin Gillett. Tarasov was behaving oddly: he wouldn’t meet her gaze, and he seemed generally uncomfortable to be talking to her. She wondered if he was trying to hide something; she’d grill him next. But for now David January was her priority. She dismissed Tarasov.

January turned out to be the squat man she’d seen leaving Singh’s
lab earlier. He was forty-four, according to Singh’s notes, and had hyperthyroid bulging eyes; he looked a bit like Peter Lorre.

“Have a seat, Mr. January,” Susan said. She deliberately chose not to call him “Doctor”—you never elevate an interrogee above the interrogator. “I’m just following up on the conversation you had with Professor Singh. I understand you told him you are linked to your wife.”

The big eyes got even bigger for a moment. “To Annie, yes.”

“How convenient, that,” Susan said, her tone neutral.

January smiled amiably. “I don’t know if it’s convenient, but there’s no one else I’d rather be linked to.”

“Well,” said Susan, trying on a disarming smile of her own, “I guess it’s what every woman wants in a man if you believe the magazines. You’ll no longer be able to say to her, ‘I can’t read minds,’ when she expects you to do something but doesn’t explicitly tell you, right?”

His smile now seemed forced. “I guess. It still seems so…so
fantastic.”
He spread his arms a bit. “I gotta tell you, it’s funny seeing myself as
she
sees me.”

“Funny?”

“You know, to have memories from her point of view, memories in which she sees me instead of me seeing her.”

Despite her suspicions, Susan was intrigued. “How closely do the memories match? I mean, do you see an almost three-dimensional scene, shifting from her perspective to your own and back again? Do they synch up that well?”

“Depends on the memory, of course. Some are more detailed than others—and some are more detailed for me and hazy for her, and vice versa.” He made an indulgent little smile. “She doesn’t like hockey nearly as much as I do; she can barely remember what
teams
are playing, let alone individual plays.”

“All right,” Susan said. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“What is Ann’s lover’s name?”

“She doesn’t have a lover,” January said, sounding miffed. “Other than me.”

“Oh?” said Susan. “Think back to last month—October. She dropped you at Reagan, and you flew to—where was it now? Ah, yes. Denver, for a conference on defibrillation technology, right?” Her Google search had found his name on the program. “You settled in for a long flight and maybe watched a movie.”

“I did. On my laptop.”

“But continue that memory from her point of view,” said Susan. “What did
she
do the moment she dropped you off?”

“My wife drops me off all the time at the airport; I attend a lot of meetings. There was nothing special about that day that I recall—that
she
recalls.”

“No? October eighteenth? Unseasonably cold and windy. And you were going to be gone for an entire week that time.”

“I don’t…”

“Remember it?” asked Susan. “Remember that day?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“All right. I’ll tell you. Stop me when this begins to sound familiar. She left Reagan and drove on to Dulles, leaving her car in long-term parking. She then took the shuttle to the terminal, and there she met a man named William Cordt—although she called him Willie.”

“Then there’s no way you could know that. There’s nothing exceptional about my wife; there’s no way you’d have been watching her back then.”

“That’s true,” said Susan. “We weren’t watching her. We were watching William Cordt. This
is
Washington, after all. We watch a lot of people—especially those who have illicit ties to foreign defense contractors, as Mr. Cordt does. When he takes a trip out of the country, we know—and he did, with your wife, to Switzerland, for a skiing vacation.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “Annie was never involved with any arms smuggler, or anything like that.”

“Now, that I actually believe,” Susan said. “That is, I believe that she never knew that that’s what he was and so would have no memories of it. But you must surely have other memories of this event, from her
point of view. The trip to Switzerland. The hotel they stayed in there, the Englischer Hof. The evenings they spent there.”

January narrowed his eyes, as if concentrating on something small. And then he made a short, sharp intake of breath. “Oh, my…Oh, God.” He slumped in the chair. “I—I had no idea…We…she…I…”

Then he looked at her, and his face was contorted in rage. “That was
cruel,”
he said. “Making me see that. Making me
know
that.”