Triggers

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 19

  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.”

  “It would have been cruel, Mr. January, if any of it had ever really happened. But it didn’t. There is no William Cordt. Your wife hasn’t left the United States in over three years; I checked her passport records.”

  January’s eyes went wide. “You…bitch!”

  “And you’re under arrest.”

  “For what?”

  “For espionage. Spying on the president is a felony.”

  “The president!” said January.

  “Don’t play games now,” Susan said. “Yes, the president.” She stood up. “Extend your arms.”

  “What for?” asked January.

  “So I can cuff you.”

  “I demand to see a lawyer.”

  “Oh, you will. Before this is over, you’ll have seen more of them than you can count. But for now, not only do you have the right to remain silent, you have the obligation. Spying on the president is bad enough. Revealing what you’ve learned is…well, I’m glad we never got around to closing Gitmo.”

  “Wait!” said January as Susan went to cuff him. “You’re wrong! You’re wrong!”

  Susan closed the metal loops around his wrists. “Tell it to the judge.”

  “No, no. Listen to me! You’re wrong. I’m not linked to the president, honestly. God, it never even occurred to me that anyone might be linked to him—he wasn’t conscious, after all, when all this went down; he was under general anesthesia.”

  “Then why’d you lie about being linked to your wife?”

  He hesitated. Susan put the flat of her hand against his back and propelled him toward the door.

  “All right!” he said. “All right. I’m telling you the truth. I’m not linked to President Jerrison. I’m linked to Mark Griffin.”

  “The hospital CEO?” she said. “Why lie about that?” They were at the closed door to Singh’s office; Singh’s black bomber jacket was hanging from a hook on the door’s back.

  “Because I’m president of the staff association here, and he’s the hospital’s chief executive officer—and my opponent. I’m facing off against him over contract negotiations, and, well, this will give me the edge, so long as he doesn’t know I’m reading him. I figured it would be easy to fake that I was linked to my wife; we already have so many memories in common.”

  “Prove it,” Susan said. “Prove you’re linked to Griffin. When did he and I first meet?”

  “When you arrived here this morning with the president. He was on the right side of the gurney, and you were on the left. You had blood smeared on your jacket.”

  “Who was behind me?”

  “The president’s personal physician. Griffin greeted her, although he called her by her military rank: Captain Snow.”

  “And what did he say about Dr. Redekop?”

  “Nothing, then.”

  “Later, I mean. What did he call him when we were in the observation gallery?”

  “He said Redekop was ‘a doctor of the’—well, I don’t know what this means, but it’s what he said: ‘a doctor of the first water.’”

  “Fuck,” said Susan.

  “I’m sorry,” said January. “I really am. I—this all just sort of fell into my lap, you know? I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Rule number one, asshole: don’t lie to the Secret Service.” She took off the handcuffs. “Get out of here.”

  “You mean I can go home?”

  “No, you cannot. Not until I choose to end the lockdown. But get out of my sight.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he scurried out the door.

  SUSAN was livid as she walked down to Singh’s lab. The Canadian was sitting at his computer, and Darryl Hudkins had now joined him. He was looking at a city map spread out on a table.

  “Any luck tracking down the woman who went AWOL?” she demanded.

  “Not yet,” Darryl replied, looking up. “Problem is, the old thing has cataracts, I think. She’s somewhere today—I just can’t make out where; the visuals in her memories of this afternoon are indistinct. It’s noisy—she doesn’t like that—but I still don’t know where it is. She’s just not paying any real attention to her surroundings.”

  “Indoors or out?”

  “Indoors. But it’s not a museum or a gallery or a store. She’s just wandering around in a daze, it seems—she was already preoccupied with her son’s having a heart attack, and then someone told her about the president being shot, and later about the White House. When I think about this afternoon, the only memories of hers I get are of her worrying about, well, about everything.”

  “Damn it,” said Susan. “Keep trying.” She went over to the whiteboard and corrected the information on it, now that they knew that David January was really linked to Mark Griffin.

  “Agent Dawson?” said Singh.

  She wheeled around. “What?”

  Singh looked startled by the sharpness of her tone. Susan took a deep breath; she wasn’t mad at him, and she shouldn’t take it out on him. “Sorry, Ranjip. What is it?”

  “Have a look at this, please.” Singh gestured at his monitor.

  Susan came over and stared at the screen, which was showing a complex graph. It felt strange to be seeing it. For the first second or two, it appeared to be just a random shape, with numbers and letters marking certain points, but as she looked at this part, she suddenly understood it, and shifting her attention here caused that part to make sense, as well, and all at once t
he numbers at the bottom of the screen conveyed meaning for her, too. She’d originally opened her mouth to say, “What is it?,” but the words that came out were, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” said Singh. “It’s based on the data from my equipment’s diagnostic files, and it’s the only configuration that works.”

  “Twenty-one nodes, not twenty?” asked Susan.

  “Exactly. Twenty-one people were affected.”

  Darryl Hudkins walked over and stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “Dr. Griffin and I were careful in reviewing the security-camera recordings. There’s no way someone was in the affected sphere that we didn’t see.”

  “There was an electromagnetic pulse,” Susan said.

  “Well, yeah…” replied Darryl.

  “Which means there could have been an interruption in the recordings, no?”

  “Sure, yeah,” said Darryl. “There was. But according to the timecode, it lasted less than a minute.”

  “A good runner,” Susan said, “can cover a thousand feet in a minute.” She looked at Singh’s grid of linkages on the whiteboard, then picked up a marker and drew in a twenty-first column at the far right. In the spot for the person’s name at the top of the column, she put an “X” for unknown.

  CHAPTER 20

  SETH Jerrison lay on his back. His chest ached, and it hurt to breathe, but he’d insisted the doctors keep him awake as much as possible; he couldn’t risk the Speaker or anyone else trying to move for a forced handover of power under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—not this close to the initiation of Counterpunch.

  He’d just spent half an hour on the phone with his chief of staff, who was holding things together at Mount Weather, and he’d also spoken to his science advisor, who was currently at a conference at CERN but was cutting that short to return to the States.

  The phone calls had been enough to exhaust Seth, and so he stared up at the ceiling and the irritating strobing fluorescent tube there. Jesus Christ, he was leader of the free world; all he had to do was mention it to someone, and it would be fixed. He looked over at Nurse Sheila, who was ever vigilant.

  He knew he was in good hands here—and not just because the hospital was named for the man who had saved more American lives than anyone else in history, even though a recent survey had shown that less than one percent of Americans knew who he was. In fact, Jerrison had to admit, he himself hadn’t—the only holder of the same office that he could name prior to becoming president was the one immortalized by the B-Sharps, Homer Simpson’s barbershop quartet: “For all the latest medical poop, call Surgeon General C. Everett Koop—koop koop a koop.”