by Lee Child
“I said—”
He fell silent as the barrel of a Smith & Wesson .38—removed from one of the disabled orderlies—was pressed against his head.
“All the radios on the floor,” Pendergast said in a calm, firm voice. “Then the weapons. And all your keys.”
Unnerved at the sight of a gun in a patient’s hand, the orderlies quickly complied, the radios and pistols piling up on the Persian carpet. Pendergast, still covering the head orderly, sorted through the pile, pulling out one of the radios. He removed the batteries from the others and ejected the rounds from the revolvers, stuffing batteries and bullets into the pocket of his jacket. Sorting through the keys, he found a master, stuck it into the keyhole of his room door, and snapped it off. He turned the working radio over in his hands, found the panic button, and pressed it. The alarm shrieked back to life.
“Elopement!” he cried into the radio. “Room 113! He’s got a gun! He went out the window. He’s running toward the woods!” Then he turned off the radio, plucked out its batteries in turn, and tossed it on the floor.
“Good evening, gentlemen.” He nodded at them gravely, then unlatched the window again, and leaped out into the night.
As he pressed himself against the dark side of the mansion, the lawn and grounds suddenly blazed with floodlights. He could hear shouts over the sound of the alarms. Moving alongside the edge of the building, keeping behind the shrubbery, he worked his way along the bulk of the great mansion turned insane asylum. As he had hoped, security officers and orderlies were running across the lawn, flashlight beams dancing about, all operating on the assumption he had fled into the woods.
Instead, Pendergast remained against the building, an almost invisible shadow, moving slowly and carefully. In a few minutes he had worked his way around to the front. Here, he stopped to reconnoiter. A sweeping driveway curved through a vast lawn to a porte cochere at the building’s entrance, tastefully planted with arborvitae. Flitting across the graveled drive, Pendergast secreted himself in the dense shrubbery beside the porte cochere.
It took just under five minutes for a late-model Lexus to come tearing down the driveway, scattering gravel, and slow to a stop under the porte cochere.
Excellent. Most excellent.
As the door was flung open, Pendergast dashed forward and rammed the driver—it was, as he’d expected, Dr. Augustine—back into the automobile, forcing him into his seat. Keeping the doctor covered with the gun, he quickly slipped into the passenger’s seat.
“Do keep driving,” he said as he closed the door.
The car continued down the driveway and back out toward what was evidently a manned guardhouse and gate. Pendergast slid off the seat and crouched under the dashboard.
“Tell them you forgot something and will be right back. Deviate from the script and you will be shot.”
The doctor complied. The gate opened. Pendergast rose back onto the seat as the vehicle accelerated.
“Turn right.”
The car turned right onto a lonely country road.
Pendergast turned on the vehicle’s GPS and studied it briefly. “Ah. I see we’re nowhere near Saranac Lake, but quite a lot closer to the Canadian border.” He looked over at Dr. Augustine and removed the cell phone from his coat pocket. Keeping his eye on the GPS, he gave the doctor a series of directions. Half an hour later, the car was proceeding down a dirt track, which dead-ended at a lonely pond.
“Stop here.”
The doctor stopped. His lips were set in a thin line, and he was white-faced.
“Dr. Augustine, do you realize the consequences of kidnapping a federal agent? I could kill you right now and get a medal for it. Unless, of course, I’m as crazy as you claim, in which case I’ll be locked up. But either way, my dear doctor, you will be dead.”
No answer.
“And I will kill you. I want to kill you. The only thing that will stop me is a full, immediate, and complete explanation of this setup.”
“What makes you think this is a setup?” came the doctor’s quavering voice. “That’s your delusion talking.”
“Because I knew how to pick a lock. I took this revolver away from an orderly as easily as taking candy from a baby.”
“Of course you did. That’s your standard Special Forces training.”
“I’m too strong to have been locked in a mental hospital for six months. I bent the bars in my window.”
“For God’s sake, you spent half your time working out in our gym! Don’t you remember?”
A silence. Then Pendergast said: “It was a masterful job. You almost had me believing you. But I grew suspicious again when Helen did not rise to my comment about the moon—sharing the full moonrise was always our private signal. That put me on my guard. And then I knew for certain it was a setup when Helen took my hands in hers.”
“And how in God’s name did you know that?”
“Because she still had her left hand. There’s one memory in my life that’s so powerful that I know it can’t be a delusion. It occurred during the African hunting expedition in which Helen was attacked by a lion. My memory of the moment when I found her severed hand, still bearing its wedding ring, is seared too deep in my memory to be anything but real.”
The doctor was silent. The moon shone off the small lake. A loon called from some distant shore.
Pendergast cocked the Smith & Wesson. “I’ve endured enough prevarication. Tell me the truth. One more lie and you’re dead.”
“How will you know it’s a lie?” asked the doctor quietly.
“It becomes a lie when I don’t believe it.”
“I see. And what’s in it for me if I cooperate?”
“You’ll be permitted to live.”
The doctor took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s start with my name. It’s not Augustine. It’s Grundman. Dr. William Grundman.”
“Keep going.”
“For the past decade, I’ve been experimenting with memory neurons. I discovered a gene known as Npas4.”
“Which is?”
“It controls the neurons of your memory. Memory, you see, is physical. It’s stored through a combination of neurochemicals and trapped electrical potentials. By controlling Npas4, I learned how to locate the neural networks that store specific memories. I learned how to manipulate those neurons. I learned how to erase them. Not delete—that would cause brain damage. But erase. A far more delicate operation.”
He paused. “Do you believe me so far?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“I discovered that this technique could be very lucrative. I started a clinic—under the cover of the Stony Mountain Sanatorium. While the sanatorium is visible, naturally, what goes on there is quite underground.”
“Continue.”
“People come to my underground clinic to be rid of memories they no longer want. I’m sure you can imagine all sorts of situations in which that would be desirable. I make those memories go away for a price. And for a time, that was satisfactory. But then my research led me to a discovery that was even more extraordinary. I theorized that I could do more than erase memories. I could also create them. I could program new memories. Imagine the potential market for that: for the right price, you could be given the memory of having spent a weekend at Cap d’Antibes with the Hollywood starlet of your choice, or of scaling Everest with Mallory, or of conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Ninth.”
As he spoke, the doctor’s eyes shone with a kind of inner light. But then the eyes glanced at the gun again, and they became veiled and anxious once more. “Can’t you lower that gun?”
Pendergast shook his head. “Just keep talking.”
“Okay. Okay. I needed guinea pigs in order to perfect the memory insertion procedure. You can imagine the results of programming the wrong memories. So I arranged to have indigent people, drug addicts, the homeless, secretly transferred up to my clinic from New York City hospitals.”
“Those are the gaun
t patients I saw around me.”
“Yes.”
“People nobody would miss.”
“That is correct.”
“And how did I get there?”
“Ah. What a lot of trouble you were. It seems that, as part of some case you were working on, you became suspicious of Stony Mountain. You managed to check yourself into Bellevue, posing as a homeless tubercular, and you were duly transferred up here. But there was an accident, a miscommunication, and your clothes ended up being transferred with you. Those were not the clothes of a homeless drifter. I became suspicious, made inquiries, and ultimately learned who you really were. I couldn’t just kill you—as you pointed out, killing a federal agent is never the best solution. Much better would be to reprogram you with new memories. To gaslight you, as it were: erase from your memory the real reasons for your coming here, and to add new memories that would, in the end, convince your superiors and loved ones that you had become mentally ill. After that, no one listens to a crazy person. No matter what you said, it would be chalked up to your illness.”
“Diogenes and Helen were not real.”
“No. They were phantoms, reconstructed out of your memory by manipulating Npas4.” Grundman paused. “It appears my research into Helen could have been a little more thorough.”
“And the dummy?” Pendergast asked.
“Ah. The dummy. I call him Dr. Augustine. He’s a crucial part of the treatment. He doesn’t exist, either. The dummy isn’t real. He’s the conduit, the vehicle—the Trojan Horse, as it were—which I first insinuate into the patient’s mind. If I can plant Dr. Augustine in your mind, I can use him to leverage any other memory I wish to insert.”
There was a long silence, interrupted by the calling of the loons. The full moon cast a buttery light over the water. Pendergast said nothing.
The doctor stirred nervously in his seat. “I assume that, since you haven’t killed me, you accept my story?”
Pendergast did not answer directly. Instead, he said: “Step out of the car.”
“You’re going to leave me here?”
“It’s a lovely summer evening for a walk. The main road is about ten miles back. The local police will probably pick you up before you have to trek the whole distance.” He waved the doctor’s cell phone meaningfully. “You’ll miss the SWAT team raid on your clinic, of course . . . lucky you.”
Grundman opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pendergast slid over to the driver’s seat, turned the car around, and headed slowly back down the dirt road. Behind him he could see Grundman, standing at the verge of the lake, silhouetted in the moonlit water.
With Grundman’s phone in his hand, he began to dial the number of the New York field office of the FBI—the first step toward raiding and shutting down Stony Mountain. But he didn’t complete the call. Slowly, he let the phone drop into his lap.
He knew who he was—knew without a shred of doubt. He was Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast of the FBI. This episode at Stony Mountain had been a nightmare, a waking delusion. But now it was over. Dr. Grundman’s treatment had been fiendishly effective—but it had failed in the end, as it must. His mind, his memories, were simply too strong to erase or manipulate for long. Now he knew, with utter conviction, who he really was. He knew his true history—it was coming back to him at last. He could put all this behind him, get on with his life. His real life.
And yet—
He looked down at the phone in his lap. As he did so, he glimpsed something in the rearview mirror—something he unaccountably had not noticed before.
There, sitting in the backseat of the car, staring back at him with blue, unblinking eyes, painted red lips, and dressed in a white lab coat with the polished brown shoes, was Dr. Augustine.
M. J. ROSE
VS. LISA GARDNER
Old world versus young gun. Pragmatic versus the occult. Actual versus the surely impossible. That’s the premise M. J. Rose and Lisa Gardner started with. The end result?
A cunningly clever tale.
M. J. Rose doesn’t believe she invented Malachai Samuels any more than he may have invented her. But certainly Samuels changed her writing career when he first showed up in The Reincarnationist (2007). Samuels became the impetus for M.J. to take her first foray into metaphysical and historical fiction, and she hasn’t turned back from that course since. Samuels is, without question, unique. He’s an enigmatic Jungian therapist, entrenched in research into past life regressions—a journey he’s never actually been able to take himself.
Which is partly why that’s become his obsession.
The other reason is that, like M.J., his ancestors, going back to the nineteenth century, have been invested in questioning the mystical lines between past and present. Bringing law enforcement face-to-face with Malachai Samuels, a man who’s managed to evade them at every turn for years, intrigued M.J. Especially when the cop in question would be one of her favorites.
Detective D.D. Warren.
Here’s an interesting fact. Lisa Gardner’s D.D. Warren actually exists in real life. Gardner named her hardened Boston detective after her neighbor, a beautiful blonde best known for her baking and gardening skills. In the beginning, Lisa intended for D.D. to only appear in one chapter of Gardner’s sniper novel Alone. But D.D.’s brash Boston attitude and relentless determination quickly captured readers’ imaginations. Before she knew it, Lisa ended up writing half a dozen novels featuring her neighbor’s namesake. The decision to use D.D. for this story was an easy one. Who better to take on the charming, enigmatic Dr. Malachai Samuels, a man suspected of multiple murders but proved guilty of none, than a young, street-smart homicide cop?
Add in the spice of Boston’s Chinatown and the legend of a rare artifact and you have the perfect recipe for a thriller.
Or maybe something else entirely?
Something unexpected.
The Laughing Buddha
New York City—1884
TWILIGHT SETTLED OVER THE CITY, shrouding it in a grayish haze. He hated this time of day, the hour lost between darkness and light, when everything became indistinct. Standing in the shadows he watched the mansion from across the street. Linden trees partially hid the Queen Anne–style villa but he could see light glowing through the glass sunburst below the curved-top window. The lugubrious strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata wafted from the open balcony door, appropriate accompaniment to the gloomy dusk.
Even in this murkiness, the elaborate building with its gables, scrolled wrought iron railing, and dozens of gargoyles tucked under the eaves was an impressive sight; a symbol of wealth.
But not his wealth.
Unconsciously, he clenched his jaw, felt the tightness, then forced those muscles to relax.
The front door—with its bas-relief coat of arms of a giant bird rising from a pyre—opened and a finely dressed woman stepped out. She didn’t have any idea what she might be coming home to later that evening, but he did and thought about how, if the worst happened, she’d accept his sympathy, come to rely on it, and never guess he’d been the one to orchestrate her grief.
“Percy? Esme? Hurry now, we can’t be late for your cousin’s birthday party,” she called.
The children ran past her; the ten-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister scampering down the steps and preceding their mother into the waiting carriage.
Once the sound of the children’s laughter and the hoofs clomping on cobblestones was far in the distance, the man crept across the street and silently let himself into the house. Quietly as he could, he traversed the black-and-white marble squares in the imposing foyer and walked down a hallway to the library’s open doorway where Trevor Talmage worked at his desk, bent over his papers, reading and making notes, oblivious to the intruder.
“Well aren’t you the busy boy.”
Momentarily startled, Trevor looked up, then smiled indulgently. “When did you get here? Why didn’t Peter announce you?”
“I let myself in.”
“Would you like it back?”
A moment’s hesitation. Trevor was considering it but would the bastard have the nerve to say yes?
“No, of course not. Would you like a glass of port? I just got a new shipment from Madeira.” Trevor motioned toward the crystal decanters and glasses on the sideboard.
“That sweet stuff? I’ll take a brandy.”
Trevor rose to get him the libation and refill his own glass at the same time and Davenport eyed the papers overflowing the desk. “So at last I see the famed text. Out of the vault for an evening. How are the translations going?”
“Amazingly well.” Now there was palpable excitement in Trevor’s voice. “According to the scribe who wrote this, the lost Memory Tools were absolutely not a legend. They existed. He saw them and gives a full description of each of the amulets, ornaments, and stones. He writes that they were all smuggled out of India and brought into Egypt well before 1500 BC which, you realize, suggests present-day historians are incorrect about when the trade routes opened. This is going to create a lot of controversy when I publish.”
“You’re still planning on publishing?”
Trevor handed his brother a glass filled with amber that shimmered like gold in the lamplight. “Of course. And please, don’t try to argue me out of it again. Our father created the Talmage Trust because he believed history was important. He who controls the past controls the future. I firmly agree and—”
“Control is exactly why you can’t publish. Don’t you understand just how much control you’d be giving up,” Davenport interrupted, pleading, really hoping—now that he was there—that Trevor would not force his hand.
“If these tools exist and if they can aid people in rediscovering their past lives, we—you, me, and every member of the Phoenix Club—need to ensure this power is used for the good of all men, not selfishly exploited,” Trevor argued.
