On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  I dug out my college yearbook, as well as my old copies of my fraternity newspapers that I had kept. Armed with all this, I turned on my computer, went to Google, and started to work.

  I made a list of all the names that I remembered as friends or even acquaintances, and looked up each name on Google. By the fortieth name, I was completely astonished by how prominent my classmates already were, in many different fields. As a person known only as a magazine writer/nut job, I felt a little embarrassed by how completely they had outdistanced me. But this was not the time to worry about it.

  Unfortunately, I was not finding anyone whose chosen field fit my needs, at least not until I got to name number forty-seven, Daniel Lovinger. Dan was a fraternity brother of mine, though because he was two years ahead of me, we weren’t close friends. Basically the only time I remember seeing him was at the Friday night parties, and we were both invariably drunk.

  But Dan must have sobered up pretty well, because according to Google he had become a prominent neurosurgeon, specializing in the brain, at Mount Sinai Hospital. I figured he must be good at it, since his name got 467,000 hits on the search.

  I called his office, gave my name, and asked for him. The receptionist put me on hold before I could add the phrase, we were friends in college, since I didn’t think he would remember my name.

  I was wrong. He got on the phone, and within thirty seconds we were laughing and reminiscing about times I barely remembered, and he was telling me about other fraternity brothers he had remained friends with.

  I finally got to tell him why I had called, that I needed his medical opinion urgently.

  “This have anything to do with your missing girlfriend?” he asked, proving once and for all that more people had read my articles than had seen the average Super Bowl.

  “In a way, yes, but it specifically refers to a health matter of mine. I have other recommendations for neurosurgeons, but I really need someone I can trust.” Dr. Fairbanks had in fact given me the names of top people, but I felt more comfortable with Dan.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I think I’ve got something in my brain.”

  He said I could come right over, and I gathered the CD that Dr. Fairbanks had given me of the brain scan I’d had done. Dan was alone in his office when I got there; it was not a day on which he saw patients, but rather when he worked on research.

  This time he was all business, no laughing or storytelling at all. He took the CD and put it up on the screen. “Whoa. Who did the surgery?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he pointed to the very small foreign object. “What is that?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  He walked away from the screen, sat down at his desk, and said, “Start from the beginning.”

  So I did. I didn’t tell him everything, since much of it had nothing to do with his area of expertise. But I told him all about Jen, and the memories that I had that no one else seemed to share. He knew a lot about it, having read my articles, but he didn’t interrupt, just nodded occasionally and listened.

  When I was finished, I said, “So I need to know what is lodged in my brain, and whether it explains what has happened to me.”

  “The only way we’re going to know what is lodged in your brain is by taking it out,” he said. “But I’m not sure you want to do that.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Well, for one thing, brain surgery always comes with significant risk. Not enormous risk in this case, but it’s not something you want to do if you can help it.”

  “Is it causing any damage?”

  “Depends on how you define that. You could live a long life with it, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s not in a particularly sensitive area.”

  “What area is it in?”

  “The main function of that area is memory.”

  It took a moment for the import of this to sink in, and then I said with understatement, “I’ve been having some difficulty in that area lately.”

  “Do you have any idea when this was done? A reliable time frame?”

  “Yes. When I was in Ardmore.”

  “Have you had difficulty remembering events since then?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of. At least if I have, it hasn’t been pointed out to me.”

  “Then whatever this is, it is not interfering with your ability to remember, so your decision is not really a medical one.”

  He was picking his words carefully, and I was getting frustrated. “Dan, can we cut through this? What do you think this is?”

  “I think it’s an implant.”

  “What does that mean? What kind of implant?”

  “There is an extraordinary amount of research being conducted in the field of memory,” he said. “Much of it is due to the epidemic of Alzheimer’s; it’s taking away our parents and costing our economy over two hundred billion dollars a year. So the incentive for a breakthrough is rather evident.”

  I didn’t want to say anything, because I didn’t want to delay what already showed signs of being a long, professorial lecture.

  “There are also motivations rooted in the field of psychology, though more of them are centered on erasing memory rather than restoring it. A childhood trauma, rather than haunting someone throughout their life, could be erased. Does it bother you that you struck out in the ninth inning of the high school state championship game? Wipe it away.”

  “Obviously there are built-in ethical issues in an area like this, but the really ominous part about memory control is when someone else has that control. Governments can use it to neutralize dissidents, employers can generate complete loyalty from their employees, you could even get your ex-girlfriend to forget you cheated on her.”

  “But neither of the things you’re describing fits my case,” I said. “If what I think has happened has happened, then they didn’t get me to recall lost memories, or erase intact ones. They’ve created new ones.”

  “Yes, it appears that they have.”

  “I’ll try to make this as simple as I can,” Dan said, though I didn’t really have any hope he’d succeed.

  “The brain sends and receives analog signals. It talks to the body in this fashion; that’s how we see, and hear, and move, and feel pain. But we, meaning medical science, have only recently been able to participate in that conversation. Believe me, plenty of people have tried, and are trying, to do better.”

  He went on to describe some examples of how scientists have had success. For instance, artificial cochlea have been implanted in the deaf and restored hearing, and artificial retinas to restore sight are very close to reality. “Those devices communicate with the corresponding brain cells; they talk to the brain and tell it what to do, and the brain does it.”

  “So maybe this device can tell it what to remember?” I asked.

  “Exactly, and once the people creating the device understand the language, it would be easy to do. Everybody in this field knows it’s going to happen; I just didn’t think the science was nearly there yet.”

  “But the memories I have are so real, so detailed.… How could they have accomplished that?”

  “Much of what they would have fed you was real … places, people, events. They put on a multimedia show in your head, probably relying on video to some extent.”

  I literally got a chill when he said that; Marie Galasso had said that the chips she was working on were designed to hold video, among other things.

  “But I’ve got a feeling this has gone even further. The communication with the brain is essentially a mechanical process, the people doing it don’t even have to fully understand the depth of it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, for example, let’s say you own one of those devices that you can download books onto, like the iPad or the Kindle. If you break it, the guy that fixes it only has to know how the device works; he
doesn’t have to have a knowledge of literature. He’s simply a technician.”

  “So you said this has gone further?”

  He nodded. “I would think so, based on what you’ve reported. They’ve included a major psychological component, and you have probably been a party to it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Much like in the way you dream. Chances are they’ve given you most of the facts, like the people and places, and you’ve filled in the rest. You’ve made up much of the story, without knowing it. I’m sure some psychotropic drugs helped it along. That’s how we remember most things anyway. We recall pieces, bits, and fill in the rest. That’s why memory is so often unreliable.”

  “So the people I remembered interacting with—I might never have met them. And the places I remembered being—I might never have been there?”

  He nodded. “That’s the way I figure it. The people doing this research would have had to have gotten audio and video of those people and places; then your mind did the rest. If they had control over someone, like your girlfriend, they could have forced her to act things out. Would they have had the technological capability of pulling all of that off?”

  I knew all too well what their technological capability was; there was no doubt it was sufficient to the task at hand.

  I continued to bombard Dan with questions, and he patiently answered every one. He kept throwing in the caveat that he couldn’t be sure this was what had happened unless he removed the implant, and possibly not even then. But I could tell he had no doubts about what he was saying.

  “So, do you want to take it out?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to lose those memories.”

  “That part I can’t help you with, Richard. I’m not a shrink.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that he should be glad of that, because the last shrink I brought into this wound up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I wished I had Philip Garber to talk to now; I felt I needed his perspective.

  My head was spinning when I left Dan’s office, yet for the first time I could tell that clarity was on the horizon. I believed his theory was accurate; it was the only credible explanation I had yet heard to explain what had happened to me.

  I probably should have been focusing on who did this to me, but for the time being I wasn’t. I was instead thinking about what it meant to me, and what it said about my mind, and my memories, and my life.

  Jen was not real; I had finally come to terms with that fact. There probably was such a person, maybe even an actress, but she was not real to me in the way that I knew her. We did not meet the way I had thought. We did not fall in love, or make love. We did not live together, and I did not ask her to marry me.

  The most important person I had ever had in my life was never even in my life.

  Or was she?

  She was in my mind, with memories as clear and as wonderful as any I have ever had. In that way she was real, and I didn’t know if I wanted to give that up.

  What is life but the memories we have of it?

  I thought about this for hours, which seemed like days. I wished I had somebody to talk to about it; I wished I could talk to Jen.

  Or Allie.

  I didn’t know where Allie fit into this. Craig would say she was probably a key member of the conspiracy that was doing this to me; he would believe she and Jen were the same person. He could be right; maybe she was Nancy Beaumont, and Allie/Jen/Nancy was somewhere laughing at what she and her coconspirators had done to me.

  It all made perfect sense, but I just didn’t believe it.

  I was exhausted, but I was also beyond angry. My mind had been invaded, literally so, and I had been made to jump around like a stupid puppet. I was going to find out who had done it, and make them wish they hadn’t.

  The best way to find out who was to find out why, but even after all this time I was nowhere with that. I’d been holding on to this vague idea that it had something to do with the trial of Sean Lassiter’s drug, though I could never figure out how it all connected. But Lassiter’s trial was a failure, and would not be bringing him the fortune he must have been counting on.

  Yet Lassiter still had to be the guy. I had been doing the story on him, the one that was going to get me the Pulitzer, and that, plus the fact that he was tied in to Ardmore, could not be a coincidence. Most significantly, the guy who held the gun on us near the highway mentioned that Lassiter was behind it before he himself was killed.

  It had to be Lassiter.

  Sleep had not come easy for a while now, and this night was not going to be any different. So when Craig Langel called me at almost midnight, I was still wide awake.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “I haven’t heard anything from you.”

  “Oh, not much. I just found out that there’s a machine in my brain, telling me what to remember.”

  Craig hesitated. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “I wish.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard, but I don’t know where to go with that or what you’re talking about. I’m going to stay in my world, okay?”

  “Okay. What’s happening in your world?”

  “Something is going down. With Lassiter.”

  He went on to tell me that Lassiter had a flight booked the next evening to Paris, with a connection to Moscow. “One-way,” he said.

  “Why Moscow?” I asked.

  I could almost see him shrug through the phone. “Beats the shit out of me. But you can bet he’s not going there for spring break.”

  “The project at Ardmore ends tomorrow night. All the workers have been called there for a cocktail party and to get their bonuses.”

  “Then tomorrow is the day, but for what, I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  I still didn’t know what was happening or why, but I couldn’t let Lassiter get on that plane.

  “I want to stop him.”

  The operation was not going to achieve perfection.

  The Stone was fairly sure of that now. The ultimate would have been for Kilmer to commit a murder, but that was now unlikely. The emotional component was mostly gone for him, and anger probably would not be enough of a motivation.

  But the disappointment struck more at the Stone’s ego than at anything else. The winning bidder had been chosen, and the representative was on the way. The buyers would only want final confirmation that secrecy was guaranteed before transferring the money.

  That secrecy would in fact be guaranteed that very afternoon, with the deaths of all who had participated. Kilmer would die as well, as would the insurance policy downstairs. And then the Stone could leave the country he hated so much.

  So for now he would just wait for the phone calls, confirming that it was over.

  It was going to be a long day. Long, but very rewarding.

  Craig and I agreed to meet a block from Lassiter’s house.

  He had gotten there early, just in case Lassiter left, so he could follow him. When I was halfway there, he called to tell me that there had been no movement in the house, but lights were on, and Lassiter’s car was there.

  I brought my gun with me, except this time it was loaded. It made me feel secure, though I wasn’t sure I’d have the guts to use it. Unless he had hurt Allie; then I’d blow his brains out.

  I parked a block farther away, and walked to Craig’s car. I got in the passenger seat, but he didn’t even look over at me. He was looking through binoculars trained on Lassiter’s driveway.

  “Nothing happening?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but at least there are no pain-in-the-ass neighbors to deal with.”

  He finally looked over at me briefly. “I assume you’ve got a plan?”

  I nodded. “I’m going to go in and threaten to shoot him if he doesn’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “Brilliant,” he said. “You come up with that all by yourself?”

  “You got anything better?”

  “Nope.
So are we ready?”

  “Ready,” I said. “No matter what happens, even if we have to shoot him, we’re going to search that place top to bottom. Today is the day we find out what the hell is going on.”

  “I hope you didn’t bring your gun,” he said.

  I tapped my pocket gently. “I did.”

  He put the binoculars down and said, “Richard, listen to me. You—”

  “Let’s get going, Craig, okay?”

  He stopped, then nodded.

  “Okay. Here’s how I think we should do this—” Before he could finish the thought, his cell phone rang, and he answered it. “Langel.”

  He listened for a while, and then said, “Shit.” About ten seconds later, he asked, “Cause of death?” and then ten seconds after that said, “Yeah. I understand.” All in all, it was not a particularly upbeat phone call, at least from his end.

  He clicked off the call and turned to me. “You need to hear this,” he said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but they fished a body out of the Hudson River this morning. It was Nancy Beaumont, or Allison Tynes, or whatever the hell her name was.”

  The news hit me right between the eyes, and I sagged back into the seat. I hadn’t verbalized it, even to myself, but my reaction made me realize that I still had been positive that Allie was one of the good guys, and that she was okay.

  And that we’d come out intact … and together.

  I had no idea how I would deal with the loss; it seemed that I had finally reached my limit. Maybe I would figure it out, maybe I wouldn’t, but it would have to wait. Now it was time for revenge.

  “Sorry, man,” Craig said. “Maybe she was okay; maybe they were just using her.”

  “Yeah.” I was feeling an anger greater than any I had ever felt. “It gives us something to talk to Lassiter about.”

  “One of us should go in the front door and confront him; the other should go around the back. No need for him to know there are two of us.”

  I nodded. “I’ll take the front.”

  Something about the tone of my voice made him concerned; I could see it in his face. “Don’t do anything stupid, Richard. This is not your comfort zone.”