'How close?' Agent Atta asked.
'Bum-buddy close. What fucking business is it of yours?' Thomas paused. He was letting his temper get the best of him—and letting these Feds push his buttons. Think clear, he reminded himself. Think straight. But he couldn't squeeze the writhing images of Cynthia Powski from his thoughts. He could still hear her moan, it seemed. He could even smell her sweat.
'Look,' he continued evenly. 'Your primary suspect is a very close friend of mine. And you know what? If we were talking about somebody I didn't know, say the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, I'd probably be more than willing to play this game with you. But I know how these things work. You're fishing for something. It could be general information, or it could be something specific. The bottom line is that I have no way of knowing just what you're fishing for, which means I have no way of knowing whether I'm helping my buddy or digging him a deeper hole.'
'You don't trust us?' Agent Logan asked.
'Are you kidding me?'
'We're the good guys, Professor Bible,' Agent Atta said.
'Sure you are. Do you have any idea just how bad people are at reasoning? It's terrifying. Add to that the contradictory interests typically generated by hierarchies, like the FBI, where career-friendly decisions are so often at odds with truth-friendly decisions. Add to that the emergency repeal of the constitutional provisions guaranteeing due process—'
'It would be stupid to trust us,' Atta said, her tone tired and disgusted. 'Irrational.'
'Exactly,' Thomas said flatly. 'One might even say insane.'
CHAPTER TWO
August 17th, 9.38 a.m.
Except for two young girls with piercing eyes and pierced eyebrows, the train was empty. When they glimpsed him watching them, Thomas looked away, at once discomfited and scornful. He studied the eternal Hudson instead, trying to think away the fear that churned his gut.
'Perhaps when the next person dies,' Agent Atta had said before leaving his office. Thomas had thought of calling Neil then and there, to warn him, to question him, something, but had stopped short of actually punching the number. He needed to see him, he realized. He needed to see his reaction.
Perhaps when the next person…
It was strange how easily the obvious escaped people in the press of events. So much was seen without seeing, understood without understanding. Thomas had overreacted in his office, had dismissed something that had screamed for careful consideration. But how could anyone think clearly after watching that… that neuroporno or whatever it was?
Besides, Neil was his best friend. Closer than even his brother, Charlie.
It had to be some kind of mistake.
Even so, something in Agent Atta's look haunted him. Nor another one, her eyes had said. Another intimate of another perp, claiming there was no way their buddy/son/husband could do something like that. And she was right. As a rule, people judged themselves according to their intentions and others according to results. In study after study, individuals ranked themselves as more charitable, more compassionate, more conscientious than others, not because they in fact were—how could they be when they were just as much others as they were selves?—but because they wanted to be these things and were almost entirely blind to the fact that others wanted the same. Intentions were all important when it came to self-judgement, and pretty much irrelevant when it came to judging others. The only exceptions, it turned out, were loved ones.
That was what it meant to be a 'significant' other: to be included in the circle of delusions that everyone used to exempt themselves.
And then there was Cynthia Powski, trembling, gasping, squirming as though rolling a squash ball between her thighs.
MORE?
Pleeeeaaase …
But what was he supposed to say? 'Neil? Oh, that psychopath… Yeah, we polished a forty of whiskey at my house last night. In fact, he's passed out on my fold-out couch right now.'
Was he supposed to say that?
No. They hadn't earned his trust. There was no way he would turn in one of his oldest and closest friends, not without hearing his side first.
There were always sides.
The doorbell had rung at exactly 7.58 the previous evening. Thomas knew this because Ripley and Frankie had been begging him to watch Austin Powers, which was on at 8.00, all through dinner. He had just finished loading the dishwasher, and Frankie was throwing a tantrum in the living room, demanding he unlock the parental controls.
Thomas had swung open the door while telling Frankie to hold his bloody horses, and there was Neil, waving at the moths and midges twirling about the porch light.
'What the hell are you doing here?'
Neil beamed his best panty-remover smile, held up a brown paper bag. He was dressed at his nondescript best: khaki shorts, hindu sandals, and a black nano-T-shirt with a panel playing and replaying some clip of Marilyn Monroe swimming naked in a black-and-white pool. Thanks to his lean build and the jaunty, jockish way he carried himself, he looked more like an undergraduate hoping to score some weed than a respected neurosurgeon. Only his face advertised otherwise. No matter how expressive, it always seemed to flex about something inveterate and imperturbable, as though he had been a boxer or a Tibetan lama in his most recent previous life.
His minivan loomed in the driveway behind him.
'Found myself in need of some liquid therapy,' he said.
'Dad!' Ripley cried out in her snottiest voice. 'It's, like, starting already!'
'Austin Powers,' Thomas said in explanation.
'Smashing, baby,' Neil said, clapping him on the shoulder.
An hour later, Thomas realized he had become quite drunk. Ripley was curled around cushions, fast asleep between him and Neil. Frankie was sitting avidly on the floor in front of the screen, laughing as Austin dodged booby-bullets.
'Aren't you tired?' he asked his son.
'Nooooooo.'
Thomas looked apologetically at Neil. 'I promised I would watch it with them.' Ever since the divorce, the kids had become particularly exacting when it came to promises. He sometimes wondered how many penny-ante pledges it would take to dig him out of the hole he and Nora had shoveled together.
Neil laughed, nodded at Frankie who rocked like a heroin junkie beneath a close-up of Austin. 'Just think,' Neil said. 'Right now your son's brain is being rewired by signals from outer space.'
Thomas snorted, though he wasn't so sure he found the comment funny. It was an old college game of theirs, describing everyday events in pseudo-scientific terms. Since science looked at everything in terms of quantity and function instead of quality and intention, the world it described could sound frighteningly alien. Neil was entirely right, of course: Frankie's brain was being rewired by signals from outer space. But he was also just a kid enjoying something silly on TV.
'And,' Thomas replied, 'any minute now molecules from my large intestine will trigger nerve impulses inside of your nose.'
Neil frowned at him, his eyes luminous with reflected screens. Then he gagged and laughed all at once, pulling his nano-T over his nose. Black-and-white Marilyn kicked across the sides of an oblong pyramid.
The room thundered with machine-gun fire. Frankie turned with what he called his 'squishy face' and cried, 'You stink, Daddy!'
'Shhh,' Thomas admonished. 'You know how mad Ripley gets.'
'I have mallcools in my nose too!' Frankie chortled to Neil. 'Stinky ones.'
Instead of humor, there was a flash of anger in Neil's gaze, so quick that Thomas was certain he had imagined it.
Thomas had shrugged, flashed his son and his friend a dopey guilty-as-charged smile. 'I had KFC for lunch.'
After putting down the kids—or the little Gideons as Neil liked to call them—Thomas had found Neil checking out the books on the living room shelves. The overhead lights glared, making a ghost of Marilyn and her naked breast-stroke across his chest.
Thomas nodded at the shirt. 'Kind of sexist, don't you think?'
Neil turned and tilted his head, his trademark one-shoulder shrug. 'So is biology.'
Thomas made a face.
'Where's your book?' Neil asked, running his eyes across the landscape of titled spines. Some of them were beaten and battered, others shiny new.
Thomas grimaced the way he always did when his book was mentioned. 'In the basement with the others.'
Neil smiled. 'Been demoted, huh?'
Thomas returned to the couch, eyed the full shots of whiskey Neil had poured, decided to take a swig of beer instead.
'So what's up, Neil? How are things at Bethesda?'
As much as he loved the guy, it irritated Thomas the way he always had to press him for the details of his life. It seemed part and parcel of a more sweeping inequity that haunted their relationship. Neil had always been elusive, but not in a secretive or suspicious way. It was more aristocratic, as if something in his bloodline exempted him from full disclosure.
Neil turned from the shelves. His face looked pale and blank in the lights. 'Actually, there's nothing at Bethesda.'
Thomas cocked his head, not quite sure whether to believe him. 'You quit? Neil, you should've—'
'I didn't quit.'
'You were fired?'
'I never worked there, Goodbook.' He paused as though out of breath. 'Bethesda was, ah… Jesus, I don't know how to say it without sounding cheesy. Bethesda was, well… just a cover.'
Thomas scowled. 'Now you're screwing with me.'
Neil shook his head, laughing. He held out both hands, like a prophet or a politician or something. 'No. I'm serious. I've never even set foot in Bethesda.'
'But then…'
'What have I been doing?'
Thomas stood blinking. 'Are you kidding me? All this time you've been lying about where you worked? Neil…'
'It's not like that, Goodbook. It's not like that at all. Lying about Bethesda was part of my job.'
'Part of your job?'
'I was working for the Man. For the NSA. When they tell you to lie, you lie, no matter who it is, and God help you if you don't.'
'The NSA?'
More laughter. 'Unfuckingbelievable, huh? I was a spy, Goodbook. A fucking science spook! Reverse-engineering God's own technology!'
Thomas laughed as well, but like someone bullied into doing so. It was strange the way the company of intimates could make lunacy seem almost normal. Or maybe not. They were the baseline, after all; what we all use to sort the mad from the sane.
'I knew this would freak you out,' Neil continued. 'Which is why…' He scooped up the bottle of whiskey and banged it on the coffee table.
Thomas flinched.
What was it about lies that made them seem so pedestrian? Everyone lied all the time—Thomas knew the statistics, knew that men lied primarily to promote themselves, while women lied to spare others' feelings, and so on. But it was more than a matter of typical patterns or brute frequencies. There was something essential about lies, something that ranked them alarmingly low on the list of slights and injuries. A toolbox wasn't a toolbox unless it had a pair of pliers—something to twist or bend with.
'But why did you do it?' Thomas had asked. 'Why join… them.'
Neil had this peculiar way of smiling sometimes. 'Sly' was too small a word to describe it. Even 'conspiratorial' seemed to lack the requisite number of syllables.
'For the love of my country,' he said. 'Gotta protect the Fatherland.'
'Bullshit. You a patriot? Please.'
'Hey, man,' Neil crowed, 'my high school is, like, way, way cooler than your high school.'
Thomas refused to laugh. It was an old joke of theirs, referring to the way patriotism was simply 'school spirit' writ large, a mechanism used to generate solidarity, to enforce consensus and conformity, particularly during times of crisis or competing social interests.
'So why did you do it?'
Neil slouched back into the couch. 'For the freedom.'
'Freedom?'
'You have no idea, Goodbook. The resources. The lack of constraints.' He paused as though debating the wisdom of his next words. 'I now know more about the brain than any man alive.'
'More bullshit.'
'No. I do. I really do.'
Thomas snorted. 'Prove it.'
Neil had flashed that self-same smile.
'Patience, Goodbook. Patience.'
'So what were you doing?'
'You wouldn't believe it. It was straight out of Mengele 101.'
Thomas swallowed, struggling to absorb this. 'Try me.'
'It started small fry: experimentation with sensory deprivation interrogation techniques. They gave us this theo-terrorist, let's call him Ali Baba, who they thought could be key to unlocking several American-Muslim cells. We interviewed him several times via a sham fellow inmate, discovered what he thought his execution would look like, and more importantly, what he thought paradise would look like. Then we arranged his execution—'
'You what,'
Neil shook his head. 'Always so literal… We arranged his sham execution, making sure he recognized it by providing the cues he expected. But instead of killing him we simply put him under—deep under. Then we transferred him to a specially prepared sensory deprivation tank, pumped him full of MDMA variants and opiates, gave his body some time to acclimatize, then woke him up.'
'So what happened?'
'He awoke to nothingness, no sound, no light, no smell, no touch, and higher than a fucking kite. He tried screaming, thrashing, and all that—a brain in sensory limbo automatically attempts to generate feedback stimuli—but we'd induced motor paralysis to better prevent him from sensing himself. Besides, he had no choice but to feel good with the mickey we'd slipped him. When the MRI showed us his visual centres spontaneously lighting up, we introduced him to God.'
'You what?'
'We introduced him to God, this ultra-slick intelligence specialist from Bahrain. Ali Baba literally thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Let me tell you, when God's asking the questions, people answer.'
The horror had to be plain on his face. That and the confusion. Neil always seemed to speak to different parts of your head, to broadcast on multiple frequencies—it was one of the things that made his company at once so entertaining and nerve-wracking. But this?
'And…'
'And nothing. The guy was a dud. But after we refined the techniques, especially when we began channelling their hallucinations with VR interventions, we learned plenty, trust me. From the theo-terrorists, at least. The eco-terrorists were tougher nuts.'
'So that's what you've been doing all these years?'
'Christ no! That's how I started. After the preliminary success of the SenDep program, I was identified as a rising star. They transferred me from the psychomanipulation division to the neuro. They opened the vault, good buddy, and let me wander the wonderful world of black ops.'
Thomas lowered his beer. 'The NSA has a neuro-manipulation division.'
'You're surprised? Why do you think places like Washington or Beijing are infested with spies? Because that's where the decisions are made. Wherever important decisions are made, you find spies. And ultimately—' he tapped his temple with a finger—'this is where all the decisions are made. So why not?'
Thomas poured two more shots and handed one to Neil. 'Because it's immoral,' he said. 'And just plain creepy.'
'Immoral? You think it's immoral?'
'Fucking A, I do.'
Neil scowled and smiled at once. 'Weren't you the one always arguing that morality was a sham? That we're simply meat puppets deluded into believing we live in a moral and meaningful world?'
Thomas had nodded. 'Ah, the Argument.'
The Argument. Its mere mention seemed to open a pit in his stomach. Evidence of an old atrocity.
'Well,' Neil had said, 'we are talking about terror suspects here.'
'Bullshit again. That's just part of the Paleolithic dreamworld people live in. They estimate threats as if they still live in a stone-a
ge community of a hundred and fifty people rather than a world of billions. Terrorism is theater, you know that. Slippery bathtubs are more of a threat. Christ, campaigns against autoerotic asphyxiation would save more lives! The powers that be are just milking our psychological vulnerabilities to secure their agenda.'
A derisive glance. 'And what about Moscow?'
'That has precious little to—'
'You know,' Neil interrupted, 'it's hard not to feel sorry for them, sometimes, even when you know for a fact that they've had a hand in dozens of deaths. Our heads are just filled with so much crap. The older ones, in particular, think they're Captain Kirk or something. Our evil mind-scanning technology is no match for the human spirit. I even had one old theo-terrorist tell me that his soul was his citadel, and that God guarded the gate.'
He paused for a moment, as though pensive with regret. His face was drawn.
'What did you say?' Thomas asked lamely. He still couldn't believe he was having this conversation.
'That I could give a rat's ass about his spirit. That it was his brain I was interested in. That his will was simply one more neural mechanism, and that once it was offline, he would quite happily tell me everything our field operatives needed to know. And I was right. We had moved far beyond sensory deprivation interrogations by that time. Using all the imaging data on the brain's executive functions—you know, Roach's famous experiments on the differences between weak-willed and strong-willed individuals—we simply isolated the offending circuits and shut them off. It was as easy as flicking a switch.' His laugh was more a breath-filled snort. 'Who would have guessed, huh?'
'Guessed what?'
'That all that evil mind-scanner stuff would be so laughably far from the truth. Why design a machine to read thoughts when all you have to do is shut down a few circuits and have your subject read them out for you?'
Dumbstruck, Thomas stared at him. Neil, his best friend, was saying that he was one of the bad guys.
Wasn't he?
'I…' Thomas began in a thin voice. 'I don't know what to say… let alone think.'
'Fucked up, huh?'
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