Triggers

As he looked at Leon Hexley—my God, yes!—the man’s memories became accessible to him; links were apparently forming now without physical contact.

Memories unveiled; secrets revealed. Hexley had been in Afghanistan, along with Gordo Danbury and Dirk Jenks. All three of them had been converted there, wooed with real riches in this life and the promise of so much more in the next.

Leon Hexley was older than the other two men, and had been with the CIA before the Afghan war; it had been easy enough for him to get a senior position in the Secret Service upon his return to the States, and eventually to become its director, promoting and deploying Danbury and Jenks as he saw fit.

But they had waited until the time was right—until the US had been demoralized by attacks on San Francisco and Philadelphia and Chicago—to strike at the very heart of the American government. Danbury was to have gone out in a blaze of martyrdom killing Jerrison. Then Jenks was supposed to take out Flaherty, or whatever surviving presidential successor became commander in chief after the White House was destroyed: two dead presidents in a matter of hours.

Seth was relieved to learn from Hexley’s memories that only three members of the Secret Service had been compromised; tomorrow, he’d go back to having its agents protect him and his family. But for now…

The Secret Service had originally been part of the Treasury Department; Seth had used that bit of trivia in his classes at Columbia. Since 2003, it had been an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and DHS was a cabinet department under his direct jurisdiction as leader of the executive branch. “Agent Dawson?” he said.

She was still holding her gun. “Sir?”

“I’m giving you a promotion. Effective immediately, you are the new director of the United States Secret Service.”

Jan Falconi was lying down now on the couch, her head in Eric’s lap. She was listening to all the voices and reliving all the memories: hers, and those of the veteran named Jack, and those of everyone he’d touched at the Vietnam Memorial, and—

Ah, yes, it was a cold night, and Jack had gone to a homeless shelter. He’d brought in dozens more there, first by touching them, but then, after the total number had reached some critical threshold, merely by looking at them.

Eric’s ornate wall clock made its hourly chime; it was midnight. The TV was still on, and a new program began. Jan laughed, and Eric, who was linked to her, did, too, and so did Nikki, safely back at her house, since she was linked to Eric, and so did Lucius Jono, who was linked to Nikki, and on and on: the laughter cascading not just down the chain, for it was no longer a simple series of links, but out onto the branching, growing network.

The new TV program Jan was watching, and so therefore were all the others, was an infomercial—for a surefire technique guaranteed to improve memory.

Chapter 50

Monday

Triggers.

Stimuli that invoke memories.

So idiosyncratic: a fragrance, the way someone holds their head, a pattern woven into cloth, a few bars of music, a taste, a touch, a word. For one person, a memory might be brought to the fore; for another, nothing.

History provides shared triggers. Where were you when you heard President Kennedy had been shot? When Armstrong took that first small step, that first giant leap? When the Twin Towers fell? When they blew up the White House?

But even those were only triggers for a fraction of the world’s population. Still, there were a few general triggers—universally shared experiences—that focused most minds, putting people on the same page, the same wavelength.

The circle had originally been closed.

Then—with triggers figurative and literal—it had opened. More and more individuals were drawn in. A few dozen minds, then a few hundred, then a few thousand, then more still.