Triggers

Darryl spoke into his sleeve. “Hudkins to Dawson. Sue, we’re done here.”

“Great,” said Susan. “Come on up to Singh’s lab. It’s room 324.”

“ ‘Praise be to Allah,’ ” said Manny Cheung, reading from the computer screen in Gordo Danbury’s house.

“Danbury must have been a plant,” said Smith, the skinny one of the two FBI agents.

“But he’d been with the Secret Service for two years,” Cheung said.

Smith nodded. “They’re nothing if not patient.”

“No one has claimed responsibility for the White House bombing yet,” said Cheung, “but it was the same type of device they intercepted at L-A-X—so it’s probably al-Sajada.”

Kranz, the other FBI agent, looked at him. “But how would they recruit an all-American boy like Danbury?” They had gone over Danbury’s personnel file before coming here; he’d been born in Lawrence, Kansas, and had earned school letters in baseball and track.

“He was ex-army,” Cheung said. “Stationed in Afghanistan. He could have been compromised there.”

“They probably promised him seventy-two virgins,” sneered Smith.

“He wouldn’t be the first soldier they’d turned,” said Cheung. “Lots of grunts feel disenchanted with the US and wonder what we’re doing there. Give them enough drugs and money, maybe some women, and…” He gestured at the screen. “But whatever Danbury thought he was going to receive in heaven was presumably contingent on him taking out Jerrison. He probably planted the bomb on the White House roof during his last shift up there, with the timer set to blow up the building shortly after Jerrison was scheduled to finish his speech.”

“That would have been pretty fucking demoralizing,” Smith said, “on top of all the demoralizing kicks in the balls they’ve already given us. Jerrison gives a speech about how we’re going to win the war on terror and—boom!—he’s killed as the White House blows up. Classic al-Sajada.”

“Yeah,” said Kranz. “But when Jerrison decided to move his speech to the Lincoln Memorial…”

Cheung nodded. “With the bomb’s timer already set, and no clearance for him to go back up on the roof until his next shift on Sunday, Gordo must have been scrambling for a Plan B. But as a sharpshooter, he figured he could take Jerrison out while he was giving the speech. He might have thought it was even better, a one-two punch: Jerrison assassinated during his speech about the war on terror, and an hour later the White House is destroyed.”

Danbury’s house was small. Kranz was nosing around, looking on the bookshelves, which, from what Cheung could see, contained mostly military nonfiction and Tom Clancy novels.

Smith nodded, then said, “I guess when Danbury heard that agent calling out that Jerrison was still alive, Danbury must have realized he wasn’t going to be a martyr—his mission to take out the president was a failure. He probably hadn’t even planned an escape route at the Lincoln Memorial; he was all set to go out in a blaze of glory. Guy like that, a crack shot, probably never even occurred to him that Jerrison would survive.”

“I suppose,” said Cheung. “But when Jerrison did survive, Gordo panicked and ran—hoping to get away and find another way to earn his heavenly virgins.”

“But now that fucker is in hell,” said Smith.

Cheung found himself a chair, dropped into it, and looked out the window, out at the changed world. “Aren’t we all?”

The year Ranjip Singh’s family had moved from Delhi to Toronto, US television, which spilled over the border into Canada, was filled with “Bicentennial Minutes,” celebrating America’s past.

Years later, Canada started its own series of similar television spots called “Heritage Minutes.” Singh fondly remembered several of them, including Canadian Joe Shuster creating Superman, paleontologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell discovering dinosaur bones in Alberta, Marshall McLuhan electrifying his students at U of T with a lecture during which he coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” and a moving monologue by an actress portraying Emily Murphy, the first woman magistrate in all of the British Empire, who fought for the rights of Canadian women to be recognized as persons under the law.

But the one that caught teenage Ranjip’s attention most of all was about pioneering Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, performing in 1934 what came to be known as “the Montreal procedure.” By touching electrodes to particular parts of his patients’ brains, Penfield could apparently reliably elicit specific memories. A phrase from that Heritage Minute—“I can smell burnt toast!” uttered by a female patient in astonishment when Penfield identified the source of her ongoing seizures—became a catchphrase in Canada, and Ranjip had been so fascinated by that little film, he’d ended up choosing memory research for his career.

All of this came to Susan Dawson as she waited in Professor Singh’s lab for Darryl and Dr. Griffin to get there. As soon as they arrived, she asked, “What’s the tally?”