Triggers

January turned out to be the squat man she’d seen leaving Singh’s lab earlier. He was forty-four, according to Singh’s notes, and had hyperthyroid bulging eyes; he looked a bit like Peter Lorre.

“Have a seat, Mr. January,” Susan said. She deliberately chose not to call him “Doctor”—you never elevate an interrogee above the interrogator. “I’m just following up on the conversation you had with Professor Singh. I understand you told him you are linked to your wife.”

The big eyes got even bigger for a moment. “To Annie, yes.”

“How convenient, that,” Susan said, her tone neutral.

January smiled amiably. “I don’t know if it’s convenient, but there’s no one else I’d rather be linked to.”

“Well,” said Susan, trying on a disarming smile of her own, “I guess it’s what every woman wants in a man if you believe the magazines. You’ll no longer be able to say to her, ‘I can’t read minds,’ when she expects you to do something but doesn’t explicitly tell you, right?”

His smile now seemed forced. “I guess. It still seems so…so fantastic.” He spread his arms a bit. “I gotta tell you, it’s funny seeing myself as she sees me.”

“Funny?”

“You know, to have memories from her point of view, memories in which she sees me instead of me seeing her.”

Despite her suspicions, Susan was intrigued. “How closely do the memories match? I mean, do you see an almost three-dimensional scene, shifting from her perspective to your own and back again? Do they synch up that well?”

“Depends on the memory, of course. Some are more detailed than others—and some are more detailed for me and hazy for her, and vice versa.” He made an indulgent little smile. “She doesn’t like hockey nearly as much as I do; she can barely remember what teams are playing, let alone individual plays.”

“All right,” Susan said. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“What is Ann’s lover’s name?”

“She doesn’t have a lover,” January said, sounding miffed. “Other than me.”

“Oh?” said Susan. “Think back to last month—October. She dropped you at Reagan, and you flew to—where was it now? Ah, yes. Denver, for a conference on defibrillation technology, right?” Her Google search had found his name on the program. “You settled in for a long flight and maybe watched a movie.”

“I did. On my laptop.”

“But continue that memory from her point of view,” said Susan. “What did she do the moment she dropped you off?”

“My wife drops me off all the time at the airport; I attend a lot of meetings. There was nothing special about that day that I recall—that she recalls.”

“No? October eighteenth? Unseasonably cold and windy. And you were going to be gone for an entire week that time.”

“I don’t…”

“Remember it?” asked Susan. “Remember that day?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“All right. I’ll tell you. Stop me when this begins to sound familiar. She left Reagan and drove on to Dulles, leaving her car in long-term parking. She then took the shuttle to the terminal, and there she met a man named William Cordt—although she called him Willie.”

“Then there’s no way you could know that. There’s nothing exceptional about my wife; there’s no way you’d have been watching her back then.”

“That’s true,” said Susan. “We weren’t watching her. We were watching William Cordt. This is Washington, after all. We watch a lot of people—especially those who have illicit ties to foreign defense contractors, as Mr. Cordt does. When he takes a trip out of the country, we know—and he did, with your wife, to Switzerland, for a skiing vacation.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “Annie was never involved with any arms smuggler, or anything like that.”

“Now, that I actually believe,” Susan said. “That is, I believe that she never knew that that’s what he was and so would have no memories of it. But you must surely have other memories of this event, from her point of view. The trip to Switzerland. The hotel they stayed in there, the Englischer Hof. The evenings they spent there.”

January narrowed his eyes, as if concentrating on something small. And then he made a short, sharp intake of breath. “Oh, my…Oh, God.” He slumped in the chair. “I—I had no idea…We…she…I…”

Then he looked at her, and his face was contorted in rage. “That was cruel,” he said. “Making me see that. Making me know that.”

“It would have been cruel, Mr. January, if any of it had ever really happened. But it didn’t. There is no William Cordt. Your wife hasn’t left the United States in over three years; I checked her passport records.”

January’s eyes went wide. “You…bitch!”

“And you’re under arrest.”

“For what?”

“For espionage. Spying on the president is a felony.”

“The president!” said January.

“Don’t play games now,” Susan said. “Yes, the president.” She stood up. “Extend your arms.”

“What for?” asked January.

“So I can cuff you.”

“I demand to see a lawyer.”