Triggers

“Oh, you will. Before this is over, you’ll have seen more of them than you can count. But for now, not only do you have the right to remain silent, you have the obligation. Spying on the president is bad enough. Revealing what you’ve learned is…well, I’m glad we never got around to closing Gitmo.”

“Wait!” said January as Susan went to cuff him. “You’re wrong! You’re wrong!”

Susan closed the metal loops around his wrists. “Tell it to the judge.”

“No, no. Listen to me! You’re wrong. I’m not linked to the president, honestly. God, it never even occurred to me that anyone might be linked to him—he wasn’t conscious, after all, when all this went down; he was under general anesthesia.”

“Then why’d you lie about being linked to your wife?”

He hesitated. Susan put the flat of her hand against his back and propelled him toward the door.

“All right!” he said. “All right. I’m telling you the truth. I’m not linked to President Jerrison. I’m linked to Mark Griffin.”

“The hospital CEO?” she said. “Why lie about that?” They were at the closed door to Singh’s office; Singh’s black bomber jacket was hanging from a hook on the door’s back.

“Because I’m president of the staff association here, and he’s the hospital’s chief executive officer—and my opponent. I’m facing off against him over contract negotiations, and, well, this will give me the edge, so long as he doesn’t know I’m reading him. I figured it would be easy to fake that I was linked to my wife; we already have so many memories in common.”

“Prove it,” Susan said. “Prove you’re linked to Griffin. When did he and I first meet?”

“When you arrived here this morning with the president. He was on the right side of the gurney, and you were on the left. You had blood smeared on your jacket.”

“Who was behind me?”

“The president’s personal physician. Griffin greeted her, although he called her by her military rank: Captain Snow.”

“And what did he say about Dr. Redekop?”

“Nothing, then.”

“Later, I mean. What did he call him when we were in the observation gallery?”

“He said Redekop was ‘a doctor of the’—well, I don’t know what this means, but it’s what he said: ‘a doctor of the first water.’ ”

“Fuck,” said Susan.

“I’m sorry,” said January. “I really am. I—this all just sort of fell into my lap, you know? I didn’t know what to do.”

“Rule number one, asshole: don’t lie to the Secret Service.” She took off the handcuffs. “Get out of here.”

“You mean I can go home?”

“No, you cannot. Not until I choose to end the lockdown. But get out of my sight.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he scurried out the door.

Susan was livid as she walked down to Singh’s lab. The Canadian was sitting at his computer, and Darryl Hudkins had now joined him. He was looking at a city map spread out on a table.

“Any luck tracking down the woman who went AWOL?” she demanded.

“Not yet,” Darryl replied, looking up. “Problem is, the old thing has cataracts, I think. She’s somewhere today—I just can’t make out where; the visuals in her memories of this afternoon are indistinct. It’s noisy—she doesn’t like that—but I still don’t know where it is. She’s just not paying any real attention to her surroundings.”

“Indoors or out?”

“Indoors. But it’s not a museum or a gallery or a store. She’s just wandering around in a daze, it seems—she was already preoccupied with her son’s having a heart attack, and then someone told her about the president being shot, and later about the White House. When I think about this afternoon, the only memories of hers I get are of her worrying about, well, about everything.”

“Damn it,” said Susan. “Keep trying.” She went over to the whiteboard and corrected the information on it, now that they knew that David January was really linked to Mark Griffin.

“Agent Dawson?” said Singh.

She wheeled around. “What?”

Singh looked startled by the sharpness of her tone. Susan took a deep breath; she wasn’t mad at him, and she shouldn’t take it out on him. “Sorry, Ranjip. What is it?”

“Have a look at this, please.” Singh gestured at his monitor.

Susan came over and stared at the screen, which was showing a complex graph. It felt strange to be seeing it. For the first second or two, it appeared to be just a random shape, with numbers and letters marking certain points, but as she looked at this part, she suddenly understood it, and shifting her attention here caused that part to make sense, as well, and all at once the numbers at the bottom of the screen conveyed meaning for her, too. She’d originally opened her mouth to say, “What is it?,” but the words that came out were, “Are you sure?”

“I’m positive,” said Singh. “It’s based on the data from my equipment’s diagnostic files, and it’s the only configuration that works.”

“Twenty-one nodes, not twenty?” asked Susan.

“Exactly. Twenty-one people were affected.”