Thomas lingered behind to take one last look. A strange vertigo haunted the room, like the delayed reaction to a near miss on the freeway. He had a drunken memory of Neil disappearing through the doorway. Not his friend Neil, but the Neil looming behind the frame of Cynthia Powski's final porn. Neil the shadow. Neil the knife.
'So he had the run of the place…'
Thomas found Agents Logan and Gerard in his office. Sam was studying his giant satellite poster of the Earth on the far wall, framed by high-resolution whorls and continental land masses.
'Space buff?' she asked.
He suddenly felt embarrassed by how juvenile it looked. 'When I was a kid,' he explained. 'I put it up to cover the tacky panelling more than anything else.'
'Still, nice picture,' Sam said, as though she understood the wonder of such things.
'No tits,' Gerard chimed, leaning back to peak behind a bookcase.
Despite their earlier laughter, something about their carefree attitude sparked resentment in Thomas. Then he realized: when you lost a trail, you followed a search pattern, which was little more than a systematic attempt to squeeze dumb luck out of an indifferent world. For the human mind there was precious little difference between looking for something unknown and looking for nothing.
So they were going through the motions. Same as him.
He walked over to the oak desk that he and Nora had spent a laborious summer refinishing. Everything seemed to be where he'd left it. A stack of draft course outlines. Sticky notes with meaningless reminders. He turned on his desk light—the green glass one Neil had given him for Christmas years ago in college. What he saw punched the breath from his lungs.
'Sam,' he said numbly.
'Nine inches in dog years,' she was saying in a you-take-the-cake tone.
'Sam,' he repeated. 'Come here.'
He pointed to the light.
'What about it?'
'That wasn't there before.'
'Shelley!' Sam shouted. 'You're going to want to look at this!'
In a blue marker all but invisible against the green glass when the light was off, someone had written
www.semanticapocalypse.com
Not someone. Neil.
There could be no doubt, Thomas realized with horror.
He was part of the game.
He stood by woodenly as Sam sat at his desk and fired up his computer.
You already have Nora, was all he could think. Just leave me alone.
Within moments, his office was crowded with people, and Thomas was numbly explaining how he found the web address. Atta had Gerard chase all the newcomers except Dean Heaney from the room, then call someone named Lamar at 'CI'.
'And tell him to keep it under his hat,' she snapped. Gerard nodded, frowning in concentration.
'Got it!' Sam cried.
They all crowded around the flat panel. Gerard muttered on his palmtop behind them.
A small black window had opened in the centre of the screen. No, not entirely black. Grey shapes—moving shapes. Legs scissoring across…
'Low-res webcast,' Sam said.
'Realtime?' Agent Atta asked.
'Impossible to tell.'
They saw booted feet kicking something.
'Is that a hand?' Dean Heaney asked. 'Someone dead?'
A bright flash, as though a floor lamp had been rolled around. A glimpse of a prostrate body. Shining blood? Then…
'Fuck me,' Sam muttered.
It was over. Whatever it was Neil had broadcast, it was over.
Special Agent-in-Charge Shelley Atta turned to Thomas with baleful eyes. Your fault, her look muttered.
'Wait a sec,' Sam said. 'It's starting over. He's probably been replaying this all day.'
She was right. The window was still black, but something in the character of the gloom had changed. A pale smear near the center seemed to gain resolution. A face, like that of a drowning victim rising through black waters. Then suddenly the picture was bright—there had been some kind of cut. It was a talk-show clip, something like the old Charlie Rose, showing a handsome, middle-aged Latino man wearing a suit and seated in studio lighting. He appeared to be listening.
'Is that who I think it is?' Sam asked.
'Zarba,' Agent Atta hissed. At first Thomas thought she was naming the man, but then he remembered that zarba was Arabic for shit.
'Who is it?' Gerard asked.
Sam rolled her eyes. 'It's Peter Halasz. You know, the congressman who went missing two days ago.'
Thomas realized he'd been holding his breath. 'It's him all right,' he said. He and Nora had actually voted for him when he was running for city council years back when they had lived in Brooklyn. He heard himself say, 'What the hell you up to now, Neil?'
'Nothing good,' Atta said darkly. She raised a hand and started snapping her fingers. 'Someone? Dean…'
'Already on it,' he said, holding his palmtop. 'Sorry to bug you, Jeff, but you ain't going to believe what I'm—'
'Look,' Sam said, 'he's saying something.'
'Sound!' Agent Atta exclaimed. 'Doesn't this thing have sound?'
Thomas dropped to a crouch and rather indelicately pushed past Sam's bare knees. He'd connected his computer to an old amplifier, which he kept beneath the desk. He cranked the volume.
'… as for the implications of the so-called "Wetware Revolution"' Halasz's voice boomed from the speakers, 'I really think it's a tempest in a teapot.'
Thomas turned the volume down some. Sam greeted him with a quick, nervous smile as he pressed himself free.
'God has imbued each man with a free soul,' Halasz was saying, 'and it's that free soul that makes each man—excuse me, Felice, I meant to say, person—it's that free soul that makes each person responsible for their fortune good or bad, and more importantly, responsible for their crimes'
'But surely—' a female voice began, but was cut off. The fishbowl scene froze. A heartbeat passed and the window went black.
'I saw that interview,' Heaney said, holding his hand over his palmtop. 'It's from this spring, I think, when Halasz was campaigning against neurological courtroom pleas.'
'He taped it,' Thomas said, thinking of Cynthia Powski. 'It's part… part of his argument.'
Why did that word 'his' feel so wrong?
Suddenly the window brightened, and they saw Halasz again, this time crouching on the floor of what looked like a cage, his head wrapped in bandages. He held a little girl with matted blond hair cradled in his arms. He seemed to be wearing a disheveled version of the same suit he'd worn in the interview. The little girl wore a plaid skirt with white stockings—some kind of school uniform. She wasn't much younger than Ripley. They both stared at the camera in abject terror.
'Is Lamar getting this?' Atta barked to Gerard.
'Loud and clear,' Gerard said, his palmtop to his ear. 'He's running biometrics on the girl right now.'
'This is an outrage!' Halasz snarled at the camera. 'An outrage?
The girl starting cooing—a sound that made Thomas tingle with horror. It was like watching a psychotic nightmare through a pipe. Suddenly Thomas wanted to run, to be anywhere-but-here.
'Roberta Sawyer,' Gerard said, repeating an inaudible voice. 'Goes by "Bobbie". Reported missing last week in West Virginia.'
'Our boy gets around,' Atta muttered.
'Shush,' Halasz was saying to the girl. 'Shhhh…' He pressed his cheek against her matted locks. Low-res tears spilled from his eyes when he closed them. They popped open, seemed to search the blackness somewhere off behind the camera. 'Hush,' he whispered.
Then he bit into her cheek as though she were an apple.
Her shriek was inhuman.
'There re boundaries?' Halasz wailed. 'Limits?'
The girl flopped like a deep-sea fish in his arms. People fought, Thomas numbly realized, as frantic and as vicious as any wild animal.
'NO, CONGRESSMAN,' Ocean Voice said. 'ONLY CIRCUITS AND BEHAVIORAL OUTPUTS. WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER THE INP
UTS COME FROM ME OR FROM THE WORLD?'
Halasz shook his head, like a dog rending tendon from bone.
'God's circuits!' he cried, spitting blood like spittle. 'Your perversion!' he sobbed, leaning back to the twitching girl. 'This isn't me! God made me!'
'BUT YOU FEEL IT. YOU CHOOSE.'
Drenched in hot blood, Halasz laid the girl on the cement floor before him, weeping.
'Pleeaase,' he hissed, as he started taking off his clothes. 'Pleeeassse,'
'YOU WANT THIS. YOU ACHE.'
Thomas simply turned and walked from the room. He could hear Halasz muttering, 'But… but…' He went to the bathroom and sat in front of the toilet for a while. He stared at the rind of dust rimming the faux-brass register, wondered about germs. 'No! Just a little longer, please…' floated down the hall, followed by noises too human… too human to be animal.
He did not vomit.
'Soooo good…'
He could not think. He could not feel.
'Soooo…'
When he returned to his office, all was ashen-faced silence. The computer was off. Sam began softly sobbing.
'That is some fucked up shit,' Gerard was saying.
The four of them, Thomas, Sam, Gerard, and Dean Heaney milled around the living room. Agent Atta was in the kitchen, talking on her palmtop after having chased away the locals and the Evidence Response Team.
'Did he hypnotize him?' Gerard asked.
Thomas ran a slow hand over his scalp. 'No. Hypnosis doesn't work that way. The notion of the all-powerful hypnotist and the all-compliant subject is a myth.'
A scowl flexed across the agent's pudgy-handsome face. 'But I saw this act in college once where—'
'Half-true, half-bullshit,' Thomas interrupted with a heavy breath. 'Researchers have discovered that many participants actually follow the hypnotist's instruction just to please the crowd, not the hypnotist.'
Gerard shook his head, wild-eyed and unconvinced. 'I know what I saw.'
'But then, you are an idiot,' Sam said. 'Didn't you see the bandages?'
The big man sneered. 'I was talking about college.'.
'So you think it's another brain thing, professor,' Dean Heaney asked.
Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. Every time he blinked he saw… too much.
'Gotta be,' he said after a moment. 'Some kind of surgical intervention, probably in the anterior cingulate gyrus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—but you'd have to ask a neurologist.'
'The anterior what?' Gerard asked.
'The parts of the brain involving executive functions.'
'Oh.'
'Just so you know,' Sam said, 'he means the will—the parts of the brain involving the will.'
There was poison in the air—Thomas could feel it—and they only had one another as targets.
'Good thing you clarified that for me, Logan. I thought he was talking about the president's last dump.'
'Sorry, Ger,' Sam said with mock contrition. 'I didn't mean to sound condescending—you know, talk down to you
Still on the phone, Agent Atta sauntered in from the kitchen, saying 'I got it, I got it, I got it,' in an irritated tone. 'Okay. Bye.' She clapped her palmtop shut, glanced at each of them in turn. 'Well,' she said, 'I've talked to some of the more expensive suits in Washington.' She fixed Thomas with a hard look. 'Just so you know, professor, from this moment forward, you're not to talk to anyone about what you witnessed here, understand?'
'What do you mean? Why?'
'National Security.'
Thomas blinked. It was funny how charged certain words could become. Thomas's father had always sworn aloud whenever he heard the phrase on old broadcast TV. During the Cold War, he would explain, back when nothing less than the fate of humanity was at stake, they hadn't required a fraction of the measures supposedly necessary for the War on Terror. 'There's always a lunatic fringe,' he would rant. 'You might as well declare war on jacking off?
'Oh,' Thomas said. 'I get it.'
'I'm not sure you do.'
'Oh, but I do, Agent Atta. Neil told me he was NSA.'
'So then you understand. We're dealing with highly classified subject matter here.'
'Important weapons in the never-ending war against terror, I suppose.'
Atta scowled. 'Something like that.'
She had the cornered look of someone forced to resort to a threadbare rationale, to be earnest about words that no one took seriously anymore. A certain willful fanaticism was required to act contrary to the obvious, a determination to make true.
'Bullshit,' Thomas said. 'Terrorism is theater, and if the government was really interested in helping citizens, instead of manipulating them, it would tear down the stage, remind people that statistically, owning a gun is a greater danger than terrorism. This is about political embarrassment. About illegal skunkworks projects. About the lack of judicial oversi—'
'That's not what my—'
'Your handlers tell you what you need to hear! Nothing more, nothing less!'
Agent Atta stepped into his personal space, jabbed a long-nailed finger into his chest. 'You want to get into a pissing contest with me, professor? Hmm? Right or wrong, how difficult do you think I could make your life?'
Thomas stared down at her apprehensively. Suddenly Gerard's earlier quip about child pornography seemed more premeditated than otherwise. Ominous.
'There's a madman out there,' he said, finding courage in the steadiness of his voice, 'abducting and killing innocent—'
'You must be talking about the Chiropractor,' Atta said, 'because as far as the world is concerned, Neil Cassidy does not exist.'
'This is insane. Absolutely in—'
'Go ahead,' Atta said, jabbing him in the chest yet again. 'Test me.'
'That's enough, Shelley,' Thomas heard Sam say from his periphery.
'You,' Atta snapped at her subordinate, 'shut your barbie-ass up.'
Thomas turned away and strode to the door.
'Where are you going?' Atta asked sharply.
'Next door to get my kids.' He paused, shot Sam an apologetic look. 'Just so you know, agent, I expect all of you to clear out before I come back.'
He slammed the door behind him.
Thomas saw the headlights through the kitchen window.
The kids were asleep upstairs—they probably wouldn't even remember him carrying them home from Mia's. He should have been asleep too, but for some reason he sat at the kitchen table, staring at the cold tiles across the floor, listening to the refrigerator hum.
He was walking to the door before he heard the timid knock. For a pulse-pounding moment, he realized it could be Neil—but his day had been too long, too traumatic for him to sustain any kind of alarm.
Numb, he simply pulled open the door, saw Sam standing on the darkened porch. She looked drawn, her face framed by too-much-has-happened hair.
'Crazy day,' she said, smiling nervously.
Thomas nodded. 'Crazy day.'
'Can I come in? Are you busy?'
'Look, I really am sorry for ly—'
'People do crazy things,' she said breezily. 'That's what makes a crazy day crazy.'
Thomas smiled, stepped aside so she could come in.
'Besides,' she continued as Thomas closed the door, 'I wanted to apologize for Shelley.'
Thomas turned, regarded her for a moment. She looked tired, yet frenetic around the edges, like someone venturing out on a dubious limb. She looked beautiful.
'You really got the hunger for this one, don't you?' he said.
She smiled, looked at him quizzically. 'Hunger for what?'
'For this case. You really want to crack this case.'
Playful frown. 'That obvious, huh?'
'Would you like a coffee?' Thomas asked.
'Sure. A decaf if you got one. My nerves are fried.'
He smiled, nodded. 'Crazy day.'
Sam cocked her head, smirking. 'Crazy, crazy…'
'Be-fucking-yond,' he said, as he wa
lked to the kitchen. He loved the fact he could swear freely in her presence. He grabbed the glass pot from the coffee-maker, but paused when she failed to keep up her end of their goofy verbal game. He turned. She was leaning against the door frame, watching him, the toe of her left shoe hooked behind the heel of her right.
'Look,' she said. 'This… this isn't right.'
Thomas nodded. He suddenly felt pale and naked in the kitchen light. 'Yeah.'
'Why I'm here. I mean really…' She smiled, then laughed nervously. 'I should tell you.'
'Why are you here?'
'Tomorrow, I'm scheduled to interview this guy, Dr Mackenzie. Someone who worked with Neil.'
Neil. Everywhere he fucking turned, his life's new centre of gravity. Thomas suddenly felt like a fool. For a moment he'd thought she'd returned… well, for him.
'And?' He winced at the impatience of his tone.
'Well—' she swallowed—'I've been informed that this guy can't mention Neil's work in any way—it's all classified—so the most he can do is give us his personal impressions.'
'So?'
'I could really use your help.'
'What about Shelley or Gerard?'
'Like I told you, we're stretched to the breaking point here.'
Thomas frowned. 'Why? I mean, what could I do?'
Her face went blank. The FBI, Thomas knew, underwent extensive training in tactical communication—or 'verbal judo' as they liked to call it in the media. The courses typically used words like 'managing', 'redirecting', and 'achieving', but manipulation was pretty much what it all came down to. A veneer of impersonal professionalism, as it turned out, was generally the best way for law enforcement to get what they needed, whether from civilians or suspects. The best way to win a pissing contest was to keep your dick holstered.
'Interpretation requires context, professor. No one knows Neil better than you.'
Thomas scrutinized her for a bemused moment. 'Have you always been so ambitious, Agent Logan?'
'C'mon… It's not so simple. You know that.'
She was right. There were lives on the line. Real honest-to-goodness people.
'I suppose not.'
'Then will you come?'
It felt wrong. He knew it in his bones—it felt so very wrong.