Devil's Plaything (21 page)

I
hold out my hands, palms up, then ball them into fists, enraged. “Worse than frying her memory with a fucking motherboard!?”

“There was some chain reaction.”

“Meaning?” My fists are still clenched.

“A handful of patients suffered sudden degradation of their memory assets.”

“You mean: their memory
cells
? These aren't widgets.”

“Right. It's been described to me that they contracted a virus. Somehow the interaction between computer and human stimulated a cascade of cell loss.”

“A wildfire,” I say.

He nods.

“But if the computers reported a ‘wildfire,' they must have been programmed to look for it. Its creators must have known this was a possibility. That makes this something less than an unforeseeable accident.”

I ring my fingers around the wine opener in my pocket. “So why did you try to kill her—and me?”

Chuck puts out his hands, trying to calm me. I take another step forward. He scoots to the edge of the couch and, without taking his eyes from me, opens the drawer in an end table. He pulls out a gun.

“The only thing I've ever tried to kill, or killed, has been helpless wildlife.” He cradles the gun casually, the threat only implicit.

“Who then? Who tried to kill us?” I demand.

He sighs. “You said it yourself. The Swiss.”

I shake my head. Not grasping this.

“Falcon,” he says flatly.

“The Swiss giant trying to buy Biogen?” Incredulous.

He shifts back to his computer. He moves the cursor and double clicks on something on his monitor. Moments later, the PowerPoint presentation disappears, and a new image appears—the hooded man who tried to shoot us and set me on fire.

“That's the Swiss guy?”

“Sven something. Works for Falcon. If they're going to buy Biogen, they can't afford to have a messy secret experiment exposed.”

“Did they kill Adrianna?”

“My guess is they've detained her, not killed her. No reason to. They're not indiscriminate killers.”

“But they'll kill a demented grandmother who can't reveal any information, and her grandson who doesn't know a damn thing? Or didn't until now. Why?”

“That part is personal.”

I shake my head—I don't understand his meaning.

“Adrianna has made a long-term investment in another person, and she's deeply emotionally committed to seeing it pay off.”

“English!”

“She's playing the role of aunt to the boy. As long as they threaten his safety, she won't compromise their secrets.”

“Newton?”

He nods.

“And Grandma and I don't have anything to live for?”

He closes the top of his computer.

“Two different issues,” he says. “Your grandmother—she can't be stopped from talking because she can no longer understand reason, or be coerced or blackmailed. Ironically enough, because she has dementia, she's a liability for what she knows, even if she doesn't know she knows it.”

“What does she know?”

He shakes his head. He wants to say something else but seems to change gears. He says: “You're a liability for a different reason.”

“Because I'm a journalist.”

“Because you're a junkie for the hunt. I'm guessing here, inferring a little. But if I were them, I'd find you threatening because you live for this kind of action. No personal connection or promise of wealth or intimacy is as interesting to you as the chase. That makes you beyond blackmail or reason.”

I close my eyes and clench my teeth. I let out a loud, frustrated exhale. I'm seeing an image of Grandma and then, surprising to me, Pauline. He has no idea how wrong he is about my intimate connections and my will to fight for them.

“None of this explains why they didn't kill me when they had the chance.”

“What do you mean?”

I tell him about Grandma's abduction. Whoever took Grandma left me alive, with her care file. He takes it all in. I can see from the machinations in his jaw that he's working it out, His face shouts stress and concern, displeasure.

“The Swiss took her?” I say, a statement as much as a question.

“I'll help you find out, Nat. I promise you that.”

“Chuck, you've still not explained your interest—the military's interest.”

“I'll show you.”

Toting his gun, Chuck starts to walk out of the room. I follow, feeling the sharp tip of the wine opener in my pocket.

W
e climb thickly carpeted stairs to the second floor. Chuck walks a few steps in front. He still holds his gun, casually, but his finger is laced through the trigger loop. I keep one hand on the smooth wooden rail and the other curled around the opener.

“Wait here,” Chuck says when we reach the top. We stand in a dark hallway that leads toward the back of the house. He knocks on a door across from the stairs. A deferential woman's voice tells him to come in. He does.

Left alone, my mind tumbles through a series of images, moments, rapid-fire memories, evidence, and unanswered questions from the last few days:

Grandma and me nearly shot; Why? Because she knew about a science experiment gone wrong?

A Human Memory Crusade transcript that doesn't seem to test Grandma's memory so much as write over it. Why?

The hooded man had an accent. Was it Swiss?

Polly's seductiveness. Is she in with Chuck?

Chuck tells me not to trust the police. How might they possibly be involved? Who shot Chuck outside my house? Why isn't he limping?

How does any of this relate to the secret from Grandma's past?

Whom can I trust?

Chuck reemerges.

“Time to meet my father.” He holds open the door for me, then whispers, “Be pleasant.” It sounds like a threat.

The room is dimly lit. In the corner is a desk. An old man sitting behind it, looking down through a magnifying glass.

“Dad, this is Nathaniel Idle. He's a writer, like Dave Cardigan.”

“Dave could shoot a gook from a thousand yards,” his father responds without looking up. But I can see his face is fleshy and unsubstantial to the point of being gaunt, his cheeks droopy like a cartoon dog. He wears a leather hunting cap. His voice is deep but textured with crackles. He's had lung trouble, maybe early onset of emphysema. He's late sixties or early seventies, but poorly aged, his white hair wispy thin.

And yet the room looks like it belongs to a high-school kid. To the right of the desk is a poster of a gleaming Harley Davidson motorcycle shown off by a woman in a tight nurse's outfit. Hung next to it is a wide-shot picture of a mountain stream, set against sun-drenched peaks.

In the corner opposite the desk is a queen-size bed covered by a dark blue down comforter pulled tight. There is no woman in the room. She must have exited through the doorway next to the bed.

“Did I hear your wife?” I ask Chuck.

“His nurse. Transparent way to elicit personal information.”

The old fellow looks up. “Charles doesn't like girls.”

He looks down again.

“Guess it worked,” I mutter.

I walk toward the desk. Chuck comes up behind me and puts a hand on my arm, gently holding me back.

For some reason, I'm deeply curious what Chuck's father is looking at so intently with his magnifying glass. I shuffle another step closer. Chuck doesn't stop me. I peer over the desk and see that he's looking at airplane models.

I see a framed photo on the desk, facing in our direction. It's a picture of Chuck's dad from a decade ago, at least. I recognize where he's standing: on the dock of the San Francisco Marina. Behind him is a boat named
Surface to Air
. In the picture, Chuck's dad wears the tight-jawed look of a tough guy and quiet narcissist.

Chuck spins me around. “Meeting's over.”

He whisks me into the hallway.

“What was that dog and pony show?” I ask.

“As you alluded to downstairs, we lose a lot of fine patriots to PTSD. It's arguably the biggest problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wounds you don't see and that never heal.”

“Your dad served in Vietnam.”

“We've created an environment to remind him of the days before the VC popped out of a tunnel in a village Dad and his men were clearing and started spraying fire from a flamethrower. He killed one of Dad's close friends and left Dad with burn scars on his arms and chest.”

“I'm sorry,” I manage.

“We'd like to help these boys put less emphasis on the bad memories, think about more innocent times.”

“You're trying to erase their memories?”

“C'mon, Nat. Stop thinking like a muckraker. We never got that far. We just wanted to find out whether there was any validity to our scientific premises that might help us reinforce some memories and limit others.”

“By erasing the bad ones.”

“What is it with journalists always seeing the negative? Progress takes change, which can be disruptive.”

“So now you have to erase the evidence before you all look bad.”

“Nothing of the sort. We're passive investors trying to make sure that the R and D process doesn't exceed our downside loss projections.”

After a pause, I say: “But you invest in Internet start-ups, infrastructure companies, not far-fetched neurological experiments.”

“Neuro-tech,” he says.

“What?”

“Biotech combined biology and technology, saved millions of lives, and made billions for investors. This is the next wave.”

“The brain and technology.”

He motions me down the stairs.

“Now what?”

He's following me. “You go find your grandmother.”

I want to ask how. Instead I say: “I have no money or cell phone.”

At the bottom of the stairs, I turn around. Chuck's two steps above me, paused in thought. Then he says: “I'll give you a cell phone but you won't trust it's not a tracking device.”

“True. I'll turn it off unless I need to make an urgent call.”

“Don't move. If I see you move, I might mistake you for a hippo.”

He brushes past me, ducks underneath the hippo head, and disappears somewhere in the back of the house. He returns with a cell phone and a fistful of $20 bills in a rubber band. It's got to be at least $500.

“You keep a spare cell phone?”

“It's my father's. He doesn't need it but I expect you to return it.”

“My first call is to the police.”

He shrugs.

“Do what you must. But the more attention you bring, the more nervous the bad guys. That's bad news for your grandmother. I've told you before and I meant it: I don't trust police. They're underpaid, poorly incentivized bureaucrats who get their return on investment by fucking with people.”

“You lied to me about the police being involved. You told me they were the source of the mystery call in Golden Gate Park.”

“You're right. I lied.”

“Why?”

“Because I was trying to get my bearings, and I didn't want the Keystone Kops involved before I figured out what was going on.”

“That's a hell of a lot of subterfuge and lying for an investor.”

“Not really. Business is rough, especially in these economic conditions. You're just not used to looking at it from the inside.”

He hands me the phone. I pocket it.

I look Chuck in the eyes. “Does my grandmother have a secret? Something from her past that would make her dangerous, or valuable?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because of the transcripts.”

“What are you talking about?” He sounds surprised.

But I don't feel like sharing anything more than I need to. “I'm sorry about your father. But you've ruined my grandmother's life. I'll never forgive you for that.”

He looks at me in silence, making an assessment.

“Fair enough,” he finally says. “Find her.”

I know where to start looking.

A
horrific confluence of fear and violence hijacked Chuck's father's brain. A few years in Vietnam, punctuated by death-by-fire in a rice paddy, overwrote and gained primacy over thousands and millions of other memories. Could a computer be doing something analogous to my grandmother? Could the hyper-kinetic interaction with an artificially intelligent interviewer be overriding her daily perceptions?

I pull out Chuck's father's phone.

For an instant, looking at the device, I wonder about the impact of constant computer use on my own memory. Practically speaking, I no longer remember addresses or phone numbers or directions; that's because I've ceded all the remembering to the hard drive of my computer and phone. Isn't that just a convenient trade-off? Or is there something more insidious at work. Is my interaction with my device rewiring my brain? At this moment, my answer is: Who cares?

I need Chuck's phone to do what my brain cannot divine on its own: give me the address to the home of Pete and Kristina Laramer, and directions to get there.

Through an Internet search I get the responses instantly.

Computer 1, Idle's Mind 0.

Dr. Laramer, the scheming neurologist, worked with Biogen to turn my grandmother into a guinea pig, lied to and manipulated me, and now I'm planning to give him an unforgettable late-night Halloween visit—dressed merely as an aggrieved grandson with sudden violent urges, packing a wine opener.

Minutes later, I'm back at my car. I fire up my laptop, and the transcripts to the Human Memory Crusade. I look at how much story I have yet to read. Looks like another handful of interviews. I glance at them, looking for key words, or obvious revelations that might explain Grandma's disappearance, or why she's taken center stage in this conspiracy.

Her story continues in fits and starts, punctuated by increasing interruptions by the computer. Most striking is that, towards the end of the transcript, the computer does most of the talking. It appears to be telling Grandma about her past, asking her a handful of yes and no questions to make sure it has properly recorded her story. It asks her pointed questions about what kinds of cars her father and husband drove, whether anyone in her neighborhood used a butter churn, what Irving wore to their wedding and how many people attended the affair, what her favorite candy bar was as an adolescent, and other strangely particular facts.

As to the substance of Grandma's tale, it appears to me to end inconclusively. Just before the war, she met some man nicknamed Pigeon and had an intense relationship of an uncertain nature. It feels romantic, exciting, dangerous. But I don't sense there is anything broadly sinister. There is no hint of conspiracy, military intrigue, or treason. But at this point, who knows.

I put down the laptop.

The clock on the phone says 10:48. I turn off the gadget so that someone can't use it to track my whereabouts. I start the car.

Twenty minutes later, I'm at the gates of heaven. Two stone pillars announce the entrance to Sea Cliff, the place I'll live in another life when I'm blessed with wealth and good taste. Sea Cliff, which sits on the edge of San Francisco at the opening of the Pacific and under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, has two qualities you don't often see in the same place: it is home to the outrageously affluent but still feels homey, warm, and tasteful. Robin Williams lives here; so does Senator Dianne Feinstein. And Pete and Kristina Laramer.

I drive past their Spanish-style, three-story home. Inside, lights are on upstairs, but shades make it impossible to see shape or movement.

Outside, the front yard is a mix of succulent plants, including one towering cactus, and neatly arranged pebble ground cover. Near as I can tell, the backyard opens to the Pacific Ocean. I pass the house and park half a block away.

I walk casually through the quiet neighborhood, the trick-or-treaters bedded down already. I approach the front door. I do not have a plan. I reach for the big brass door handle. It's locked. No surprise.

I peek through the long vertical windows on either side of the door. Inside it's dim. I can make out an entryway, and a table with stacks of paper on it. Looks like the day's newspapers and mail. I realize with relief: no dog. But stuck into the pebbles next to the doorway is a sign indicating the house is protected by ADT Security.

I walk to the side of the house. The backyard is surrounded by a white picket fence. I ease over it. Then pause, frozen by what I see: great beauty. Lit by a nearly full moon, the ocean rolls in and out at the bottom of the cliffs, hundreds of feet below these blessed residences curving along the coastline. Small waves crash foamy white, creating a rhythmic cacophony, at once violent and calming. I feel a sudden desperation for sleep. I push the sensation down and turn to the house.

In the upstairs, I see light in two rooms at opposite ends of the house. Downstairs, darkness. Immediately in front of me is a door that, I can see upon creeping closer, enters into an open pantry that leads to a kitchen. I try the door. It is locked.

I slink along the back of the house to a set of double doors covered on the inside with a slatted blind. Twisting my neck to see between the slats, I make out a formal dining room. The doors are locked.

I move to the next set of double doors. These are protected by a thick curtain, precluding any view inside. I reach for the door handle. It turns. Reflexively, I recoil.

I feel in my pocket and discover the pointed wine opener I took from Chuck's living-room bar. It's a meager weapon, unless I encounter a hostile bottle of Pinot Noir.

I push open the door.

There is enough moonlight for me to make out the décor: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Victorian furniture and trappings. Lots of insurance-company reimbursements funded these digs.

Then I hear the moan.

It is low, pained, husky and animalistic, like a dying animal. Or a dying neurologist.

I take two steps into the house and can make out the soft lump of humanity propped up against a desk at the far side of the room. Pete Laramer. His arms dangle loosely, palms up. He struggles fiercely to raise his right hand to his face.

Dark liquid stains his scrubs. The highest concentration spreads from just below his chest, the lowest edge of the rib cage, the apparent epicenter of a major wound. I rush toward him, then pause, taking stock.

“Heart okay . . . blood loss,” Pete manages to say.

I put my hand on his stomach to stanch the bleeding. Not a place you can tourniquet.

“Where are the girls?”

“Fuck you.”

He thinks I'm asking for purposes of attacking them.

“Are they safe, Pete?”

He takes a breath, and seems to accept my meaning. “Away with their mom. Fine. . . . Happier without their workaholic . . . unfaithful father.”

“Don't talk.”

“You can love someone completely . . . love your family, need them . . . and still lead a double life.”

He's wheezing. Punctured lung, or lungs.

“Bullet?” I ask. I'm trying to focus him.

He shakes his head.

“Knife. Big one,” I say. It's obvious now. There's a wound too on his neck, missing the jugular, hitting some of the windpipe.

I pull out my phone. I turn it on. While I wait for it to come to life, I say, “We might have to do a trach.”

Battlefield tracheotomy. Stick a sharp object into the windpipe to allow breathing. I've never done one myself and have seen only a handful performed in person during med school. But it's less complicated than it sounds.

“I didn't know,” he whispers.

“Shh.”

“A walking server, Soylent Green 2.0 . . . the digital version,” he says.

I want to tell him to save his strength, but what the hell does he mean?

My phone is alive. I dial 911.

“They've spread it already,” he says.

“Who?”

“She's carrying a secret. . . . They won't stop until they get it.”

“Lane?”

He nods.

He must be referring to what Chuck told me—that someone has triggered Lane's precipitous memory decline and they can't let the secret get out.

The 911 operator answers. I'm about to speak when the interior door to the library opens.

“Intruder,” I say into the phone.

“Heavily armed one,” says the hooded man. He's standing at the doorway, holding a hunting knife.