Dean Koontz - False Memory

“Nothing whatsoever will deter you from attending this party for the president,” the doctor instructed.

"Nothing.”

“Illness, injury, earthquakes, nubile teenage fans of either sex — neither those distractions nor any others will prevent you from being on time for this event.”

“I understand.”

“I believe that the president is a particular fan of yours.”

‘Yes.”

“On that evening, when you come face-to-face with the president, you’ll use your charm and manipulative skills to put him instantly at ease. Then, induce him to lean especially close, as if you intend to impart an irresistible bit of gossip about one of the most beautiful actresses present. When he is very close and most vulnerable, you will seize his head in both hands and bite off his nose.”

“I understand.”

The trailer was indeed humming, as Skeet had noted, but Martie found the hum more annoying than nice. In fact, an auditory tapestry of electronic buzzes and purrs and sighs and tiny tweets wove through the air, some constant in tone and volume, others intermittent, still others oscillating. All of these sounds were quite soft, whispery, never shrill, and the combined effect was not dissimilar to sitting in a meadow on a summer night, surrounded by cicadas and crickets and other insect troubadours as they sang of bug romance. Maybe that was why the hum made Martie itchy and gave her the feeling that things were crawling up her legs.

Two walls of the living room, of which this dining area was an open extension, were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves holding computer monitors and ordinary televisions, most aglow and streaming with pictures, numerical data, flow charts, and abstract patterns of shifting forms and colors that made no sense to Martie. Also on these shelves was a large quantity of mysterious equipment featuring oscilloscopes, radar-display units, gauges, light-snake tracking graphs, and digital readouts in six different colors.

When everyone had been served juice, Fig Newton sat at the table, too. Behind him was a wall papered with star charts, Northern and Southern Hemisphere skyscapes. He looked like a hillbilly cousin of Captain James Kirk, skippering a bargain-basement version of the starship Enterprise.

The mascot of the space command, Valet, lapped water from a bowl the captain had provided for him. Judging by his happy attitude, the dog was not bothered by the trailer’s hum.

Martie wondered if Fig’s perpetually flushed face and cherry-bright nose resulted from the radiation emitted by his collection of electronic gear, rather than from exposure to the sun during his day job as a housepainter.

“So?” Fig asked.

Dusty said, “Martie and I have to go to Santa Fe, and we need —”

“To be energized?”

“What?”

“It’s an energy locus,” Fig said solemnly.

“What is? Santa Fe? What kind of energy locus?”

“Mystic.”

“Really? Well, no, we’re just going to talk to some people who might be witnesses in. a criminal case. We need somewhere for Skeet to stay for a couple days, where no one would think to look for him. If you could —”

“Gonna jump?” Fig asked Skeet.

“Jump where?”

“Off my roof.”

“No offense,” Skeet said, “but it’s not high enough.”

“Shoot yourself?”

“No, nothing like that,” Skeet promised.

“Okay,” Fig said, sipping his prune juice.

This had been easier than Martie expected. She said, “We know it’s an imposition, Fig, but could you make room for Valet, too?”

“The dog?”

“Yeah. He’s really a sweetheart, doesn’t bark, doesn’t bite, and he’s great company if —”

“He dump?”

“What?”

“In the house?” Fig asked.

“Oh, no, never.”

“Okay.”

Martie locked eyes with Dusty, and apparently his conscience was as guilty as hers, because he said, “Fig, I’ve got to be really straight with you. I think there's going to be someone looking for Skeet, maybe more than one someone. I don’t believe they’re likely to show up here, but if they do… they’re dangerous.”

“Drugs?” Fig asked.

“No. It has nothing to do with that. It’s…

When Dusty hesitated, struggling to capsulize their bizarre plight in words that wouldn’t strain Fig’s credulity to the breaking point, Martie took over: “Crazy as this might sound, we’re caught up in some mind-control experiment, brainwashing, a conspiracy of some —”

“Aliens?” Fig asked.

“No, no. We —”

“Cross-dimensional beings?”

“No. This is —”

“Government?”

“Maybe,” Martie said.

“American Psychological Association?”

Martie was speechless, and Dusty said, “Where’d you come up with that one?”

“Only five possible suspects,” Fig said.

“Who’s the fifth?”

Leaning over the table, his pink pie-round face as close to an expression of solemnity as it could ever get, limpid gray eyes flooded with the sorrow over the human condition that was always with him, Fig said, “Bill Gates.”

“Good juice,” Skeet said.

The naked actor. Frivolous man of movies. Fame and infamy.

Dreadful. If beautiful women did not easily inspire the doctor to reach the heights of poetic composition, this thespian with his surgically sculpted nose and collagen-enhanced lips was not likely to be the subject of immortal haiku.

Rising from the edge of the bed, staring down into the placid face and the jiggling eyes, Ahriman said, “You will not chew the nose once you have bitten it off. You will at once spit it out in such a condition that it can be reattached by a team of first-rate surgeons. The intention here is not assassination and not permanent disfigurement. There are some people who wish to send the president a message — a warning, if you will — that he cannot ignore. You are simply the messenger. Tell me whether or not this is clear to you.”

“It’s clear.”

“Repeat my instructions.”

The actor repeated the instructions word for word, far more faithfully than he ever delivered the lines from one of his scripts.

“Although you will do no additional harm whatsoever to the president, all other attendees at this event will be fair game in your attempt to escape.”

“I understand.”

“The shock of the assault will give you a chance to slip out of arm’s reach of Secret Service agents before they react.”

“Yes.”

“But they will be on your heels in an instant. After that, do what you must… though you will not be taken alive. You may want to think of yourself as Indiana Jones surrounded by Nazi thugs and their evil minions. Be inventive in creating mayhem, using ordinary objects as weapons, swashbuckling your way through the house until you’re shot down.”

This nice bit of work with the actor was a contract job, which the doctor was obligated to accept from time to time. This was the price he paid to be permitted to employ his control techniques for personal entertainment, with little or no fear of imprisonment in the event that any of his games went awry.

If this had been one of his private amusements, the scenario would not have been this simple. In spite of the lack of complexity, however, this little game had a high fun factor.

After programming the actor to have no accessible memory of what transpired between them here this evening, Ahriman led him into the living room of the suite.

Originally, the doctor had intended to spend at least an hour dictating semicoherent psychotic rants while the actor entered them into his personal, handwritten journal as if they were his own dark fantasies. They had done this during a few previous sessions, and almost two hundred pages of feverish paranoid terror, bitter hatred, and doomsday prophecies — virtually all related to the President of the United States — filled the first half of the journal. The actor would remember writing none of this and would open the journal only when instructed to do so by his psychiatrist; however, following the assault on the presidential nose, once the prep had been gunned down, the authorities would discover this heinous document buried under the collection of souvenir panties that the movie star had talked off the legions of women whom he had seduced.