Robert Sawyer - Triggers

“A doctor here named Lucius Jono,” said Ranjip—and he took a moment to jot this fact on the chart he was making.

“And he’s reading a real-estate agent named Nikki Van Hausen,” said Susan. She gestured for the pad and wrote the name down. “And Nikki’s reading Eric Redekop, who was the lead surgeon for the president. And Redekop is reading a nurse, Janis Falconi.” She wrote these names down, too. “The chain just keeps getting longer and longer—which raises the question of exactly how many people are affected. Agent Michaelis wasn’t—he was too far away from your equipment, it seems. But how many were?”

“Good question,” Singh said. He consulted a PC on a worktable. “Huh,” he said, and then, “Hmmm.”

“Yes?” said Susan.

Ranjip moved to his apparatus, a padded chair and a geodesic sphere two feet in diameter. “Well,” he said, “this equipment can edit memories, but the effective field is normally constrained to the interior of this sphere. According to the diagnostics, what happened, it seems—and this certainly was unanticipated—was that during the electromagnetic pulse, the field expanded while maintaining its spherical shape. It got to be about thirty-two feet in diameter, so presumably everyone in that sphere was affected.”

“That’s a radius of sixteen feet,” Susan said. “Enough to reach up to the fourth floor and down to the second, no?”

“Exactly,” said Singh.

Susan considered. “The president was there.” She pointed down and to her left. “And I was right next door in the observation gallery.” She pointed directly to her left. She turned to Singh. “Are you sure the field didn’t get any bigger than that? And you’re sure no one outside that radius could have been affected?”

“We’re not sure of much,” Singh replied. “But the field size is directly proportional to the power used to generate it, and the equipment recorded the magnitude of the surge in its syslog file. Assuming we’re right, and it’s my equipment that caused all this, then, yes, I’d say the effect was limited to people in that bubble.”

“I can’t keep the hundreds of people in this hospital locked up indefinitely,” said Susan.

“Given the size of the bubble, it shouldn’t be more than one or two dozen who were affected,” replied Singh. “Anyone who was on the lobby level or below, or on five or above, probably isn’t affected. And anyone on two, three, or four who was more than a couple of rooms away from here probably wasn’t, either.”

“Assuming nobody has moved to a different floor,” said Susan.

“Ah, right,” replied Ranjip.

“Still, it does narrow the list of suspects,” Susan said.

“Suspects for what?” Kadeem asked. But then he looked at Susan and nodded. “Ah. For who’s reading the president’s memories. Guess you gotta find that dude soon, huh, Sue?”

Darryl Hudkins and Mark Griffin sat in the security office at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital, along with Deanna Axen, the hospital’s director of security. They were in front of a bank of twelve flatscreen monitors, arranged in three rows of four. Eleven of the monitors were doing what they normally did: cycling through the endless array of security cameras secreted inside the hospital and on its grounds, including the plaza connecting to the Foggy Bottom metro station on the south side of the triangular building. But the twelfth—the lower-right one—was showing footage from just before and just after the lights went out. Darryl and Dr. Griffin were making a list of who was within the critical radius of Singh’s machine at the key moment, starting with those in the operating room. It was almost impossible for Darryl to distinguish the members of the surgical team; nothing but their eyes were visible. Griffin, who knew them all to one degree or another, fared better, and Darryl wrote down the names:

President Seth Jerrison

Lead surgeon Dr. Eric Redekop

Surgeon Dr. Lucius Jono

Cardiac specialist Dr. David January

Anesthesiologist Dr. Christine Lee

Surgical nurse Ann January

Secret Service agent Darryl Hudkins

Next, they looked at footage from the corridor outside the O.R. The two patients who had been vacated to make room for Jerrison were there, as well as a nurse who had been tending to them. Griffin identified them as:

Intended kidney recipient Josh Latimer

Intended kidney donor Dora Hennessey

Nurse Janis Falconi

Security guard Ivan Tarasov

They then turned their attention to the third floor, starting with the observation gallery above the O.R.:

Hospital CEO Dr. Mark Griffin

Secret Service agent-in-charge Susan Dawson

And next door, in Singh’s lab:

Ranjip Singh, Ph.D.

Private Kadeem Adams

They continued on, identifying others on the third and fourth floors, including some visitors to the hospital. They were aided by the records kept by the security checkpoint in the lobby, where IDs were examined and recorded. It took a while to compare the hundreds of faces that had gone through the various entrances to the faces spotted near Singh’s equipment, but finally they had completed their list of all those who had likely been affected. As it happened, only Susan and Darryl from the Secret Service detail were within the sphere; the rest of the agents on-site had been further north or south in the corridor on two, or down on one, guarding the building’s entrances.

Darryl spoke into his sleeve. “Hudkins to Dawson. Sue, we’re done here.”

“Great,” said Susan. “Come on up to Singh’s lab. It’s room 324.”

“ ‘Praise be to Allah,’ ” said Manny Cheung, reading from the computer screen in Gordo Danbury’s house.

“Danbury must have been a plant,” said Smith, the skinny one of the two FBI agents.

“But he’d been with the Secret Service for two years,” Cheung said.

Smith nodded. “They’re nothing if not patient.”

“No one has claimed responsibility for the White House bombing yet,” said Cheung, “but it was the same type of device they intercepted at L-A-X—so it’s probably al-Sajada.”

Kranz, the other FBI agent, looked at him. “But how would they recruit an all-American boy like Danbury?” They had gone over Danbury’s personnel file before coming here; he’d been born in Lawrence, Kansas, and had earned school letters in baseball and track.

“He was ex-army,” Cheung said. “Stationed in Afghanistan. He could have been compromised there.”

“They probably promised him seventy-two virgins,” sneered Smith.

“He wouldn’t be the first soldier they’d turned,” said Cheung. “Lots of grunts feel disenchanted with the US and wonder what we’re doing there. Give them enough drugs and money, maybe some women, and…” He gestured at the screen. “But whatever Danbury thought he was going to receive in heaven was presumably contingent on him taking out Jerrison. He probably planted the bomb on the White House roof during his last shift up there, with the timer set to blow up the building shortly after Jerrison was scheduled to finish his speech.”

“That would have been pretty fucking demoralizing,” Smith said, “on top of all the demoralizing kicks in the balls they’ve already given us. Jerrison gives a speech about how we’re going to win the war on terror and— boom! —he’s killed as the White House blows up. Classic al-Sajada.”

“Yeah,” said Kranz. “But when Jerrison decided to move his speech to the Lincoln Memorial…”

Cheung nodded. “With the bomb’s timer already set, and no clearance for him to go back up on the roof until his next shift on Sunday, Gordo must have been scrambling for a Plan B. But as a sharpshooter, he figured he could take Jerrison out while he was giving the speech. He might have thought it was even better, a one-two punch: Jerrison assassinated during his speech about the war on terror, and an hour later the White House is destroyed.”