Robert Sawyer - Triggers

“I can’t confirm or deny anything at this point. These are national-security matters.”

“Darryl can’t believe Gordo did it. And—oh! He’s been wondering if you’re involved.”

“Me?” Susan was momentarily shocked, but she supposed his suspicion was as natural as her own. “No, I’m not. And you’re totally sure Darryl isn’t either, right?”

“I’m sure,” said Maria.

Susan nodded; she could use an ally—someone she could trust—and Darryl was now the only other agent she could be sure of. “Okay, thank you,” Susan said.

“Can I go home now?” Maria asked.

“I’m afraid not. But soon, I hope.”

“Good. Because I can’t wait to tell my husband the news.”

“About the president being shot?” asked Susan, surprised. “Or about the White House?” Surely everyone outside the hospital knew about those things by now.

“No, no. My news. Our news.”

“Which is?”

Maria smiled broadly. “That it’s a girl.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Our baby. I was here for an ultrasound today.”

“You’re pregnant?” asked Susan.

“Four months.”

Susan surged to her feet and ran down the corridor to Singh’s lab.

“All right,” said Ranjip Singh, writing on the whiteboard in his lab. “Mark Griffin, the hospital CEO, can read Maria Ramirez. Of course, Griffin’s been running around all day—hasn’t had much time to probe her memories; he didn’t even know she was pregnant until I just asked him about it.”

Singh continued. “Maria herself can read Agent Darryl Hudkins.” He filled in the appropriate squares.

“I spent hours modeling the linkages,” Singh added, “looking for a pattern to them—and I kept rejecting one my computer kept spitting out, because it seemed to have two nodes in one. But now that I know about the unborn baby, it makes sense. The linkage pattern of who is linked to whom is an artifact of the sequence of laser firings I’d programmed into my equipment: the paths of the beams traced out the pattern of connections. Not every pulse resulted in a link, and we’re not exactly sure of where everyone was deployed within the building when the linkages occurred. Still, here’s what I propose.” He erased the X in the name field of the twenty-first column and wrote in Baby Girl Ramirez. “Based on the beam paths, Maria’s unborn baby is linked to Rachel Cohen, although what, if anything, a fetus could make of Ms. Cohen’s memories, I have no idea. The baby girl probably lacks the referents to confabulate the cues Ms. Cohen is providing into anything meaningful…which I suspect is all to the good. Our Ms. Cohen is rather wanton; she formed a liaison with that lawyer, Orrin Gillett, with unseemly haste.”

“ ‘Wanton’?” said Susan, smiling at the choice of word. “Horny as all get-out, I’d say. But, yeah.”

“And now, as for the rest,” said Singh. “I spoke to Josh Latimer, the intended kidney recipient. He kept insisting he wasn’t detecting any foreign memories. He could be lying; he could be the one linked to President Jerrison. But my guess is that he’s telling the truth about this, as he sees it. The beam paths suggest he’s not linked to Jerrison, but rather to the unborn baby, whose memories are simply not remarkable enough for him to have noticed.” He wrote in those connections. “Which means it’s down to three possibilities.” He pointed at the names above the three remaining blank squares in the Can Read row. “This person, this person, or this person—one of them is reading the president.”

The DC police had been given copies of the security-camera photos of Bessie Stilwell, but so far they’d failed to turn her up. And Darryl Hudkins kept trying to recall her activities today, to figure out where she’d gone, and—

And memories came to him, of Richard Nixon, of all people. Although Nixon had resigned the presidency before Darryl had been born, he’d seen film of him declaring, “I am not a crook,” and him flashing a pair of V-for-victory finger signs at the crowd as he left the White House for the last time, but…

But he’d never felt sympathy for Nixon; Darryl’s dad, whenever he spoke of him, referred to him as “Tricky Dick.” And in all Darryl’s years working at the White House, he practically never heard Nixon’s name; in an almost Soviet-style rewriting of history, the thirty-seventh president had seemingly been expunged from memory.

But, suddenly, he was thinking about Nixon, recalling things he’d never known about him—like him speaking to the first astronauts on the moon…Buzz something, and that other guy. Back when we’d been proud of him. And him going to China, and meeting Mao. Such a smart move!

But then it had all come tumbling down. First his vice president—Agnew, the name came to Darryl, although he didn’t think he’d known it before—had had to resign although over unrelated matters, and then Nixon himself had stepped down.

Unrelated matters.

That was the thought that had popped into Darryl’s head, and as he considered it, more details came to him: the “unrelated matters” were charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery, and conspiracy either when Agnew had been governor of Maryland or Baltimore County Executive.

And those were unrelated to…

To Watergate, and—

And—

Yes, yes, yes! That’s where she was staying! Not at her son Mike’s place, but at the Watergate Hotel, which had recently reopened after major renovations. It came to Darryl now: she’d told Mike she was staying in his apartment, and indeed had gone by it once now, but she preferred a hotel, where housekeeping would find her no later than the next morning if she slipped and fell. She hadn’t told Mike that, though; she didn’t want him to be worrying about her running up expenses.

The Watergate was a great choice for someone who was visiting Luther Terry; it was only three blocks away, straight down New Hampshire Avenue, the diagonal street that constrained the LT building into a triangular shape. The Watergate complex was on the shore of the Potomac, opposite Theodore Roosevelt Island and just north of the Kennedy Center.

And—yes!—Bessie was looking around the grounds, as much as she could look at anything with her dim vision, and thinking this is where it all began, and—

And her thoughts were interrupted by a siren, and Darryl had heard a siren himself not five minutes ago. Normally, he’d expect to hear ambulance sirens in the vicinity of a hospital, but LT was under lockdown, and so Darryl had looked out the window and he’d seen a fire truck barreling north, and—

And Bessie had seen—or at least heard!—the same fire truck; this was a very recent memory.

Darryl spoke into his sleeve even as he broke into a run. “Hudkins to Dawson. I know where Bessie Stilwell is; I’m leaving the building to retrieve her.”

“Copy,” said Susan’s voice in his ear. “I’ll make sure hospital security knows; go out the ambulance bay, not through the lobby.”

Darryl could have commandeered a car to drive to the Watergate, but it was less than a thousand yards away. He made it down to the first floor and found himself retracing the path by which they’d brought in the president this morning, going past the staff sleep room, past Trauma, turning right, and heading out through the sliding doors that led to the ambulance driveway. A uniformed hospital security guard was indeed there. He checked Darryl’s ID, then unlocked the door for him; Darryl nodded thanks at the man and ran out into the chilly evening.

He hadn’t bothered to get his coat—that would have cost him a couple of minutes. He ran past the news crews, and one camera guy tried to follow him, shouting questions—Darryl was, after all, the first person to emerge from the building in hours—but the man, carrying a large camera, wasn’t able to keep up with Darryl as he ran along the building’s longest side, heading toward Eye Street, then—his heart pounding a bit—H Street, and then—sweating now—under the Potomac River Freeway, emerging at the Watergate complex. The hotel, he knew, was off to his right along Virginia Avenue, and he continued to run until he got there, making his way into the swanky lobby.