Robert Sawyer - Triggers

“Hello, may I please speak to Maria Ramirez?”

“Speaking.”

“This is—”

“Hello, Professor Singh.”

“Is my voice that distinctive?”

“I’m afraid so, Professor. Is there—is something wrong?”

“No, no. But I have a question, if I may.”

“Sí.”

“You can read the memories of Darryl Hudkins, one of the Secret Service agents, correct?”

“Sí.”

“Do you recall him meeting anyone…interesting, shall we say, today?”

“No.”

“Are you sure, Maria?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“An actor, perhaps…?”

“Oh! Sí! ¡Qué emocionante! Darryl is in Hollywood, no? And he met Courtney B. Vance!”

“Yes, he did.”

“But…but why is this important?”

“Just confirming something. It proves that the links remain intact even over distances of thousands of kilometers.”

“¡Dios mio!”

“My thought exactly.”

Seth Jerrison’s previous nurse Sheila had been replaced by one named Kelly. He liked her better. She wasn’t as stern, and she laughed at his little jokes. Earlier, she’d read him the most recent batch of get-well-soon and sympathy messages from foreign leaders, and she was now rearranging the vast collection of flowers that had been placed on a table by the window; they were a tiny fraction of those that had been delivered to the hospital since the shooting.

The press had been making noises about a transfer of power under the Twenty-Fifth while Seth was recuperating. Seth would be damned if he’d let that happen; this was a time of crisis, and he intended to lead. He’d insisted on being given another stimulant half an hour ago, and he was feeling, if not chipper, at least more alert and energetic than he had when he woke up.

The door to the room opened, and in came Susan Dawson. “Pay dirt,” she said.

“Kelly, will you excuse us?” Seth asked.

The nurse nodded. “I’ll be just outside.”

“That’s fine.”

Susan took the vinyl-covered chair next to Seth’s bed and she held up a lined yellow notepad so he could see it. “Yes, yes!” he said once. “That’s it—that’s it exactly. ‘Tell Gordo to aim 4-2-4-7-4 the echo.’ ”

“The ‘aim’ part is certainly suspicious,” Susan said. “But it’s not conclusive.”

“True,” Seth said. “Call it in to the NSA decoding desk; see what they make of it.”

Susan nodded and took a minute to do that. When she was off the phone, Seth motioned for her to show him the sheet again. “What do you make of the ‘4-2-4-7-4’ bit?” he asked.

“Forty-two thousand four hundred and seventy-four,” said Susan. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“It’s not some sort of reference to you? Maybe your old ZIP code or something?” She pulled out her BlackBerry and went to the USPS site. “Huh,” she said. “It’s not a valid ZIP code. Well, maybe that first ‘four’ isn’t the number. Maybe its, um, the…”

“Preposition,” Seth provided.

“Right. Maybe it’s ‘aim for 2-4-7-4.’ ”

“Well, 2-4-7-4 doesn’t mean anything to me. But if the second ‘four’ is also the preposition—aim for 2-4-7 for the echo—then maybe it’s a time. You know, 2:47?”

“But surely you’d say ‘two-forty-seven,’ then. And, besides, you were shot in the morning.”

“What about 24/7—you know, seven days a week?”

“But he said ‘two-four,’ not ‘twenty-four.’ ”

Seth frowned. “And what’s this about echoing?”

“That is strange. Danbury shot you from inside the Lincoln Memorial. With all that marble around him, it was bound to echo loudly no matter when he took the shot.”

“ ‘Echo,’ ” Seth said. “Suppose it’s not the word; suppose it’s the phonetic alphabet. You know: alpha, bravo, um…”

“Charlie,” said Susan, “delta, echo.”

“Right. So maybe it stands for something that begins with E.”

“Executive?” offered Susan. “Execute? Eliminate?”

Seth’s heart pounded—which hurt like hell. “God,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Two-four-seven. They add up to thirteen.”

“Yes. So?”

He hesitated. Did he really want to reveal the 13 Code to a Secret Service agent? But, of course, in this day of RSA encryption, no one except school kids bothered with simple substitution ciphers. He took a moment to explain how his code worked and talked her through writing up the conversion table on her yellow pad so she could see what he meant:

“There,” he said, when she was done. “A decryption table for the key two-four-seven.”

Susan looked at him like he was crazy. Seth nodded sagely. “They called me mad at the university.”

She smiled. “I’m sure they did, sir.”

After leaving Professor Singh’s lab, Ivan Tarasov had intended to simply get through his day, trying to think of nothing but his duties as a security guard here at the hospital. He was good at his job, and he liked its repetitive quality: at this time, walk down this corridor, check that the doors to these rooms were properly locked, and—

And there he was. Ivan caught sight of Josh Latimer walking toward him. Seeing him, even from a distance, brought back a flood of Dora’s memories, including the awkward call, months ago, when he’d phoned her—him here in Washington, her over in London, the father who had missed all her school plays and her move to England and her wedding and even the funeral of her mother, calling up to make sure he’d tracked down the right Dora, checking that her maiden name had been Latimer, that she’d been born in Maryland, that her birthday was August 6, and then, once he was sure, explaining that he was her long-lost father, and arranging to come visit her for a face-to-face meeting. And in a little restaurant off Piccadilly Circus, after they’d each tried to compress three decades of life into an hour, he told her why he’d sought her out and what he needed from her.

Memories of what had happened after they’d parted came to him, too. Of her talking it over with her doctor, her best friend Mandy, and her minister, and ultimately deciding she had to do this; she couldn’t deny him.

Latimer was wearing a green hospital gown but blue jeans underneath. As Ivan watched, he turned and entered a room. Ivan’s own path took him by the same room, and suddenly he found himself pushing the door open, entering, and closing the door behind him.

Latimer was sitting in the chair by his bed. Across the street, through the window, George Washington University’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dorm was visible. Latimer looked up, clearly startled to see a security guard entering.

Ivan felt his blood boiling; the mere sight of Latimer infuriated him. “How could you?” Ivan demanded.

Latimer frowned. “What?”

“After what you did to Dora, to ask her to let herself be cut open for you, to give a piece of her own body to you—how could you?”

Latimer groped on the table next to his chair for his eyeglasses, unfolded them, and put them on. “I don’t know you,” he said. “And you don’t know me. The person reading my memories is a woman—a nurse. Janis something.”

“Falconi,” said Ivan, nodding; he knew the names of all the nurses and doctors here. “I’m not reading you. I’m reading your daughter Dora.”

Latimer said nothing.

“You’re thinking she can’t possibly remember—because if she did, she’d never have agreed to help you. And maybe she doesn’t remember. But I do.”