David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

As he spoke, the doctor’s eyes shone with a kind of inner light. But then the eyes glanced at the gun again, and they became veiled and anxious once more. “Can’t you lower that gun?”

Pendergast shook his head. “Just keep talking.”

“Okay. Okay. I needed guinea pigs in order to perfect the memory insertion procedure. You can imagine the results of programming the wrong memories. So I arranged to have indigent people, drug addicts, the homeless, secretly transferred up to my clinic from New York City hospitals.”

“Those are the gaunt patients I saw around me.”

“Yes.”

“People nobody would miss.”

“That is correct.”

“And how did I get there?”

“Ah. What a lot of trouble you were. It seems that, as part of some case you were working on, you became suspicious of Stony Mountain. You managed to check yourself into Bellevue, posing as a homeless tubercular, and you were duly transferred up here. But there was an accident, a miscommunication, and your clothes ended up being transferred with you. Those were not the clothes of a homeless drifter. I became suspicious, made inquiries, and ultimately learned who you really were. I couldn’t just kill you—as you pointed out, killing a federal agent is never the best solution. Much better would be to reprogram you with new memories. To gaslight you, as it were: erase from your memory the real reasons for your coming here, and to add new memories that would, in the end, convince your superiors and loved ones that you had become mentally ill. After that, no one listens to a crazy person. No matter what you said, it would be chalked up to your illness.”

“Diogenes and Helen were not real.”

“No. They were phantoms, reconstructed out of your memory by manipulating Npas4.” Grundman paused. “It appears my research into Helen could have been a little more thorough.”

“And the dummy?” Pendergast asked.

“Ah. The dummy. I call him Dr. Augustine. He’s a crucial part of the treatment. He doesn’t exist, either. The dummy isn’t real. He’s the conduit, the vehicle—the Trojan Horse, as it were—which I first insinuate into the patient’s mind. If I can plant Dr. Augustine in your mind, I can use him to leverage any other memory I wish to insert.”

There was a long silence, interrupted by the calling of the loons. The full moon cast a buttery light over the water. Pendergast said nothing.

The doctor stirred nervously in his seat. “I assume that, since you haven’t killed me, you accept my story?”

Pendergast did not answer directly. Instead, he said: “Step out of the car.”

“You’re going to leave me here?”

“It’s a lovely summer evening for a walk. The main road is about ten miles back. The local police will probably pick you up before you have to trek the whole distance.” He waved the doctor’s cell phone meaningfully. “You’ll miss the SWAT team raid on your clinic, of course . . . lucky you.”

Grundman opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pendergast slid over to the driver’s seat, turned the car around, and headed slowly back down the dirt road. Behind him he could see Grundman, standing at the verge of the lake, silhouetted in the moonlit water.

With Grundman’s phone in his hand, he began to dial the number of the New York field office of the FBI—the first step toward raiding and shutting down Stony Mountain. But he didn’t complete the call. Slowly, he let the phone drop into his lap.

He knew who he was—knew without a shred of doubt. He was Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast of the FBI. This episode at Stony Mountain had been a nightmare, a waking delusion. But now it was over. Dr. Grundman’s treatment had been fiendishly effective—but it had failed in the end, as it must. His mind, his memories, were simply too strong to erase or manipulate for long. Now he knew, with utter conviction, who he really was. He knew his true history—it was coming back to him at last. He could put all this behind him, get on with his life. His real life.

And yet—

He looked down at the phone in his lap. As he did so, he glimpsed something in the rearview mirror—something he unaccountably had not noticed before.

There, sitting in the backseat of the car, staring back at him with blue, unblinking eyes, painted red lips, and dressed in a white lab coat with the polished brown shoes, was Dr. Augustine.

M. J. ROSE

VS. LISA GARDNER

Old world versus young gun. Pragmatic versus the occult. Actual versus the surely impossible. That’s the premise M. J. Rose and Lisa Gardner started with. The end result?

A cunningly clever tale.

M. J. Rose doesn’t believe she invented Malachai Samuels any more than he may have invented her. But certainly Samuels changed her writing career when he first showed up in The Reincarnationist (2007). Samuels became the impetus for M.J. to take her first foray into metaphysical and historical fiction, and she hasn’t turned back from that course since. Samuels is, without question, unique. He’s an enigmatic Jungian therapist, entrenched in research into past life regressions—a journey he’s never actually been able to take himself.

Which is partly why that’s become his obsession.

The other reason is that, like M.J., his ancestors, going back to the nineteenth century, have been invested in questioning the mystical lines between past and present. Bringing law enforcement face-to-face with Malachai Samuels, a man who’s managed to evade them at every turn for years, intrigued M.J. Especially when the cop in question would be one of her favorites.

Detective D.D. Warren.

Here’s an interesting fact. Lisa Gardner’s D.D. Warren actually exists in real life. Gardner named her hardened Boston detective after her neighbor, a beautiful blonde best known for her baking and gardening skills. In the beginning, Lisa intended for D.D. to only appear in one chapter of Gardner’s sniper novel Alone . But D.D.’s brash Boston attitude and relentless determination quickly captured readers’ imaginations. Before she knew it, Lisa ended up writing half a dozen novels featuring her neighbor’s namesake. The decision to use D.D. for this story was an easy one. Who better to take on the charming, enigmatic Dr. Malachai Samuels, a man suspected of multiple murders but proved guilty of none, than a young, street-smart homicide cop?

Add in the spice of Boston’s Chinatown and the legend of a rare artifact and you have the perfect recipe for a thriller.

Or maybe something else entirely?

Something unexpected.

The Laughing Buddha

New York City—1884

TWILIGHT SETTLED OVER THE CITY, shrouding it in a grayish haze. He hated this time of day, the hour lost between darkness and light, when everything became indistinct. Standing in the shadows he watched the mansion from across the street. Linden trees partially hid the Queen Anne–style villa but he could see light glowing through the glass sunburst below the curved-top window. The lugubrious strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata wafted from the open balcony door, appropriate accompaniment to the gloomy dusk.

Even in this murkiness, the elaborate building with its gables, scrolled wrought iron railing, and dozens of gargoyles tucked under the eaves was an impressive sight; a symbol of wealth.

But not his wealth.

Unconsciously, he clenched his jaw, felt the tightness, then forced those muscles to relax.

The front door—with its bas-relief coat of arms of a giant bird rising from a pyre—opened and a finely dressed woman stepped out. She didn’t have any idea what she might be coming home to later that evening, but he did and thought about how, if the worst happened, she’d accept his sympathy, come to rely on it, and never guess he’d been the one to orchestrate her grief.