“Somehow you made that man detonate his vest. I don’t understand how — except that it must involve my neurophysiology research and Dr. Tanbyrn’s psi studies.”
“Yes, of course.” Daniel stood. “Riah, if we could identify a threat, a terrorist, and without putting any soldiers in harm’s way—”
“Get him to blow himself up.”
“That’s one option, yes. Or kill him quietly, in a way that was untraceable. Think about it. If it were possible.”
She did think about it.
Identify a terrorist and somehow convince the person to blow himself up — like the man in the video. Let the terrorists take themselves out.
Or kill him quietly?
In an untraceable manner?
What did that even mean?
Tanbyrn’s research: altering galvanic skin response, respiration rate—
Heart rate.
She took a shot at it: “Cardiac arrhythmia.”
Daniel nodded. “Or a cerebrovascular accident.”
In other words, a stroke.
But how?
She didn’t know, but she did realize that what they were saying didn’t quite fit with what she’d seen on the video of the suicide bombers. “Is that what you’re telling me happened in Kabul?”
“At this point we’re not quite ready to cover all that happened,” Daniel said apologetically. “I wish we could, but we’re awaiting word on an incident in Maine, then we can explain everything. But for now, we promised to tell you how you can help us.”
Darren continued for him, “My brother and I were engaged in a study with Dr. Tanbyrn regarding the effects of mind-to-mind entanglement. Ways to nonlocally affect another person’s physiology. Daniel and I share a certain connection with each other, you know that. Even more so than most identical twins.”
“Yes.”
“In the studies, by working cooperatively, we were able to cause a person a great deal of—”
“Discomfort,” Daniel cut in.
“Discomfort?”
“Pain,” Darren specified. “Fluctuations in cardiac activity and synapses in neural activity in the centers of the brain that register pain.”
“And you’re saying you did this nonlocally?”
They nodded.
She reflected on what she knew of Tanbyrn’s research. Did it really involve the possibility of negatively influencing another person? If it were possible, as he claimed, that your thoughts could affect another person’s physiology, then—
Especially if you know which areas of the brain to alter. Especially if you had an identical twin with whom you shared the ability to communicate in unexplainable ways …
Especially if—
Ah.
So that’s where she came into the picture.
Stimulating the Wernicke’s area.
Exciting that specific area of the temporal lobe.
“You’re actually talking about—”
But before she could finish, Darren got a text message, looked at his phone, then interrupted her: “Goss’s wife and son were found dead at the house. The sheriff has Adrian in custody.”
“His son and his wife?” Daniel said.
“Yes.”
Riah had no idea who Adrian was or who the Goss family was, but she was intrigued that more people connected with the twins had died.
Discomfort.
Pain.
Death.
She waited; Darren took a breath. “Well, it looks like we can tell you exactly how you can help us after all.”
No Wind
Charlene and I sit quietly in the back of the executive car as our driver maneuvers through traffic, taking us to Bridgeport.
The silence accentuates how affected we both are by the news of Dr. Tanbyrn’s death.
I think of what Michelle Boyd, my producer at EFN, told me last night about viewers being forced to think about their own mortality if Tanbyrn died, and then being inspired to live better lives themselves.
But that’s not exactly how I feel.
Not inspired to live a better life for myself — inspired to bring down the people who took his life from him. That was more like it.
In a way, I feel like I did yesterday afternoon when I was facing down Abina’s murderer in the forest in Oregon — a sharpening of my senses, a dialing in of my attention.
And it felt good.
It’s like the higher the stakes are being raised, the clearer my focus is becoming. It reminds me of the times when I was performing my stage show and I would do stunts other people referred to as death-defying.
I always liked those.
Kinda miss them.
Knowing that I’m all in, that there’s no turning back and no backing down, it’s what I’m made to do. And it’s good to have that feeling back. I just wish it wasn’t coming today on the heels of someone’s death.
I couldn’t shake the thought that the footage of the suicide bomber and his two associates blowing up was one of the keys to unlocking what was going on here.
On the plane, I’d made a mental note to take a closer look at the footage, and I figure now’s probably a good time to do so.
To give Charlene and me privacy, I close the sliding glass shield between the front and back seats. Then, on my laptop, I pull up the video Fionna had sent me. We watch it several times, study it carefully, looking for anything we might have missed earlier.
But find nothing.
Just when I’m about to abandon the idea, Charlene motions to me. “Hang on.” She reaches over, taps the space bar, pauses the video. “I think I saw something. Back it up a little bit.”
I finger-scroll backward, to the moments immediately preceding the explosion.
She points to the screen. “There. Outside the window, across the street. You can see it between the gap in the shades. A glint.”
I enlarge that part of the video, study it closely. “On the third-floor window of that building.”
“Yes.”
I zoom in on the image even more, but the footage isn’t the highest resolution and the image becomes blurry. I back it up a bit, and Charlene reads my mind: “Could that be a scope? From a sniper’s rifle?”
The picture isn’t clear enough for me to tell for sure. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”
“Play it again. From the start.”
We cue the video at the beginning: the men in the room, the table with the vest and explosives, the man tugging the curtains partway closed, the glint, the explosion—
“Why doesn’t it billow outward?” I whisper.
“What?”
In the sharp sunlight I really can’t tell for sure. “Let me play it through again.”
I start at the beginning again, pause the video just before the explosion, then play the footage forward as slowly as the computer will let me.
“The curtain. It looks like it billows into the room as the explosion happens.”
Once more we study that crucial moment in the video, and it certainly does appear that a fraction of a second before the explosion occurs, the curtain on the left side swirls inward.
“The wind?” she suggests. “Or a breeze from the ceiling fan?”
“There wasn’t any wind, there weren’t any ripples in the curtain earlier, and the ceiling fan wasn’t on. So that leaves us with …”
It’s all about sight lines, misdirection, and—
“A bullet passing through it.” She leans back in her seat. “It’s a fake. A sniper shot the vest, blew it up.”
Expectation. The audience sees what they expect to see.
I think through what we know, balance it against what we don’t. “Let me ask Xav if that type of C-4 would detonate from the impact of a sniper’s bullet.”