“Why did you lie to us? Answer the question?” Kingsley barked. For months they had tracked down every man who had stayed in the hotel who fit the description Frat Boy had given them. They had chased down marketing executives, businessmen on holiday, tourists and locals. But nothing of significance had turned up. After the better part of a year, they began to wonder if they were chasing a ghost, a phantom, a mirage. The whole team was frustrated and on edge. Just yesterday the Conclave had ordered them to give up the mission and return to New York. Jordan was gone, case closed. But Kingsley decided they needed to pay their witness another visit.
“Let me rephrase this: who told you to lie to us?” Kingsley asked.
“Nobody . . . I don’t know what you want me to say . . . I don’t remember that night. I don’t even remember you guys. Who are you? What are you doing in my mom’s kitchen?”
“Why were you in Rio?” Ted Lennox asked mildly, playing good cop.
“A buddy of mine was getting married. . . .” he slurred. “We were there for the bachelor party.”
“You went all the way to Rio for a bachelor party? You?” Mimi scoffed, peering through to the real world, looking down at his prone form sprawled on the table. The guy looked like the farthest he ever traveled was the corner 7-Eleven.
“Hey, I lived in New York not too long ago. I was a banker. We always went away whenever anyone got married. Thailand. Vegas. Punta Cana. But then I lost my job and had to move back in with my parents. Don’t be a hater now.”
“Laid off “? Sam Lennox asked.
“No . . . just . . . I don’t remember things that well anymore. I took a leave of absence and haven’t gone back. Something wrong up here,” he said, knocking on the side of his skull with a worried look on his face.
Come to think of it, something about the witness did seem odd. Mimi remembered Frat Boy differently. The guy they had questioned a year ago had been much more articulate and alert, much cockier. She had found it strange that they had tracked him down in the boondocks. She had assumed anyone who stayed at such a fancy hotel also came from a fancy place.
“He’s not lying,” Sam said. “Look at his prefrontal cortex. It’s clear.”
“He doesn’t remember that night,” Ted agreed.
“Bring it up again,” Kingsley said. ‘this doesn’t make sense.”
Mimi pulled up the memory for a second time. The four of them watched it intently. It was the same: the tall man, the bundle, the cigarette. But Sam was right, his prefrontal cortex showed the guy wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t remember it.
“Oh, dear lord. How could we have missed this? Look at this. Force! Lennox! Look?” Kingsley said, magnifying the edge of the picture.
Then she saw what Kingsley saw: a slight tear on the border of the guy’s memory. It was like a seam that had been repaired. It was so fine, and so well done, you would never even notice it. Whoever had done this was good. You needed to be majorly advanced in the glom to pull this off . A false memory expertly weaved into a real one. Enough to have fooled a team of Venators for the better part of a year. Imprinting false memories on Red Bloods was very dangerous. It could mess people up: turn them into raving lunatics, unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Or turn a big city banker into a slacker who lived with his parents.
“Let him go.” Kingsley said wearily.
Mimi nodded. She released her hold on his mind, and the four of them stepped back into the real world. Their witness was slumped over the table, snoring.
This was no suspect. This was a victim.
CHAPTER 6 Bliss
Every day since that morning on the mountaintop in the middle of Corcovado, the hunchbacked mountain, Bliss had to ask herself three important questions.
Who am I? Where am I? What happened to me?
She’d started the practice one day not too long ago when she’d woken up to find she couldn’t remember why she was so sad. Then the next day, she couldn’t remember whether or not she was an only child. But what really scared her was the day she’d looked in the mirror and thought she saw a stranger. She had no clue who the girl with the red hair was. And that’s when she got the idea to ask herself the three questions every morning.
If she didn’t take the time to remember who she had been, then the Visitor would take over completely. And the real Bliss Llewellyn, the girl who had once failed her driving test in an old 1950s Cadillac convertible, would be no longer. Not even this half-faded memory of her that lingered in a small corner of her brain.
So. They were in the Hamptons. It was morning. She was getting up for breakfast; her servant was calling for her. No; not her servant?her father. ‘servant? was the Visitor’s word for Forsyth, not hers. Sometimes that happened. Sometimes she would find she could hear the Visitor so clearly. But then a door would slam, and she would be on the other side, in the dark again. The Visitor had access to her past, to her entire life, but she had no entree to his. His conversations with Forsyth were behind a closed door, his thoughts hidden in shadow.
A part of her was relieved that the Visitor did not talk to her anymore. She dimly remembered that there had been little conversations between them once, but those had ceased. Now there was just silence. She understood it was because he didn’t need to communicate with her any longer to assume control. He used to take over during her blackouts, but now he did not need them to do what he pleased. He was in the driver’s seat. Still, she wasn’t exactly abandoned on the side of the road, either. She had answered the first question successfully, hadn’t she?
She was Bliss Llewellyn. The daughter of Senator Forsyth Llewellyn and stepdaughter of the late Bobi Anne Shepherd. She had grown up in Houston until her family moved to Manhattan soon after her fifteenth birthday. She was a student at the Duchesne School on E. 96th Street, and her favorite hobbies were, in no particular order: cheerleading, shopping, and modeling. Oh my god, I’m a bimbo, Bliss thought. There had to be more to her than that.
Start again. Okay. Her name was Bliss Llewellyn, and she’d grown up in a big, grand house in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood, but her favorite part of Texas was her Pop-Pop’s ranch, where she would ride horses over lush prairies blanketed with wildflowers. Her favorite subject in school was Art Humanities, and one day she had hoped to own her own art gallery or, barring that, become a curator at the Met.
She was Bliss Llewellyn, and right now she was in the Hamptons. An upscale beach community two hours away from Manhattan (depending on traffic) where people from the city went to “get away from it all” only to find themselves smack-dab in the middle of everything. August in the Hamptons was as frantic as September in New York. Back when she was still just Bliss and not a vessel for evil (or V.F.E., as she had come to think of her situation when she wanted to laugh instead of cry), her stepmother had dragged them out here because it was ‘the thing to do.” Bobi Anne had been big on ‘the thing to do” and had compiled a huge list of dos and don’ts – you’d think she had been a magazine editor in a former life. The sad thing about Bobi Anne was that she always tried so hard to be fashionable and always ended up the complete and total opposite.
Images from Bliss’s last real summer in the Hamptons began to flood her brain. She was an athletic girl, and had spent the three months horseback riding, sailing, playing tennis, learning to surf. She had broken her right wrist again that year. The first three times had been because of sports, skiing, sailing, and tennis. This time she’d fractured it for a stupid Hamptons-style reason. She’d tripped on her new Louboutin platforms and landed on her wrist.
Now that she had answered the first and second questions in detail, she had no choice but to move on to the third. And it was always the third question that was the most difficult to answer.
What happened to me?
Bad things. Terrible things. Bliss felt herself grow cold. It was funny how she could still feel things, how the ghost-memory of being alive and fully aware through each of her senses lingered. She could feel her phantom limbs, and when she slept, she dreamed she was still living an ordinary life: eating chocolates, walking the dog, listening to the sound of the rain as it drummed on the roof, feeling the softness of a cotton pillowcase against her cheek.