The president said something, but Susan couldn’t make it out. She moved closer. “I’m sorry, sir?”
He tried again. “We haven’t had much luck so far today.”
She looked out the large windows and saw smoke in the sky. “No, sir, we haven’t.”
Secret Service agent Manny Cheung hadn’t recognized Gordon Danbury after his fall in the elevator shaft; it was, as the female agent who had first looked at his body on the roof of the elevator had said, not a pretty sight. But Danbury’s fingerprints had been intact, and running them had quickly turned up his identity. Cheung had known “Gordo”—as he was called—pretty well, or so he’d thought, although he’d never been to his house.
That was being rectified now. Although the Secret Service protected the president, it was the FBI that investigated attacks on him. But the two FBI agents dispatched to Danbury’s home had asked Cheung to join them since he’d been familiar with the deceased. Gordo lived an hour’s drive southwest of DC, in Fredericksburg, Virginia—far enough away that his place hadn’t been affected by the electromagnetic pulse.
It didn’t take long to find what they were looking for. Danbury had an old Gateway desktop computer, with a squarish matte-finish LCD monitor, an aspect ratio that was hard to get these days; both were connected to a UPS box. He’d left them on, with a Microsoft Word document open on the screen. The document said:
Mom,
You’ll never understand why I did this, I know, but it was the right thing. They won’t let me get away, but that doesn’t matter. I’m in heaven now, receiving my reward.
Praise be to God.
Cheung glanced around; there was no sign of a printer. “He expected to die today,” he said. “And he knew we’d find this.”
The FBI agents were both white, but one was stocky and the other thin. The stocky one said, “But he ran.”
“If he hadn’t, he’d have been gunned down,” said Cheung. “Sure, Gordo was a sharpshooter, but he’d have been facing a swarm of armed Secret Service agents; they’d have had no trouble taking him out, and he had to know that. Once he shot the president, he knew he’d be neutralized.”
“Did you know he was religious?” asked the thin FBI man, whose name was Smith, as he pointed at the glowing words.
“No,” said Cheung. “Never heard him mention it.”
“ ‘Praise be to God,’ ” Smith said. “Odd way to phrase it.”
Cheung frowned, then gestured at the computer. “May I?”
“Just a minute,” said the heavier agent, Kranz. He took a series of photos of the computer as they’d found it and dusted the keyboard for prints, on the off chance that the note hadn’t actually been typed up by Danbury.
“Okay,” Kranz said when he was done. “But don’t change or close the file.”
“No, no.” Cheung looked at the screen. The document name, showing in the title bar, was “Mom”—and since it had a name, he must have saved the file at least once. He brought up Word’s file menu, which listed recently opened documents at the bottom, and he noted which folder “Mom” was in. He then hit the Windows and E keys simultaneously to bring up Windows Explorer, navigated to that folder, and found “Backup of Mom.” “An older version of the file,” he said to the two FBI men, “prior to the last save.” He clicked on it, and it opened.
“Looks the same,” said Smith, then, “Oh!”
Oh, indeed, thought Cheung. There was a difference: one single word, the very last word in the file. Instead of ending with “Praise be to God,” in his earlier draft, Gordon Danbury of the United States Secret Service had written, “Praise be to Allah.”
Chapter 12
Eric Redekop woke with a start in the staff sleep room. The door had opened, and someone else had come in to use one of the other cots. He rolled onto his back, resting his head on the donut-shaped pillow, and looked up at the ceiling.
Eric knew that dreams were a key part of the brain’s process of consolidating memories—of determining which of the day’s events were important enough to store permanently. He only remembered his dreams when, as now, he awoke during them. But this dream was—
It was the most astonishing thing. He never recalled colors from his dreams. He’d always imagined that was because the act of dreaming predated the advent of color vision in primates. Dogs dreamed, after all, and they didn’t see in color. He’d read about the experiment that had eliminated the part of a dog’s nervous system that caused sleep paralysis—the effect that kept one from acting out one’s dreams. Not surprisingly, it revealed that dogs dreamt about running and hunting and humping.
But he had just dreamt about…well, it was hard to say. The imagery was the usual surreal dreamscape mishmash, but there was vibrant color in it: a scarlet dress, an azure sky, someone with striking emerald eyes, someone else with copper-colored hair.
He’d heard that artistic people were more likely to have vivid dreams, and, of course, Jan Falconi had made the original tiger illustration that a tattoo artist had faithfully transferred to her skin. He guessed that he was now consolidating her latest memories, flying through them the way she herself would have: Janis and the amazing Technicolor dream float.
He opened his eyes and saw a short, thin Asian woman: Christine Lee, the anesthesiologist who had worked on Jerrison. She said something, but he couldn’t make it out; he moved one of the noise-canceling earphones off his ear. “Pardon?”
“Sorry to wake you,” Christine said. “Who’d have thought putting other people to sleep could be so exhausting?”
Eric interlaced his fingers behind his head. “That’s okay.”
“I just need to lie down,” Christine said, apologetically.
“No problem,” Eric replied. He was still tired but was grateful for the intrusion; anything was better than the craziness swirling through his head.
Christine moved over to another cot and sat on its edge, holding her head in her hands.
“Are you okay?” Eric asked. The room was dimly lit, and he couldn’t quite make out Christine’s expression.
“I guess,” she said.
Eric removed the headset and propped his head up with a crooked arm. “You did great earlier today, Christine.”
“What?” she said. “Oh. Thanks. It’s not that.”
He didn’t say anything more, but after a minute she went on. “You know David January?”
Eric did his best Peter Lorre impression. “You despise me, don’t you, Rick?”
He’d hoped for a smile, but all he got was a nod. “That’s him. Little bug-eyed man.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve known him for a few years,” Christine said. “But not well. But now I know all sorts of things about him. It’s like…”
She trailed off. Eric felt his heart pounding. He wanted to say, “It’s like you can access his memories, right?” But he couldn’t say that—that was crazy.
Christine didn’t say anything else, and Eric stared at her, wondering what to say. He felt like he was going out of his mind, but—but—
It hit him. God, yes. He’d been so discombobulated by his encounter with nurse Janis Falconi that he’d forgotten what had happened earlier. But suddenly he recalled Nikki, the distraught woman who had accosted Jurgen Sturgess. She had known his name. He sat up on the cot. “Christine?”
She was still sitting there, head in her hands. “Hmmm?”
“Something very weird is happening.”
Susan Dawson went to the round lobby, which had a very high ceiling; people on the second floor could look down on the comings and goings. Except of course that, right now, there were no comings or goings. Susan had a brief word with the uniformed security guard who kept individuals from getting into the hospital proper without showing ID, then she crossed over to the cafeteria, passing people who looked dazed, people who looked inconsolable, people who looked scared to death.