'What are you saying?'
Thomas found himself looking at his hand, at the missing wedding band on his ring finger, thinking of all the neural machinery churning away underneath, making this experience possible.
That
was where Neil was striking. Not at the heart, but at the soul.
'That Theodoros Gyges lives in a world of boogeymen.'
Other than in the back seat of a taxi, Thomas so rarely drove through Manhattan that he found the trip downtown to Federal Plaza vaguely disconcerting. Manhattan had always (and there was no other word for it) flummoxed him. The scale was nothing short of geological, as though the streets and avenues were river beds sunk canyon-deep into some ancient Martian plain. But the
feel
… At once archeological, like a vast inscription with Central Park the indent of some God-King's seal, and yet statistical, like a great 3-D bar graph, charting the sum of human hopes against the GDP of nations—a Powerpoint presentation frozen in monumental stone.
New York, Neil had once told him, was braille for a blinded God—the one place where the bumps of human ingenuity towered high enough for divine fingers to read. When Thomas had asked what it spelled out, Neil had replied: 'Three words: "
Fuck. You. Too
."'
'So what do you think, professor?' Sam asked. 'If Gyges is Cassidy's first premise, what is it?'
'I'm not entirely sure,' Thomas said absently.
Nothing made sense. That was the heartbreaking truth. Nora fucking Neil. Neil murdering innocents. Sam pursuing him, career hound that she was. Europe freezing to death. Moscow gone—or a good chunk of it, anyway. Even a fool could see there was no plan, no hidden author.
Everything shouted indifference.
Everything
. And those who thought otherwise, who embraced their hardwired weakness for simplicity, certainty, and flattery, simply made it worse. Voting for hardline rhetoric. Killing in the name of x, y or z.
Why couldn't they just play the game and let the world die?
Neil's words… from the previous night.
'Well, we need to come up with something,' Sam said. 'Something to wow Shelley. We're not going to catch this guy without your help, professor.'
Is that what he wanted? To hunt Neil?
He's hurting people.
What did it matter?
'Did you hear me, professor? Professor Bible?
Yoo-hoo
…'
'Call me Tom,' he said.
Think clear. Think straight.
He had already decided he was suffering some kind of dissociative stress response. The wan feeling of dislocation. The sense of self-estrangement, as though he shammed every smile, every word, every breath. Classic characteristics of the 'crisis phase' of critical incident stress.
Thomas Bible's world had been turned upside down. Like Gyges's staff, it had become unrecognizable.
'Recognition,' he said abruptly, suddenly seeing the answer to Sam's earlier question.
'Go slow, Tom. It's been a long day.'
He looked at Sam and smiled. 'I'll be okay. My brain is more plastic than most.'
'Like my shoes,' Sam replied.
The click of Sam's heels possessed an oily echo as they hustled across the Federal Building's basement parking garage. 'Neil's saying something about recognition,' he explained. 'He's saying recognition—self or other—is simply a matter of wiring.'
Sam frowned in the exhaust-stained gloom. 'I don't get it.'
'Think. Without recognition, there's nobody, just like Gyges said. There are no
people
, only buzzing brains bumping into buzzing brains.'
Sam pondered this over the course of several more clicks. 'So what would Powski be?' she asked as they approached the elevator. 'That pleasure is simply a matter of wiring?'
'Why not?'
Sam scowled, as though struck by something she should have thought of earlier. 'It almost seems as though he's arguing with you. You in
particular
, not the world.'
Thomas felt his stomach clench.
'Why do you say that?'
Her look was penetrating, almost manic in its intensity. 'Because you're the only person who could possibly decipher his message. Without you, he'd be talking over everyone's head, don't you think?'
Why
had
Neil come over last night? Why the confession? He had banged Nora shortly before—her bullshit trip to San Francisco made that clear enough. So what? He screws Nora, then drops by unannounced to drink and break bread with his old buddy, Goodbook? On his way between murders, no less. And on the night before the FBI is sure to start hunting down his old contacts.
Neil Cassidy was probably the most brilliant, most
premeditated
man Thomas had ever known. Sam was right. Neil was playing a game only Thomas knew, which meant he simply
had
to be playing
with
him. But why? Did he simply need him to teach his real opponents, the FBI, how to play? To bring them up to speed? Or was he doing all of this for Thomas's benefit?
Does he hate me that much?
A pang stuck him in the chest. For a moment, he felt like a schoolboy, all alone, abandoned by his only friend. He's
been screwing Nora all this time
… And smiling, clapping him on the back afterward. Didn't that speak of a fixation of some kind, of a pathological hatred?
Not necessarily, Thomas-the-professor had to admit. Friends banged friends' wives all the time, even friends they genuinely loved and respected. If they hated, it was usually to rationalize their betrayal.
Looks good on the prick
, or
Serves him fucking right
. Otherwise, such peccadilloes had surprisingly little impact on the suite of expectations and attitudes that made up friendship. It was as though the two behaviors worked on a different frequency.
'Could be,' Thomas replied, looking away from Sam.
She needs to know! Tell her!
'What's wrong, professor?' Sam asked. Just then, the elevator chimed open.
'Cynthia Powski,' he said, as the doors closed. 'Do you think she might still be alive?'
What have I done?
'Might… But we doubt it.'
'Why's that? He spared Gyges, didn't he?'
'In a living-death sort of way, I suppose he did. But you missed the rest of Cynthia Powski's performance this morning.'
Thomas swallowed. It hadn't occurred to him there might be more. 'What do you mean? What happens?'
Sam hesitated—her face looked all the more beautiful for its concentration. 'There's a break, and when he starts shooting again, Cynthia's still in the throes of passion, but something's changed. The neurologists we consulted think he somehow attached a transmitter to the primary pain pathways to her brain—'
'The spinothalamic and spinoreticular pathways?'
'Exactly, and used it to replace the pleasure control panel or whatever the hell it is he uses in the beginning of the BD.'
Thomas could only stare.
'Then he hands her a piece of broken glass.'
Images of Cynthia—memories from this morning—flashed before his mind's eye, her writhing now soaked in blood and scored by weeping gash after weeping gash.
Sam continued. 'The pain input generated by the resulting tissue damage, they told us, was probably stopped before it reached her brain, and translated into a signal that directly stimulated her pleasure centres. He rewired her like a basement rec-room, professor, then watched her slice her way to ecstasy.'
'My God,' Thomas whispered.
He made her cut herself. He made her
want
to cut herself
…
Sam blinked rapidly. 'Wait till you see it, Tom. There's no God, trust me.'
Churning in his gut.
What the fuck is happening? Wake up… Wake up!
'But then that's Cassidy's point, isn't it?'
Thomas clutched his hands to keep them from shaking.
The Field Office was smaller than he expected, and except for cleaners, apparently abandoned.
'Hard to believe I run the FBI, isn't it?' Sam said, as she gestured to her cubicle.
Thomas smiled, cataloguing—as much out of habit as anything else—the various identity claims and behavioral residues that every workspace sported. The things that said
I belong to this; this is what I do
. Nothing surprised him, except, perhaps, the blue-headed pins arranged in the shape of a heart on her tackboard. He nodded to a NY Rangers cap hanging from a tack. 'You a fan?'
'Fucking A,' she said, settling into her chair. She cracked her knuckles, then began tapping at her keyboard. 'You?' she asked.
'Too much heartbreak.'
'One of
those
, are you?'
'One of those who?'
Sam sorted through a succession of bright windows on her flat screen. 'One of those who think games are about winning.'
'I guess I—'
'Here it is,' Sam interrupted. 'Neil Cassidy's brain.'
The screen was tiled with neural cross-sections, day-glo colored and shaped like chestnuts. For an instant, it seemed impossible that these images could be in any way related to his best friend, let alone to what he had seen on the BD earlier this morning. They seemed too abstract, too clinical, to be the engine of today's events.
But they were.
'According to the appended assessment,' Sam said, 'there's nothing to suggest that Cassidy is missing shame or guilt circuits. He's definitely not a garden variety psychopath, whatever he is.'
But Thomas already knew this. Neil lacked the behavior crucial to psychopathy, or to antisocial personality disorder more generally. He and Neil had been close for a long time, and as good as psychopaths were at bluffing conscience in the short term, they always showed the heartlessness of their hand sooner or later.
'Scary smart though,' Sam added. 'You want me to print these files up for you?'
'Please,' Thomas said. He felt numb. Meeting the FBI was one thing, but coming here, walking the halls of the bureau, was altogether different. It reminded him that it was an institution he was dealing with, with all the perils and pitfalls that represented. You could generally depend on individuals to be rational, but an organization? Especially one as enormous as the FBI. No matter how reasonable the decisions made at this or that labyrinthine juncture, the sorry fact was that you simply could not trust them to add up to anything sane.
'How did you get these?' he asked as the first pages began slipping from the laser printer.
'From the NSA.'
Speaking of monstrous institutions.
'And how did they get them?'
'Low-fields are pretty much part of any government biometric scan, nowadays, especially at sensitive locations.' She shot him her peculiar but endearing slanted smile. 'Would you like to see
yours
?
'You gotta be kidding me.'
'Nope. Check it out.' She flashed through an array of windows, entered a code, then scrolled through what looked like dates and times. Another graphic of a brain, this one three-dimensional, popped onto the screen, animated by shifting colors like the temperature contours on a weather map. 'When I logged you in, this snapshot of your noggin was automatically taken.'
Thomas cursed under his breath.
'Pretty creepy, huh?'
'But this is useless without analysis,' Thomas said. 'What can it possibly tell you?'
A pained smile. 'Analysis comes included. It's a package deal. Look.'
A small window of text opened in the bottom left-hand corner. Thomas swallowed.
'So let's see,' Sam said. 'Subject is agitated: fear and anxiety, mostly, little aggression and absolutely no murderous intent. Whew—that's a relief. The subject also shows signs of grief and disorientation, with—oh, this is interesting—with a strong possibility of deception.' Sam leaned back to look up at him. 'You hiding anything from me, professor?'
Tell her!
Thomas laughed. 'Not consciously, no.'
Sam smiled. 'That's the thing with these things. All hints and probabilities. I've been told that the software improves every year, though.'
'No doubt,' Thomas said grimly. 'Context mapping seems to be the only thing people in my biz are doing any more—that and parallel behavioral testing. That's where the real money is.'
'Context mapping?'
'Yeah, where they correlate different behaviors, emotions, mental tasks and so on to various imaging results across populations. Basically mapping what these patches of color mean in terms of our real-world experience.'
'Mind reading,' Sam said.
'Worse.'
'So then why is the money in—what did you call it?'
'Parallel behavioral testing.' Thomas scratched the back of his neck, trying his best to cultivate a look of almost—boredom. 'Remember how a couple of years back the government made it illegal for corporations to use low-fields on their customers and employees? Well ever since, big business has invested heavily in attempts to bring together the results of various behavioral tests—written, verbal, task-oriented, stuff like that—to various fMRI types. So, if you respond in such and such a way to such and such a test, they can roughly
infer
your low-field, and consequently what kind of customer or employee you'll be. Basically it's given them a crude way around the law. And it's meant big bucks for many a mediocre psychologist.'
People were almost universally shocked when he explained this. But what did they expect? They lived in a social system devoted to the pursuit of competitive advantages. The very structure of the society they so prized, even prayed to, was devoted to getting them to do what others wanted, short of outright coercion.
You were only allowed to push the buttons that people couldn't see.
'Does it work?' Sam asked. Apparently she was more pragmatic.
'You know,' Thomas said with a shrug. 'Less than they hope, more than they admit. You wouldn't believe the bullshit.'
'I work for the FBI.'
'Even so.'
Sam grinned. 'Enough fun for now,' she said, gathering up the printed sheets and handing them to Thomas. 'We need to see if the boss is still lurking around.' She smiled triumphantly, as though anticipating brownie points.