Implant Read online

“I can’t answer that.”

  “Fine, but it wasn’t just a simple recon mission, was it?” she asked. “And there was no Al-Qaeda camp.”

  “I can’t answer that, either, and what difference does it make, anyway?”

  “I’m looking for some other reason things went to hell besides the implant. If there were no stakes, if the whole thing didn’t matter, then it had to be either a hardware problem, a software problem, or a medical problem. I mean, something that I screwed up in surgery or some overlooked side effect of the brain machine interface. But if you make the mission important, all sorts of other variables enter the equation.”

  “Other variables? Like what?”

  “Like sabotage,” Julia said. “An enemy might have learned about the implant, in spite of all precautions. They could have damaged the implant, or tried to extract data, or something. Or how about this—”

  “You’re thinking too hard.”

  “Am I? Or am I getting close and you’re nervous I’ll figure out something I’m not supposed to? You know what I think? I think there was something else on that implant that Markov and Sarah Redd don’t want me to know about. Sarah tried to dismiss me the second we got data from the implant.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you know or what you think you know. What matters is that you’re going to get in trouble if you keep pushing. Look, it’s fine if you ask me all these questions. But you’d better keep your mouth shut or you’re going to lose your position. No, worse than that, you’ll get us both in trouble.”

  “You sound like a scared child. I’m a doctor. I have a responsibility to my patient. I have every right to know what happened.”

  Terrance stared back without flinching. “Julia, please. You don’t know how the system works like I do. The stakes are bigger than you know.”

  He stood up and went to her side, then picked up her garment bag and took her suitcase. “Come on, honey, let’s get your stuff upstairs. It was a long flight. You had too much time to think. Just let it go. You’ve got a lot to do before the next round of implants. Focus on your work. Leave the operational stuff to other people. That’s what they’re good at.”

  Julia followed him upstairs, feeling more and more glum. Terrance was probably right, and no doubt he’d developed a thick skin for this sort of thing. But it was easy enough for him to blow off the death of one man and the psychosis of another as setbacks. He wasn’t the one who’d drilled holes in their skulls, or the one who’d come to know them as real people during weeks of intensive training.

  There was no way she could let this rest.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  “I eat brains,” the disembodied voice whispered.

  Ian lay on a thin mattress over a ledge in the wall. The voice grew more insistent until he could no longer ignore it. Again and again, the same thing. “I eat brains. Do you hear me? Brains.”

  It was a new wrinkle in the trance that led Ian farther and farther out to sea, always at the edge of consciousness, but never fully aware. He could sometimes hear himself crying out, begging for help or swearing revenge, but this sounded like it came from somewhere else. How long had it been? A week? Two weeks? A month? He didn’t know, and as time went by, a small, semi-conscious part of his brain told him that he would never emerge from this stupor.

  Until yesterday. Yesterday, someone had made a mistake.

  Normally, two men came into his cell, held him down, while a third poured a syrupy liquid into his mouth and forced him to swallow. But yesterday, whatever doctor, nurse, or torturer ordered his medications simply forgot and he missed a dose.

  And so he was semi-lucid when they came in to give him his medication this morning. Ian let his head loll back when they poured in the drugs, feigned a swallowing motion and then spit the mess into the polished stainless steel sink in the corner as soon as they closed the door to his cell.

  A little went down, of course, but he could handle that, and as the day went on, he grew stronger, more alert with every passing hour.

  But strangely, the disembodied voice didn’t go away. “I eat brains. Do you hear me? Why won’t you answer?”

  Ian rose shakily to his feet and looked down at himself. He wore a gray jumpsuit, faded but bleached. A stain ran down his front pocket. No shoes. The neon white bed linens were immaculately clean and smelled like hotel towels. The matte industrial carpet looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. You could spend hours tracing the thin sworls of subdued colors into the clouds of gray and brown. The whitewashed ceiling spanned pale blue walls, maybe fourteen feet overhead with a single, recessed bulb in the middle of the room. High in one corner was a window, smaller than his head and out of reach, but barred anyway, on the opposite side of the room from the small porcelain toilet. The door was a contour in the wall, no handle, with a small slit opening at the base and an even smaller one at eye level.

  “I eat brains.”

  Ian turned, but couldn’t see the source of the voice. “Who is that? What do you want?”

  “You’re awake!” the voice said. “The Almighty thought you’d never wake up, or maybe that you were completely nuts. Unlike the rest of us,” the hoarse voice added with a hollow laugh that sputtered into a coughing fit. “What’s your name?”

  Ian rubbed his eyes, trying to decide how much to tell. “Ian Westhelle. You?”

  A satisfied grunt. “Joe Kilroy. That’s what I told them, too. Bastards. They may have me locked up, but they’ll never get my real name. They’re afraid of my powers.”

  “You mean the voice?”

  “No. That’s easy. Can’t you see the air vent? Haven’t you heard the pounding?”

  “No,” Ian admitted. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “I think they’re replacing the air conditioning system, which is why it’s been so hot sometimes and so cold other times. Ever since they started working, voices carry. The duct work is exposed, maybe. We can communicate up and down the line. Gandhi talks to the Almighty, who can talk to me, and now I can talk to you.”

  “But who are you?” Ian asked. “And what’s all this stuff about eating brains?”

  A long silence. “I’ve said too much.”

  Ian shrugged and closed his eyes, trying to decide if the strange conversation was all in his head. Ever since the implant had been placed there were moments when he sensed more than just vertigo or confusion, like there really was another voice in his head. But he’d never heard it quite so audibly.

  And the voice sounded crazy. He should know. There were some loons in Ian’s family. His father’s sister was into séances and invoking spirits. She called herself sangorma, a witch doctor. One of his first memories of seeing her as a child was when she’d cornered him at a family party, taken him through a beaded curtain made from tiny plastic skeletons into a dark room, and proceeded to “channel” his foot. She told him he had “evil toxins” in his body and started chanting to get them out. His father came in and hauled him out of there, but not before he heard his aunt panic that if she wasn’t allowed to finish the toxins would be let loose in her house and fall on her.

  The voice returned. “What’s my magical power? The government gave it to me. I can eat a man’s brains and everything he knows, every person, every ability, every memory, becomes mine.”

  “That’s, er, amazing,” Ian said.

  Kilroy must have heard the skepticism in his voice. “Ah, but it’s true. At Guantanamo, I opened a man’s skull with a forensic anthropologist’s bone saw, scooped his brains out with my bare hands and ate them raw, still hot and steaming. It tasted a little bit like fresh sheep intestines. You know what that tastes like, right?”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “And suddenly I could understand—but not speak—Waziri, I knew a little bit of classical Arabic, or enough to recite the Koran from memory front to back, and I knew the location of Osama bin Laden’s safe house in South Waziristan, along the Pakistani border with Afghanistan.” The voice paused as if in r
eflection. “It’s quantum mechanics, you know. Roger Penrose. That’s what consciousness is all about. And memory. It’s in the quarks. Up, down…and strange. When the quarks get in your blood, some of them lodge in your brain. But I’m different, my brain knows how to find them, make room for the new quarks. I think it works better if you know the full name of the brain’s owner, Ian Westhelle.”

  This explanation would have solidified Ian’s belief that Kilroy was insane, except for the cortical implant in his own head.

  “Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to gain a taste for fresh brains,” Kilroy said with a sigh. “I ate the wrong brain and ran afoul of the dreaded Fer-de-lance.”

  “Fer-de-lance? Isn’t that a poisonous snake?”

  “Yes, it’s a snake. A poisonous snake who treacherously sank its fangs into my back when I was least expecting it. Three years ago two men came in the middle of the night and kidnapped me from my flat in Paris—beautiful place overlooking the Seine, with a delightful little patisserie on the corner and this French maid with the cutest pair of nichons you’ve ever seen who would come every Saturday and…wait, where was I? Ah, yes, so they kidnapped me, and brought me here. And two years passed and I never spoke to a single person, until they started to work on the duct work shortly before they brought you in, ranting, and raving.” He paused. “That patisserie, what I wouldn’t give for one of their tartes aux framboise, right about now.”

  Another sigh, as Kilroy seemed to be transporting himself to happier times. “The Almighty said that some day, I will find the Fer-de-lance and take my revenge. He’s called the Almighty for a reason, you know. He can see the future, even make stuff happen. But wait, I need to tell him that I’ve met you. Just a minute.”

  “If he’s the Almighty, doesn’t he know already?” Ian asked, but Kilroy had disappeared.

  Once Ian was alone, there was nothing to stop the flood of memories; they came first as smells. He could smell his own blood, could smell explosives and smokeless powder. The smell of the desert air.

  And the sound of tons of rock, falling, burying his friend. Oh, God, Kendall was dead. Ian had been half out of his mind with rage when they’d tried to take him prisoner after he’d climbed under the burned out RATEL armored personnel carrier. What had they done? The bastards. What had he done to end up here?

  They’d drugged him at some point, but he had a strange, dream-like memory of someone prodding his head with instruments, and later, of flying somewhere, bound, with a hood over his head. Where was this place?

  Kilroy’s voice came through a minute later. “Are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Did you talk to the Almighty?” It sounded silly coming out of his mouth.

  “I did. And he told Gandhi. They want to know your skills.”

  “My skills?”

  “Yeah, what’re you in for? Why is the government hiding you here? You’re not some foot soldier who went AWOL in Iraq. You must know something, have something dangerous. They had you drugged, didn’t they? Why is that? So I’m wondering what kinds of skills you’ve got.”

  “Let’s see, skills. I can hold my breath for more than three minutes, can run ten miles with a seventy pound pack. I can do a handstand on one hand. Uhm, what else? I can multiply big numbers in my head.”

  “I see,” Kilroy said. “You think this is a trick, some way to get you to reveal classified information. You think I’m not really a fellow prisoner but an enemy spy.”

  “That wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me, but sure, why not? Or maybe it’s a test, to see if I know how to keep my mouth shut. But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t want to talk about it, not with a disembodied voice that I’m half convinced doesn’t exist.”

  “So now I’m a manifestation of your insanity. Quite possible. There’s a fine line between insanity and genius. On the flip side, maybe you and the Almighty are simply my own alter egos—he is the side that knows everything and you are the side that admits nothing. In any event, I’ll bet you know some really good stuff,” Kilroy added in a wistful voice. “It’s too bad I can’t eat your brain, Ian Westhelle.”

  “No thanks. There’s been too much messing around with my brain already.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Kilroy asked.

  Ian didn’t like the eager tone. “Never mind.”

  “Fine, play hard to get. Have you made contact with the guy on the other side yet? You know, keep the chain going down the line.”

  “I don’t think there is a guy on the other side. There’s a window high up on the far wall, so I think I’m at the end of the building.”

  “A window? What kind of window?”

  “It’s barred, with what looks like plexiglass on the other side.”

  “Can you see out?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ian admitted. “I haven’t tried yet.”

  “Well try, for God’s sake. Gandhi thinks we’re in Guantanamo, my guess is somewhere in the States. We asked the Almighty, but he said we were not ready for that knowledge yet.”

  “Meaning, he doesn’t know.”

  “I’d like to believe that he does,” Kilroy said.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, as my father used to say,” Ian said.

  “Something like that,” Kilroy said with a laugh. “Anyway, you can’t take those nicknames too literally. After all, you wouldn’t expect a guy named Gandhi to have the power to kill with his brain.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Well, I haven’t actually spoken to the man. Since he lives on the other side of the Almighty, I get everything second hand. He might only exist inside the Almighty’s head, and since the Almighty might only exist inside my head…”

  “And you may only exist inside mine,” Ian added.

  “Exactly. It makes the information somewhat suspect. Well, according to the Almighty, Gandhi can concentrate on a man’s heart until it stops beating. He’s killed half a dozen guards. That’s why any guards in this cell block wear lead-lined suits and diving helmets. That works well enough, but sooner or later a skeptic will take off his helmet to eat a Snickers bar or take a smoke and clank, his heart will stop beating.”

  “How do you know what they wear? I thought you said you never saw the guards.”

  “I don’t,” Kilroy said. “But Gandhi can see through walls. But how about that window?”

  “Don’t know why you need me, with Gandhi and the Almighty as friends. But okay, give me a minute.” Ian looked up, tried to figure how he would get his fingers on the sill. May as well try the straightforward approach first.

  He moved to the other side of the room and took a run, then jumped for the windowsill. He fell a few centimeters short. A few weeks ago, when still in training in Virginia, he could have done it. Now, he was too weakened by his ordeal in Africa and a week, two weeks of being drugged.

  He climbed onto the edge of his bed and took a leap into the corner. His bare toes dug into the corner and pushed off and then the fingers of one hand grasped the windowsill. He swung his other arm up and then he had the sill. From there, it was a simple matter to grab the bars and lift himself to look out. The muscles in his forearms bulged at the strain.

  Behind the bars was a thick barrier of plexiglass, and the bars were too close together to reach his arm through to touch it anyway, but it let in a view of his surroundings.

  He stared across a flat, barren landscape of brush and dirt and rocks. There was a mountain in the distance, covered in browning vegetation. It was not the rainy season, wherever this was.

  “It’s not Guantanamo,” he said. He told Kilroy what he could see. “Maybe I’m still in Africa.”

  “What happened in Africa?”

  “No, uh-uh. Not going there.” His arms were getting tired, but he strained to turn his head and get as much of a glimpse as he could see. “No, it doesn’t look like Africa. I think that’s sage brush. And there’s a bit of snow on top of that mountain.”

  He dropped to the ground.
/>   “Somewhere in the States, most likely,” Kilroy said. “Montana or New Mexico or something.”

  “Those are big, empty states,” Ian said. “A man could get lost there. Or hide.”

  “You’re thinking about escape.”

  “Of course.” The words tumbled out as he momentarily dropped his guard.

  “But why?”

  “Why?” Ian didn’t understand the question. “Why would I want to escape from this lovely facility, where they keep me drugged, where nobody tells me what I did wrong or why they treat me like a dangerous criminal?”

  “But maybe it’s temporary,” Kilroy said. “Maybe they’ll rehabilitate you, or give you a trial where you can explain why they’re wrong, why you don’t belong here. They’ll see their mistake, give their apologies and you’ll be a free man.”

  “Does that happen?”

  “Who knows? Hasn’t happened to me or my friends, but you never know. You could wait and find out. You don’t need to escape. Even if you could figure out a way, it might just be counterproductive.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I do,” Kilroy said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Fine, since you’re so brilliant,” Ian said. He paced the cell, studying the patterns in the carpet. “You tell me why I want to escape.”

  “Justice. Righteous indignation.”

  Ian stopped, looked up at the spot on the wall that seemed to harbor Kilroy’s voice. He thought about Kendall Rose, dying in the desert. He thought about their training with the implant, he thought about the time they almost died in Afghanistan.

  And he thought about his first week at football camp, all that stupid stuff he’d said. He’d been in the bathroom, talking to one of the white linebackers, repeating a bit of racial nonsense so stupid Ian must have heard it from his dad when talking about rugby.

  “You see Rose get sacked?” the linebacker said with a chuckle. “He must’ve been twenty yards behind the line of scrimmage. Kept running backwards.”

  “White guy never would’ve done that,” Ian said.

  “Huh?”