Ramsey slumps in his bonds, eyes closed, chin on his chest. He appears to be sleeping, as if four savage murders have exhausted him. He’s a sizable specimen, football-linebacker material.
His blond hair is discolored by the spilled life of others, stiff and matted and spiked. Spattered face. Streaked clothes. Resting on the chair arms, his strong hands are gore-mottled, the creases of the knuckles dark with encrusted blood.
Taratucci, who looks as though he changed careers from Mafia muscle, sits in a chair about five feet from Ramsey. His pistol rests on his thigh and ready in his hand.
Solomon wears a better suit than Taratucci’s, a tailored white shirt, and a club tie. His receding hair is white at the temples, his features patrician, his posture ramrod when he rises from a chair, his manner like that of a cultured attorney for a mainline law firm in business since the 1800s.
“Why is this haywire piece of meat still alive?” Radley Dubose asks. “Why didn’t you make him as dead as the four in the kitchen?”
Solomon does his best to present the facts in a dispassionate, lawyerly recitation.
“For injection, we strapped the Corrigan family in the kitchen chairs. The newest iteration of the nanoweb was established in Mrs. Corrigan in three hours forty minutes. The final implant established in about four hours ten minutes. That last one was Ramsey Corrigan.” Solomon glances at the young man in the office chair. “They all responded to the phrase—‘Do you see the red queen?’ We ran the usual control tests. They were fully adjusted people.”
Originally, the sentence that accessed the mind of an adjusted person and compelled him to follow commands was “Play Manchurian with me,” a reference to the classic novel of mind control, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, published in 1959. After Jane Hawk learned the power of those four words and could make an adjusted person obey her, the sentence was changed to “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira,” a line from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hawk, the troublesome bitch, learned that one, too, necessitating the reprogramming of sixteen thousand adjusted people with yet another sentence: Do you see the red queen? This one, like the first, was from the Richard Condon novel, in which a brainwashed assassin, Raymond Shaw, was activated by the sight of the queen of diamonds whenever told to play a game of solitaire.
“We removed the restraints from all four,” Solomon continued. “We instructed them how to search for Travis Hawk, what their role was. We’re almost finished when—” He looks at the teenager, this time with obvious dread. “Ramsey puts his fists to his head and screams. I never heard such a scream, as if he was slammed by pain, rage, and terror all at once. He began to shake violently and scream louder. Something was wrong with the brain implant.”
Solomon isn’t able to maintain his detachment. A slight tremor comes and goes in his voice. Sometimes he pauses before he can continue.
“Kirk Granger, one of ours … the one dead in the kitchen. He rushes to restrain Ramsey before the kid hurts himself, bends over him with fresh zip-ties. Ramsey shrieks a long stream of obscenities worse than you’d hear in the most-violent ward of a prison for the criminally insane, not coherent, just vicious, rank. He comes out of his chair. He bites … bites Kirk’s face … bites it hard. So damn fast, snake-quick. He tears into Kirk’s face, his throat. He rips a carotid, maybe a jugular. Didn’t see how he took the eyes. Kirk is a martial-arts guy … but he’s blinded then dead, taken down in five seconds. Ramsey scrambles across the table, knocks his dad out of a chair, tramps his throat, snatches a cleaver from a rack, swings it. Such power. It’s just ten seconds after he first went nuts.”
Dubose returns to his unanswered question. “Why doesn’t the sonofabitch have five bullets in his head?”
From his chair, without taking his eyes off Ramsey, Taratucci says, “Don’t be a jerk. You notice all the bullet holes in the kitchen cabinets, the walls? He’s like some bat out of Hell, how fast he moves. You can’t hit what won’t be a target.”
Solomon says, “Brother’s dead, mother runs for it. He wants her more than us, maybe to rape before he kills her. His own mother. It’s chaos. But when we inject an entire household, we bring a Taser XREP twelve-gauge, in case there’s effective resistance. So I put a round in his back while he’s on the porch tearing at her clothes.”
“He was so gone,” Taratucci says, “he didn’t know who she was.”
Solomon says, “She was already dead. When he caught her and dragged her down, she broke her neck.”
Staring at Ramsey Corrigan, Dubose speculates. “He knew—he could feel—something was deep inside his head, enslaving him. The control program tried to repress his fear, maybe applied too much pressure, burnt out some neurons, maybe the nanoweb itself badly malfunctioned, whatever, and just kicked his terror into hyperdrive, triggered a rapid-fire psychological meltdown. His psyche came apart like sugar lace. Personality dissolved. Shenneck said this might rarely happen, but he hoped a collapse would end in a catatonic state or in a condition of feeble physical and mental incoherence. He didn’t think an adjusted person, damaged like this, would instead plunge all the way down through the forbidden door.”
“Well,” Jergen says, “damn if that’s not another thing you never shared. What door? Why forbidden?”
“Shenneck said Nature is all about change, progressive change, always refining its creatures. Of course it’s impossible for one of us to revert, through some genetic cataclysm, to an earlier physical form in the evolutionary chain. You can’t go to bed human and wake up an ape. Shenneck said the same is true about our psychological state. If the history of all life from the first lizard onward is like a series of ghosts in our genome, Nature won’t allow us to be haunted backward to a primitive consciousness because of any trauma. Nature will have built into our psyche a forbidden door forever locked against the past of the species, and no event can open it.”
“Or Shenneck was wrong,” Jergen says. “So then … hello, reptile consciousness.”
“I needed all five rounds in the Taser XREP,” Solomon reveals, “just to keep Ramsey disabled long enough for Taratucci and Damon Ainsley to restrain him again.”
Dubose shakes his head. “You should have killed him. Let’s roll the freak outside and do some target practice.”
“Can’t,” Solomon declares. “The main lab in Menlo Park wants to study him, see if they can understand why the breakdown.”
“Bring the monster in for a chat,” Jergen says. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Solomon says, “They’re sending in a Medevac helicopter and a team of CIA black-ops tough guys to load him and get him there.”
“Sedated?”
“They don’t want a sedative used in case it causes further disintegration. They want to study him just as he is.”
“How many black-ops guys?”
“They said four. I want six. They think even four is too many.”
If Ramsey Corrigan has been asleep, now he wakes. He raises his head, which turns slowly left to right, right to left, like a turret on a tank as the gunner seeks a target. He focuses on Jergen.
Although there is nothing inhuman about the man’s eyes, the ferocity of his attention makes his stare more intense than any Jergen has previously encountered. Perhaps because of the horrific carnage in the kitchen, because Ramsey sits here in the blood of others and in his own urine, appearing eerily unconcerned and even confident in spite of being securely bound, his gaze imparts a chill to Jergen. Although his shackles constrain him, he projects an impression of being tightly coiled and ready to strike.
“Kill him now,” Jergen warns.
“I agree,” Solomon says. “I wish I had. But now … the order transferring him to Menlo Park comes from the central committee, through the regional commander, from our cell leader. Anyone who pulls the trigger on Ramsey will be considered a traitor to the revolution. The consequences … well, you know the consequences.”
12