Recursion(60)

Her stomach tightens. “DARPA?”

“Is there anything I can get for you, Helena?”

“Answers. Am I under arrest?”

“No.”

“So I’m being detained.”

He nods.

“I want a lawyer.”

“Not possible.”

“How is that not possible? I’m an American citizen. Isn’t this illegal?”

“Possibly.”

Raj lifts his briefcase and sets it on the table. The black leather has worn through in places and the brass hardware is deeply tarnished. “I know it’s not much to look at,” he says. “It was my father’s. He gave it to me the day I left for America.”

As he begins to fumble with the locking mechanism, Helena says, “There was a man with me on the seventeenth floor of that—”

“Barry Sutton?”

“They won’t tell me what happened to him.”

“Because they don’t know. He was killed.”

She knew it.

Felt it in her bones all week locked in this luxurious prison.

And still it breaks her.

As she cries, her face screws up with grief, and she can feel the stitches pulling across her forehead.

“I’m very sorry,” Raj says. “He shot at the SWAT team.”

Helena wipes her eyes and glares across the table.

“How are you mixed up in all of this?”

“It was the mistake of my life abandoning our project on Slade’s oil platform. I thought he was mad. We all did. Sixteen months later, I woke up one night with a nosebleed. I didn’t know how, or what it meant, but our entire time together on the rig had turned into false memories. I realized you’d achieved something incredible.”

“So you knew what the chair was even then?”

“No. I only suspected you had figured out some way to alter memories. I wanted to be a part of it. I tried to find you and Slade, but you’d both vanished. When False Memory Syndrome first cropped up on a mass scale, I went to the one place I knew would be interested in my story.”

“DARPA? You seriously thought that was a good idea?”

“All the government agencies were discombobulated. The CDC was trying to find a pathogen that didn’t exist. A RAND physicist wrote a memo theorizing FMS could be micro changes in space-time. But DARPA believed me. We started tracking down victims of FMS and interviewing them. Last month, I found someone who claimed to have been put into a chair and sent back into a memory. All they knew was that it had happened in a hotel somewhere in Manhattan. I knew it had to be you or Slade, or the two of you working together.”

“Why would you go to DARPA with something like this?”

“Money and resources. I brought a team to New York. We started looking for this hotel, but we couldn’t find it. Then after Big Bend appeared, we heard chatter that an NYPD SWAT team was planning a raid on a building in Midtown that might have some connection to FMS. My team took over.”

Helena looks out the window across the river, the sun warm on her face.

“Were you working with Slade?” Raj asks.

“I was trying to stop him.”

“Why?”

“Because the chair is dangerous. Have you used it?”

“I’ve run a few diagnostics. Mainly I’ve been getting myself up to speed on the functionality.” Raj pops the lock on the briefcase. “Look, I hear your concerns, but we could really use you. There’s so much we don’t know.” From the briefcase, he pulls out a sheaf of paper and tosses it on the coffee table.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“Employment contract.”

She looks up at Raj. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

“They know the chair is capable of memory return. Do you actually think they’re not going to use it? That genie is never going back into the bottle.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to help them.”

“But if you are willing, you’ll be treated with the respect that’s owed to the genius who invented this technology. You’ll have a seat at the table. Be a part of making history. That’s my pitch. Can I count you in?”

Helena looks across the table with a razor-blade smile. “You can get fucked.”





Day 10


It’s snowing outside, a fragile inch already collected on the windowsill. Traffic creeps along on the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which appears to pass in and out of existence depending upon the intensity of the snowfall.

After breakfast, Jessica unlocks the dead bolt and tells her to get dressed.

“Why?” Helena asks.

“Now,” Jessica says, with the first hint of menace Helena has heard from either of them in the ten days they’ve been together.

Down the freight elevator to the underground parking garage and a row of pristine black Suburbans.

They take the Queens-Midtown Tunnel like they’re heading out to LaGuardia, Helena wondering if they’re flying somewhere, but not daring to ask. They pass by the airport and continue into Flushing, past the rainbow-colored storefronts of Chinatown, then finally pull into a collection of low-rise office buildings that defines nondescript.

Once outside, Alonzo takes Helena by the arm and escorts her up the walkway to the main entrance, through the double doors, then deposits her by the front desk, where a very tall man—at least six and a half feet—stands waiting.