Neuropath

  Gyges smiled bitterly. So it's therapy after all, his look said. 'And what might those be?'

  Thomas shrugged. 'Why? For starters. Don't you want to know why he did this to you?'

  The man turned back to the drinks. 'Oh, I know why.'

  'You do?'

  'But of course. I'm being punished.'

  Thomas nodded carefully. For some reason he said, 'For your sins…'

  'Yes. For my sins.'

  'And what sins are those?'

  Gyges gave the Scotch a curious swirl, as though soaking the ice cubes. 'Are you a priest?' he asked as he handed Thomas his drink. For the first time Thomas noticed how assiduously the man avoided looking at either of their faces.

  'No,' Thomas replied.

  'Then my sins have nothing to do with you.' He turned abruptly, not toward Sam, but in her general direction. His mannerisms were beginning to remind Thomas of a blind man. 'Psychologists,' he said, with easy contempt. 'They want all your sins to be symptoms, don't they?'

  'I apologize, Mr Gyges,' Thomas said, setting down his drink. 'Would you prefer—'

  'Professor Bible thinks Cassidy is making some kind of argument,' Sam ventured. 'We need your help, Mr Gyges.'

  The billionaire finally looked her full in the face. His eyes reflected a peculiar horror. 'Argument? What kind of argument?'

  Sam glanced at Thomas. 'That nothing has meaning,' she said. 'This might sound hard to believe, but Neil Cassidy believes that there's no such thing as… as…'

  'People,' Thomas finished for her. 'He thinks that much of what we believe, things like purpose, meaning, right and wrong, are simply illusions generated by our brains.'

  Gyges's eyes glistened with tears. 'Well he's certainly wrong there, isn't he?'

  'Wrong where?' Thomas asked.

  'About none of this having meaning.'

  'I'm not sure I understand.'

  'Of course not,' he snapped without explanation. He shook his head. 'Just what is it you want?'

  Thomas and Sam exchanged a nervous glance. The man possessed a peculiar presence, something at once awesome and pathetic. Thomas thought he finally understood what Sam had said earlier regarding men who piss two paces back from the urinal. 'Did Neil say anything to you about a… about a premise?'

  'Neil?'

  'I mean Cassidy. Did he?'

  Gyges stood quietly for what seemed a long while.

  'I want to say, yes,' Gyges finally said. 'But I really can't remember.'

  'Are you sure?' Sam asked.

  Gyges scowled. 'Do you know where my favorite place is, Agent Logan?'

  Thomas put a hand on Sam's knee—whether to warn or to reassure her, he couldn't say.

  'No,' she said. 'Where?'

  'The subway,' the man replied with a pained smile. 'The fucking subway is where I feel the most at home. The most… normal. At first it was just a… a comfort, you know? But it's become far more. Far, far more. Now it feels like Christmas with dead relatives or something. Just sitting there, swaying with strangers.'

  He turned to refill his tumbler. 'Pathetic, huh?' he called over his shoulder.

  'Would it be better,' Thomas ventured, 'if we did this by phone?'

  'Oh, now he humors me,' Gyges said to the vaulted ceiling. He turned, hesitated, then looked at them as though on a dare. He smiled warmly and said, 'Get the fuck out.'

  Thomas and Sam could only stare.

  'Which word seems to be the problem?' Gyges asked. 'Get? Fuck? Out?'

  The two of them hurried to their feet. 'Can we call you, Mr Gyges?' Sam asked. 'We really—'

  'Jeeesuss!' the burly man cried. 'Get! The fuck! Out!' With each word he stomped forward, like a silverback broadcasting an imminent charge.

  Thomas stumbled on the curled edge of a Persian. Sam steadied him. His arms wide, Gyges herded them toward the foyer. They paused before the door.

  Thomas looked up, saw the three of them reflected in a heavy, rococo-framed mirror.

  'Three strangers,' Gyges said with a calm that seemed frightening given the savagery of moments before. 'Do you know what it's like, Dr Bible, to live nowhere? To look and look and find yourself nowhere?'

  In a curious sense, Thomas did, but he wasn't about to say so. 'You're standing right here, Mr Gyges.'

  'Am I? I'm not so sure.' A contemplative scowl. 'But you don't realize what it's like, do you? You think I see you, that I know you, that the problem is that every time I look away I forget who you are. But it's not like that. Not at all. When I stare at you—like this, like I'm staring at you right now—I don't recognize you from one second to the next. And it's not like your face becomes something new every moment, something that I've never seen before. It's just unknown. Unknowable…'

  Gyges turned from the mirror to Thomas.

  'When I look into the mirror, Dr Bible, I'm not there. But the kicker is that you aren't either. For me, there is no you. Just a voice. A voice from the dark.'

  For a moment Thomas could only stare at him. 'You're suffering a brain injury,' he said lamely. 'You need to underst—'

  'Brain injury?' the bearded man replied. 'Brain injury? Is that what you think this is?' Shaking his head, he strode past them and yanked open one of the oak-stained doors.

  Thomas turned as he crossed the threshold. 'Then what is it?'

  'You're not a priest,' Gyges snapped.

  The door pounded shut, swallowed the world before Thomas's face.

  Neither of them said anything until the elevator doors closed.

  'What do you make of that?' Sam finally asked.

  'I don't know. He was drunk, for one. But beyond that? Could be he's suffering some post-traumatic stress…' he trailed, struggling to make sense of what had just happened. 'One thing's for sure.'

  'What's that?'

  'Did you notice how he behaved around us? The utter absence of any eye contact. His body language. Almost cringing from our presence.'

  'So?'

  Thomas breathed deeply. 'So, we were monstrosities to him. Faceless monstrosities.'

  '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 p
revious 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 l
abyrinthine 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.'