Death & the City Book Two (26 page)

"Trust principles can be engineered," says Ash. "Trust games, extreme team-building sports - like white-water rafting, abseiling, skydiving, and whatever puts your life in someone else's hands. And, of course, the old neuro-linguistic programming charisma party tricks, for the indoor sofa-surfer types."

I find my focus of memory shifting away from Alice's predicament and back to my own, trusting Connor. I know I shouldn't forget that concept, about trust being engineered. That's what team-building weekends are based on. Maybe I should be more aware of Connor trying to set me up in that sense - not less cautious.

"Or, we just work out what her fairytale is that she tells herself still," James remarks. "Out of curiosity, do you think it's possible to trigger a psychotic episode in a clinical self-monitor?"

I shrug and lean on the desk.

"If you're talking about loss of control, sounds like any psychopathic self-monitor's idea of a dream holiday," I remark. "Most of the fun I've had has been jumping up and down on the roofs of police vans in my pyjamas. A psychotic episode to me is just like a fat person's Black Forest Gateaux binge. I know it's a bad idea and potentially lethal, but I like to dream about it."

"So you do have a personality disorder, then?" he asks. "It's not that you have issues with your functionality or reality. Your emotional responses are skewed in favour of an alternate reality."

"Inappropriate emotional response is about right," I agree. "Why do you ask?"

"If she self-monitors, or has been monitoring this fake reality she's believed in for however long, how would you disintegrate it?"

"I don't think it ever fully disintegrates," I say thoughtfully. "A psychotic state occurs when too much reinforcement, or emphasis, or coincidence occurs in a specific thread of the individual's life story. Usually a thread of fantasy, like having a crush on a celebrity, or in a negative sense, that a partner is having an affair. A few coincidences might lead to the individual actively looking for further reinforcement. It can be only one thing, or a series of things they choose to emphasize, that make the fantasy thread their new full-blown reality. Do you know the Mandelbrot Set for fractals? They only have to go down a certain theoretical pathway from Reality to Fantasy, and if they see patterns they recognise as having previously reinforced their old reality, appearing again, reinforcing their fantasy, the repetition or echoes of the same pattern reinforce the belief that this is the new reality for them. And outlines what their expectations are for the outcome. It's what marriage guidance counsellors deal with, when facing couples repeating past relationship patterns, due to assumed characteristics or behaviour of a partner. It's quite literally pattern-matching. With her, I reckon you'd only need to get her in a bar with a guy acting shady and suspicious, and she'd be itching to get her hands on him. All over him like a rash. Again, quite literally. Telling herself a new twisted fairytale."

"So you'd have to work out what her pattern is and match it," James remarks, while Ash shows me his search results for fractals on Boogle Images.

"Can you identify the suspect?" he says jokingly.

"When you think about chat-up lines and NLP, basically what men learn, is how to pattern match themselves to women in order to get some fundamental responses from them, but not necessarily learn anything about each other in a healthier fashion," I say, pointing out the Mandelbrot Set for Ash. "Why, are you thinking of giving her a job?"

"She might make a good informer if we approach her in the right way," James admits. "Sleeping with subjects would be optional. She'd have to do her own seducing, though, if that was her method of choice - no pimp setting up blind dates for her. We'd want the information she came back with to be real, not made up as part of some sex fantasy."

"So if you recruit her as a super grass, what are her long-term promotion prospects?" I query, thinking about my earlier theories on Jay and Bob.

"Don't think we'd need to offer her any. Most likely she'd continue to write an enormous blog and then try to sell the movie rights to her life story. Either that, or she'd suddenly grow a moral backbone, quit blogging and end up as Special Obs. She won't be the first sperm-jacker on their books," Ash says, selecting a fractal image, and setting it as his on-screen wallpaper. "Probably we'll call her back to do another statement. See if her story changes or if she sticks to it. Then work from there, depending on what that gives us. What's the equation for this again?"

I pick up a pen and write on the clipboard next to him.
Z
_n+1
=
Z
_n
²
+ C
.

"How would you translate that into psychosocial manipulation like NLP?" he asks, still watching Alice on the screen.

"
Z
_n
is the target's existing perception of self, you equal
C
," I tell him. "By adding yourself to her reality and successfully showing you reinforce and increase her ideal self-identity, you get a self-regenerating fractal reality - she fills in the blanks with her own pattern matching."

"Nice." Ash doesn't take his eyes off the screen, draining the last of his orange squash. "I like your metaphysical polymath skills."

"Warren said you're an engineer," James remarks. "Yuri reckons more of a physicist. Now you sound like a mathematician. What was your science major again?"

"I didn't finish," I say, slightly wary, not knowing if head office kept track of my student alter ego while at University. It was an experiment in privacy, and a whole identity and self-contained world that had nothing to do with door work or the To Do List. "It was Electronics, actually. I never thought about it much though since. Can't remember much either. Voltage, current, power, the basics. Not stuff I've been able to integrate in everyday life psychological theories. Except maybe in finances."

"Ah," says James. "You're a sparks. That explains everything."

"Explains what?"

He grins at me.

"You make all the right connections."

In the interview room, Officer Dibble seems to have a similar thought, along the line of making possible connections.

"Did you ever have to meet female clients… sorry, suspects?" he asks. "Or just men?"

"He said he would set me up with a woman who was really important, but he never got round to it," says Alice. "There was one woman he mentioned a number of times as being his biggest case so far, and I'd have to train really hard to get the experience first, or she'd suss me out. The other girls and I would get drunk and practise, and he would watch, but he said we weren't good enough yet."

"Who was this female target, did he give you a name?"

"No. Just that she was top dog of some big French company that was recruiting all of its science and medical staff from African Universities, so she could pay them less than Western graduates. Also meaning that important skills were being lost by the smaller communities there, who would have benefited from their support and qualifications. That she was making some mockery of African tribal culture as well, but he wasn't specific."

"Okay," Dibble nods. "We'll look into that. He's bound to have - case files, I suppose you'd call it. If he's a genuine agent, we'll find the right people who can talk to us about it."

Chapter 30:
Dressing To Kill

My brain is aching slightly from discussion with James and Ash. James notices I didn't get myself a drink, and offers me a can of ginger beer from his rucksack under the table. I sit down on the spare chair, while on the monitors in the interview room, Officer Dibble reads back Alice's statement to her, and asks her to initial any changes or corrections.

For some reason, something about Ash's posture as he sits opposite me, attentively watching the screen and doodling his ideas on the clipboard next to him, reminds me of 'Yakuza Man' that I saw in Green's Restaurant by the hotel spa. I have a pattern-matching moment of my own. Just a thought. Potentially a big one. But also potentially a psychosis. I decide to keep it to myself.

I'm just wondering now if this was as much about getting an observation of me, as about the interviewee. Which in itself, is a self-centred psychotic ego-trip. Could be a very fine line between work and hallucination.

My phone rings again, and I check Caller I.D. before answering to Connor.

"Hey," I say.

"You avoiding me already?" he teases.

"No, I just couldn't think of a smart enough reply to your text."

"Hmm, okay. I believe you. How's it going?"

"Just discussing
Dungeons & Dragons
in City Central with the lads."

"Yeah, it's called prismatic observation, I'll tell you about it later. Different viewpoints based on different background and experience. Triangle, rectangle, square. You know the drill."

"And different personalities," I agree. "I get the idea. Head office sound a bit quantum physics about it, sounds like they wanted to test the possibility of remote influencing, not just remote viewing."

"Power of the observer over the subject, yeah, I know it," Connor sighs. "Can be draining and bad for the ego. I knew a guy reckoned he moved photons with his mind every time he analysed distant galactic spectral data. You can bet he ended up with a God complex along with all the other worried sick people in The Priory. Draws cartoons now."

"How was it with the site in the woods we found earlier?" I ask.

"Talk about it later. Hoping to move the contents to the lab in a few hours before we lose daylight this evening. We've got to restore it, because it looks like somebody was planning a trip back at some point, we wouldn't want to disappoint them too soon. I'll catch you later after work."

"Cool," I say, and he hangs up, before I realise he's still working out supposedly legitimate ways of hanging out with me unofficially. It's normal conversations like that which temporarily make me forget he's also interested in other stuff to do with me, not just a work colleague, and has caught me out by leaving stuff out of conversation to catch up on out of necessity. Smart ass, I think to myself. Only one official date so far. Remember that. It's a plot device, I tell myself, for some reason still thinking like a literary critic. Even though he's no Dan Brown and his storyline is basically summed up as 'get into my pants' there's no knowing what elaborate games might be employed to get there. I feel like a Hell-raiser trapped in a
Bridget Jones
diary, like Jack the Ripper trapped in the plot of
Pride & Prejudice
. Mr. Ripper doesn't want to think about tea dances and marriage and popping down to gay old Brighton for the summer with Mr. Darcy and friends, any more than I want to think about seducing guys, red wine and the horizontal fandango like Desdemona, Sadie and Mgr Diane.

Maybe head office need an Alice Cooper, for that sort of thing. To get information out of people who talk freely while they're naked, or tied up in some exotic fashion. It's more substantial as evidence, particularly when recorded, and corroborated by additional background information, than the stuff I can read in the gaps between things people normally say and do. That was how I ended up doing the dirty work in the first place. I was replaced as an information filter by electronics and computers.

For some reason, I start wondering if Connor was replaced by some form of advances in Pest Control, meaning his sniper skills were called into alternative use. He hasn't talked about that particular transition yet. Just his personal reasons for switching identity - not for switching jobs.

My phone rings again from head office.

"Okay, looks like you're tailing her for a couple of hours after she leaves," they tell me. "We've subscribed you to her Tweaks and blog posts, so if she breaks any new stories, you'll know the same time as us."

"I don't want that crap on my phone," I complain.

"It's only for the times she's under your direct surveillance, we'll discontinue it the rest of the time," they assure me. "She's got no further appointments, and she's on foot, so just see where she heads and we'll talk to you later."

"She'll be escorted out of the front entrance, you can pick her up from the side," James tells me, after I disconnect the call. "Good luck. It was nice meeting you, by the way."

"Same," Ash agrees, standing up to shake hands. "Keep up the good work, Buffy."

I still have an odd feeling about those two, as I leave the remote viewing suite and head downstairs. A little bit deja-vu, a little bit psychotic hallucination. I'll have to analyse it later, if I get time to remember fully who I am and write my own diary, instead of living someone else's fantasy one.