The Eighth Day (30 page)

The fact that she was also an Academy Award–nominated actress never penetrated his mind—which he was literally fucking himself out of right now. As happens in all Hollywood bedroom adventures, they climaxed at the same time. She was sprawled out flatly beneath him and he collapsed on her. They lay there for a minute catching their breath, squeezing the last bit of pleasure from their loins. They did a little kissing, but mostly just allowed the waves of passion to wash away. His head was buried face down next to hers, his chin on her shoulder, her arm under him, dangling near the bedside table. He felt her move, but didn’t adjust his position. Eyes closed, he never saw her remove the .357 Magnum from between the mattress and box spring. The click of the hammer going back was a curious sound to him, but he never got to lift his head as she pressed the cold steel of the gun’s muzzle into her temple.

Looking up at the ceiling, Shari pulled the trigger. Her eyes widened in her final, frozen-for-all-time close-up as the slug traversed the twelve inches through both her head then his, finally embedding itself in the Chippendale desk under which Harvey Warner was personally serviced by the then-struggling actress Heddy Dukes.

Hiccock entered the conference room with a small blue-and-white box in his hand. Janice was at the far end, underlining phrases on large printouts taped to the wall. He jutted the box under her nose. “Will you take these? I’ve done enough damage.”

“Ooooh, Entenmann’s chocolate donuts! Where’d you find these in Washington?”

“Joey brought ’em to me. He was back in the Bronx this weekend visiting his family.”

Janice selected one from the box and savored that incredible first bite. “Ya know, it
maketh
you want a
glassth
of milk.”

“I’ll get you some.”

“
Thankth
.” She went back to the subliminal messages, trying to divine the method that created the madness. Holding the donut with her teeth, she made red-ink notes in the margins of one of the enlarged outline pages tacked to the wall.

Kronos entered. “I heard the donuts came this way.”

She pulled the donut from between her teeth. “Help yourself. They’re right on my desk. In fact, take the whole box. Less for me to guilt over.” She sighed, taking a step back in an attempt to realize any pattern not yet obvious to her.

Kronos stabbed through the hole of one of the donuts and picked it up from the box like a ring around his index finger. He held it that way as he started to nibble his way around, removing the chocolate covering like a lathe. He walked over to Janice. “Doing a little programming?”

“Kronos, please, I’m trying to work this out. Could you just take your donut and leave? Ewwwww!” She finally looked away from the chart and reacted to the sight of him eating it off his finger.

“Jeez, what a grouch.”

Something ruminated in Janice’s mind. “Kronos!”

He returned. “Yeah?”

“What did you mean ‘was I programming’?”

“What you got plastered on the wall here looks like an old Basic program.”

“How so?”

“Well, in that old language, each line of instruction was numbered, like the way you got it there. And you see that grouping there …” he pointed to a “paragraph” that stood alone. “That looks like a subroutine. This here looks like an old ‘If-Then’ statement. You know,
if
the proposition is true
then
do this,
if
it is false
then
do that.”

“Hold it, hold it, go slow. What’s a subroutine?”

“Well, it’s a way to get the computer to do repetitive tasks without having to write repetitive code. So you write it once and keep telling the machine to run the subroutine as many times as you need it to. Burying a nasty line of instruction in a subroutine was how I did some of my best hacking, because the program wouldn’t immediately hit it until the subroutine was called up. I named them ‘time bombs’ cause it was just a matter of time ’til …”

She kissed Kronos, interrupting his boasting. “Mister, you just got yourself a year’s supply of donuts!”

The two most powerful places in America being Washington and Hollywood, the news of the movie star’s and senator’s deaths came as a shock to just about everyone. The details were never released by the LAPD. “Murder-suicide” was the official cause of death in the coroner’s report. The impact on Hollywood was considerable, as Miss Saks was in the middle of a $200-million film that would now have to be trashed. The senator was just about to start his re-election bid and many pundits, posthumously of course, foresaw a possible White House residency in his recently extinguished future.

Unreported in the
L.A. Times
was the fact that along with the senator’s death came the death of the Dent-Farber Emergency Cyber Crimes Initiative legislation. That bill would have pseudo-nationalized his corporate constituents in Silicon Valley, forcing them to design a new Internet police force in exchange for the political plum of getting billions in funding for advanced computational research engines. This, ostensibly, would be done as a national security issue to thwart any future attempts by any foreign power to gain the advantage in the never-talked-about computational power race.

The Hollywood press, however, reported the following news bulletin: “Self-help guru Kindwa Seiene, multimillionaire TV empowerer and author of
My Karma, My Power
has offered $44 million for the Saks estate. The mansion and grounds in Beverly Hills was the former home of mogul …”

“YOU KNOW WHAT makes a church a basilica?” Kronos said.

“No, what?” Janice asked, playing along as she and Cheryl set up enlargements of the outlines on easels.

“A basilica is a church where the pope has held mass. It can be any church. Once the pope celebrates mass in it, boom, it becomes a basilica.”

“You ... are an idiot,” Hiccock said as he opened the briefing folders.

“I was just wondering if this is the Presidential Suite because some president stayed here once … if the same rule applies.”

“According to that, then Yankee Stadium would be a basilica!”

“How ya figure that?”

“Hello, the pope held mass there back in the sixties or seventies.”

“Guys, guys!” Janice called out, “can you finish this theological debate later. The president will be here any minute.”

“Bill, don’t you think we should have waited until the president got back to Washington to do this?” Janice’s anxiety tinged her tone. “He’s going to be here on the West Coast for two more days. He needs to hear what you’ve discovered
now
.” Kronos stood captivated by two tables of catered food. “Did you see this spread?”

Kronos’s eyes widened as he surveyed the bounty sprawled before him. The buffet offered everything from finger sandwiches to hot chafing dishes all laid out just in case the president, on a whim, wanted a bite or decided to invite a head of state to his suite.

While Cheryl prepared the briefing papers and Kronos worked his way methodically through the food groups, Hiccock took Janice aside. “Are you okay?”

Janice nervously smoothed the St. John suit, which only a few hours ago seemed to her to be a “sure-fire look.” She caught herself and forced her hands to her side. “It’s easy for you. You work with the man. I’ve never met a president before, much less reported a ‘theory’ to one. It’s just a little nerve-racking, Bill.”

“He’s a really decent guy, Janice, a straight shooter and pretty smart. I think he’s going to get this without too much trouble. Besides, he knows you’re the best in your field.”

Bill’s cell phone chirped. “Hiccock.”

Joey Palumbo was on the other end in his new capacity as the FBI’s Quarterback liaison officer. “Bill, we just put together a time line on the Saks-Dent killings.”

“Give me the shorthand. We’re about to meet with the boss.”

“She worked out from 11 AM to 12:15, threatened her agent on a conference call until 12:35, then spent more than an hour online. After that, she dismissed all her house staff for the rest of the day and placed a call to Dent’s personal phone. Forty minutes later at 3 PM, they were both dead according to the coroner.”

“And so was Dent’s firewall legislation.”

“It’s certainly a high-tech enough motive. I have my guys running her computer through your cockamamie subliminal gadget back in D.C. right now. Hansen says that the first few messages he’s found so far point to an online-ordered assassination of a sitting U.S. senator.”

“Gadget” was the in-house term the FBI geeks had given to Hiccock’s circa 1960s technological dinosaur, which just now happened to be the single key to breaking open the most devastating use of technology in American history.

“As soon as they have a hard copy printout, have it sent to us here …” Hiccock’s phone went dead. Pulling it away from his ear, he saw there was full signal strength. That’s when he remembered “the bubble” that blanked out all cell service when the president was nearby.

At that moment, the Secret Service appeared in the room to conduct their secondary sweep. Two agents, having already cleared Hiccock’s team, concerned themselves with the windows and any possible line of fire that a rooftop assassin might utilize to achieve infamy.

“He’s here,” Bill said to Janice.

An agent mumbled something into his wrist radio microphone about the room being secure. A split second later, the president, followed by Chief of Staff Reynolds, entered the room with Tate in tow. The president took off his jacket, laid it over the back of a chair, and loosened his tie. He headed straight to the bar. One of the Secret Service agents shadowed the president’s movements, positioning himself between the window and the president. The Commander in Chief commandeered a ginger ale and popped it open, grabbed some ice, and poured. The White House steward, Mr. Jefferies, watched helplessly as the president temporarily usurped his duties. His only way to do his job was to hand the president a cocktail napkin.

“Thanks, Bob. My stomach has been doing loop-da-loops all day,” Mitchell said. “Please people, feel free.” He referred to the food and bar, oblivious to the fact that Kronos had already helped himself.

As he headed toward the couch, the president extended his hand to Janice Tyler.

“I know everyone else in the room but we haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Tyler. I’m James Mitchell, nice to meet you.”

“It’s Janice, please. And you know, ginger ale is the perfect thing for a nervous stomach.”
Oh shit
, she thought,
what a stupid thing to say
. “So I’ll get one, too,” she said, patting her Nicole Miller–covered tummy.

As she started toward the bar, the president simply uttered, “Mr. Jefferies,” and a glass of ginger ale appeared in Janice’s hand. The president smiled and clinked her glass with his. “I hope you’ve got something good for me. I just came from the funeral of a U.S. senator. To mangle a line from Shakespeare, ‘I came to praise Hank Dent not to bury him.’ The director here tells me that Dent’s death may have been connected with your line of research, Doctor. Before that, I sat through a memorial service in Silicon Valley for all the people who died on that plane …” The man sat motionless for a moment, as if he could see the terror that those souls aboard the plane must have endured, then snapped out of it. “Horrible, horrible tragedies; we have to stop these terrorist acts … so what do you have for me?”

Everyone took their seats and immediately scanned the big blowups of the outline propped on easels throughout the room. Janice sipped her ginger ale and set it down. “Mr. President, I saw a film in college that chronicled the technique of a famous vaudevillian named Mesmer. He was a hypnotist. He would ‘mesmerize’ members of the audience and get them to do funny things by having them concentrate on a dangling pendant. But the big part of his act was when he planted a post-hypnotic suggestion usually based on a trigger word. After the subject returned to his seat, he might bark like a dog if Mesmer uttered the trigger word. We now firmly believe that all of the homegrown terrorists were programmed online by a method not unlike that, but supercharged by the power of a computer. There are subtleties and nuances we haven’t figured out as yet, but the main gist of it has been uncovered.”

She walked over to the first easel. “Like Mesmer, the way to control a subject is through the eyes. Lion tamers use the same technique. In short, get them by the eyes and they’re yours. Today a large segment of the population gives their eyes over to the most powerful technological device created by humans, the computer.”

“They also give their attention to television,” Tate said, interrupting.

“Yes, and that was abused in the sixties until the government interceded and stopped the practice. Because it was broadcast, it was also a one-way message, unilateral if you will. The Internet adds two important and powerful differences. First it’s interactive, a two-way street. The degree by which the subject is affected can be fed back to the controller and instantly tailored to optimize the depth of submission. Computers also have higher definition and therefore can pack more information into the bandwidth than television.”

Janice rotated the pointer in her fingers as she addressed the president. “As was the case in the sixties, without the targeted individual being aware, subliminal messages were transmitted directly into their subconscious. Their conscious minds did not realize these messages were being projected. Normally, these would reveal themselves upon a trigger or hypnotic-style suggestion.

“So the computer is hypnotizing them?” Tate asked.

“The old hypnosis model only follows to a certain point, falling far short of what we are dealing with here. For one thing, even the most susceptible subject wouldn’t do anything under hypnosis that would be against their conscious will.

In today’s version, somehow, by a means we haven’t yet deduced, the encoding of these messages is layered, hidden inside the target’s subconscious. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to refer to that hidden layer as the deep subconscious. There, the instructions lay dormant, waiting for a condition to be met in the layer above the subconscious. Kronos … er … Mr. DeMayo has identified that condition as an ‘if-then’ statement. It’s a logical argument that is the key to making decisions in a computer. If such and such is true then do action A, if such and such is false do action B or do nothing. Have I left anything unclear or are there any questions before we go further, Mr. President?”

“No, I’m following you. Somehow, two sets of commands are buried into a person’s brain. One says, if something is true, then do the second.

“Yes, that’s it, Sir. So here’s what we think happened in Martha Krummel’s case. As you know, she is the only homegrown who has survived. At first, her recollections of how she came to derail the freight train seemed random and disjointed. But when you apply this programming sequence, it all becomes plausible. As far as we can tell, buried in Martha’s deep subconscious were four “subroutines.” The first gave her the complete and very real experience that her husband Walter had just called. In that fabricated experience, he asked her to come to his office with jumper cables to boost his car’s dead battery. Although she knew he had been dead for twenty years, she was totally and absolutely living in the false reality in which she had, a few moments earlier, conversed with him.”

“Now how could something like that happen?” Tate asked.

“I think the positive side of her brain embraced this implanted reality. In fact, I believe her desire to have him back was so strong that, in her mind, the fact that he was dead was nothing more than a nightmare she once had. She was in a state that could best be described as dreamlike, where she wanted to get back to a dream that was interrupted. You know, the way sometimes people wake up from a dream that is so good, they try to go back to sleep to experience it again. But buried in Martha’s subconscious was an ‘if-then’ statement. As she drove, the sight of a road sign that read ‘Waukesha Gap two miles’ triggered it.” Janice pointed to easel number three and the image on it taken from Martha’s computer screen. “We found a picture of this road sign, originally from the Wisconsin Highway Department’s web site. It was embedded in the subliminal instructions we decoded using the MIT machine.”

Janice then pointed to an easel that held a shot of the fruit stand from the subliminal frames. “The ‘if-then’ statement in Martha’s mind said, ‘If you see this sign, then jump to the next subroutine.’ Originally, it seemed to us that Martha had changed her story. She told us that she turned down the access road to the train tracks because she thought there was a fruit stand there. What actually happened was, once she saw that sign, all thoughts of Walter and the intention to help him with his dead battery evaporated from her mind and were replaced with a new goal … the fruit stand.”

“But didn’t she know there was no fruit stand on that road?” the president asked.

“Sir, have you ever experienced déjà vu?”

“Yes. When you feel as though something has happened before.”

“But you know intellectually it hasn’t, correct?”

“Yes.”

“This whole new area of research that we are rapidly uncovering here may explain the phenomenon of déjà vu—or what I now prefer calling a concurrent memory. It is caused by a temporary lapse of the conscious mind. It concerns two parts of our minds, the conscious, the part of the brain that is our awareness of the here and now, and the memory, the repository of all things that have happened to us. To illustrate, if I were experiencing déjà vu right now, then everything that’s happening in this room, right at this moment, would bypass my conscious mind and land directly in my memory. Of course, I would have no idea this had happened. However, I do perceive what’s going on, or more accurately,
recollect
it in my memory. I am experiencing something as it is happening by instantly reading it back from my memory. Coming from there it has the same credibility as an old, cherished thought. Even though it is, in fact, an instant or concurrent memory of what is simultaneously happening at this moment.”

“I see. But we feel it happened already because it came from the place in our mind where everything we remember comes from.”

“This is getting a little hard to follow,” Tate said.

“The next part may help. Like déjà vu, these instructions were placed directly into Martha’s subconscious and deep subconscious by subliminal suggestion.”

“Hold on, you just said ‘suggestion.’ Earlier you said she was, what was the word you used?” The FBI director referred to his notes. “Programmed. But clearly, she wasn’t choosing to follow a suggestion. She doggedly followed out orders.”

Janice read the skepticism on Tate’s face. She took a deep breath. “That’s the part that’s still up in the air, but I have a theory.” She focused on the president. “Somehow, these instructions get layered into the deepest recesses of the mind and are released by higher levels of instructions. Whoever devised this has broken through to some new understanding of the human brain.”

“Are you aware of any research in that area, Dr. Tyler?”

“No, Sir, but I am talking about the total remapping of the human brain to a level and specificity that, yesterday, I would have told you was two to three centuries away. For all modern science has learned about the mind, we are merely strangers without a map. The creator of this program has the ultimate blueprint and can go anywhere and do anything inside the human brain.”

“That’s a frightening prospect, Doctor.”

“So you’re saying Martha had four or five split personalities?” Reynolds said.