Unforgettable - eARC (2 page)

My plan was still the same, just on a slightly faster timeframe. With a few twists, the cap came off the canister.

I had to take a moment to psych myself up for the next step: setting off the smoke bomb. When I was a kid, I was caught in a fire. Even without flames, smoke tended to make me anxious.

Someone pounded on the door.

Taking a deep breath, I activated the smoke bomb, then tossed it into the middle of the room.

As thick smoke billowed out of the canister, I put on my gas mask. Then I made my way to the desk and hid under it. If they managed to break through the door before the sixty seconds was up, that might give me the few extra seconds I needed for them to forget why they were breaking down the door.

The pounding continued, but fortunately the door still held.

The smoke in the room quickly became thick enough that I could barely see the chair three feet away. Even though I had the gas mask on, my breathing became labored. I knew it was psychological, so I tried to breathe evenly and concentrate on my counting.

Just as I reached twenty-seven seconds, the building’s fire alarm blared to life. Good. That would give them reason to evacuate the floor as soon as they forgot about me.

At forty-three seconds, there was a splintering crash, followed by the thud of a body hitting the floor. Someone groaned, then coughed.

“Find him,” said Jamshidi, shouting to be heard over the fire alarm.

Through coughs, George said, “He has a gas mask.”

A male voice I didn’t recognize said, “There’s no way out of—”

Sixty seconds.

“—too thick, sir,” continued the voice. “It’s too risky. Let’s get you safely out of the building.”

I waited another thirty seconds to give them time to be on their way downstairs, then came out from under the desk. Jamshidi’s brown leather chair was comfortable, although the armrests were set too wide apart for me to use. But I wasn’t there to relax.

After pulling the keychain out of my pocket, I flipped through the keys until I found the one I wanted. With a strong tug, the blade of the key separated from the rest. The part that had been concealed served as a USB drive. I plugged it into the computer on the left, then leaned forward so I could see the screen through the smoke.

An antivirus program popped up a warning screen, which I clicked to cancel. The specially designed worm on the USB drive activated, automatically bypassing the login.

When I saw that his browser was open to a web page, I knew this was the wrong computer. My target was the computer that was inaccessible to remote hackers because it was not connected to the internet.

I removed the USB drive and plugged it into the other computer. The worm again bypassed the login, and I had access to Jamshidi’s secret files. Of course, they were mostly written in Farsi, but the drive had an automatic translation system on it.

Jamshidi was liquidating billions of dollars in assets—even the financial papers had noticed that—but no one seemed to know what he was doing with the money. My job was to find out.

My big advantage on a job like this was that I didn’t need to erase the tracks of what I did on the computer—because computers forgot me, sixty seconds after my last interaction with it, all trace of what I had done would be gone. Jamshidi would never know his computer had been accessed.

My big disadvantage was that I couldn’t just copy the files onto the USB drive, because after a minute it would forget I had copied them. Printing files would work—because getting them into physical form put them beyond the reach of my talent—but Jamshidi did not have a printer connected to this computer. And lugging up a printer full of paper might have raised a few questions from George.

So that left one other way of getting the information out: my memory. I would need to locate the key data and remember it. The problem was, I didn’t really know exactly what I was looking for.

I brought up a list of translated document names and sorted them by most recent. A document with “Shipping Manifest” in the name caught my eye, and I opened it. It listed tons of computer equipment—three hundred and seventy-four tons, to be exact. Departure from the Port of London. Destination: Bushehr, Iran.

There were other shipping manifests with similar information. Whatever Jamshidi was doing required a lot of computing power.

I almost skipped over a document titled “Prophet,” because I thought it would just turn out to be something to do with Islam, but then I wondered why Jamshidi would keep religious stuff on his protected computer.

The document popped open. I had just enough time to see the words “quantum supercomputer” before I heard someone cough behind me.

I whirled in the chair. Partially obscured by smoke, the vague shape of a man stood inside a lit rectangle. This was something completely unexpected: the building plans had not shown a secret door at the back of Jamshidi’s office.

“Who are you?” the man demanded.

I whirled back to face the computer, then kicked the leather chair backward toward the intruder, hoping it would block him temporarily. The USB drive was still plugged in, so I yanked it out. There couldn’t be any physical evidence of my hacking or it wouldn’t matter that no one remembered me.

As I rounded the corner of the desk and headed for the door, someone grabbed my right arm. I twisted out of his grip and lunged for the door. By the time I got to the stairwell, despite the fire alarm’s shriek I could hear his footsteps close behind, punctuated by coughs as he tried to clear his lungs of smoke. For the second time that day, I ran down the steps.

As the stairs turned at the thirteenth floor, I looked up and saw my pursuer. He looked around fifty, with a fit, muscular build and a full head of black hair graying at the temples. He wore a white shirt, no tie. There hadn’t been anyone like him in the personnel files.

I lost sight of him as I looped down the stairs. But his footsteps didn’t slow. Just before reaching the tenth floor landing, I remembered that it was probably still wet from my water bottle. I slowed to a walk, stepping carefully, and took advantage of the moment to pull off my backpack. Since the smoke hadn’t spread down here, I took off my gas mask, shoved it into the pack, and pulled out two spray bottles.

Breathing easier as I continued down toward the ninth floor, I shouted, “Watch out for the—”

A yell and a thud told me my warning had been too late.

“—water!” I finished.

I had to slow him down even more if I wanted to put a minute’s distance between us. I unscrewed the top of one spray bottle and poured oil over the ninth floor landing. “It’s slippery down here,” I shouted. “Slow down!”

His footsteps didn’t resume immediately, so my pace was more leisurely. As I reached the seventh floor, I decided there was no need to detour to the janitorial closet.

When I reached the fifth floor, I could faintly hear his footsteps again, but I estimated he was still about three floors behind me.

As I turned toward the third floor landing, the footsteps were louder, but I thought they were still far off.

Then I saw him less than a half-flight of stairs behind me. He had taken off his shoes, and in his socks he made so much less noise I had misjudged the distance.

With a burst of speed, I raced toward the ground floor. The man was in fantastic shape, especially for someone about thirty years older than me, and he continued to gain.

My second spray bottle—filled with concentrated capsaicin—was still in my hand. Pepper spray was always my last resort, because I hated to leave people temporarily blinded without any idea of what had happened to cause it once they forgot about me. But this guy wasn’t giving me much choice.

I turned suddenly, aimed the nozzle at his face, then squirted.

He dodged to the left and mostly avoided the spray, but he stumbled and had to catch himself on the railing to keep from sprawling onto the landing.

I ran. If I could make it to my van parked right outside, I was sure I could get a minute head start before he could get a vehicle to follow me.

Bursting into the lobby, I headed straight for the glass doors.

As he exited the stairwell only about ten seconds behind, he yelled, “Guards! Get him!”

There weren’t any guards between me and the doors. There was no one in the lobby. The fire alarm was still sounding, so people must have evacuated.

But my van was gone—they must have towed it.

A moment of panic subsided when I spotted my messenger bicycle still chained to the lamppost. I dug into my left pocket for my keys while using my right hand to spray capsaicin randomly behind me, hoping that would slow him long enough to get my bike lock open.

Fortunately, the automatic doors were stuck open, maybe because of the evacuation. As I passed through, I dropped the spray bottle, switched my key to my right hand, and ran to my bike.

It took me only a couple of seconds to unlock the chain. Pushing the handlebars, I sprinted alongside the bike before hopping on and beginning to pedal.

I chanced a look over my shoulder. The man was still running after me, but he was falling behind. I wove through pedestrians on the sidewalk until I got into the street, then pedaled away.

Once I was sure I had left him more than a minute behind, I pulled over to catch my breath. I got out my iPhone and checked the time. It would be a little after eight a.m. on the East Coast of the United States. Perfect. I don’t have any contacts listed in the phone—not because storing phone numbers would be a security problem but because it would forget them after I entered them. So I dialed a number I had memorized.

A computer-generated female voice on the other end answered, “How may I direct your call?”

“Edward Strong,” I said.

The phone rang a few times, then someone picked up. “Strong here.”

“Mr. Strong,” I said, “in the lower drawer on the right side of your desk, there is a manila file folder labeled ‘CODE NAME LETHE.’ I need you to pull it out and read the cover letter. There should also be an authentication protocol sheet in there.”

Having to go through this sort of rigmarole every time I reported in was an inconvenience. But what else could I do?

My name is Nat Morgan. And even though they don’t remember me, I work for the CIA.

Chapter Two

I’ve been forgotten all my life. The day I was born, my parents left me at the hospital and drove home. They didn’t realize it until a couple of hours later, when my grandmother arrived from out of town and asked where the baby was.

My mother cried all the way back to the hospital, feeling guilty because she couldn’t even remember giving birth to me. It probably didn’t help that my grandmother was in the back seat, telling her what a bad mother she was obviously going to be. When my parents returned to the maternity ward, the nurses were very confused, because no one had filled out the paperwork on my birth. They finally located me because I was the only baby left after they’d accounted for the rest.

After they got home, guilt over forgetting me made my mother cling to me. She sat in the rocking chair in the living room and held me for hours. To her shock, both my father and my grandmother forgot my existence after leaving the room.

Once I was old enough to understand, my mother read me the journal entry she wrote that night, still cradling me in one arm. She was exhausted, but terrified that she would forget me again if she fell asleep.

Which is exactly what happened.

* * *

For obvious reasons, I wasn’t the easiest child to raise. My mother never complained to me, so it wasn’t until I read her diaries that I understood how difficult it was for her, particularly at first.

She would be puzzled to hear a baby crying in the apartment and go to investigate. I would be in a crib in the room she and my father had decorated as a nursery back when she was pregnant. She would pick me up to try to calm me down while she figured out whose baby I was. Then she would remember that she wasn’t pregnant anymore and wonder if I was hers and if she had amnesia. Then she would go and check her journal to try to figure things out.

I don’t know how many times she went through that cycle of rediscovering me before she started pinning a note on my jumper that read “Tina, you don’t remember him, but this is your baby, Nat. Read your journal.”

Over the next few years, my mother set old-fashioned wind-up alarm clocks with notes on them to remind herself to feed me and check up on me. Even after I was old enough to find her when I needed something, she kept detailed journals of her interactions with me. Fortunately, she liked the feel of writing in a paper journal, because anything she typed into a computer about me would soon end up changed to read as if I had never been there. Eventually she discovered that if she printed something out immediately, the printed copy wouldn’t change, so she would sometimes take pictures of me with a webcam and print them out to put in a photo album.

Because all the hospital records were on computer, there was no record of my birth, and since she and my father hadn’t decided on a name before I was born, she wasn’t sure what name they told the hospital for the birth certificate.

So she called me Nat, after Nat King Cole, because she hoped that someday I would become unforgettable.

Of course, that had never happened.

* * *

It was just my mother and me as I was growing up—my father couldn’t handle it and left when I was just a few weeks old. After he left, he didn’t remember having a son, just that he and my mother kept arguing.

The amazing thing about my mother is that she could have given up on me at any time, just like he did. All she had to do was abandon me somewhere, and a minute later she would have forgotten I even existed, and she could have moved on with her life because no one else remembered me either. Instead, she quit her job and lived off welfare in order to take care of me.

I was homeschooled, of course. It would have been too awkward having to reintroduce myself to classmates and teachers multiple times every day, constantly being the new kid.

I never had a friend for more than a day. If I spent all day with someone, they’d remember me while we were together. But eventually they had to sleep, and when they woke, the memory of me would be gone.

So I grew up unconnected to anyone but my mother, and even she needed to be reminded to read her journals so she would know who I was. I know it sounds like a strange life, but it was the only life I knew, and I was happy enough.

* * *

When I was eleven years old, my appendix ruptured. Because we had no car, my mother called 911. The pain I felt while waiting for the ambulance was the worst of my life.

In an attempt to distract me from the pain, my mother asked me to recite the Vice Presidents of the United States. “John Adams,” she said, to get me started.

I didn’t have a photographic memory, but my mother discovered early in my childhood that I was very good at memorizing things. She told me many times that my excellent memory was “ironic,” which at first I thought meant it was magnetic like iron, until I finally looked it up in a dictionary.

When homeschooling me, she helped me develop my skills by giving me lists, like vocabulary words or state birds or elements of the periodic table, to memorize. When I was ten, I even memorized the first thousand digits of pi.

So, lying in my bed while the ambulance was on its way, I recited the Vice Presidents of the United States, followed by the capital cities of Europe and the plays of Shakespeare in chronological order. And by concentrating my mind on something other than my physical pain, I was able to bear it.

That memory training came in handy in other ways once I started working for the CIA. My Russian accent might be terrible, and the grammar didn’t come naturally, but I memorized large amounts of phonetically spelled vocabulary without too much trouble. And, of course, I had memorized the authentication protocol sheet I used with Edward.

I still found it quite ironic that people could forget me within a minute, yet if I concentrated I could still remember lists of useless information I had learned as a child.

* * *

One night when I was thirteen years old, my mother shook me awake to the sound of sirens. From the fourth floor of our high-rise apartment building, I looked out my bedroom window to see fire engines pulling up in the street.

By the time we got to the hallway, the fire was in the stairwells. We went back into our apartment to try the fire escape, but the fire had started below us on our side of the building—the steps descended into flames.

My mother screamed out the window for someone to help us, then we huddled together low to the floor, trying as much as possible to avoid the smoke filling my room.

Suddenly, she rose to her feet. “My journals!” she cried. When I started getting up to go with her, she said, “Stay here.” She rushed out the door, headed toward her bedroom.

She came back a few moments later with some of her journals cradled in her arms, but flames had caught onto her nightgown.

I remembered what she had taught me about fire safety. I grabbed the blanket off my bed and tackled her to the floor, wrapping the blanket around the flaming part of her nightgown. “Roll,” I said.

She rolled, and the flames went out.

But the smoke was thicker now, and we were both coughing. My lungs felt like they were burning, and I lacked the strength to even reach out to hold my mother’s hand.

Through my squinted eyes, I saw two shapes enter the room. Firemen. One of them hoisted me over his shoulder and started out. I saw the other pick up my mother—and the journals fell from her grip as he lifted her.

“No! I need those,” she said, but he ignored her.

The firemen carried us out and put us on stretchers.

I can still remember the way my mother’s voice wheezed as she called my name, trying to make sure I was all right.

The paramedics rushed us both to the hospital.

In separate ambulances.

* * *

Later that night, I crept down the corridor in my loose-fitting hospital gown, hoping none of the nurses would notice me. At each door, I checked the digital sign outside each room, until I found the one with Tina Morgan on it. I opened the door and slipped inside, then closed it behind me.

After my eyes adjusted to the dark, the light coming through the open blinds was good enough that I could see my mother lying asleep in the hospital bed. I wanted to turn on the light, then wake her up and see if she remembered me, but I was scared she wouldn’t. My only hope was to go back to our apartment and find some of her journals and photo albums so I would have proof when I told her that I was her son.

So I quietly said goodbye and slipped back out the door.

“Hey, kid!” a man said. “What are you doing?”

I turned to see a dark-haired man wearing a white lab coat over pale green scrubs, and I vaguely remembered that he was one of the doctors who had been checking out some of the other people rescued from the fire.

“It’s my mother’s room,” I said. “We’re fire victims.”

“You need to get back to your room.”

“I don’t remember where it is,” I lied.

“Come with me,” he said. He led me to a nurses’ station. Of course, with room assignments and even the door signs being computerized, there was no record of my being in the hospital at all, so I had to wait while they sorted things out.

After they put me in my room, I waited a few minutes, then snuck out. Obviously, I couldn’t go home in the hospital gown, so I took some scrubs that were way too big for me from a locker, promising I would return them after I got the evidence I needed to prove to my mother who I was.

After all, I wasn’t a thief.

* * *

Our apartment didn’t even have a floor anymore. I spent hours looking through the still-smoldering debris that remained in the apartment below ours, despite being found and taken out several times by police who were trying to keep people away from the building.

It was evening and my borrowed scrubs were blackened with soot by the time I had to face the truth: All my mother’s journals, everything that connected her to me, had burned to ashes in the fire.

* * *

“But a DNA test would prove you’re my mother,” I said. It was a month after the fire that had destroyed all the evidence I was her son, and we were standing in the living room of my mother’s new apartment.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what scam you’re trying to pull, but it won’t work.”

It was my third try, and the first two had ended this same way—she would rather believe her false memories of the past thirteen years than believe she had forgotten her own son.

I realized that in our old apartment, with my obviously lived-in room and the sheer accumulation of journal entries and photos, she had been able to convince herself she was my mother, but in this new home, it would take something more than a simple picture.

“Mom, please list—”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. She strode to the door and yanked it open. “Just leave or I’ll call the cops.”

Across the hall, a woman carrying two bags of groceries paused in her struggle to open the door and peered at us.

“Wait, I can prove the forgetting thing is real,” I said to my mother. Raising my voice, I said, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you need a hand with those groceries?”

The woman answered, “No, thank you.” She quickly opened her door and entered her apartment. The lock clicked behind her.

My mother scoffed. “What does that prove, other than your real mom taught you to be polite?”

“Just wait a minute, then go ask the lady across the hall if she’s ever seen me before.”

She stared at me. “You seriously believe this. You need help.”

“Please, just try.” I held up my hands in surrender. “If she remembers me, I’ll leave with no more fuss.”

After a moment, she stepped into the hall.

“Wait,” I said. “It takes a minute.”

When time was up, she knocked on the door. Footsteps approached on the other side, the lock turned, and the door opened a few inches. A chain prevented it from opening further.

“Excuse me,” said my mother, “I know this sounds crazy, but you remember this young man offering to help with your groceries as you were coming in just now, don’t you?” She pointed to where I stood in the doorway.

“No. And if he did, I wouldn’t’a let him. Can’t trust kids these days. Probably run off with them.”

“But you’re sure he didn’t—”

“Never seen him before. Go away.” The door slammed shut, and the lock clicked.

“See,” I said. “I told you, Mom. People forget me.”

Her shoulders slumped as she turned to face me. “It can’t be true. How could I forget my own child?” Tears brimmed in her eyes.

“It’s not your fault,” I said as she walked past me and sat on the couch.

“You look like your father,” she said. “I should have seen it before.”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember him. You raised me.”

“I thought the fire was a wakeup call,” she said. “I was finally getting my life back together, finding a job, making friends. But it was you, wasn’t it? My life for the past thirteen years is a blur because I can’t remember you, not because I was depressed.”

“It was me.”

She let out a half-choked sob, which reminded me of how often I had found her crying in the mornings, and how if I asked her what was wrong, she always said it was nothing. It had been me, all along—every day as she woke up and discovered the truth, she had cried.

“I must have been a terrible mother,” she said.

“No, Mom, you were the best.” For the first time in my life, I saw the real sacrifices my mother had made to raise me. “I love you and always will, no matter how many times you forget me.”

That only made her sob more.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“For what?”

“For coming.” I turned and walked out the door.

When I heard her call for me to come back, I began to run.

* * *

And so I was thirteen years old and living on the Dallas streets the first time I got caught stealing. Three weeks after I ran away from my mother, a store detective grabbed me as I stuffed a three-hundred-dollar digital camera inside my Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. He took me back to his office to keep an eye on me while he called the police.

Until then, I had always gotten away just by running fast and turning corners. When I was out of sight for long enough, my pursuers would forget who they were chasing and why. But even after calling the cops this store detective watched me like I was his favorite TV show, and I was scared the cops would take me and lock me in a cell and then forget about me and I would starve to death.