“He’s just not there,” Jefferson said. “I’ve jacked with more people than everybody in this room put together, and nothing like this has ever happened. You can’t unjack yourself mentally, but that’s what it felt like. Like he decided to pull the plug.”
“Not exactly a selling point for humanization,” I said to Marty. “It works on everyone but psychopaths?”
“That’s the word they used to describe me,” Ellie said, saintly and serene. “And it was accurate.” She had murdered her husband and children, with gasoline. “But the process worked with me, and still works after all these years. Without it, I know I would have gone crazy; stayed crazy.”
“The term ‘psychopath’ covers a lot of territory,” Jefferson said. “Ingram is intensely moral, even though he’s repeatedly done things that all of us would call immoral; outrageously so.”
“When I was jacked with him,” I said, “he reacted to my outrage with a kind of imperturbable condescension. I was a hopeless case who couldn’t understand the rightness of the things he had done. That was the first day.”
“We wore him down a little over the next couple of days,” Jefferson said. “By not disapproving; by trying to understand.”
“How can you ‘understand’ someone who can follow an order to rape a woman and then mutilate her in a specific way? He left her tied up and gagged, to bleed to death. He’s not even human.”
“But he is human,” Jefferson said, “and however bizarre his behavior is, it’s still human behavior. I think that’s what shut him down—we refused to see him as some sort of avenging angel. Just a profoundly sick man we were trying to help. He could take your condemnation and laugh at it. He couldn’t take Ellie’s Christian charity and lovingkindness. Or, for that matter, my own professional detachment.”
“He should be dead by now,” Dr. Orr said. “He hasn’t taken any food or water since the third day. We’ve kept him on IVs.”
“A waste of glucose,” I said.
“You know better.” Marty waved fingers in front of Ingram’s face and he didn’t blink. “We have to find out why this happened, and how common it’s going to be.”
“Not common,” Mendez said. “I was with him before, during, and after his retreat into wherever he is now. From the first, it was like jacking with some kind of alien, or animal.”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said.
“But nevertheless very analytical,” Jefferson said. “Studying us intently from the very first.”
“Studying what we knew about jacking,” Ellie said. “He wasn’t that interested in anybody as a person. But he had only jacked before in a limited, commercial way, and he was hungry to absorb our experience.”
Jefferson nodded. “He had this vivid fantasy that he extrapolated from the jack joints. He wanted to be jacked with someone and kill him.”
“Or her,” Amelia said, “like me, or that poor woman he raped and cut up.”
“The fantasy was always a male,” Ellie said. “He doesn’t see women as worthy opponents. And he doesn’t have much of a sex drive—when he raped that woman, his penis was just another weapon.”
“An extension of his self, like all of his weapons,” Jefferson said. “He’s more obsessive about weapons than any soldier I ever jacked with.”
“He missed his calling. I know some guys he’d get along with fine.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Marty said. “Which makes him that much more important to study. Some people in hunter/killer platoons have similar personality traits. We have to find a way to keep this from happening.”
Good riddance, I didn’t say. “So you won’t be coming with me tomorrow? Stay here?”
“No, I’m still going to Portobello. Dr. Jefferson’s going to work on Ingram. See whether he can walk him back with a combination of drugs and therapy.”
“I don’t know whether to wish you luck. I really prefer him this way.” Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bastard showed a glimmer of expression at that. Maybe we should send Marty down to Portobello alone, and leave me up here to taunt him out of catatonia.
* * *
julian and marty missed by only a few minutes sharing the Guadalajara airport with the woman who had come down to kill Amelia. They got on a military flight to Portobello while she took a taxi from