I'm saying is, with the right drug cocktail, you could have been plunged into an episode of madness, but you'd have no memory of it. You'd be a raving lunatic for a few hours ..."
Ambler nodded slowly. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling with excitement.
"And then they record you while you're in this state," she went on. "And make believe that you're crazy. Try to persuade you that you're crazy. For whatever reasons of their own."
Reasons of their own.
The larger questions Who? Why?
-yawned like an abyss that would repay those who gazed too deeply into it with destruction. Grappling with the elementary question of What was exhausting enough.
Reasons of their own.
To ascribe reason to madness was only a seeming paradox. The artificial induction of dementia was, in fact, in the counterespionage arsenal of dirty tricks. A method of discrediting someone. A tape could be quietly circulated, which would persuade any interested parties that the subject was indeed stark raving mad. Inquiries would be swiftly put to rest.
The prospect was horrifying. Then why did Hal Ambler feel oddly exhilarated? Because he was not alone. Because he was putting the pieces together with somebody else.
Somebody who believed him. Who believed in him. And whose belief helped him to regain his own belief in himself. He might still have been lost in a labyrinth, but Theseus had found his Ariadne.
"How do you explain about the databases?" Ambler pressed. "It's as if I never lived."
"You know about the things that powerful people can do. So do I. I hear gossip at work, the stuff people aren't supposed to talk about but do anyway. About creating records for people who never existed. Not that much harder to erase the records of someone who actually did exist."
"You know how crazy that sounds?"
"Less crazy than the alternative," Laurel said firmly. There was certainty in her voice, a certainty that dismissed Osiris's hypothesis out of hand. "They're burying you in the psych system. So they want to put off any casual inquiries. Kind of like kicking away the ladder after you've climbed through the window."
"What about what I saw in the Sourlands? There was no sign of my cabin, no sign that it ever really existed."
"And you think that's beyond the landscaping skills of somebody able to enlist a powerful government agency."
"Laurel, listen to me," he said, his voice almost breaking. "I look in the mirror and
I don't recognize myself."
She reached over and touched his cheek. "Then they changed you."
"How is that possible?"
"I'm not a surgeon," she said. "But I've heard rumors about plastic surgery techniques, about how they can change people so the person himself couldn't even tell he'd ever been operated on. I know that you can keep people anesthetized for weeks at a time. They do it in burn wards, sometimes, to spare patients from a period of agony. There are all sorts of 'minimally invasive' surgery they do now. They could have changed your face, then kept you under until you'd healed up. Even if you had conscious intervals, Versed therapy, again, could stop memories from forming. How would you ever know?"
"That's crazy," Ambler repeated.
She came over to him, stood very close, and placed her hands on his face. She examined the skin along his jaw, his ears, and then felt for scars that might be concealed behind his hairline. She peered closely at his eyelids, cheeks, nose. He could feel the warmth of her own face near his, and then, as she ran her fingertips over his features, something stirred within him.
God, she was beautiful.
"See anything?" the operative asked.
Laurel shook her head. "Haven't found any entry scars-but that doesn't mean anything," she insisted. "There are techniques I wouldn't even know about. The scalpel could enter through the mucosa of the nose, the reverse of the eyelids, all sorts of possible surgical portals. It isn't my field."
"You don't have any evidence for this. You just think it." Although the words were of skepticism, Ambler was momentarily buoyed by her stalwart conviction.
"It's the only thing that makes sense," she said heatedly. "It's the only thing that makes sense of what you've experienced."
"That's assuming, of course, that my experience-my memory-makes sense." He fell silent. "Christ, I feel like such a goddamn victim:'
"Maybe that's how they want you to feel. Look, the people who did this to you-they're not good people. They're manipulators.
I don't think they put you on Parrish Island because you're weak. Probably they put you on Parrish Island because you