Trapping Zero

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Alright,” said Reid. “Ask me whatever you’d like, and I’ll be honest. Take as long as you need.”

He sat across from his daughters in a corner booth of a fondue restaurant in one of Engelberg-Titlis’ higher-end hotels. After Sara had told him in the lodge that she wanted to know the truth, Reid had suggested they go elsewhere, away from the common room of the ski lodge. Their own room felt like too quiet a place for such intense subject matter, so he took them to dinner in the hopes of providing something of a casual atmosphere while they talked. He had chosen this place specifically because each booth was separated by glass partitions, giving them some modicum of privacy.

Even so, he kept his voice low.

Sara stared at the table for a long while, thinking. “I don’t want to talk about what happened,” she said at last.

“We don’t have to,” Reid agreed. “We’ll only talk about what you want, and I promise the truth, just like with your sister.”

Sara glanced over at Maya. “You… know things?”

“Some,” she admitted. “Sorry, Squeak. I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”

If Sara was angry or upset at all by this news, she didn’t show it. Instead she chewed her bottom lip for a moment, forming a question in her head, and then asked. “You’re not just a teacher, are you?”

“No.” Reid had assumed that clarifying what he was and what he did would be among her top concerns. “I’m not. I am—rather, I was—an agent with the CIA. Do you know what that means?”

“Like… a spy?”

He shrugged. “Sort of. There was some spying involved. But it’s more about stopping bad people from doing worse things.”

“What do you mean, ‘was’?” she asked.

“Well, I’m not doing that anymore. I did for a while, and then when…” He cleared his throat. “When Mom died, I stopped. For two years I wasn’t with them. Then, back in February, I was asked to come back.” That’s a mild way of putting it, he chided himself. “That thing on the news, with the Winter Olympics and the bombing at the economic forum? I was there. I helped stop it.”

“So you’re a good guy?”

Reid blinked in surprise at the question. “Of course I am. Did you think I wasn’t?”

This time Sara shrugged, not meeting his gaze. “Don’t know,” she said quietly. “Hearing all this, it’s like… like…”

“Like getting to know a stranger,” Maya murmured. “A stranger that looks like you.” Sara nodded her agreement.

Reid sighed. “I’m not a stranger,” he insisted. “I’m still your dad. I’m the same person I’ve always been. Everything you know about me, everything we’ve done together, that was all real. This… all of this stuff, it was a job. Now it’s not anymore.”

Was that the truth? he wondered. He wanted to believe it was—that Kent Steele was nothing but an alias and not a personality.

“So,” Sara started, “those two men that chased us on the boardwalk…?”

He hesitated, unsure if this was too much for her to hear. But he had promised honesty. “They were terrorists,” he told her. “They were men that were trying to get to you to hurt me. Just like…” He caught himself before saying anything about Rais or the Slovakian traffickers.

“Look,” he started again, “for a long time I thought that I was the only one who could get hurt by doing this. But now I see how wrong I was. So I’m done. I still work for them, but I do administrative stuff. No more fieldwork.”

“So we’re safe?”

Reid’s heart broke anew at not only the question, but the hope in his youngest daughter’s eyes. The truth, he reminded himself. “No,” he told her. “The truth is that no one ever really is. As wonderful and beautiful as this world can be, there will always be wicked people that want to do harm to others. Now I know firsthand that there are a lot of good people out there that are making sure there are fewer wicked people every day. But no matter what they do, or what I do, I can’t ever guarantee that you’ll be safe from everything.”

He didn’t know where these words were coming from, but it felt like they were just as much for his own benefit as for his girls. It was a lesson that he very much needed to learn. “That doesn’t mean I won’t try,” he added. “I will never stop trying to keep you two safe. Just like you should always try to keep yourselves safe too.”

“How?” Sara asked. The faraway look was back in her eye. Reid knew exactly what she was thinking: how could she, a fourteen-year-old weighing eighty pounds soaking wet, keep something like the incident from happening again?

“Well,” said Reid, “apparently your sister’s been sneaking off to a self-defense class.”

Sara looked sharply over at her sister. “Really?”

Maya rolled her eyes. “Thanks for selling me out, Dad.”

Sara glanced back over at him. “I want to learn to shoot a gun.”

“Whoa.” Reid held up a hand. “Pump the brakes, kiddo. That’s a pretty serious request…”

“Why not?” Maya chimed in. “Don’t you think we’re responsible enough?”

“Of course, I do,” he replied flatly, “I just—”

“You said we should keep ourselves safe too,” Sara added.

“I did say that, but there are other ways to—”

“My friend Brent has been going hunting with his dad since he was twelve,” Maya cut in. “He knows how to shoot a gun. Why shouldn’t we?”

“Because that’s different,” Reid said forcefully. “And no ganging up on me. That’s unfair.” Up until then, he had thought this was going quite well, but now they were using his own words against him. He pointed at Sara. “You want to learn to shoot? You can. But only with me. And first, I want you caught up with school and I want positive reports from Dr. Branson. And you.” He pointed at Maya. “No more secret self-defense classes, okay? I don’t know what that guy is teaching you. You want to learn to fight, to defend yourself, you ask me.”

“Really? You’ll teach me?” Maya seemed buoyant at the prospect.

“Yes, I will.” He picked up his menu and opened it. “If you have more questions, I’ll answer them. But I think that’s about good for one evening, yeah?”

He considered himself lucky that Sara hadn’t asked him anything that he couldn’t answer. He didn’t want to have to explain the memory suppressor—that might complicate matters and reinforce their doubt about who he was—but he also didn’t want to have to answer that he didn’t know something. They would immediately suspect he was keeping it from them.

That clinches it, he thought. He had to get it done, and soon. No more waiting or excuses.

“Hey,” he said over his menu, “what do you say we check out Zurich tomorrow? It’s a beautiful city. Tons of history and shopping and culture.”

“Sure,” Maya agreed. But Sara said nothing. When Reid looked over his menu again, her face was scrunched into a pensive frown. “Sara?” he asked.

She looked up at him. “Did Mom know?”

The question had been a curveball once before when Maya had asked, not much more than a month earlier, and it took him by surprise again hearing it from Sara.

He shook his head. “No. She didn’t.”

“Isn’t that…” She hesitated, but then took a breath and asked, “Isn’t that kind of like lying?”

Reid folded his menu and set it down on the table. Suddenly he wasn’t very hungry anymore. “Yeah, sweetheart. It’s exactly like lying.”

*

The next morning Reid and the girls took the train north from Engelberg to Zurich. They didn’t talk any further about his past, or about the incident; if Sara had any more questions, she held them back, at least for now.

Instead they enjoyed the scenic views of the Swiss Alps on the two-hour train ride, snapping photos through the window. They spent the late morning enjoying the breathtaking medieval architecture of Old Town and walked the shores of the Limmat River. Despite not claiming to enjoy history as much as he did, both girls were stunned by the beauty of the twelfth-century Grossmünster cathedral (though they groaned when Reid began to lecture them about Huldrych Zwingli and his sixteenth-century religious reforms that took place there).

Though Reid was having a great time with his daughters, his smile was at least partially forced. He was anxious about what was coming.

“What’s next?” Maya asked after a lunch at a small café with views of the river.

“You know what would be really great after a meal like that?” Reid said. “A movie.”

“A movie,” his eldest repeated flatly. “Yeah, we definitely should have come all the way to Switzerland to do something we can do at home.”

Reid grinned. “Not just any movie. The Swiss National Museum isn’t far, and they’re showing a documentary on the history of Zurich from the Middle Ages to the present. Doesn’t that sound neat?”

“No,” said Maya.

“Not really,” Sara agreed.

“Huh. Well, I’m the dad, and I say we go see it. Then we can do whatever you two want to do and I won’t complain. I promise.”

Maya sighed. “Fair is fair. Lead the way.”

Less than ten minutes later they arrived at the Swiss National Museum, which really was showing a documentary about the history of Zurich. And Reid genuinely was interested in seeing it. And even though he bought three tickets, he only intended on using two of them.

“Sara, do you need to use the restroom before we go in?” he asked.

“Good idea.” She ducked into the bathroom. Maya started to follow, but Reid quickly grabbed her by the arm.

“Wait. Maya… I have to go.”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“There’s something I have to do,” he said quickly. “I have an appointment.”

Maya raised an eyebrow warily. “Doing what?”

“It has nothing to do with the CIA. At least, not directly.”

She scoffed. “I can’t believe this.”

“Maya, please,” he pleaded. “This is important to me. I promise you, I swear, it’s not fieldwork or anything dangerous. I just have to talk to someone. Privately.”

His daughter’s nostrils flared. She didn’t like it one bit, and worse, she didn’t truly believe him. “What do I tell Sara?”

Reid had already thought of that. “Tell her there was a problem with my credit card. Someone back home trying to use it, and I have to get that cleared up so that we don’t have to leave the ski lodge. Tell her I’m right outside, making phone calls.”

“Oh, okay,” Maya said mockingly. “You want me to lie to her.”

“Maya…” Reid groaned. Sara would be exiting the bathroom at any moment. “I promise you I will tell you all about it afterward, but I just don’t have the time right now. Please, go in there, have a seat, and watch the movie with her. I’ll be back before it’s over.”

“Fine,” she agreed reluctantly. “But I want a full explanation when you’re back.”

“You’ll get one,” he promised. “And don’t leave that theater.” He kissed her forehead and hurried away before Sara came out of the bathroom.

It felt awful, once again lying to his girls—or at least keeping the truth from them, which as Sara had astutely pointed out the night before, was pretty much the same as lying.

Is that how it’s always going to be? he wondered as he hurried out of the museum. Will there ever be a time that honesty is really the best policy?

He hadn’t just lied to Sara. He had lied to Maya as well. He had no appointment. He knew where Dr. Guyer’s practice was located (conveniently close to the Swiss National Museum, which Reid had considered in his plan) and he knew from an anonymous call that the doctor would be in today, but he did not dare leave his name or make a formal appointment. He didn’t know who this Guyer was at all, other than the man that had implanted the memory suppressor in Kent Steele’s head two years earlier. Reidigger had trusted the doctor, but that didn’t mean Guyer didn’t have some kind of link to the agency. Or worse, they could be watching him.

What if they knew about the doctor? he worried. What if they’ve been keeping tabs on him all this time?

It was too late to concern himself with that now. His plan was simply to go there, meet the man, and find out what, if anything, he could do about Reid’s memory loss. Consider it a consultation, he joked to himself as he walked briskly down Löwenstrasse, parallel to the Limmat River and towards the address he had found online. He had about two hours before the documentary at the museum was over. Plenty of time, or so he assumed.

Dr. Guyer’s neurosurgery practice was located in a wide, four-story professional building right off a main boulevard and across a courtyard from a cathedral. The structure was medieval in architecture, a far cry from the bland sort of American medical buildings he was accustomed to; it was nicer than most hotels Reid had stayed in.

He took the stairs up to the third floor and found an oak door with a bronze knocker and the name GUYER inscribed on a brass plate. He paused for a moment, unsure of what he would find on the other side. He wasn’t even certain of how common it was for neurosurgeons to have private practices in upscale buildings in Old Town Zurich—but then again, he couldn’t recall ever needing to visit one before.

He tried the knob; it was unlocked.

The Swiss doctor’s taste and affluence was immediately apparent. The paintings on the walls were mostly Impressionist, colorful open compositions in ornate frames that looked as if they cost as much as some cars. The van Gogh was most definitely a print, but if he wasn’t mistaken the lanky sculpture in the corner appeared to be an original Giacometti.

I wouldn’t even know that if it wasn’t for Kate, he thought, reinforcing his reason for being here as he crossed the small room towards a desk on the opposite side.

There were two things that immediately caught his eye on the other side of the reception area. The first was the desk itself, carved from a single irregularly-shaped piece of rosewood with dark, swirling patterns in the grain. Cocobolo, he realized. That’s easily a six-thousand dollar desk.

He refused to let himself be impressed by the art or the desk—but the woman behind it was another matter. She regarded Reid evenly with one perfect eyebrow arched and a smiled on her pouting lips. Her blonde hair framed the contours of an exquisitely shaped face and porcelain skin. Her eyes appeared too crystalline blue to be real.

“Good afternoon,” she said in English with only a slight Swiss-German accent. “Please have a seat, Agent Zero.”

CHAPTER NINE

Reid’s fight-or-flight instinct kicked in immediately at the receptionist’s words. And since it was clear to him that he wasn’t going to fight this woman—mostly clear, anyway—he decided to run. But halfway back to the door he heard a loud click.

The doorknob rattled, but did not move.

He spun and saw the woman’s hand beneath her expensive desk. There must be a button. A remote locking mechanism.

This is a trap.

“Let me out,” he warned. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“I do,” she replied. “And I assure you, you are in no danger. Would you like some tea?” Her tone was pacifying, as if she was dealing with a schizophrenic that had skipped their meds.

Words nearly failed him. “Tea? No, I don’t want tea. I want to leave.” He slammed his shoulder against the heavy door, but it would not budge.

“That won’t work,” the woman said. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

He turned back to her. She had stood from her desk and held her hands out in a non-threatening manner. But she locked you in here, he reminded himself. So maybe you will fight this woman.

“My name is Alina Guyer,” she said. “Do you remember me?”

Guyer? But Reidigger’s letter said the doctor was a “he.” Besides, Reid was fairly sure he wouldn’t forget a face like that. She was downright stunning.

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember you. I don’t remember ever being here and it was a mistake to come here. If you don’t let me out, bad things are going to happen…”

“My god,” said a hushed male voice. “It’s you.”

Reid immediately put up his fists as he turned towards the new threat.

The doctor—presumably, since he wore a white coat—stood in the threshold of a door to the left of the cocobolo desk. He had to be in his late fifties, if not sixty, though his green eyes were keen and sharp. His entirely white hair was trimmed neatly and impeccably parted. His tie, Reid noted, was Ermenegildo Zegna, though he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

Most important of all, however, was that the doctor looked entirely awestruck by Reid’s presence.

“Dr. Guyer, I presume?” he said breathlessly.

“I always thought you might come back,” the doctor said, a wide smile breaking upon his face. He had a similar Swiss-German accent as his receptionist, who he turned to as he said, “Alina, darling, cancel my appointments. Hold my calls. Keep the lock on. We are closed for today.”

“Of course,” said Alina as she slowly sank back to her chair, her lake-like eyes not leaving Reid.

“Come!” Guyer motioned for Reid to follow. “Please, come. I promise you are in the company of friends here.”

Reid hesitated. “You understand I might be a little distrusting.”

Guyer nodded appreciably. “I understand we have a lot to discuss.” He turned and vanished through the doorway.

This feels wrong. They had a remote door lock, no patients present, and a small fortune in furniture. But he wanted answers, so Reid ignored his instinct to flee and followed the doctor.

Before he went through the doorway the receptionist—who Reid had surmised was Guyer’s wife—glanced up at him with a thin smile and asked, “About that tea?”

“Maybe something stronger, if you’ve got it,” Reid muttered.

The walls of Guyer’s office held an impressive number of framed certifications and diplomas, as well as an array of photographs of various travels and achievements. But Reid barely glanced at them. He didn’t care about anything this doctor had done other than the single procedure Guyer had performed on his head.

The doctor pulled open a desk drawer and took out a notebook and pen, and then sat heavily in his chair, beaming at Reid like he was Christmas morning.

“Please,” he said. “Have a seat, Agent Zero.” Guyer sighed. “I always suspected you might return here. I just didn’t know when. I assumed the implant would eventually fail—if you survived—but only two years? That is simply shoddy craftsmanship.” He chuckled as if he had told a joke. “Now that you’re here, I have a thousand questions. But I’m afraid I don’t know where to start.”

Reid lowered himself into a chair opposite Guyer’s desk, keeping his guard up and his periphery on the door behind him. He glanced down at his watch and saw a message from Maya: Sara bought it. You’d better be here when the movie is over.

Right, he thought. No matter what happened here, he couldn’t forget that he was on a schedule. “I know where to start,” Reid said. “What do you mean the implant would eventually fail?”

“You know where this technology was acquired, yes?” the doctor asked.

Reid did. Alan Reidigger had stolen it from the CIA; in fact, the eccentric tech engineer Bixby was a co-inventor of the memory suppressor. “Yes,” he answered.

“Well, your friend Mr. Reidigger made me a deal,” said Guyer. “He did not only bring me the memory suppressor, but also the schematic upon which it was built so that I might attempt to copy its technology. However, upon studying it, I saw the flaw in its design. It was, after all, just a prototype. I estimated that it would begin to fail after five or six years.”

“Begin to fail?” Reid repeated. “So these memories would have come back to me eventually anyway?”

“Well… yes,” the doctor said blankly. “Is that not why you’re here? You have started to recover the memories that were suppressed?”

“Not quite. Iranian terrorists tore the implant out of my head.”

Dr. Guyer’s expression fell slack. “Oh,” he said empathetically, “that is most unfortunate. You poor man… Your mind must be a jumbled mess.”

“It is. Thanks,” Reid said flatly. “What about the other part? You said ‘if I survived.’ What does that mean?”

Guyer looked at his desk as if there was something very interesting there. “I think that question would be best answered by your colleague Mr. Reidigger.”

“He can’t answer,” Reid told him. “He’s dead.”

Guyer seemed extremely troubled by the news. He folded his hands reverently on the desk with his brow furrowed, the creases in his forehead aging him several years. “I am very sorry to hear that,” he said quietly. “He seemed a good man. He went to great lengths to help a friend.”

“That may be so, but he’s not here,” Reid said simply. “I am. And you didn’t answer my question.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes. Well. It is no simple answer, nor one you may want to hear…”

“Try me.”

Guyer sighed. “You and Mr. Reidigger wanted your memories suppressed so that you might live out your days with your family, blissfully unaware of the hardships you had faced. But both of you thought that your agency would find you eventually and… and silence you.”

What? Reid could not believe what he was hearing. This entire time he had thought that the purpose of the suppressor was for him to return to a normal life, away from the CIA and everything that had come with it. “You’re suggesting that I knew, or thought, I would be killed? And I still agreed to this?”

“That is correct, Agent Zero.”

Reid shook his head. Why would I do that? Why would I take away anything that would have given me a fighting chance? It felt as if he had condemned himself to some sort of memory hospice. He never imagined he would ever think it, but the Iranians’ intrusion into his home on that night in February was suddenly welcome. Without it, he never would have remembered his sordid past, or the truth about his wife’s death, or anything about the conspiracy…

Then he realized. That was exactly why he did it—so that whatever time he had remaining wouldn’t be lived in heavy secrets and lies. Everything he knew, everything he had shared with his girls and everything he still kept from them, felt as if it was slowly eating away at him. If he had truly believed that the agency would eventually take him out anyway, then the suppressor would have allowed him to live without the weight of his past on his shoulders.

“I can’t speak for your personal motivations, Agent Zero,” said Guyer. “But you agreed to all of this. I have it on video.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Would you like to see?”

Reid hesitated. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think I would.”

Dr. Guyer rose from his chair, but even as he did a new memory flashed across Reid’s mind.

You were sitting in this very office. In the same chair.

Beside you is a friendly face with a boyish smile, dark hair neatly parted. Alan Reidigger.

Guyer sits behind the desk with a video camera.

Reidigger nods to you once in reassurance.

“My name is Kent Steele,” you begin. “This video is to confirm that I consent to an experimental neurosurgical procedure to be performed by Dr. Edgar Guyer…”

Reid shook his head. “Forget it,” he told Guyer. “No need for the video.”

The doctor, still standing behind his desk, regarded Reid with eyes wide and attentive. “It happened just now, didn’t it? A memory returned to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Incredible,” Guyer breathed. “Tell me, what was the trigger?”

“Um… a combination of things, I suppose,” Reid said. “The word ‘video.’ Being here in this office, seeing you.”

“Tell me, what other triggers have you experienced?” Guyer sank back into his seat and plucked up his pen.

“It’s usually things I hear,” Reid explained. “But that’s not always enough alone. It’s a blend of things—being in a particular place, hearing something, sometimes even a scent…”

Guyer scribbled furiously in the notebook as he said, “So no single sensory reception is recalling memories? Visual or auditory stimulus alone is not enough… fascinating. Can you give me an example?”

Reid sighed. “Sure. Uh… okay, a couple of months ago I was in France, in a part of Paris I thought I had never been. I smelled a bakery, and I saw a street sign, and suddenly I realized I had been on that exact corner before, and I knew exactly where I needed to go. Well, my feet knew where to go. In my head, I was still experiencing everything new. I guess you could say it’s like the most frustrating version of déjà vu possible.”

“Hmm,” Guyer murmured as he took notes. “What about abilities?”

“Abilities?” Reid asked.

“As an agent, you had combat training, flight training, emergency intervention…”

“Oh, right. Yes, some have come back,” Reid told him. “Those are probably the most confusing to me. Two months ago I couldn’t speak Arabic, Russian, French, Slovak… but if someone speaks to me in a language I know, it all comes back at once, as if it’s unlocked. Suddenly I can speak it as well as I’m talking to you now. The same goes for fighting, or even piloting. It’s as if the familiarity of an instinct kicks in and it all just rushes back.”

“That is very promising,” Guyer said without looking up.

“Why?”

The doctor set down the pen. “You see, Agent Zero—”

“Can you stop calling me that?” Reid interrupted. For some reason being referred to by his CIA handle was getting on his nerves. “Call me Reid. Please.”

“Certainly, Reid. This procedure was extremely complex. It took eighteen hours to complete, because it was about suppressing far more than just memory. For what are abilities if not skills learned through repetition? And repetition itself is based on memory. Even our most basic skills rely on subconscious recollection—walking, speaking, writing, et cetera. I cannot express to you how difficult it was to suppress the knowledge of how to handle a gun without accidentally hindering your ability to hold a pen. To quell the ability of flying an airplane without inadvertently quashing how to drive a car…”

“And I suppose you don’t know what it’s like to climb into a cockpit and suddenly know how to fly a plane,” Reid mused.

The doctor looked to him somberly. “Bewildering and exhilarating, I would imagine.”

Reid scoffed—though he had to admit silently that it was, at times, exhilarating.

“Anyhow,” Guyer continued, “the recollection of abilities is promising because it is not a single memory that learns a skill, yet your mind has a way of collating that data, so to speak. For example, you may not remember precisely where you were or what you were doing when you learned the word bonjour, but your brain—the prefrontal cortex working with the hippocampus and temporal lobe—has ‘bundled’ that information with the rest of your knowledge of the French language, and it would seem that recovering any part of it ‘unlocks,’ as you put it, its entirety. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” Reid nodded, mostly following what the doctor was suggesting. “But then why doesn’t it work that way with other memories? If I remember one thing about a particular person, why don’t I remember everything about them?”

“While I can’t say with any certainty, I imagine it has to do with the way that our brains process memories,” Guyer told him. “The memory suppressor works by affecting the limbic system. The amygdala, part of that system, plays a large role in processing emotional reactions and social behavior. See, we tend to associate only a few central memories with any given person or even place. To recall more than that requires… well, it requires us to think about it.”

Reid sighed heavily. Everything that the doctor was saying made some semblance of sense, but the simple fact of the matter was that he had come here to have only one question answered.

“Dr. Guyer,” he said, “while all of this is very enlightening, I can’t continue to live like this. There are questions in my mind that I can’t answer. So I need to know: can this be reversed? Can my memory be restored?”

The doctor was silent for a long moment, tenting his fingers on the desk. “Are you certain,” he asked, “that is what you want? You had these memories suppressed for a reason.”

“Yes,” Reid said. “I’m certain.” The past had come back to haunt him in more ways than one, and he couldn’t continue on knowing only half-truths.

Guyer stood from his desk. “Come with me, please.” He led Reid wordlessly out of the office, further down the hall and into a wide white room with dim blue lighting, filled with an array of high-tech medical equipment. Reid recognized an X-ray machine, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, and an ultrasound generator; there were monitors and computers and carefully laid surfaces of shiny, impeccably clean surgical tools, the purpose of which Reid could only start to guess.

The doctor directed his attention to a large piece of equipment in the corner of the room. It somewhat resembled a cross between an MRI machine and a tanning bed, a large white cylindrical chamber with a circular aperture in the center that held a narrow cot. But before Guyer even began to explain, Reid suspected its objective was more than just imaging.

“In the wake of your procedure,” Guyer explained, “I studied the schematics from Alan Reidigger and the technology behind the memory suppressor with the intention of copying it. But as I mentioned before, there are flaws in its designs. And I came to realize, after some months, that fixing them is unfortunately beyond me. So I shifted my focus, and created this.”

Reid did not say anything, but he raised an eyebrow curiously, wondering how the stolen CIA tech had evolved from an implant the size of a grain of rice to the enormous machine before him.

“As I said, the suppressor works by affecting the limbic system,” Guyer continued. “That is, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the epithalamus, and the hypothalamus—among other parts. It does not affect the four main lobes of the brain, save for a small portion of the medial temporal lobe, which is associated with episodic memory. What that means is that the suppressor does not hinder your ability to create new memories or to turn short-term memory into long-term.”

“It only affects what you already know,” Reid offered. “No offense, Doc, but I don’t need to know the science behind it. I just need to know what it can do.”

“Of course,” said Guyer apologetically. “Essentially, I have spent the last thirteen months reverse-engineering the suppressor’s technology into a way to oppose the device; that is, to affect the limbic system in a manner that will, to use layman terms, ‘encourage’ memory.”

Reid frowned. “I’m not sure I follow. You built this for people that had a memory suppressor implanted?” As far as he was aware, there had been only one suppressor created—and only one person affected by it.