Red by Ted Dekker Page B

whatever country he’s using. Not as long as he has the antivirus.” The director stood and grunted. “The world’s coming apart at the seams and we’re sitting here, blind as bats,” Grant replied.
    â€œWhatever happens, don’t let anyone talk the president into compromising,” Thomas said.
    â€œI think you’ll have the opportunity to do that yourself,” Grant said. “He wants to meet with you personally tomorrow.”
    The phone rang. Grant snatched it up and listened for a moment. “On our way.” He dropped the phone in its cradle. “He’s ready. Let’s go.”

    DR. MYLES Bancroft was a frumpy, short man with wrinkled slacks and facial hair poking out of his orifices, overall not the kind of man most people would associate with the Pulitzer Prize. He wore a small knowing grin that was immediately disarming—a good thing, considering what he played with.
    People’s minds.
    His lab occupied a small basement on the south side of Johns Hopkins’s campus. They’d flown Thomas in by helicopter and hurried him down the steps as if he were a man committed to the witness protection program and they’d received warnings of snipers on the adjoining roofs.
    Thomas faced the cognitive psychologist in the white concrete room. Two of Grant’s men waited with crossed legs in the lobby. Grant had remained in Langley with a thousand concerns clogging his mind.
    â€œSo basically you’re going to try to hypnotize me, and then you’re going to hook me up to these machines of yours and make me fall asleep while you toy with my mind using electrical stimuli.”
    Bancroft grinned. “Basically, yes. I describe it using more glamorous, fun words, but in essence you have the picture, lad. Hypnosis can be rather unreliable. I won’t josh you. It requires a particularly cooperative subject, and I would like you to be that subject. But even if you’re not, I may be able to accomplish some interesting results by Frankensteining you.” Another grin.
    Thomas liked this man immensely. “And can you explain this Frankensteining of yours? In terms I can understand?”
    â€œLet me give it a whirl. The brain does record everything; I’m sure you know that. We don’t know precisely how to access the information externally or to record memories, et cetera, et cetera. But we are getting close. We hook you up to these wires here and we can record the wave signatures emitted by the brain. Unfortunately, we’re a bit fuzzy on the brain’s language, so when we see a zip and a zap, we know it means something, but we don’t yet know what zip or zap means. Follow?”
    â€œSo basically you’re clueless.”
    â€œThat about summarizes it. Shall we get started?”
    â€œSeriously.”
    â€œWell, it’s rather . . . speculative, I must admit, but here you go: I have been developing a way to stimulate memories. Different brain activities have different wave signatures. For example, in the simplest of terms, conceptual activity, or waking thought, looks different from perceptual, dream thought. I’ve been mapping and identifying those signatures for some time. Among countless other discoveries, we’ve learned that there’s a connection between dreams and memories—similar signatures, you see. Similar brain language, as it were. Essentially what I’m going to do is record the signatures from your dreams and then force-feed them into the section of your brain that typically holds memory. This seems to excite the memory. The effect isn’t permanent, but it does stimulate the memories of most subjects.”
    â€œHmm. But you can’t isolate any particular memories. You just have a general hope that I wake up remembering more than when I fell asleep.”
    â€œIn some cases, yes. In others, subjects have dreams that turn out to be actual memories. It’s like pouring