False Memory

requested. Childlike adoration. Erotic rapture. Impotent rage or even lamblike meekness with a glaze of bafflement, if either of those responses amused him.

He had no intention of killing her. Not here, not now — though soon.

When the time inevitably came, he wouldn’t act directly to snuff Susan, because he had great respect for the scientific-investigation division of virtually any contemporary American police agency. When wet work was required, he always used intermediaries to deliver the death blow, sparing himself the risk of suspicion.

Besides, his purest bliss came from clever manipulation, not directly from mutilation and murder. Pulling the trigger, shoving in the knife, twisting the wire garrote — none of that would thrill him as keenly as using someone to commit atrocities on his behalf.

Power is a sharper thrill than violence.

More precisely, his greatest delight arose not from the end effect of using power but from the process of using it. Manipulation. Control. The act of exerting absolute control, pulling strings and watching people perform as commanded, was so profoundly gratifying to the doctor that in his finest moments of puppeteering, plangent peals of pleasure shook through him like great gongs of sound shivering the cast bronze of massive cathedral bells.

Susan’s throat beneath his hand reminded him of a long-ago thrill, of another slender and graceful throat that had been torn by a pike, and with this memory came a tintinnabulation through the bone bells of his spine.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, stands a Palladian mansion in which a willowy young heiress named Minette Luckland pounds her mother’s skull to mush with a hammer and shortly thereafter shoots her father in the back of the head while he is eating a slice of crumb cake and watching a rerun of Seinfeld. Subsequently, she leaps from a second-floor gallery, free-falling eighteen feet, impaling herself on a spear held by a statue of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt, which stands on a fluted plinth in the center of the entry rotunda. The suicide note, indisputably written in Minette’s own neat hand, claims that she has been sexually abused since childhood by both parents — an outrageous slander that Dr. Ahriman had suggested to her. Around Diana’s bronze feet: spatters of blood like red plum-flower petals on white marble floor.

Now, standing half naked in the shadowy kitchen, green eyes reflecting the faint green light of the digital clock in the nearby oven, Susan Jagger was even lovelier than the late Minette. Although her face and form were the stuff of an erotomaniac’s sweat-drenched dreams, Ahriman was less excited by her looks than by the knowledge that in her lithe limbs and supple body was a lethal potential as great as that unleashed in Scottsdale so many years ago.

Her right carotid artery throbbed against the doctor’s thumb, her pulse slow and thick. Fifty-six beats per minute.

She was not afraid. She was calmly awaiting use, as though she were an unthinking tool — or, more accurately, a toy.

By using the trigger name Ben Marco and then by reciting the conditioning haiku, Ahriman had transferred her into an altered state of consciousness. A layman might have used the term hypnotic trance, which to a certain extent it was. A clinical psychologist would have diagnosed it as a fugue, which was closer to the truth.

Neither term was adequately defining.

Once Ahriman recited the haiku, Susan’s personality was more deeply and firmly repressed than if she were hypnotized. In this peculiar condition, she was no longer Susan Jagger in any meaningful sense, but a nonentity, a meat machine whose mind was a blank hard-drive waiting for whatever software Ahriman chose to install.

If she had been in a classic fugue state, which is a serious personality disassociation, she would have appeared to function almost normally, with a few eccentric behaviors but with far less detachment than she now exhibited.

“Susan,” he said, “do you know who I am?”

“Do I?” she asked, her voice fragile and distant.

In this state, she was incapable of answering any question, because she was waiting to be told what he wanted of her, what act she must commit, and even how she must feel about it.

“Am I your psychiatrist, Susan?”

In the gloom, he could almost see the puzzlement on her face. “Are you?”

Until she was released from this state, she would respond only to commands.

He said, “Tell me your name.”

Receiving this direct instruction, she was free to provide whatever knowledge she possessed. “Susan Jagger.”

“Tell me who I am.”

“Dr. Ahriman.”

“Am I your psychiatrist?”

“Are you?”

“Tell me my profession.”

“You’re a psychiatrist.”

This more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state had not been easily engineered. Much hard work and professional dedication had been required to remake her into this pliant plaything.

Eighteen months ago, before he had been her psychiatrist, on three separate carefully orchestrated occasions, without Susan’s knowledge, Ahriman had administered to her a potent brew of drugs: Rohypnol, phencyclidine, Valium, and one marvelous cerebrotropic substance not listed in any published pharmacopoeia. The recipe was his own, and he personally compounded each dose from the stock in his private and quite illegal pharmacy, because the ingredients must be precisely balanced if the desired effect were to be achieved.

The drugs themselves had not reduced Susan to her current obedient condition, but each dose had rendered her semiconscious, unaware of her situation, and supremely malleable. While she had been in this twilight sleep, Ahriman had been able to bypass her conscious mind, where volitional thinking occurred, and speak to her deep subconscious, where conditioned reflexes were established and where he met no resistance.

What he had done to her during those three long sessions would tempt tabloid newspapers and writers of spy novels to use the word brainwashing, but it was nothing as twentieth-century as that. He had not torn down the structure of her mind, with the intention of rebuilding it in a new architecture. That approach — once favored by the Soviet, the Chinese, and the North Korean governments, among others — was too ambitious, demanding months of around-the-clock access to the subject in a dreary prison environment, with lots of tedious psychological torture, not to mention a tolerance for the wretch’s annoying screams and cowardly pleading. Dr. Ahriman’s IQ was high, but his boredom threshold was low. Besides, the rate of success using traditional brainwashing techniques was uninspiring and the degree of control seldom total.

Rather, the doctor had gone down into Susan’s subconscious, into the cellar, and he had added a new chamber — call it a secret chapel — of which her conscious mind remained unaware. There, he conditioned her to worship one god to the exclusion of all others, and that god was Mark Ahriman himself. He was a stern deity, pre- Christian in his denial of free will, intolerant of the slightest disobedience, merciless with transgressors.

Thereafter, he had never again drugged her. There was no need to do so anymore. In those three sessions, he had established the control devices — the Marco name, the haiku — that instantly repressed her personality and took her to the same deep realms of her psyche to which the chemicals had taken her.

In the final drug session, he also implanted her agoraphobia. He thought it was an interesting malady, ensuring satisfying drama and many colorful effects as she gradually cracked apart and finally came to ruin. The whole point, after all, was entertainment.

Now, with his hand still upon Susan’s throat, he said, “I don’t think I’ll be myself this time. Something kinky tonight. Do you know who I am, Susan?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m your father,” Ahriman said.

She did not reply.

He said, “Tell me who I am.”

“You’re my father.”

“Call me Daddy,” he instructed.

Her voice remained distant, devoid of emotion, because he had not yet told her how she was required to feel