anything either, and Joe operates on intuition at least as much as I do.
A few weeks later, Ngo was arrested in Salt Lake, but Properties hates to throw anything away, so the mask went into a drawer in what we call 'the limbo files.'
I never imagined it would mean anything to me, let alone how much.
2
Two days after Elena Marquez had her psychotic break at the Academy Awards ceremony, her husband, Bo Haugen, took her to the well-known psychic healer, Olaf Sigurdsson.
Haugen's worth a lot of money, a lot of it earned, but his seed money was inherited. He's a low-profile Hollywood producer—actually San Fernando Valley—specializing in biographies and other historical series and miniseries. He's a very private man.
Elena Marquez's doctor had her doped to the gills, but Ole got beneath the drug level and regressed her to the ceremonies. She told him that crossing the stage, she'd been struck by a crushing head pain. Which was followed instantly by what she called an assault of 'memories,' of things she said she'd never even dreamed, but were as real as life and unimaginably terrible. Along with the feeling that someone or something was taking over her body.
That's when she'd passed out and gone into convulsions.
Interestingly, she had bruises, lesions, abrasions, burns, that so far as anyone knew, had never actually been inflicted on her. Somatic hysteria, her doctor called them, which amounts more or less to saying she'd imagined them so strongly, they'd appeared on her body. Her blood also contained enzymes which metabolize a class of aphrodisiacs, but not the aphrodisiacs themselves, which was a chemical anomaly the lab couldn't explain.
The intruding 'memories' were of waking up naked in a place she'd never been before, having no idea how she'd gotten there. There'd been a dark-complexioned female nurse who spoke a little English, who'd given her a shot and then fed her. After that—
After that she'd been a sex slave to someone she described as an oil sheikh. To Elena Marquez, any wealthy Arab who wears robes is an oil sheikh. She was injected with an aphrodisiac before each of his visits, and to intensify his kicks and keep himself going, he had a Harem Smoke fumer. He abused her pretty badly, and after a week or so had brought in other men. One she thought of as a general—he'd arrived wearing a uniform loaded with medals. The others she thought of as sheikhs. She had internal injuries from the abuse she took. Between times the nurse wept with her, and treated her with what were probably antibiotics.
After a couple of weeks, the repeated drugging and abuse broke her sanity. She started hallucinating like a drunk drying out from a week-long binge, shaking so badly she couldn't feed herself, and what the nurse fed her, she vomited back out. She'd cry even under the aphrodisiac. Which annoyed the sheikh, who quit coming to see her, sending soldiers instead, several at a time. They were the ones who'd burned her with cigarettes. After several days of that, her memories of it suddenly stopped, and that second persona had 'burst into her skull' in the middle of the awards ceremony, with a headache she wouldn't have believed possible.
And to top it off, she knew—
* * *
Though Ole could get her into a trance, then locate the traumatic incidents and get her descriptions of them, he couldn't defuse them until the sedative was out of her body. So he'd called in a music therapist; the music was to function in place of the drug. After a few days of music and detoxifying, he defused the whole sequence of traumas; it took just one evening and the following afternoon. I got to talk with her the day after that, and she seemed as poised and matter-of-fact as you could want. Ole didn't doubt at all that what she'd described had somehow really happened, but I wasn't so sure, even after I talked with her. I couldn't even think of an
Bo Haugen told me privately he'd have liked to believe it was all hallucination, but he acted on the assumption that it had somehow derived from a criminal act—perhaps before they'd met. Maybe after she'd finished an overseas film, and she'd suppressed the memories afterward.
I couldn't buy that, although I didn't say so to Haugen. I know Ole, and with him helping, she'd have dredged up the rest of the story if there was one. He's a master at fishing up buried memories, and without hypnosis.
At any rate, Haugen contracted with Prudential to find out what had happened and who was behind it. And because I'd solved 'The Case of the Twice-killed Astronomer,' and what my wife Tuuli and I thought of as 'The Puppetmaster Case'—both of them damn tough—I got the assignment.
* * *
The first thing I did was create a time track for Marquez, going back to high school, and there was no unaccounted-for period long enough to accommodate the set of horrors she'd described. I told Haugen that, but he wanted me to stay with it, so Joe had Elena Marquez swear out a criminal complaint against a person or persons unknown, for her 'covert drugging.' That got me second-level access to the California State Data Center.
The only approach I could think of was to treat the 'memories' as if they really were—as if those things had actually happened—and try to place the events geographically. Judging from the few words she'd learned, that Ole fished from her subconscious, the language there was Arabic, probably the dialect spoken on the Arabian peninsula. And clearly the 'sheikh' was someone important in government, perhaps a cabinet minister. Also it seemed to be one of the less secularized states, like Saudi Arabia, Ibadhan, or Yemen.
But we had no proof at all that any of it was real, and in whatever country it was, we'd probably have no legal standing anyway. I asked Haugen what good it would do him to find out who it was. He said it would be worth it just to know. Which may have been true, as far as it went, but I have no doubt he had thoughts of something more. It seemed to me, though, that there wasn't a chance in hell of having a murder contract carried out on some middle-eastern government minister.
* * *
I had Marquez work with a computer artist, Jamal Lodi, who turned out an iterative series of computer drawings of her captor. Then I turned to the web and checked the lifelike final result against pictures of wealthy or prominent Arabs. It was a close match with one of Rashid ibn Muhammed, the uncle, one-time regent for, and currently financial advisor of the Sultan of Ibadhan.
But Haugen also wanted to know how the crime had been committed, which promised to be a lot harder to learn. Impossible seemed more like it. Joe told him we'd go into fishing mode, and see what we found.
