Strangers

but entirely rational method of avoiding the repressed memories that the mind-control experts had forbidden her to recall.
        She said, "But what about the brass buttons on the coat of the man who killed Pablo? And on the policeman's uniform? Why did they terrify me and throw me into a fugue?"
        "We know the military is involved in this cover-up," Dom said, turning up the heater to counteract the cold air pouring off the car's wind-buffeted windows, "and officers' uniforms have brass buttons like that, though not a lion passant. Most likely… raised images of eagles. The buttons on the killer's and cop's coats were probably similar to the buttons on the uniforms of those who imprisoned us in the motel."
        "Okay, but you said they wore decontamination suits, not uniforms."
        "Maybe they didn't wear the decon suits for the entire three and a half days. At some point they decided it was safe to take them off."
        She nodded. "I'm sure that's right. Which leaves only one thing. Those carriage lamps behind the house on Newbury Street, the day Pablo was murdered. I told you about them: black iron with pebbled amber panes of glass. They had those bulbs that flickered like a gas flame. Perfectly innocent lamps. But they kicked me into another blackout."
        "The bases of the lamps in the rooms at the Tranquility Motel are designed like hurricane lamps, with little windows of amber glass."
        "I'll be damned. So every blackout was triggered by an object that reminded me of something from those days when I was being brainwashed."
        Dom hesitated, then reached inside his sweater and withdrew the Polaroid photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her.
        She paled and shuddered when she saw herself staring up with vacant eyes at the camera. "Gevalt!" She looked away from the picture.
        Dom gave her time to recover from the shock of the snapshot.
        Outside, in the fading dirty-gray light, a score of vehicles waited silently like dark, dumb, brooding beasts. The wind harried collections of litter, dead leaves, and miscellaneous debris across the macadam.
        "It's meshugge," she said, lowering her troubled gaze to the photo again. "It's crazy. What could possibly have happened to us that would justify this elaborate, risky conspiracy? What could we have seen that was so dreadfully goddamned important?"
        "We'll find out," he promised.
        "Will we? Will they let us? They killed Pablo. Won't they do whatever's necessary to keep us from uncovering the truth?"
        Adjusting the heater again, Dom said, "Well, I figure there're two factions among the conspirators. There are the hard-asses represented by Colonel Falkirk and his people, and the better guys - can't call them good guys exactly - represented by the fella who sent us these snapshots and by the two men in decontamination suits in my dream last night. The hard-asses wanted to kill all of us right at the start, so there'd never be any doubt that the cover-up would be permanent. But the better guys wanted to scrub our memories, use mind-control techniques instead of violence, so we could go on living, and the better guys must be the stronger of the two factions because they got their way."
        "The gunman who killed Pablo was most likely one of the hard-asses."
        "Yeah. Working for Falkirk. The colonel's evidently still willing to kill anyone who jeopardizes the cover-up, which means none of us is safe. But there's the other faction that doesn't believe in Falkirk's ultimate solution, and they're still trying to protect us, I think. So we have a chance. Anyway, we can't walk away. We can't go home and try to get on with our lives just because the enemy looks formidable."
        "No," Ginger agreed, "we can't. Because until we find out what happened, we don't really have lives to get on with." The wind blew withered leaves against the windshield, over the roof. Ginger swept the parking lot with her gaze. "They must know we're gathering at the motel, that things are falling apart. Do you think they're watching us now?"
        "Very likely they've got the motel under surveillance," Dom said. "But no one followed me to the airport. I watched for a tail."
        "They wouldn't need to tail you here," she said grimly. "They knew where you were going. They knew who you were picking up."
        "Are we laboring under a delusion of free will? Are we only bugs on a