Triggers Read Online Free PDF

the darkness helped him clear his mind.
    This was going to be hard, he knew. He’d spent years trying to avoid triggering flashbacks—and now Singh was going to find whatever switch in his brain caused them and throw it, hopefully for the final time. The only small mercy there’d been with the previous flashbacks was never expecting them—they just hit him upside the head, with no warning. But now Kadeem felt dread, knowing one was coming. He was hooked up to a vital-signs monitor, and he could hear the soft ping of his pulse accelerating.
    The intersecting lasers were specially tuned to pass through bone and flesh; the teal dots were mere markers for invisible beams that coincided with them. The beams entered his skull without having an effect, but when two or more beams crisscrossed inside his brain, they stimulated the neural net at the intersection and caused it to fire, providing, as Singh had explained to him, the equivalent of an action potential. First one net was brought to life, then another, then another. Singh’s equipment bypassedthe usual excitatory disinhibition that frustrated other brain researchers: normally, if a neural net had fired once recently, it was disinclined to fire again. But Singh could make the same net fire as often as possible, until it had, at least temporarily, exhausted its supply of neurotransmitters.
    Singh was doing that just now, and—
    A picnic, one of the few happy moments of Kadeem’s childhood.
    Five big kids taking his lunch from him on the way to school.
    His mama, trying to hide her bruised eye from him, and his rage at knowing she was going to let that man back in their home.
    His first car.
    His first blowjob.
    A sharp pain but—but no, only a memory of a sharp pain. Ah, it was when he broke his arm playing football.
    More pain, but of a good kind: the short, sharp shock of Kristah playfully biting his nipple.
    A flock of birds blocking the sun.
    The sun—
    The sun.
    Hot, beating down. The desert sun.
    Iraq.
    Yes, Iraq.
    His heart pounded; the sound from the monitor had the tempo of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.”
    Singh was homing in, getting close, circling his prey.
    Kadeem gripped the padded arms of the chair.
    Sand. Tanks. Troops. And, in the distance, the village.
    Shouts. Orders. The roar of vehicle engines fighting against the drifting sand and the heat.
    Kadeem’s breathing was ragged. The air he was taking in was cool, but his memory was of searing hotness. He wanted to shout for Singh to
abort, abort, abort!
But he bit his lower lip and endured it.
    The village was growing closer. Iraqi men in desert gear, women who must have been sweltering in their robe-like black abayas, children intattered clothes, all coming to see the approaching convoy. Greeting it.
Welcoming it.
    Kadeem tasted vomit at the back of his throat. He fought it down and let the memory wash over him—all the screams, all the pain, all the
evil
—one last time.
    SHARPSHOOTER Rory Proctor continued to watch the activity on the roof of the White House from what he hoped was a safe distance. He was angry and worried: the nation had been pounded for months now by al-Sajada. How much more was yet to come? How much more could this great country take?
    He’d tuned his headset to pick up the appropriate police channel and was listening to the running commentary from the man operating the bomb-disposal robot: “I’m going to try cutting into the side of the enclosure so that we can get at the device. In five, four, three, two…”
    AGENT Susan Dawson kept flashing back to an episode of
Columbo
she’d seen years ago, in which Leonard Nimoy had guest-starred as a surgeon who’d tried to arrange the death of someone while supposedly saving his life: when installing an artificial heart valve, Nimoy’s character had used dissolving instead of permanent suture. But as far as she could tell, Eric Redekop and his team had worked fervently to save Seth Jerrison.
    “Central to Dawson,” said