FaceOff by Dennis Lehane, James Rollins, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, R. L. Stine, Heather Graham, Jeffery Deaver, Peter James, Steve Martini, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Joseph Finder, Lee Child, Raymond Khoury, Linwood Barclay, Steve Berry, John Sandford, M. J. Rose, Lisa Gardner, F. Paul Wilson, T. Jefferson Parker, John Lescroart, Linda Fairstein

case I’ll be locked up. But either way, my dear doctor, you will be dead.”
    No answer.
    “And I will kill you. I want to kill you. The only thing that will stop me is a full, immediate, and complete explanation of this setup.”
    “What makes you think this is a setup?” came the doctor’s quavering voice. “That’s your delusion talking.”
    “Because I knew how to pick a lock. I took this revolver away from an orderly as easily as taking candy from a baby.”
    “Of course you did. That’s your standard Special Forces training.”
    “I’m too strong to have been locked in a mental hospital for six months. I bent the bars in my window.”
    “For God’s sake, you spent half your time working out in our gym! Don’t you remember?”
    A silence. Then Pendergast said: “It was a masterful job. You almost had me believing you. But I grew suspicious again when Helen did not rise to my comment about the moon—sharing the full moonrise was always our private signal. That put me on my guard. And then I knew for certain it was a setup when Helen took my hands in hers.”
    “And how in God’s name did you know that?”
    “Because she still had her left hand. There’s one memory in my life that’s so powerful that I know it can’t be a delusion. It occurred during the African hunting expedition in which Helen was attacked by a lion. My memory of the moment when I found her severed hand, still bearing its wedding ring, is seared too deep in my memory to be anything but real.”
    The doctor was silent. The moon shone off the small lake. A loon called from some distant shore.
    Pendergast cocked the Smith & Wesson. “I’ve endured enough prevarication. Tell me the truth. One more lie and you’re dead.”
    “How will you know it’s a lie?” asked the doctor quietly.
    “It becomes a lie when I don’t believe it.”
    “I see. And what’s in it for me if I cooperate?”
    “You’ll be permitted to live.”
    The doctor took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s startwith my name. It’s not Augustine. It’s Grundman. Dr. William Grundman.”
    “Keep going.”
    “For the past decade, I’ve been experimenting with memory neurons. I discovered a gene known as Npas4.”
    “Which is?”
    “It controls the neurons of your memory. Memory, you see, is physical. It’s stored through a combination of neurochemicals and trapped electrical potentials. By controlling Npas4, I learned how to locate the neural networks that store specific memories. I learned how to manipulate those neurons. I learned how to erase them. Not delete—that would cause brain damage. But erase. A far more delicate operation.”
    He paused. “Do you believe me so far?”
    “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
    “I discovered that this technique could be very lucrative. I started a clinic—under the cover of the Stony Mountain Sanatorium. While the sanatorium is visible, naturally, what goes on there is quite underground.”
    “Continue.”
    “People come to my underground clinic to be rid of memories they no longer want. I’m sure you can imagine all sorts of situations in which that would be desirable. I make those memories go away for a price. And for a time, that was satisfactory. But then my research led me to a discovery that was even more extraordinary. I theorized that I could do more than erase memories. I could also create them. I could program new memories. Imagine the potential market for that: for the right price, you could be given the memory of having spent a weekend at Cap d’Antibes with the Hollywood starlet of your choice, or of scaling Everest with Mallory, or of conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Ninth.”
    As he spoke, the doctor’s eyes shone with a kind of inner light. But then the eyes glanced at the gun again, and they became veiled and anxious once more. “Can’t you lower that gun?”
    Pendergast shook his head. “Just keep talking.”
    “Okay. Okay. I needed guinea pigs in order to