“Cuba libre,” the man repeated, and then turned his attention to Lowen again. He extended his hand. “John Berger,” he said.

Lowen took it. “Danielle Lowen,” she said.

Berger looked momentarily confused and then smiled. “You arethat doctor from the Brazilian consulate,” he said. “And you work for the State Department. Which is how you could be here and have been in New York yesterday. I’m sorry, let me introduce myself again.” Berger held out his hand once more. “Hello, I’m a moron.”

Lowen laughed and took his hand a second time. “Hello,” she said. “Don’t feel bad. I wasn’t exactly being forthcoming.”

“Well, after all the attention you got the last couple of days, I can see why you might want to lay low,” Berger said. He motioned to Lowen’s drink. “Is that what the tub of margarita is about?”

“What? No,” Lowen said, and made a grimace. “Well, maybe. Not exactly.”

“The drink is working,” Berger said.

“It’s not about the attention, although that certainly could have driven me to drink,” Lowen said. “It’s about something else, related to my job.”

“And what is that, if you don’t mind me asking?” Berger said.

“What do you do, Mr. Berger?” Lowen asked.

“John,” Berger said. His Cuba libre arrived. He smiled his thanks to the bartender and took a drink. Then it was his turn to grimace. “This is not the best Cuba libre I’ve had,” he said.

Lowen flicked the edge of her margarita glass with her finger. “Next time, go with one of these tubs,” she said.

“Maybe I will,” Berger said, took another drink of his Cuba libre and then set it down. “I’m a salesman,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals.”

“I remember youguys,” Lowen said.

“I bet you do,” Berger said.

“Now it makes sense,” Lowen said. “Easy conversationalist, blandly attractive, not too quirky, looking for the sale.”

“You have me pegged,” Berger said.

“You’re not going to make the sale,” Lowen said. “I mean, no offense. But I plan on walking out of here alone tonight.”

“Fair enough,” Berger said. “Good conversation was my only goal, anyway.”

“Was it,” Lowen said, and drank some more of her margarita. “All right, John, a question for you. How do you make a boring person a killer?”

Berger was quiet for a moment. “Now I’m suddenly very glad I won’t be making that sale,” he said.

“I’m serious,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, you have this person. She’s a normal person, right? She has normal parents, has a normal childhood, goes to a normal school, gets normal degrees and then goes and has a normal job. And then one day, for no particularly good reason that anyone could see, she goes and murders some guy. And not in a normal way—I mean, not with a gun or a knife or a bat. No, she does it in a complicated way. How does that happen?”

“Is the guy an ex-lover?” Berger asked. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Hypothetically, no,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, the best way to describe their relationship would be work colleagues, and not particularly close ones at that.”

“And she’s not a spy, or a secret agent, or leading a double life as a crafty assassin,” Berger said.

“She’s completely normal, and completely boring,” Lowen said. “Doesn’t even have pets. Hypothetically.”

Berger took a sip from his Cuba libre. “Then I’m going to go with what I know,” he said. “Mental derangement caused by addiction to pharmaceuticals.”

“There are drugs that can turn you from a boring person into a methodical murderer, as opposed to turning them into someone who kills everything in the house in a rage, including the fish?” Lowen asked. “I don’t remember those being touted to me when I was working as a doctor.”

“Well, no, there’s nothing that will do something that specific,” Berger said. “But you know as well as I do that, one, sometimes drug interactions will do funny things—”

“Turn someone into a methodical murderer?” Lowen asked again, incredulously.

“—and two, there are lots of our products out there that will eat your brain if you overuse them, and if they eat your brain, then you’ll start doing uncharacteristic things. Like becoming a methodical murderer, maybe.”

“A reasonable hypothesis,” Lowen said. “But hypothetically this person was not regularly taking either legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. Next.”

“All right,” Berger said, and gave the appearance of thinking quickly. “A tumor.”

“A tumor,” Lowen said.

“Sure, a tumor,” Berger said. “A brain tumor starts growing, hypothetically, and starts pressing on a part of the brain that processes things like knowing what is socially appropriate behavior. As the thing grows, our boring person starts putting her mind to murder.”

“Interesting,” Lowen said. She sipped her drink again.

“I’ve read stories about such things, and not only because my company sells a pharmaceutical treatment for cutting off the blood supply to tumorous masses in the body,” Berger said.

“It’s good to read for recreation,” Lowen said.

“I think so, too,” Berger said.

“And as superficially appealing as that suggestion is, this hypothetical person received a clean bill of health before her last assignment,” Lowen said. “It was hypothetically a job that required extensive amounts of travel, so a thorough physical examination was part of the job protocol.”

“This hypothetical person is getting very specific,” Berger said.

“I don’t make up the rules,” Lowen said.

“Yes, you do,” Berger said. “That’s why it’s a hypothetical.”

“One more chance, Mr. Berger, comma, John,” Lowen said. “So make it good.”

“Wow, on the spot,” Berger said. “Okay. Remote control.”

“What?” Lowen said. “Seriously, now.”

“Hear me out,” Berger said. “If you wanted to do someone in, and have no one know, and completely cover your tracks, how would you do it? You would have someone that no one would ever expect do it. But how do you get them to do it? Skilled assassins may be good at looking like normal people, but the best assassins would be people who are normal people. So you find a normal person. And you put a remote control in their brain.”

“You’ve been reading a few too many science fiction thrillers,” Lowen said.

“Not a remote control that gives you gross control over a body, with everything herky jerky,” Berger said. “No, what you want is something that will lay across the frontal lobes and then subtly and slowly, over the course of time, bend someone towards doing the unspeakable. Do it so the person doesn’t even notice their own personality changing, or questions the necessity to kill someone. They just go ahead and plan it and do it, like they’re filing taxes or making a report.”

“I think people would notice a remote control in someone’s head, though,” Lowen said. “Not to mention the hypothetical person would remember someone opening up their skull to get inside of it.”

“Well, if you were the sort of people who would make this sort of remote control, you wouldn’t make it easy to find,” Berger said. “And you wouldn’t make it obvious when it was inserted. You’d find some way to slip it into their body when they weren’t expecting it.” He pointed at Lowen’s drink. “Nanobots in your drink, maybe. You’d only need a few and then you could program those few to replicate inside the body until you had enough. The only problem you might have is if the body starts trying to fight off the ’bots and then the person gets sick. That would present as, say, a meningitis of some sort.”

Lowen stopped sipping her drink and looked at Berger. “What did you just say?” she said.

“Meningitis,” Berger said. “It’s when there’s a swelling of the brain—”

“I know what meningitis is,” Lowen said.

“So it looks like meningitis,” Berger said. “At least until the people who have inserted the ’bots tweak the ’bots so that they don’t cause an immune response. And then after that, they stay in the brain, mostly passive and mostly undetectable, until they’re turned on and they perform their slow counterprogramming.”