Free The Abduction: A Novel by Jonathan Holt Page B

love someone – unless I did.”
    “Are you in love with someone?”
    It was getting to be too much now. Surely the six minutes were up? He shook his head. “No.”
    “But there’s someone you’re interested in?”
    The silence drew itself out. Behind him, he heard the click of the stopwatch. He no longer had to answer.
    “There is someone, yes,” he said slowly. “Perhaps it’s not possible. But I think I’d like to find out.”
    “Thank you, Daniele,” Father Uriel said quietly. “You too, Sabrina. That’s all for today.”
    Sabrina stood, pulled on a woollen cardigan, smiled briefly at Daniele, and left. He watched her go, feeling how the consulting room suddenly seemed a little emptier, a little drabber, for her absence. He thought: is this what people feel? Is this what normality means? To make a brief connection with a fellow human being, only to experience the wrench as it was broken?
    And what if the connection wasn’t a brief one, and breaking it hurt something fundamental in you? What then?
    “You’re making good progress,” Father Uriel was saying. “I think you might soon be ready to move on to the next exercise. Perhaps even to some real-world socialising.”
    “A date, you mean?”
    “If you like. It would be a big step, I know.”
    Daniele indicated the door. “Will I see her again?”
    Father Uriel considered. “Usually I try to rotate the surrogates, to minimise the danger of my patients forming an emotional attachment to them. But in your case, that’s hardly likely. Why? Would you like to see her again?”
    “I don’t know. I want to see her. But I want to meet the other surrogates, too.”
    Father Uriel laughed, confusing Daniele. Had he said something funny? “Well, I don’t have that many research assistants. Not ones as pretty as Sabrina, anyway. So I imagine you may well see her again.” He consulted his computer screen. “The same time next Monday?”
     
    As he left the consulting room Daniele flicked his phone back on, attracting a curious glance from a passing monk. He barely noticed these days that he was almost the only person at Father Uriel’s Institute who wasn’t wearing a religious habit.
    Daniele didn’t believe in God, except as a principle of higher mathematics. But he did appreciate the way that the sex scandals currently enveloping the Church meant greater resources for doctors like Father Uriel who were quietly exploring new ways of treating sexual deviance as a form of dissocial personality disorder. It was Father Uriel who had suggested that the reverse might also be true – that the same behavioural techniques he used to reprogramme a priest’s sexual attraction to children, say, could also be used to develop empathy in people like himself. The treatment was highly experimental, but when Daniele had checked it out by hacking into the archives of a few peer-reviewed journals, he’d been reassured to discover that it was based on sound science.
    He scanned his messages. Most were automated alerts from the Carnivia servers, notifying him of surges in traffic or attempted security breaches. The others he deleted rapidly one by one without reading them.
     
    From: Holly Boland
    Subject: Can you help?
     
    He hesitated, then marked that one to read later.
    It was another message, a little further down, that he stopped at. It had been sent to a hidden message board that, in theory, was only accessible to Carnivia’s administrators. The sender was someone who until a few days ago he’d never heard of. The subject line read:
     
    Dan, a generic description of the process
     
    He opened it.
     
    On arrival at the detention site, the prisoner finds herself under the complete control of her captors. She is subjected to precise, quiet and almost clinical procedures designed to underscore the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, her uncertainty about what may happen next, and her potential dread of captivity. The captive’s own clothes are