Thomas laughed as well, but like someone bullied into doing so. It was strange the way the company of intimates could make lunacy seem almost normal. Or maybe not. They were the baseline, after all; what we all use to sort the mad from the sane.

'I knew this would freak you out,' Neil continued. 'Which is why…' He scooped up the bottle of whiskey and banged it on the coffee table.

Thomas flinched.

What was it about lies that made them seem so pedestrian? Everyone lied all the time—Thomas knew the statistics, knew that men lied primarily to promote themselves, while women lied to spare others' feelings, and so on. But it was more than a matter of typical patterns or brute frequencies. There was something essential about lies, something that ranked them alarmingly low on the list of slights and injuries. A toolbox wasn't a toolbox unless it had a pair of pliers—something to twist or bend with.

'But why did you do it?' Thomas had asked. 'Why join… them.'

Neil had this peculiar way of smiling sometimes. 'Sly' was too small a word to describe it. Even 'conspiratorial' seemed to lack the requisite number of syllables.

'For the love of my country,' he said. 'Gotta protect the Fatherland.'

'Bullshit. You a patriot? Please.'

'Hey, man,' Neil crowed, 'my high school is, like, way, way cooler than your high school.'

Thomas refused to laugh. It was an old joke of theirs, referring to the way patriotism was simply 'school spirit' writ large, a mechanism used to generate solidarity, to enforce consensus and conformity, particularly during times of crisis or competing social interests.

'So why did you do it?'

Neil slouched back into the couch. 'For the freedom.'

'Freedom?'

'You have no idea, Goodbook. The resources. The lack of constraints.' He paused as though debating the wisdom of his next words. 'I now know more about the brain than any man alive.'

'More bullshit.'

'No. I do. I really do.'

Thomas snorted. 'Prove it.'

Neil had flashed that self-same smile.

'Patience, Goodbook. Patience.'

'So what were you doing?'

'You wouldn't believe it. It was straight out of Mengele 101.'

Thomas swallowed, struggling to absorb this. 'Try me.'

'It started small fry: experimentation with sensory deprivation interrogation techniques. They gave us this theo-terrorist, let's call him Ali Baba, who they thought could be key to unlocking several American-Muslim cells. We interviewed him several times via a sham fellow inmate, discovered what he thought his execution would look like, and more importantly, what he thought paradise would look like. Then we arranged his execution—'

'You what,'