Page 51 of Diagnosis Attraction

Drop to the ground.

She was fifteen yards away, and he didn’t know if she could reach the guy from there. But he did what she asked, watching the man with the gun gasp and topple over. Luckily, he didn’t alert anyone else by pulling the trigger as he went down.

Elizabeth sprinted out of the woods. Matt clicked the safety on the gun and set it on the man’s abdomen. Together, they dragged the guy across the lawn and under the trees.

Matt turned to look back on the way they’d come. As far as he could see, no one else had noticed the capture.

Thanks,he said to Elizabeth.

I should have seen him sooner, but I was focused on you.She looked down at the guard, who was about Matt’s height, with bulging muscles and a swarthy complexion.What are we going to do? You said that if anyone saw us, they might shut down the operation out here.

Yeah. I’m thinking.

Can we … zap his brain or something?

It might cause him permanent damage.

Do you care?

He considered the question. He was a doctor dedicated to treating illness and injury. But in Africa, he’d gotten used to the truth that if someone tried to do you harm, you might have to beat him to the punch.

No,he answered.

How do we do it?

Aim a blast at his head, he said, then considered the answer more carefully.

“We don’t want him to come out of this like a vegetable.”

“Why not?”

“Better if he just has a memory gap. If it looks like he had a stroke, they might take him to the hospital and find something … off.”

“Then what do we do instead?”

“Blast his hippocampus.”

“Which is?”

“One of the areas of the brain that governs short-term memory. The other is the subiculum, which is next to it, but that’s only forveryshort term.”

He knew that they didn’t have time for a medical school lecture, but he sent her a picture of the brain, showing her the hippocampus, which was two horseshoe-shaped structures, one in the left hemisphere and the other in the right.

“It takes in memories and sends them out to the appropriate part of the cerebral hemisphere where they are retrieved when necessary.”

He knew she was studying the picture he’d sent.

The hippocampus. It’s kind of at the bottom.

Yeah.He pulled at the limp body of the unconscious man, arranging him so that his knees were under him, his butt was in the air, and the back of his head was facing upward at an angle.

Matt didn’t have to tell Elizabeth to give him power. She simply did it, and he felt it gathering inside himself—before he directed a thin stream of lightning at the back of the man’s head. The guy’s body jerked, and he fell over on his side.

Did that do it?Elizabeth asked.

Let’s hope so. And there’s one more thing we’d better do.

He picked up the gun, wiped it off with his shirt tail, and put it into the man’s hand.

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