by Steven James
Lake Superior rippled nearby in the moonlight.
If they catch you, they’re probably not going to just take you back to your room. They’ll take you to jail this time to make sure you don’t get away.
No, that didn’t quite fit in with Daniel’s plans of finding out what’d happened to his dad.
Mr. Zacharias clicked the unlock button on his key fob and slipped into the driver’s seat.
The guards didn’t see where you went. You’re good for a minute or two. Figure this out.
Daniel climbed in beside him, and as soon as Mr. Zacharias reached around the steering wheel to slide the key into the ignition, Daniel grabbed his wrist with one hand, twisted it, and snatched the keys away from him with the other.
He’d been quick and had obviously surprised Mr. Zacharias, who now stared at him through the light cast down by the streetlamp.
“I want some answers,” Daniel said, “and I want them now. We’re not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”
Honestly, he wasn’t sure how Mr. Zacharias would react.
If he really was a police officer, or a prison guard, or whatever, he might threaten him or try to get the keys back, but Daniel had one hand on the door handle and was ready to take off if he needed to.
Kyle could certainly outrun this guy.
Can you?
Even though he wasn’t as fast as his friend, based on how well he did on wind sprints for football and suicides for basketball, he was pretty sure he could get away.
Mr. Zacharias might have realized the same thing because he didn’t go for the keys, but just said, “Despite what most people at that hospital think, you’re not the dangerous one. The person who took your dad is.”
“And who is that?”
“I’m not certain, but based on the amount of blood they found at the scene, your father was hurt very seriously and—”
“Who was it? Who attacked him?”
“I think it was a man we transferred from the Derthick State Penitentiary yesterday.”
“The one you took to the Traybor Institute?”
Mr. Zacharias looked at him curiously. “How did you know that?”
“I was there.”
“You were . . . Ah, so the dogs. You were the one they were after.”
Daniel didn’t mention that Nicole had been there too. “I saw you. The guy was handcuffed when you took him in. You’re saying, that—what? He escaped?”
“Daniel, it won’t be long before they find this car and when they do they’re going to take you back into that hospital and this time around you won’t be guarded by someone who’s on your side—I can guarantee you that. But I am on your side. Believe me. Give me the keys. I’ll tell you what I can on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“Back to Beldon.”
Whoever Mr. Zacharias was, he had helped Daniel out of the mental hospital and he was offering to drive him away from here. That much was true.
Though Daniel wasn’t sure how much he should trust this guy, he did believe that the hospital security guards would be here any minute and if they managed to take him
in, they certainly would be keeping a closer eye on him than before.
In the side-view mirror, he saw someone flare around the edge of the building, point at the car, and race in their direction.
Okay.
Time to go.
He handed over the keys. “Let’s get out of here.”
Mr. Zacharias started the engine and peeled away from the curb, keeping his lights off until he and Daniel were three blocks away.
“Alright,” Daniel said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
“You said you were at the Traybor Institute.” Mr. Zacharias continued picking his way through the city’s back streets. “What do you know about it?”
“First of all, they don’t study fish there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Lucky guess. It has something to do with chronobiology, doesn’t it?”
“You really are starting to impress me. What else do you know?”
“Dr. Waxford isn’t an expert on fish. He studies how humans relate to and process the passage of time. But I don’t understand what that has to do with the prisoner you were leading into the facility.”
Mr. Zacharias took a moment to gather his thoughts, then said, “Well, as you might know, the death penalty is becoming rarer these days. As a result, someone might be sentenced to several lifetime sentences in prison, or maybe even four or five hundred years for, say, being a serial killer. But they’ll obviously never serve all that time because they’ll die first. They might serve thirty or maybe forty or even sixty or seventy years—but that’s still just a fraction of their actual sentence.”
Daniel could see where this was going. “So, chronobiology. You’re looking for a way to make it seem like hundreds of years have passed for someone. To make them experience, in their mind, that much passage of time.”
“I’m not looking for a way to do it, I’m looking for a way to stop it—but yes, that’s what the research is about.”
“You’re trying to stop it?”
“The group I work for is.”
“What group is that?”
“I’m afraid that’s something I can’t tell you.”
Why didn’t that surprise him.
“You have a gift, Daniel. We know about what happened with Emily. With how you pieced things together after she was killed.”
“How can you possibly know that? Even I don’t know how I did that.”
“Maybe I should’ve said we know that you did it, not how, because that’s one of the things we’re interested in talking with you about. We think you can help us locate people—missing people—maybe solve cold cases.”
“How did you find out about me?”
“A source.”
“A source.”
“Yes. And we’ve been monitoring you.”
“Monitoring me? What—my web searches?”
“And emails, status updates, instant messages, photos you’ve shared, texts. With technology the way it is today, do you really think there’s such a thing as privacy anymore?”
“So you’ve been spying on me?”
“We’ve been collecting data.”
That’s a nice way to put it.
Daniel tried once more to get him to open up about who he was working for, but Mr. Zacharias remained evasive, so he let it drop. “You said before that I was intuitive. But I’m not. I’m not special. I’m just a normal guy who’s starting to go crazy, to lose his grip on reality.”
“Oh, you’re special in ways you don’t even realize.”
“I still don’t understand why you say that.”
“Am I real? Right here? Right now?”
“Of course.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because you’re behind the wheel and I’m not. We wouldn’t be going anywhere if you weren’t really here, if you weren’t really driving the car.”
“But isn’t it possible that you’re still back in the hospital and you’re imagining this, or dreaming it, or that it’s all a blur?”
Daniel narrowed his eyes at Mr. Zacharias. “I never told you what I call them.”
“What?”
“My visions, hallucinations, whatever. How do you know I call them blurs?”
“Research.”
“Research.”
“Yes. And for right now we’ll have to leave it at that.”
“And what about Nicole? How did she find out I was at the hospital?”
“I sent her a text.”
“So she knows who you are?”
“It was sent anonymously.”
There was an
awful lot of that going around this week.
“Have you been sending me texts too? Signing them ‘Madeline’?”
“No.” He shook his head. “That wasn’t me. You’re going to need a place to stay tonight.”
“What about you?”
“I’m set, but I need to take care of a few things. We have to find somewhere for you where you’ll be safe.”
At first Daniel thought that maybe staying at his own house would work, but then he realized that it would probably be one of the first places the cops would look for him when they found out he was missing from the mental hospital.
His two best options were Nicole’s place or Kyle’s house. Nicole had both parents at home, but at Kyle’s there was just one parent to worry about.
“Let me use your phone,” Daniel said. “I need to make a call.”
PART V
GASOLINE
MONDAY, DECEMBER 24
CHRISTMAS EVE
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
12:02 A.M.
Kyle answered right away and, after Daniel filled him in on what’d happened, said, “So, someone from a secret, shadowy organization was sent to help you escape from a mental institute and now wants to protect you because he’s interested in your psychic crime-solving abilities?”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“Bro, do you realize how crazy that sounds?”
“Let’s avoid that term for now.”
“Which one?”
“Crazy.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know, but trust me on this. We need to find my dad and the cops think I had something to do with his disappearance. If they catch me, they’ll take me in—especially now that I snuck out of that psych ward. I need somewhere to stay tonight. Can I crash at your place?”
“Sure, no problem.” It sounded like Kyle was shuffling his phone around, then he got back on the line and said, “Does this spy, or cop, or whoever it is, need a place to stay too?”
“He’s real, Kyle.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t.” But Daniel caught more than a hint of disbelief in his friend’s voice.
“Here, I’ll let you talk to him.”
Daniel passed the phone over.
“My name is Malcolm Zacharias and Daniel is telling the truth. I’m here and I’m quite real; I can assure you of that.” He gave the cell back to Daniel.
“Convinced?” Daniel asked Kyle.
He was slow in responding. “So it’ll just be you?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to get over here?”
“Mr. Zacharias will drop me off.”
“Well, um . . . Tell him to park down the street so Mom and Michelle don’t wake up. I’ll meet you at the front door.”
THE TRAYBOR INSTITUTE
6 MILES EAST OF BELDON, WISCONSIN
In order to maintain the illusion that the facility was engaged in fish management studies, there were four large fish hatchery tanks for trout and walleye in the main section of the building.
However, the real research went on underground, in the rooms that did not appear on the blueprints.
Though in his midsixties, Dr. Waxford was not at all interested in retirement. He briskly entered the break room and, without putting any money into the snack machine, punched in D134 on the keypad and then took a step backward.
Instead of offering him a Snickers bar, the machine unhinged from the wall and swung forward automatically, revealing a set of stainless steel elevator doors behind it.
He leaned close to the retinal scanner beside them and after it positively identified him, the doors slid open and he stepped onto the elevator.
While the vending machine tracked back into place, he punched L3 in the elevator, then the doors closed and he began to descend.
As he passed the two subbasements L1 and L2, he thought of the importance of the work they were doing here.
Justice.
It was all in the name of justice.
Twenty-four years ago his younger brother had been murdered by a psychopathic killer who was responsible for the deaths of eight other people. He was sentenced to four hundred and fifty years in prison.
When he made his statement to the judge during the trial, he had mocked the pain of the victims and their families, claiming that he would never suffer as much as they had.
The man was fifty-two years old and a heavy smoker when he was caught. He died of lung cancer in prison less than five years later.
He served only one-ninetieth of his sentence.
That’s what had gotten Dr. Waxford involved in this research in the first place.
If the United States of America was going to be a country governed by laws, if it was going to be a place where justice was truly served, then we needed to make certain we did all we could to ensure that the guilty served the sentences they were given.
Or at least that they experienced that many years of punishment.
That’s all he was working toward.
True and lasting justice.
The elevator stopped.
No, of course there wasn’t any way for someone to serve hundreds of years in prison. No one lived that long, at least not yet. Someday, through nanotechnology and bioengineering it might be possible, but that was still a few decades out.
In the meantime, through advances in chronobiology we had the capability to make it seem to someone like he was undergoing hundreds of years of imprisonment, or even solitary confinement, in much less time.
The doors parted.
It wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment; it was simply the punishment that the courts had legally determined was just and fair. If the sentences weren’t fair, why would they be handed down in the first place?
But not everyone was as forward-thinking as Dr. Waxford. And that’s why his research was, for the time being, not open to public scrutiny.
He left the elevator and walked past the operating room.
It had a rolling gurney, medical equipment, computer monitoring feeds, and shelves containing the various instruments he used in his research.
And of course, the arrays of electrodes to stimulate the different parts of his subjects’ brains that processed memory.
He was used to hearing screams come from that room.
He didn’t mind them.
In fact, he’d come to expect them.
All in the name of justice.
Now, however, since no subjects were currently at the facility, the room was silent.
The inmate he’d been administering his treatments to on Saturday had escaped.
Dr. Waxford made his way to the security suite at the far end of the hall.
The four other subjects who’d been brought to the Traybor Institute since it had opened had been transferred to other prisons after the doctor was done with them, some still mentally intact.
Others, not so much.
He’d worked at two other facilities over the years and had been responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the field of chronobiology.
That’s what had caused the Department of Defense to take notice of his work.
Concerning the applications of chronobiology, the military had its own goals dealing with enhanced interrogations, but he didn’t ask them about that. They were allowed to have their agenda and he was allowed to have his.
The Defense Department had an undisclosed agency that had been secretly experimenting for years to find ways to alter, implant, or erase people’s memories and since they were helping fund his project, he was able to utilize their findings to augment his research.
Things had come a long way in the last decade.
He entered the institute’s security center so he could review the video footage and try to figure out
how inmate #176235 had escaped.
Here’s what he did know: sometime between 4:20 p.m. and 6:25 p.m. on Saturday, the man had made it out of his holding cell on L2 before overpowering two guards and fleeing the property.
It was still unclear how he’d gotten out of that cell and how he’d taken out both guards so easily—and how he’d made it past the dogs outside—but somehow it’d happened and now he needed to be found before he did anything to compromise their research.
It was possible he’d received help once he was out. One of Dr. Waxford’s hunting rifles—his .30-06 Browning Automatic—had been stolen out of his car a month and a half ago and he wondered if that security breach and this one might be related. He didn’t want to write anything off as unrelated.
His staff hadn’t been able to figure out what had happened on Saturday and now, tonight, he hadn’t been able to sleep and had decided to come here himself to try his hand at getting to the bottom of things.
He sat down in front of the bank of computer monitors and pulled up the security footage to ascertain how the inmate had gotten free.
Maybe that would help determine where he was now.
The man was a loose end and he needed to be taken care of, whatever measures that required.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
They arrived at Kyle’s house and Mr. Zacharias parked down the block. “I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow,” he said to Daniel.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Kyle does. I’ll contact you through his number.”
“And you’re going to help me find my dad?”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
The phrase was nearly the same as the one Dr. Fromke had used when he’d promised Daniel that he was going to do all he could to help him get out of the hospital, so Daniel didn’t find Mr. Zacharias’s words as encouraging as he’d probably intended them to be.
“When are you going to text me, call me, whatever?”
“That’ll depend. I have some things I need to take care of in the morning.”
“We may be at the lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse?”
“Up on Madeline Island. Long story. If you find out anything about my dad, text me right away.”
