The Ghost Pattern

by Leslie Wolfe

  One-Eye extended his hand, holding a small packet with insulin vials.

  “Insulin,” he spoke harshly.

  Dr. Gary Davis stepped forward, grabbing the box.

  “Thank you,” Gary said, then opened the box. “Hey, this is just two days’ worth,” he said, showing the man the four vials.

  One-Eye shrugged and replied dryly. “If you all behave, she’ll get more.” Then he turned and left, latching the door behind him.

  He rushed to Dr. Crawford’s cot, while Dr. Adenauer brought a hypodermic and some alcohol on a piece of gauze. Dr. Crawford sat with difficulty on the side of her cot, preparing her insulin shot.

  “Thank you,” she said, speaking weakly. “This will help.”

  She shot the insulin into her thigh, then massaged the spot gently, while everyone kept their backs turned to give her some privacy.

  “Thank you,” she repeated, “I’m done.”

  They all huddled around her cot except the pilot, who remained crouched on the floor, not moving much or saying anything since they’d entered the makeshift lab. Lila, the flight attendant, kept as great a distance from the pilot as physically possible, quiet and grim, crying at times.

  “Do you understand what they want us to do?” Dr. Crawford asked. “I was a little out of it and I couldn’t focus,” she explained apologetically.

  They stood silent for a few seconds, looking at one another, various degrees of concern marring their expressions. It was as if the nightmare would become more real if one of them would put it into words.

  “They want us to build a drug formulation,” Gary spoke, “a drug that will increase the violence drive in subjects in a controlled manner. Not too violent; just enough to cause damage, and controllable with an antidote. They also want the drug to be aerosolized, yet have precise, controllable response in subjects.”

  “This is insane,” Dr. Mallory spoke. “I don’t even think that can be done. Not here, not like this. What they’re asking for requires years of work.”

  “Don’t say that, please,” Dr. Teng spoke, his voice strangled by tears. “I–I have my family with me. My wife and my little girl…they have them. We can’t say no.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Adenauer spoke, arrogance seeping in his voice. “We all know we cannot say no to the malignant, sociopathic narcissist without taking considerable risk. We have to be judicious about our approach to this research.”

  “Approach to research?” Gary snapped. “Are you seriously considering doing this? It’s against everything we have sworn to do as doctors.”

  “What choice do we have?” Adenauer replied. “Compliance, in this case, is the logical, self-preserving thing to do.”

  “But consider the consequences, for chrissake,” Gary insisted.

  He felt Dr. Teng’s hand grabbing his sleeve. “Please,” the tiny man whispered, tears welling in his eyes.

  “Ah, you are forgetting,” Dr. Adenauer replied, pedantic as if he were lecturing in front of young students, “I said research…I never said delivery of a drug formulation.”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Mallory asked.

  Gary was starting to see Adenauer’s point. He was, indeed, brilliant, and, he had to admit, he stayed cool and rational better than most. Better than himself even.

  “I mean we comply, we do the research,” Adenauer clarified with a parental tone, “but we will not be able to deliver results very soon,” he ended his phrase in a whisper. “We…stall. Isn’t that the right word in English?”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard, considering how insanely absurd and complex this task will be,” Mallory added.

  They nodded in agreement, and remained silent for a while.

  “What are we hoping for, though?” Dr. Klaas Fortuin asked. “They’ll never let us go. If we are worthless to them, they will kill us all. There is no doubt about that.”

  The harsh reality expressed so simplistically by the direct, almost blunt Dr. Fortuin hit hard. They bowed their heads and hunched their shoulders, desperation taking over.

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything,” Gary said. “For now, let’s focus on immediate survival, right? Dr. Bukowsky, what would you say to a patient in this situation?”

  “Exactly true, let’s focus on survival,” Howard Bukowsky confirmed. “Our situation has definitely improved,” he continued, trying to focus everyone on the very few positive aspects of their confinement. “We slept on cots last night, not on the floor, we have water, and we had warm food last night. Dr. Crawford has insulin for a while, and that demonstrates a very important point.”

  “What?” Dr. Crawford asked.

  “That we were able to negotiate with them. We asked for something and we got it. It’s important we keep that in mind,” Bukowsky concluded.

  “Ah…” Gary said. “You’re right. Then let’s ask them to keep our lab rats healthy and well-fed, to ensure the tests will be relevant and successful.”

  “You’re not saying…you’re not seriously considering testing on human subjects, are you?” Dr. Fortuin asked, barely containing his apprehension at the thought.

  “No, of course not,” Gary replied. “But they expect us to use them as test subjects. If we ask for it that way, we can hope to negotiate better conditions for the rest of the passengers.”

  “We might not have a choice, you know,” Dr. Adenauer said. “We might be forced to test on them. Who knows what they’ll do if we resist?”

  “Then how do we prevent harm from coming their way?” Dr. Mallory asked. “We formulate weak batches?”

  “Uh–huh,” Gary said, pensively, shoving his hands in his pockets. “That would work. Weak batches, using low-toxicity components with small halftimes.”

  Dr. Crawford stretched her legs, as if to see if she was able to stand on her own. Then she spoke in a quiet voice, just above a whisper. “Let me ask you all something that might seem unusual. Are any of you good with hypnosis? I mean, really good, as in hypnotizing someone against their will?”

  “Hmm…” Gary said, “interesting thought.”

  “I’ve had some results,” Dr. Mallory replied, “but, of course, I’ve never tried it against a patient’s will. It’s unethical, illegal even.”

  “Here, it doesn’t matter,” Dr. Crawford said. “Try, try it whenever you have a chance, let’s see what happens. Maybe some are more susceptible than others. It could be a way. But be careful,” she added. “They can’t suspect a thing.”

  She stood and stretched her back a little. “In the meantime,” she added, “I will ask for any documentation they might have on previous research. Something tells me this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to formulate this drug.”

  ...17

  ...Sunday, May 1, 3:03PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

  ...Tom Isaac’s Residence

  ...Laguna Beach, California

  ...Four Days Missing

  She stood in front of the whiteboard again, staring at the only thing written on it. XA233 and a question mark, that was all, scribbled at the center top of the board.

  Alex paced Tom’s den nervously, sipping her fifth French Vanilla brew of the day and occasionally glaring at the almost completely whiteboard on the wall. Tom sat quietly, slouched in his chair, appearing entirely absorbed in his reading of the latest edition of TIME magazine. He hadn’t spoken a word in almost an hour, nor had he looked at her.

  She’d heard about authors having writer’s block in front of a brand new, white, untouched manuscript page, but never in front of a whiteboard. Although the psychology could very well be quite similar.

  Argh…damn this fucked-up shit to hell and back! Alex thought. I’m babbling here, wasting time. I need to think. I need to come up with something.

  “Tom?” she called. “Can I interrupt your reading for a minute?”

  He smiled and put his magazine down. “Absolutely, my dear. What can I do for you?”

  “Let’s bounce some ideas around, what do you say?”


  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said with a smile. “I was running out of good stuff to read, you know.”

  She chuckled.

  “I—I just need to let some steam out, for now. Just for a few seconds.”

  “OK, let’s hear it,” Tom replied all serious, but with a parental smile in his eyes.

  She paced the room a little more before speaking, then spoke in a high-pitched, machine-gun rhythm, showing how frustrated she was.

  “How in the red fucking hell am I gonna find the goddamn plane that no one else can find? This is not a case, or a challenge; this is insane! I can’t be expected to—to deliver on this!” She stood right in front of Tom, with her fisted hands firmly stuck in her jeans pockets.

  “Seems to me you’re afraid of failure, and you’re presenting me with a disclaimer, a waiver of liability or something,” Tom replied quietly.

  “No…What I meant was…Well, yes, I guess I am. And? What if I am? You find that absurd?” She sounded argumentative, ready to fight, her frustration taking over.

  “I never said that, now did I?” Tom said, his voice taking that kind, fatherly tone that always helped her get grounded and be prepared for anything.

  “No, you didn’t,” she admitted, aware she was blushing and hating it. Lately, her brain had misfired a lot.

  “OK, so consider it signed,” Tom said and winked.

  “Consider what signed?”

  “The waiver of liability. You are off the hook if you fail. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”

  Now she was blushing big time, her face burning red and seeding tears of embarrassment at the corners of her eyes. Damn!

  “You really see right through me, huh?” she found the courage to ask.

  “Like reading an open magazine,” he acknowledged, rapping his fingers humorously on the cover of TIME.

  “OK, so I need some improvement in that area,” she admitted and smiled widely.

  Tom nodded his approval, then frowned a little and asked, “Why did you take the case, Alex?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why didn’t you express your regrets to Blake, and send him on his way?”

  She bit her lower lip, thinking hard. Great question. Tom was making an interesting point.

  “I guess I thought I could help. I thought I should at least try,” she said in a weak, unsure voice. “I thought I had some ideas, but…”

  “Then what changed?”

  “Nothing, really. I just…well, I’m just having a moment of self-doubt, I guess,” she conceded with a tentative smile, feeling her mind become clear again.

  “Is it over, then? Your moment of self-doubt?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sipping more coffee.

  “OK, then, let’s find us that goddamn plane, as you like to call it.” He threw her a blue dry-erase marker.

  She caught it and turned toward the whiteboard.

  “This is what we know,” she said, and drew a vertical line on the board to create a column, then labeled it “Known.” She added the information in the form of a bulleted list.

  423 passengers

  18 crew

  Tokyo to San Fran

  Took off on time

  All communication normal before it disappeared

  “These are the coordinates where they think it crashed,” she added, transcribing those from a handwritten note she had in her pocket. Then she added the word manifest in the “Known” column.

  “We have the manifest?”

  “Yeah. Lou grabbed that yesterday from the airline’s system. He was able to break through their security in less than ten minutes; I was impressed.”

  “So, what do you want to do next?”

  “Start from the manifest,” she said, her voice firming as she regained her self-confidence. “We looked at it yesterday and this morning, but we need more than human eyes and brains to draw any conclusions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were able to figure out the passengers’ nationalities and final destinations, their dates of birth and genders, but that’s about it. We need more. Lou is modifying a piece of software he wrote to extract background information on all passengers and crew, and then we can look for commonalities, for anything we can find. It’s pattern recognition software he’s adapted for any type of data,” she added, seeing how confused Tom looked. “It will extract deep background on all passengers, then compare the data and look for things they have in common.”

  She paused for a few seconds, seeing how Tom looked at her pensively, creases forming on his forehead, right above his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

  “I am grasping at straws, I know,” she added.

  “No, you’re not. This is the best way to start. Who else is helping you?”

  “Steve is helping Blake deal with everything.”

  “Good. What do you expect to derive from the manifest analysis?”

  “If anything other than a crash has happened to XA233, then it must have been intentional. Even if the plane made an emergency landing due to some failure, someone would have found it by now. We would know. I’m hoping that the manifest will give us a hint as to what, or who, had XA233 in their crosshairs, and why.”

  Tom leaned forward, his interest piqued.

  “When do you expect that to be completed?”

  “The manifest analysis should be done by the end of today. Then we’ll look at commonalities and formulate scenarios. At that point, Lou will run his adapted pattern recognition software and get deeper data, but that might take some time.”

  She took the marker and wrote a new column heading, “Scenarios.”

  ...18

  ...Monday, May 2, 4:12PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

  ...Undisclosed Location

  ...Russia

  ...Five Days Missing

  Dr. Theo Adenauer pushed his food around with his spoon, too deep in thought to be aware of how hungry he was, or to register the annoying sounds made by the aluminum spoon scraping against the aluminum plate.

  For the third time in as many days, they’ve been served cabbage. Chopped, boiled, and tasteless, with about zero nutritional value. He had to admit that today’s serving tasted better due to the clever Dr. Fortuin, who played in the lab a little and came out with salt, chunks of salty deposits on the bottom of a Petri dish, but edible salt nevertheless.

  Fortuin had joked while handing them the salt, saying that he’d graduated from biochemistry and pharmacology to molecular gastronomy, and was committed to get them some oil and some protein next.

  Theo looked at his prison mates, scrutinizing them one by one. How different people were! Some took their abduction really badly, cried a lot, or let themselves spiral into worry and depression. Lila Wallace, their flight attendant, was one of those. Dr. Teng, for understandable reasons, considering his family was in the test subject population, was another. Dr. Chevalier, who had held on bravely for a couple of days, was coming apart, thinking of her husband with advanced coronary artery disease.

  Others were calm, probably keeping their feelings bottled inside, or engaging the use of reason and logic to fight the feelings of terror and absolute powerlessness brought by what was happening to them. Drs. Mallory and Davis were like that. Calm, composed, holding it together, at least on the surface.

  Finally, Drs. Fortuin, Bukowsky, and Crawford were irritatingly accepting of the entire situation, applying the precepts of positive thinking to the point where he wanted them slapped back into reality. Yes, people, even if you’re still alive now, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be dead the next minute!

  And then there was him, struggling with the huge burden of guilt he felt, so overwhelming he couldn’t even breathe sometimes. To be responsible for the abduction of hundreds of people, for the death of Dr. Faulkner and who knows how many more to come…He didn’t know how he could live with that burden, even if they somehow made it out of there alive.

  Be
cause it was him, Dr. Theo Adenauer, who the Russians had hijacked the plane for; he knew that for sure. After all, he was the world’s highest regarded expert in molecular psychopharmacology and transitional addiction. Whom better would they choose if they wanted a psychotropic drug formulated? It was him they put in charge of the research team. That Russian doctor, Bogdanov, knew exactly who he was and what his lifelong work was about.

  The latest antidepressant that had hit the market, the first one in history to reduce suicide risk in patients by more than 90 percent, was his formulation, the result of five years of research. The pharmaceutical company had valued it at more than four billion dollars within a week of the drug obtaining FDA approval for release in the United States. Yes, whom else would they have hijacked the plane for?

  His head hung low and deep ridges formed around his mouth, underlining the tension in his lips. He was no longer proud of his professional achievements. It was the first time in his life he’d felt such overwhelming guilt. Shame. Despair.

  “Do you think they’re looking for us?” Dr. Bukowsky said, chewing vigorously his half-cooked cabbage with added salt.

  “Who?” Gary Davis asked.

  “You know, the people who normally search for missing planes,” Bukowsky replied. “Don’t they have crews, teams who search for planes? There’s always someone…A plane doesn’t just disappear, and no one’s looking, right?”

  Theo Adenauer put his plate down noisily. He hadn’t even eaten half his food.

  “No one will come rescue us, because no one is looking,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Gary Davis asked, blood visibly draining from his face. The American was so impressionable.

  “If the plane appears to have crashed in the Pacific, that’s where they’ll be looking,” Theo replied, “for bodies and debris, not for people to rescue. Not for us.”