Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “You’re not allowed to say. Amos never talked about it.” Reese shook his head. “You can get in deep trouble if you do. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why would God allow something like what Amos did to that girl to happen? I’ve been trying to understand it, but I can’t.”

  Dani looked to Tommy.

  “We can’t either,” Tommy said. “Theologians have been asking that kind of question for centuries. We can do everything humanly possible to understand the specific causes of something like that, but in the larger sense all we know is that evil is something we have to react to and fight. We can move forward, but understanding it backward is often not possible.”

  “I suppose only God really knows,” Reese said.

  “I had the impression they don’t talk much about God at that school of yours,” Dani said.

  Reese nodded. “They don’t.”

  “But you have a Bible,” she said.

  “Oliver gave it to me. We could have been expelled if we were caught reading it. It’s banned on campus.”

  “No surprise,” Tommy commented.

  “That was why I wanted to find out what was in it for myself,” Reese said.

  “My father used to say the best way to get a kid to do something is to tell him not to,” Dani said. “He was a pediatrician.”

  “So Amos was one of the Selected. Do you know what they’re selected for?” Tommy asked, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his coffee cup. “What is the criteria? Do they have some kind of mission or task?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Once you’re in, you don’t really associate with the other students. You have special classes. You eat all your meals at Honors House. And after you graduate, your future is virtually guaranteed, because Honors House people promise to do business and help other Honors House people. It’s like the Skull and Bones at Yale or the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. All hush-hush. A lot of us on the outside think the whole thing is ridiculous, but it’s not ridiculous to the people on the inside.”

  “Do you know how many others were chosen? What their names are?”

  “Some,” Reese said, smiling apologetically. “Not sure how helpful I can be.”

  “The first time we met,” Dani said, “you brought me a pill.”

  “The blue pill,” Reese said, nodding. “I remember.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Oliver stole it from Amos. I gave it to you because I thought it might explain why Amos did what he did,” Reese said.

  “And you thought it was a pill to help people study, like Adderall?”

  “I wasn’t sure,” Reese said. “I thought it was one of the benefits of living in Honors House. They give you pills that help you get straight As.”

  “Do you have any idea how long this might have been going on?”

  Reese shook his head. “Did it help you?” he asked.

  “It did,” Dani said. “We think it might be a beta version of Provivilan.”

  “The drug the TV ads say is going to revolutionize the treatment of depression?”

  “That’s what they’re saying,” Dani said, leaning away to give Reese more room. “Except that instead of being an antidepressant, it acts like a weaponized depressant. It affects changes in embryonic development, in the womb. Somebody whose mother took it grows up perfectly normal until they hit puberty, and then the drug combines with hormones to reduce empathy and create a craving for the kind of adrenaline that’s released through violence.”

  “We’re still trying to crack the specific mechanisms,” Quinn added.

  “Do you know who else at St. Adrian’s might have been taking performance-enhancing drugs?” Dani asked.

  “We all do,” Reese said, sounding surprised at the question, as if it were common knowledge. “Everyone at the school does. They make us.”

  “They make you?” Tommy sounded not just surprised but shocked.

  “Yes. We take attention deficit drugs to help us study. It depends on what sort of things we’re studying. They’ve been trying to fine-tune it and personalize it. Last year they finished running every student’s genome. Some medications are better for creative types. Or sometimes if someone just needs help staying awake for a test, they give us the same drug they give astronauts who have to be awake for a mission. It’s apparently the same drug the president or the secretary of state takes if they’re flying long distances and can’t afford jet lag.”

  “That’s what they told you?”

  “Isn’t everyone doing it?” Reese asked. “Other schools?”

  “I would hope not,” Dani said. “How much sleep a night have you been getting? On average?”

  “Five or six hours,” Reese said.

  “From now on, eight hours a night. Doctor’s orders,” she said. “What else? What other drugs?”

  “Well, steroids and human growth hormones for the athletes,” Reese said. “And some other things for mood control.”

  “Better living through chemistry,” Quinn said.

  “Do you know what drugs they’ve been giving you?” Dani continued.

  Reese shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t take them. I didn’t like the way they were making me feel, so I’d pretend to take them and then spit them out. But I got pretty good grades anyway.”

  “Do you, by any chance, know how long the school has been doing this?” Dani asked.

  “A long time,” Reese said. “One of the legacy students—both his father and his grandfather were Addies—he said his father told him he was on a drug program back in the sixties.”

  “It would make sense to use one part of the student population as a test group and the others as a control,” Quinn said. “Unethical, but it would make sense from a scientific point of view.”

  “Well, the ones who got the good stuff were definitely the selected ones,” Reese said. “I don’t know if their test scores proved it, but their experiences later in life certainly seem to.”

  “Were those the names on the SD card you sent to my office—was that a list of alumni who’d been selected?”

  Reese nodded.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “Oliver and I were snooping around in the school databases,” Reese said. “We sorted for the ones who’d lived in Honors House. Those were the names I got. But none of the ones from this year were on it.”

  “Why did you send them to me?”

  “I don’t really know,” the boy said, scratching his arm nervously. “I thought maybe you could do something with them. I think maybe I suspected there was something wrong with my school. Not the things you’ve been telling me. Just a feeling. I know the teachers are good and the facilities are state-of-the-art, and I know that if you graduate from there, you’ll be taken care of by the people who’ve graduated before you. But all the nonstop emphasis on achievement and excellence and single-minded purpose? Something about it … there’s just something missing. Do you know what I mean?”

  “A soul,” Tommy said. “Humanity.”

  “Dr. Villanegre said something about a thousand years,” Reese asked. “And Vikings? The school’s only two hundred years old.”

  Dani looked at Tommy, who nodded. Ruth pulled up a chair while Cassandra swiveled on her stool at the food island.

  “You’d better get comfortable, Reese,” Dani said. “I have a story to tell you.”

  She explained then just what it was that was so terribly wrong with St. Adrian’s Academy, beginning from the time the school’s namesake, St. Adrian, a holy man and a scholar, arrived in England in 671 AD intent on spreading the Word of God. Adrian soon met resistance from a group of pagans and Satan worshipers, the Druids. With the help of a legion of holy warriors, led by an aide known as Charles the Black, Adrian drove the Druids from England, killing them to the last man. Or so he thought. As it turned out, a hundred or so of them escaped, sailing west from the English coast across the Atlantic in hired
Viking ships. The shallow-drafting vessels eventually navigated the St. Lawrence River and off-loaded their passengers in what would become upstate New York. There, for an undetermined period of time, the Druids ruled over one of the Iroquois nations, spreading dark worship and black magic.

  They were eventually defeated and driven underground, surfacing again after the American Revolutionary War when the school itself was formally established at its present location. The academy’s leaders proposed an institution to rival Yale in New Haven, or Harvard in Boston, or William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. But somewhere along the line the school returned to its true mission—to corrupt its students, tempt them with power, and lead them into sin, doing Satan’s bidding, protected by secrecy and “old-boy” collegiality behind the stone walls of St. Adrian’s Academy for Boys, where the world’s leaders sent their sons to be educated.

  “The key has always been secrecy,” Dani said. “The fact that you’re unaware of what’s going on doesn’t surprise me. The names on that list you gave me—did you look at them?”

  “A few,” Reese said. “They didn’t really mean anything to me.”

  “They weren’t supposed to mean anything to you,” Tommy said. “St. Adrian’s didn’t teach the bad guys whose names you’d recognize. They taught the guys standing next to those guys. The anonymous guy no one remembers, who whispers in the other guy’s ear.”

  Reese looked puzzled.

  “For example, epidemiologists think the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 originated in Kansas,” Dani said. “The disease killed over fifty million people. Three percent of the world’s population. Most accounts point to a man named Albert Gitchell, who was a cook at Ft. Riley. He gave the virus to the troops, and they brought it to Europe with them.”

  “And Albert Gitchell went to St. Adrian’s,” Tommy said.

  “You gave us six hundred plus names,” Quinn said. “Men who lived in Honors House as students. We’ve been able to tie over four hundred of them to some kind of tragedy. Always indirectly. Never the guy with the gun.”

  Reese fell silent a moment, thinking.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” Tommy said. “It makes anybody who says it out loud sound like one of those conspiracy fanatics, but we’ve been putting this together for a while. The people before us were putting it together for even longer.”

  “Actually, it makes sense,” Reese said. “It explains a lot of things I was wondering about at the school. Stories I heard that I wasn’t sure were true. Now I think they are.”

  “Reese—we think the school psychologist is part of this,” Tommy said. “Did you have any interaction with him?”

  “We all did,” Reese said. “You have to do a long interview with Dr. Ghieri before they let you in. They call it intake.”

  “That’s probably where the selection process starts,” Dani said. “That’s where they find out who the best candidates are.”

  “Best candidates for what?”

  “Persuasion. The kids most susceptible to being influenced,” Dani said. “Kids who don’t know themselves or kids who’re bluffing that they do. Your sense of yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so, seems to be on strong footing. You know who you are and what you want and like, and you’re not terribly troubled if you don’t fit into someone else’s categories. That’s why you didn’t have any problem deciding not to take the medications they wanted you to take—you were ‘above the influence,’ as the commercials on television say. Would you say that’s fair?”

  “I suppose,” Reese said.

  “Not always, but sometimes it’s the kids who proclaim themselves the loudest—the ones with the Mohawks and tattoos or the long black trench coats—who are the least certain of who they are, so they brand themselves to a group they hope will accept them. It looks like confidence, but it’s a false confidence. Their sense of self is actually pretty fragile.”

  It occurred to her that Tommy would have been the worst possible candidate for “selection.” He had always known who he was and what he stood for. There were other similarities between Tommy and Reese—a kind of resident calm, and maybe a capacity for simply listening. Whereas most people, while they listen, are trying to think of what they’ll say in response—the boy seemed fully present.

  “What do you think they’re going to make the boys who’ve been selected do?” Reese asked. “If they’re susceptible to influence, what’s the goal?”

  “We can’t be sure,” Tommy said, glancing out the window. Dani saw that it was snowing again. “We think that Linz Pharmazeutika developed a drug that they intend to put into the water supply. We’ve been calling it the ‘Doomsday Molecule.’”

  “Let’s not give it more power than it deserves,” Quinn interrupted. “It’s an endocrine disrupting agent. That’s what I’m calling it. It’s harmless to adults, as far as we can tell, but it changes the way embryos develop.”

  “Changes them how?” Reese asked.

  “Emotional overload,” Quinn said. “More than the circuit can handle.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into an army of Amos Kasdens,” Quinn said. “Linz offered me a job awhile back, and I turned them down at first, but three days ago I told them I’d take it. Hopefully I can find out more about the drug from the inside. As far as I can tell, they haven’t connected me to Tommy and Dani yet.”

  “The end result is, twelve or thirteen years from now, it all kicks in and the whole world goes crazy,” Tommy added.

  “That’s what Provivilan is going to do?”

  “Not all by itself,” Quinn said. “It’s a binary delivery system. When we take drugs, the metabolites eventually pass through the body and reenter the water system. During World War I, a German chemist named Fritz Haber, often called ‘the father of chemical weapons,’ devised binary compounds that were harmless on their own—you could store them and ship them without having to worry about them. But they’d combine inside the artillery shell at the time of detonation to form a gas, and then they were deadly. The world’s drinking water is already a soup of pharmaceutical metabolites. When Provivilan combines with what’s already in the drinking water, it forms the endocrine disrupting agent.”

  “The Doomsday Molecule,” Reese said.

  “They poisoned my pond out back as a practice run,” Tommy said. “We’re at the highest elevation in Westchester County. We dammed it up, but everything from here drains into Lake Atticus and from there into New York City’s drinking water.”

  “But we don’t think they’re going to wait for Provivilan to go on the market,” Quinn said.

  “We don’t?” Dani said.

  “I was doing the math last night,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “Assuming Provivilan metabolites are environmentally persistent or that they bio-magnify through the food chain, it would still take a few hundred years to reach concentrations high enough to disrupt embryonic brain development, just by marketing a drug. That’s going to mask what they’re doing, but it’s not a very efficient delivery system.”

  “It’s not?” Tommy said.

  “Not really,” Quinn said. “But you’re right—poisoning your pond was a test run. I need to know more about how the drug works, but I think a single dump of the drug in a reservoir or catch basin would be enough to kick-start the process in a way that’s irreversible. You could have an amount equal to a bag of Starbucks coffee and pour it into Lake Superior, and you’d be on your way.”

  The room grew silent as Dani and Tommy and the others considered Quinn’s dire prediction.

  “Maybe the drug they’re putting on the market is just misdirection,” Tommy said. “The way a magician gets you to look at his right hand so you don’t notice what he’s doing with his left.”

  “Okay,” Dani said, returning to Reese. “So we think we know what they’re doing. We just don’t know who’s doing it, or when it’s going to happen.”

  “Christmas Eve,” the boy said.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked
.

  “Christmas Eve,” Reese said again.

  “You sound pretty certain,” Tommy said.

  “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy,” Reese said. “I heard a voice. I can absolutely guarantee you it’s Christmas Eve, and that the voice is 100 percent reliable, but I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Dani?” Tommy said, rising from his chair and carrying his dishes to the sink. “Can I talk to you for a second in the study? Reese, will you tell Cassandra and Quinn and Ruth about the classes you’ve been taking? Maybe there’s something we can learn from them.”

  Cassandra sat down next to Reese, who sat up a little straighter. Tommy smiled. Dani knew the effect the beautiful actress had on grown men; the boy would answer any question she asked, obviously. In the meantime …

  He led Dani into his study and closed the door behind them. He took her in his arms and kissed her.

  “First things first,” he said. “I am once again absolutely awed by your intelligence and your compassion.”

  “Well, shucks,” Dani said, smiling and kissing him back. “You’re worried.”

  “A little,” Tommy said. “I’m worried that we’re telling him too much.”

  “What would you consider too much?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “But last time they tried to get someone inside our circle, they preyed on Carl’s weaknesses and used him as a spy. How do we know they’re not doing it again?”

  “Reese was holding a Bible,” Dani said.

  “I know, but maybe we’re missing something. Maybe Reese doesn’t know he’s being used, somehow.”

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s lying,” Dani said. “I’m not detecting deception, at least as far as I understand the signs of it.”

  “Your opinion is worth everything to me,” Tommy said, “but he doesn’t have to be lying to us to deceive us.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That’s what disinformation does,” Tommy said. “Not misinformation—disinformation. What if they somehow have allowed Reese to think he’s discovered a secret about their timing—then he tells us that, totally believing he’s telling the truth? Maybe they let him escape knowing he’d come to us and tell us what they want us to believe.”