Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “Maybe,” Dani agreed, thinking. “That theory depends on a number of assumptions, but they’re all reasonable assumptions. Occam’s Razor says the theorem requiring the fewest assumptions is the one most likely to be correct.”

  “Yeah, except I think by now Occam’s grown a very long beard,” Tommy said. “What do you make of the idea that Reese heard a voice?”

  “Paracusia,” Dani said. “That’s the psychiatric term for it. Auditory hallucinations are generally significant in diagnosing various disorders. Schizophrenia. Mania. One psycho-anthropologist theorized that three thousand years ago the human brain was bicameral, meaning ‘two houses.’ His theory was that the corpus callosum hadn’t evolved to the point that the two halves were fully connected and mutually conversant. People would hear a voice in their head, and it was just the right half of the brain speaking to the left, but to them it sounded like the voice of some all-powerful outsider, some superior being commanding them to obey. It was the voice of God, to them. Or maybe it was plural and polytheistic, I forget. But then we evolved and our brains physiologically changed, so now the voice doesn’t sound like an outsider. I’ve read papers suggesting that in some psychiatric patients, that ancient bicameralism somehow gets restored.”

  “Is that something you think is true?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” Dani said. “As I recall, the argument against it was that evolution takes place over millennia. It’s not like some sort of switch gets flipped and all of a sudden, in a few years or a hundred, everything changes. But there’ve been new studies that say sudden paradigm shifts aren’t unprecedented. A sudden shift in the environment can cause radical alterations in how a species has to adapt to survive.”

  “Joan of Arc heard voices,” Tommy said.

  “And look where it got her,” Dani said.

  “All I’m saying is, let’s be careful. Maybe they want us to think it’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not.”

  “Reese was telling us something we think might be relevant,” Quinn said when Dani and Tommy returned to the kitchen. “Usually the selection process takes place over the Christmas break, and then when the boys get back, the graduating seniors move into Honors House for their final semester. This year they made the selection in October. Nobody’s moved into Honors House yet, but he’s pretty certain the boys know who they are.”

  “Everyone was trying to guess, but they’d have been kicked out of Honors House if they told anybody before the moving-in ceremony,” Reese said.

  “How did you get the names you sent me on the SD card? Where were you?” Dani asked. “Maybe we can get the names of the boys the same way.”

  “We were in Dr. Ghieri’s office. Oliver and I. Ghieri stepped out for a minute, and when I had a chance, I sent them to myself in an e-mail from his computer, and then deleted it from his Sent folder and from the Recently Deleted folder.” Reese frowned. “I don’t think they found out. But Oliver is missing, so that might be why.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Dani said. “You did absolutely the right thing. I just wish we had more information.”

  Suddenly the boy looked stricken.

  “You’re not going to make me go back, are you?” he said. “I can’t go back there. I know this is important, but …”

  “We won’t make you go back,” Dani said. “You can stay with us.”

  “You’ll be safe here,” Tommy added. “The angels are looking after us.”

  “The school knows who we are,” Dani said. “Tommy and I. We don’t think they necessarily know about Dr. McKellen or Miss Morton.”

  “They know about me,” Ruth said. “I have a big hole in the side of my house to prove it.”

  “We had a demon lurking in the garden,” Tommy explained. “We scared him off with a couple of shotgun blasts.”

  “You can shoot demons?” Reese asked.

  “Demons are fallen angels,” Tommy explained. “When they take on a physical form, they can feel pain. Only another angel can defeat them, though. They run away because they’re afraid of drawing the wrong kind of attention.”

  “At least you can kill those things in the woods,” Reese said.

  “How do you know?” Tommy said.

  “The accident. Didn’t we hit one with the car?”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was,” Reese said. “My understanding was that we hit one with the car and killed it.”

  “Your understanding, based on what?” Tommy asked.

  “What the policeman said.”

  “He told me he thought you hit a deer,” Tommy said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. For the record, I think you’re right. I think you’re right about Christmas Eve too. Under normal circumstances, I’m not sure what I think about people hearing voices, but these aren’t normal circumstances.”

  After the breakfast meeting broke up, Reese told himself he had to be more vigilant about the things he said—another slip of the tongue like that and he would surely give himself away.

  “Stop it,” the voice in his head said. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

  No, you’re the one who needs to stop what you’re doing—it’s dangerous and it’s wrong. You’re the one who has no idea what he’s doing.

  He waited for a reply.

  Where did you go? Why aren’t you listening to me? This is important.

  His mind was a raging storm of fears and apprehensions, so he tried to calm it and focus on the love he felt instead.

  Please—just talk to me—PLEASE!

  5.

  December 21

  8:11 a.m. EST

  Three inches of snow lay on the ground, still falling lightly with no sign of letting up. Ahead, Otto sniffed the ground and then turned, as if urging Tommy on. The bloodhound could be walked without a leash and obeyed voice commands unless, Quinn had warned, he got the scent of something, and then he was off. Tommy trusted that the stone wall and the deer fence surrounding his property would be enough to contain Otto’s olfactory investigations.

  Tommy needed to walk. To be away from the others for a while—even from Dani—and be alone with his thoughts. He needed to try to understand why George and Julian were gone. He knew that God had a plan for everyone, but that did little to lessen the blow—it still hurt to lose someone you loved, and Tommy had come to love and admire both men.

  It reminded him of how short and uncertain life could be, and how important it was to tell the ones you loved how you truly felt about them. Which made him think of Dani again, and the question he’d decided to ask her.

  Otto barked.

  Tommy looked up. The dog was standing at the top of the rock where Tommy had stood the night before with the Helios 9000 spotlight. Otto’s nose was straight up in the air, his tail stiff and straight as well.

  “I know what you smell,” Tommy said, taking his GPhone from his pocket. “There’s a wolf sanctuary about a mile from here. I think they have about fifty of ’em. You want to go join ’em, Otto? Huh, boy?”

  Tommy petted the dog and scratched him behind his floppy ears, then turned on his phone. He tapped on his contact list and then on the name Sid Gunderson. His father, Arnie, was in Texas, visiting with his brother—Tommy’s Uncle Sid. The call went to voice mail, which struck Tommy as odd because Uncle Sid was in a wheelchair from arthritis in his knees and hips and rarely went anywhere.

  Tommy left his number and a request for a call back.

  He dialed the number for Lucius Mills’s cell phone, thinking his father’s caregiver might be able to tell him what was going on. Arnie was suffering from Lewy body dementia, cognitively similar to Alzheimer’s but more of a roller coaster ride, with intermittent periods of lucidity and progressive symptoms that included Parkinsonisms. Lucius picked up on the fourth ring.

  “I was just about to call you, Tommy,” Lucius said. “We’re at the hospital.”

  “Is my uncle all right?”

  “Not your uncle, Tommy. It’s your d
ad. I’m sorry. He had a seizure last night. They did a CAT scan and said he has cortico-basal degeneration.”

  “How—”

  “He’s stable now, but I think it’s time to move him to the next level. I’m happy to do what I can for him, T, but they say he’s going to need attention 24/7. Sorry to tell it to you like this, man, over the phone. I know it’s rough.”

  It took Tommy a moment for the news to sink in. It was news he’d been expecting, but not this soon. And not right now.

  “It’ll be okay, Luc,” Tommy said. “I’ve already got a room reserved for him at High Ridge Manor. Do you think he’s okay to fly?”

  “I think he’d be okay on a plane,” the caregiver said. “He’s been sleeping a lot. I’ll sit with him.”

  “I appreciate it,” Tommy said. “Can I talk to him? Is he right there?”

  “He’s right here, but I’m not sure, man. You can try. They gave him some medicine. Made him a little loopy. Hang on …”

  Tommy heard a rustling sound, and then he heard Lucius Mills say, from a few feet away, “Go ahead.”

  Tommy cleared his throat. “Arnie? Dad? How are you feeling? It’s Tommy calling. It’s your son, Tommy …”

  He waited for a response.

  He tried again.

  “Dad? Can you hear me? Listen, don’t try to say anything, but this is Tommy. I’m going to bring you home, okay? You’re going to be home for Christmas. Okay? So that’s good news. And I have more good news for you—do you remember that I told you I’ve been working with Dani Harris? Remember Dani Harris? The girl I almost dated in high school when she was homecoming queen, except we both freaked out? The really smart one?”

  Again he waited for a response. His father said nothing.

  “She’s my soul mate, Papa. I’m crazy in love with her. And I’ve decided … she’s the girl I want to marry. And I wanted you to be the first to know,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the right moment to ask because I want to do it up right. So I’ll keep you posted. So that’s good news too, right? It’s all good. All good news. I can’t wait to see you, Papa.”

  When the call ended, his false cheer ended with it, and for a moment he broke down and let a single tear fall, wondering if he’d ever get through to his father again. Otto came to his side and licked his hand. Tommy gave the dog a pat on the head to thank him.

  By the time he got back to the house he was on a more level keel.

  Dani met him on the steps and kissed him.

  “I saw you through the window,” she said. “Thought you might need some support. I called Julian’s home number in Oxford to tell them the news, but it went straight to voice mail, so I told them to call us. You’re thinking about them, aren’t you?”

  “I was,” Tommy said. “There’s just—there’s no limit to what those … We keep thinking like human beings. We have a conscience. They don’t think like that. To them, we’re just bugs. Something to flick away because we accidentally landed on their french fries. I feel like to defeat them, we have to think like them, and I don’t want to do that.”

  “It doesn’t mean we have to be like them,” Dani said. “You’re right. We’re at war.”

  “I just wish I knew how to be smarter,” Tommy said. He looked up, and his expression changed. “Maybe we should ask them?”

  He pointed to a pair of figures standing in the falling snow beneath the willow tree beside his pond. One was a biker who went by the name of Charlie, clad in black railroad boots, black jeans, and a black leather jacket. The other was an old Native American called Ben; he wore jeans, suede cowboy boots, and a plaid flannel shirt beneath his coat, and his hair descended from either side of his black cowboy hat in two black braids.

  They hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier when Tommy had glanced in that direction, but that wasn’t surprising. Despite appearances, neither Charlie nor Ben was human—they were angels who’d assumed these forms because their heavenly guises were too beautiful to look at. Charlie and Ben had guided Tommy and Dani throughout this ordeal. Tommy knew they were there to help them now.

  “Why are you troubled?” Ben said, reaching down to pet Otto. “Julian and George are with us.”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “I just wish I’d had a chance to say good-bye.”

  “You said good-bye,” Charlie reminded him.

  “I know, but not the way I wanted to. I thought I was going to see them again.”

  “Maybe you should treat everyone as if you’ll never see them again,” Ben advised. “There’s a country song about that that I like very much. I can’t remember the name of it.”

  “‘Live Like You Were Dyin’,’” Tommy said. “Tim McGraw.”

  “That’s the one,” Ben said. “I like Tim McGraw.”

  “What’s not to like?” Tommy said.

  “You couldn’t save them?” Dani asked, holding her coat closed at the throat to keep out the cold. “George and Julian? I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” Ben said. “We’ll be there when you need us, but our purpose is to glorify God and do his work. His plans and yours are not always the same.” Dani turned to Tommy.

  “I know it’s not enough to tell yourself they’d lived long, productive lives,” she said. “I feel lucky for the time we had with them. Just think about what you had. Not what you don’t have.”

  Tommy supposed those were the same things she’d told herself when she lost her parents. They’d flown to Africa to visit her there, where she’d worked with Doctors Without Borders helping rehabilitate child soldiers back into mainstream society, but they’d perished when their plane went down in the jungle. He held his arms out to her and hugged her, buried his face in her hair, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the angels were gone.

  “They keep doing that,” she said, staring at the empty space they’d occupied. “They’re not much for good-byes, I guess.”

  “We’ll see them again,” Tommy said.

  “When we need them,” Dani said. “Why does it feel like we always need them?”

  “That’s what being human feels like,” Tommy replied. “Speaking of which … I have to call my travel agent.”

  “Well, there’s a non sequitur. Your travel agent?”

  “Yes. I have to fly my dad home. I’ll tell you all about it inside.”

  They joined hands and turned toward the house.

  6.

  December 21

  10:05 a.m. EST

  The research campus for Linz Pharmazeutika was an array of glass boxes on twenty lush, landscaped acres in the town of Sexton, Connecticut, south of East Salem and just ten miles across the state line. The glass walls were intended to symbolize the theme of transparency, though with their mirrored finishes, the buildings were only transparent at night with the lights on inside. Linz’s corporate motto—“Clear Genius”—was emblazoned in raised brass letters on a stone marker by the entry gates.

  The company had invited Quinn to come in for an interview months earlier when they’d accepted his paper, “An Immunoradiometric Study of Hyperandrogeny and Autism,” for a conference on autism Linz was sponsoring at Columbia. That was where he and Dani had reconnected. She’d asked for his help understanding the autopsy results on Amos Kasden’s brain and the drug, the blue pill she believed Amos had been taking at the behest of St. Adrian’s school psychologist. Quinn had done more than that.

  He’d determined how Provivilan worked on the brain, its dual nature, doing one thing for adults in normal doses but affecting embryos at one part per trillion. But there were still questions to be answered. How long would it take for the drug to have an effect? Could the effects be reversed—was there an antidote of some kind? And who was in league with the devil and who was a pawn, doing the devil’s bidding without knowing who was signing the checks?

  When Quinn had his first interview with the head of research and development, he’d been told all the things he wanted to hear, that Linz only wanted him to continue doing the resea
rch he was already doing, except with the guarantee that Linz would share in the financial benefits of his work. He was to head up a team and hire whomever he wanted to help. When the head of R&D told him the budget he would have and the salary he would be paid, Quinn’s first reaction was that there had to be some kind of mistake—the director had moved a decimal or added a zero where it didn’t belong.

  In the first few days after his hiring, he’d met with a number of different executives to be briefed on what was going on in each of their respective departments. Some of what he heard sounded completely innocent, some of it troubled him, and a few things sounded vaguely sinister—particularly the IT head’s long-term plan to digitize and coordinate the medical records of every human being on earth, including their genomes, beginning at birth. The man spoke blithely of how easy it would be to study the genetic components of diseases sorted for every possible population permutation, and how easy it would be to find organ donors and tissue matches. He speculated that the full computerization of medicine alone would extend the average human lifespan by ten or twenty years while cutting the costs for health insurance in half. Inwardly, Quinn recoiled at the idea of every human being’s genetic composition being stored and controlled by one central authority without any regard to privacy or individual choice, but he kept his concerns to himself and smiled and nodded.

  After making the rounds, his impression was that while Linz had interests in virtually every aspect of modern medicine in every part of the globe, its primary focus was going to be on the mental health of children and young adults. It was a simple matter of demographics, one department head explained. “In another twenty years, the Baby Boomers’ll all be dead, and their kids will be relatively healthy, with kids of their own who are going to find a rapidly changing world hard to cope with, and we’re going to be there with pills to make ’em feel better. Ka-ching!”

  Linz was a privately held firm, so its profits and losses were not public information, but as an employee Quinn was able to get a sense of the company’s scale and scope. It was invariably described as a “pharmaceutical giant” in the press, but the word giant, Quinn came to think, did not describe it by half. Linz’s annual profits, by his best estimate, exceeded those of all the big oil companies combined, with manufacturing facilities in China that paid workers as little as twenty dollars a month and positions in every significant marketplace in the world.