Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “I think so,” Reese said.

  “Did Amos Kasden have a twin brother?”

  Reese nodded. Dani wondered why Ed Stanley, her contact in the State Department, hadn’t told her. But as far as she could tell, Amos’s adoptive parents hadn’t known either, and they were, as the saying went, as honest as the day was long.

  “Well, at least there’s one evil twin we don’t have to worry about,” Tommy said.

  “What?” Reese said.

  “Amos Kasden. He’s dead,” Tommy said. “One less evil twin.”

  “You don’t understand,” Reese said. “Amos was the good one. His brother Marko was the evil one.”

  “Marko?” Tommy said.

  Reese nodded.

  “And where is he?”

  “You tell me.”

  14.

  December 22

  8:34 a.m. EST

  The sensory deprivation tank arrived first thing the next morning. Tommy suggested they set it up in his “man cave,” a room at the far end of the house with a walk-out basement that opened onto the barbecue patio. The man cave or media room contained, among other things, a huge projection screen that served as a movie theater, with seating on reclining leather couches for twenty, complete with cup holders and electronic massage—for the times, Tommy said, when he wanted to have a few old friends or teammates over to watch a football game or play the latest version of Madden.

  “And that’s an Xbox,” he said to Dani, pointing to a gaming console on the shelf below the television screen.

  It struck Dani as odd that men who played football for a living would play football video games to relax. When she said as much to Tommy, he pointed out that in truck stops there were video games where truckers could get off the road and play driving games or Grand Theft Auto. “I’d rather have them crashing video trucks than real ones. Wouldn’t you?”

  She helped him set up the tank next to his pool table; he ran a garden hose from the laundry room downstairs to fill the tank with twelve inches of water. It would take time, he said, to dissolve the Epsom salts and bring the temperature up to a neutral ninety-nine degrees. While they waited, Reese and Tommy played a game of foosball, which Reese won, causing Tommy to spin his goalie rod in disgust.

  “That’s the first time I’ve lost at foosball since middle school,” he told Reese. “It’s only because you come from a country where everybody plays soccer. Which is a nice sport, if you like tiny guys in dainty little shorts playing on tippy-toe.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Reese said. “Let’s go again, American style. We’ll play for three seconds, and then we’ll stop and think for half an hour about what we’re going to do next. Can you tell me where the loo is?”

  Tommy pointed down the hall and to the left.

  When they were alone, Dani looked up from the book she’d been reading while they waited, an article on twin studies from the Journal of Psychiatric Medicine, and smiled at Tommy.

  “First loss since middle school?” she said. “You let him win, didn’t you?”

  “He’s very good,” Tommy said. “But yeah, I did. I want him feeling confident.”

  He’d gone up to the guest quarters to get a bathrobe and a set of towels and a bathing suit for Reese to change into when Reese returned from the bathroom. The boy took a seat opposite Dani.

  “He threw the foosball game, didn’t he?” Reese asked. “He wasn’t playing his best.”

  “You’ll have to ask him,” Dani said.

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t either,” Reese said. “Don’t worry—I got this.”

  She made room for him on the couch, and he sat down. He seemed nervous, uncertain what to do with his hands, trying not to look at the sensory deprivation tank next to the pool table.

  “Reese—would you mind telling me a little more about your brother?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “I don’t know,” Dani said. “What’s he like?”

  The boy looked puzzled at first, then politely suppressed a chuckle.

  “Well, that was a pretty stupid question, wasn’t it?” Dani said. “He’s your identical twin. He’s like you.”

  “Our parents used to dress us differently so that they could tell us apart,” Reese said. “That only worked until we figured out we could switch clothes and fool them.”

  “You must have been terribly sad when you lost them.”

  Reese shifted in his chair to lean closer to the fire. “It’s hard to remember them,” he said. “It gets harder all the time.”

  “I know what you mean. I lost my parents too,” Dani said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So you and Edmond were already close—did that make you feel even closer? Losing them?”

  “I suppose it did,” Reese said. “We still had each other. We already spent every minute of every day together. If we went shopping independently of each other, we’d come home with the same things, because we had the same tastes.”

  Dani thought of the journal article she’d been reading. The bond between identical twins was remarkable, more nature than nurture. It wasn’t unusual for twins who’d been separated at birth and raised in dramatically different households or environments to show astonishing similarities. They’d marry women with the same name, give their kids the same names, have the same kind of dog, the same job, even paint their houses the same color.

  “It must feel pretty bad now, not to be close to him,” she said.

  “We never missed a night that we didn’t say good night to each other before going to sleep. Until this year, anyway.”

  “Dubbo di zubbo,” Dani said. “I can see how you’re alike, but how are you different?”

  “He’s six minutes older,” Reese said with a laugh. “As he never stops reminding me. He says it makes him more mature.” He put a sarcastic emphasis on the word mature.

  “I don’t think being six minutes older is going to make much of a difference,” Dani said. She’d read studies on birth order, and how older or firstborns tend to be conservatives who fight to maintain the status quo, while youngest or last-borns are the radicals who lead revolutions and favor change. Six minutes didn’t seem like much, but maybe it was.

  “It does if you think it does,” Reese said. “Plus, the estate has been in the family for over three hundred years. Primogeniture. But neither of us cares about that. We truly don’t.”

  The laws of primogeniture meant that as the oldest son, Edmond would inherit their parents’ estate. Was that why Ghieri and Wharton had selected Edmond and not Reese? If they were identical, why choose one over the other?

  “You don’t say good night anymore?”

  “I don’t even know what happened,” Reese said. “I thought we’d always be together. That we’d live together after we graduated. I mean, I know what happened but …”

  Dani gave him time to collect his thoughts.

  “How did you guys stop being so close?”

  “It started at the school,” Reese said. “We lived together our first year, but the second year they wouldn’t let us. They said we had to learn how to develop separately. That we’d never reach our individual potential if we held each other back and spent all our time together.”

  “That’s what they’re good at,” Dani said. “Turning people against each other.” She thought of the ways Carl, once he’d been attacked and controlled by the demon, had tried to drive a wedge between Tommy and her. Making her jealous of Cassandra. Making her and Tommy suspicious of each other. It had almost worked.

  “They said we were going to have to become independent someday,” Reese said. “Be our own men. And that’s true, I suppose.”

  Dani settled back into the chair. “But you didn’t like it, did you?” she asked.

  Reese shook his head. “We’d meet each other in secret,” he told her. “In the tunnels.”

  “What tunnels?”

  “Between the buildings on campus,” Reese said. “Where the hot water pipes and the
electrical wires go. But then I started seeing Carolyn.”

  “Who’s Carolyn?”

  “A girl,” Reese said. “Mrs. Carlyle’s daughter.”

  “The housekeeper’s daughter. She’s your girlfriend?”

  “She used to be,” Reese said. “When we went home during the summer, she wanted to be with me and I wanted to be with her. We didn’t want Edmond tagging along all the time. I wanted to be with her. Alone. I really loved her.”

  “Did she love you?”

  “She said she did.”

  “What happened next?” Dani asked, sipping her tea.

  “Edmond got angry,” Reese replied. “He said Carolyn had cast a spell on me. I told him it would be different when we got back to school. That I could be with her during the summers when we were home, and that we could be with each other during the school year.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He cut his hair and dyed it black so he wouldn’t look as much like me,” Reese said. “He started … I don’t know. Doing drugs, I guess.”

  “The drugs the school provided?”

  “And others,” Reese said. “He said he wasn’t, but I knew he was lying. That was what I was saying when I said I knew students who didn’t get caught.”

  “How did you know he was lying?”

  “Because he was saying things I wouldn’t say,” Reese told her. “I knew he was lying the same way I’d know if I was lying.”

  “I think you’re the empathetic one,” Dani said. “That’s why you know what he’s feeling.”

  “No,” Reese said. “He’s exactly like me. Or he was. He just changed.”

  Reese looked lost. Dani leaned forward, took his hands, and squeezed.

  “It’s really hard when you don’t know what to do,” Reese said. “He’s all alone. Normally, any decision we’d make, we’d consult with each other. I mean, we didn’t have to—we’d just know what the other one was feeling, and then we’d put our minds together.”

  “Maybe we can change him back,” she said. “Does the tank scare you?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, maybe a little. I can’t really tell. Maybe I’m just scared that it’s not going to work.”

  She explained to Reese how it was simply a way to make a person’s body relax completely, and how doctors used it to treat people with insomnia or fibromyalgia, or to recover from spinal injuries when they couldn’t lie down without feeling pain, or just to relieve stress and encourage creativity.

  When Tommy returned with the towels, Reese asked him if he’d ever tried a sensory deprivation tank. Tommy said he had, when the salesman invited him to the showroom for a demonstration.

  “What was it like?”

  “It was interesting,” Tommy said. “At first, all I could think of was all the other things I needed to be doing and how I was wasting my time, and then I started daydreaming, so I got out and told the guy I’d try it another time. He asked me how long I thought I’d been in. I thought maybe ten, fifteen minutes tops. He pointed at the clock on the wall. I’d been in for an hour and a half.”

  He let Reese walk around the tank, which resembled an eight-footlong white egg. He showed Reese how to lift the top half of the egg, which was balanced with a counterweight so that it could be raised effortlessly with only one finger. He showed him where the internal loudspeakers were as Dani explained that initially, as Reese floated inside the lightless tank, he’d hear music and her voice, and then they would leave him alone with his thoughts. Dani and Tommy would be right outside and wouldn’t let anything happen to him. He would enter a kind of wakeful sleep, and if it worked, and he started to think about his brother, he might be able to get through to him.

  The boy was silent for a moment.

  “So … ,” Dani began. “What do you think?”

  “It’s worth a try,” Reese said. “If I can get my brother back, it’s worth a try.”

  “Do you want to start with maybe fifteen minutes and work your way up to a full hour?” Dani suggested.

  “I think that might be a good idea,” Reese said.

  He changed in the bathroom and emerged in the bathing suit Tommy had found for him. Tommy lifted the tank lid, and Reese dipped his toe in, testing the water. He nodded to Tommy that it felt fine, then doffed the robe and got in, sitting in the water first before floating on his back.

  “There’s so much salt in the water that you can’t sink,” Tommy said. “If you move, the waves you make will bounce off the walls, and the shape of the tank will keep you centered. Ready to try it?”

  “You’ll be right outside?”

  “Not going anywhere.”

  They lowered the lid slowly. Reese tested it once to make sure it hadn’t somehow locked, then kept it closed.

  Fifteen minutes later Tommy opened the lid and the boy sat up.

  “How was it?” Tommy asked.

  “I wasn’t really thinking about my brother,” Reese said. “I think I might have if I’d had more time.”

  “We can try again after lunch,” Dani said.

  “I did remember something,” Reese said. “Something Dr. Villanegre said before he died. While he was struggling with the thing—he said ‘beast of Gevaudan.’”

  “Beast of Ge-what?” Tommy said. “I don’t suppose he happened to have spelled it, did he?”

  “He was fighting for his life,” Reese said. “But if it’s a town in France, I’ve been there. On holiday. G-e-v-a-u-d-a-n.”

  “Hang on.” As Reese dried himself off and went back to the bathroom to change, Tommy used his GPhone to search the web for the term. “Uh-oh,” he said. “This isn’t good.”

  15.

  December 22

  10:45 a.m. EST

  “There’s a meeting of department heads,” Quinn’s assistant said. “You’re invited to sit in.”

  His assistant was a young woman named Allison; impossibly thin, ridiculously intelligent, with close-cropped, boyish light brown hair and black-rimmed glasses that looked more like motorcycle goggles. She was also over six feet tall, with long spindly legs that made her seem to glide from place to place. She wore khaki pants and a blue button-down oxford shirt to work every day, or at least for the past two days that she’d worked for him. Quinn liked her a great deal.

  “Invited or expected?” he asked. “I’ve already met a lot of them. I’m not a department head.”

  “Both,” she said. “You’re an important part of the company’s future, I hear. Word to the wise—Guryakin himself might be there.”

  “Ah.” Quinn had been hearing about Guryakin ever since he’d joined Dani and Tommy’s group. Currently Linz’s head of research, formerly involved with some very shady Soviet-era bioweapons programs. Quinn had little doubt that whatever bad was happening at Linz, Guryakin was in the thick of it.

  “Well, if Peter Guryakin is going to be there …”

  “Peter?” Allison pushed her glasses up her nose. “No. Not Peter. Andrei. The sinecure. Doktor Frankenstein.”

  Guryakin had a son who worked at Linz? It shouldn’t have surprised him. The name Andrei Guryakin had turned up on the list of Honors House alums that Reese had sent to Dani. He was one of the more recent graduates, his name accompanied by a school photograph.

  “Dr. Frankenstein? Why do you call him that?”

  “Because he’s ghoulish,” Allison said. “And quite possibly a troll who lives under a bridge and eats children. And he never says a word about what he’s up to.”

  “This is the first time I’ve heard you exaggerate. I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.”

  Allison’s face remained straight for a moment, and then she arched an eyebrow as if to say, What makes you think I’m exaggerating?

  “Why doesn’t he say anything?”

  “Because he can’t,” she said. “I mean, he could—he possesses the gift of speech. Obviously. He runs the lab in Building C.”

  A Guryakin running Building C, Quinn thought. He shouldn’t have been su
rprised.

  “It’s his subterranean lair,” Allison said. “It’s like the bat cave. The only way in or out is if you’re blindfolded first. All right—that is an exaggeration. But only a little.”

  “And what is Mr. Guryakin working on in Building C?” Quinn asked, feigning disinterest and clicking through the inbox for his e-mail.

  “I couldn’t say. And I have the gift of speech too—I can’t say because I don’t know,” Allison said. She leaned against the doorframe. “If I were a betting woman—and a hundred bucks says I am—I’d say that’s where they keep the secret formula for Provivilan. And possibly Coca Cola. And Dr Pepper. If you haven’t noticed, this company is going all-out for Provivilan. The release version has a half dozen markers that’ll make it virtually impossible to reverse-engineer, but they fired a woman who was sneaking the beta version. Illena somebody. Nemkova? Nemkovic? Something like that.”

  Quinn tried not to react. He’d been circumspect, asking after Illena’s whereabouts. But he was worried for her and also, frankly, for himself—showing too much interest in someone who’d gotten fired could cast suspicion on him.

  “I saw a television commercial the other day that made Provivilan sound like the instant fix for everything that’s wrong with the world,” Quinn said.

  “Well, don’t believe the ‘instant’ part,” Allison said. “I had a friend from Building C who said—you didn’t hear this from me—that was the last tweak they made. The initial side effects were apparently so hideous that nobody would stay on the regimen. Now the co-indicators are minimal, but it takes three months for the drug to build up in your system before it has any effect. But I’m not supposed to know that, so shh.”

  “Of course,” Quinn said, smiling, wondering what else Allison knew about Building C that she wasn’t saying. “We should go out for drinks after work and you can tell me everything else you’re not supposed to know.”

  Allison seemed taken aback, as if embarrassed. He hadn’t asked her out on a date, but if there were time—if he had enough time left—the idea of seeing her socially appealed to him.