L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  When I put that together with Kelso’s laboratory, it deepened my suspicion that they’d decided to hang on to this place, using Paul as the cat’s paw. I’d scuttled that plan, along with severely cutting down his financial resources—and Kelso’s riff that I’d disrupted the Gatekeepers’ energy flow sounded more and more like it really meant I’d disrupted the cash flow to Parallax. He and Cynthia now had a tangible, compelling reason for wanting to draw me into the fold—persuading me to reverse my decisions.

  But that still didn’t come close to explaining the weird shit that had happened to me.

  For maybe another hour, there was no action to speak of. Cynthia and Sperry came in and out of sight, cooking a leisurely breakfast and then settling down with laptops. A couple of times, she came outside to get something from the Hummer, which seemed to belong to her. It was a street model, not one of the full-size military rigs—but still a statement, and it fit her to a T.

  I was starting to think about heading home; it looked like I’d gotten all the information I was going to, although that was a lot. Then something happened that seemed insignificant at first but got this entire scenario moving in a different direction.

  The vultures came out.

  The first thing that occurred to me was that it was early for them. They tended to be active later in the day, maybe because the warmer air made for better thermal conditions. And usually one or two, maybe scouts, would spend awhile gliding around in wide, lazy circles before the others slowly drifted out to join them. But now the whole flock filled the sky within a couple of minutes and quickly zeroed in over a particular spot at the base of the cliffs. Probably they already had a carcass located, and they were going for it as soon as the temperature allowed.

  I watched them for a minute, remembering their aggressive behavior last weekend and looking for more signs of it. I didn’t see any.

  But that made me think of the cats at the college—the sudden, wildly uncharacteristic menace they’d showed.

  As the vultures spiraled lower and started to land, I realized that they were going all the way down to the valley floor, a relatively open area that I could see through the glasses. I focused in on it—and got the kind of tingle you feel when you realize you’re on to something, even though you haven’t yet figured out what.

  The meal they were feasting on was not the carcass of an animal that had died naturally. It was a very big chunk of raw meat, maybe a beef quarter, completely skinned and obviously butchered.

  It looked like somebody was feeding those birds.

  The spot was toward the far eastern edge of our property, well away from the Lodge and film set. I could circle around behind it overland and easily get down there without being seen.

  I stuffed the binoculars in my pack and headed off for a closer look at Buzzard Bistro.

  Thirty-Seven

  When I was sure there were no other humans around, I approached the feeding flock cautiously. There were at least two dozen of them, big, mean-looking bastards with scrofulous reddish heads and dirty dark feathers—maybe every creature has its own beauty, but it was hard to see in these—and if they did get into that aggressive mode, I’d be starring in a real-life Hitchcock movie.

  They hissed like snakes and flapped their wings in agitation, but I saw with relief that they weren’t going to put up a fight; they backpedaled clumsily, some winging it for short distances and landing again, other beginning their laborious climb back skyward.

  The chunk of meat was relatively fresh; I could smell it, but not like it had been here rotting for days. It looked like just what I’d thought and clearly had been placed here deliberately; besides the butchering, it was covered over with heavy wire mesh staked to the ground around the edges, presumably so larger scavengers couldn’t tear into it or drag it away, but the birds could reach through with their beaks.

  Yet another bundle of work and expense—this time to nurture a bunch of buzzards. Somebody had to have a pretty good reason, and it had to be somebody with Parallax; none of the local residents, mostly longtime ranchers, would dream of anything like this.

  I walked in as close as I cared to, within about twenty feet; from there the air was thick with flies and hornets.

  Then I got another one of those tingles.

  The meat was thickly layered with whitish dust, spread on like seasoning salt, and there was more of it on the ground in a rough circle several feet in diameter. This had to be deliberate, too; there were no alkali deposits around or soil close to that color that the carcass could have been dragged across.

  But the real click was that the powder looked very much like the stuff I’d seen at the college yesterday, spread around the area where I’d fed the cats.

  That was why this was going on. The “somebody” was using food as bait to get the animals to ingest the powder.

  The clicks kept coming. Cats and vultures both turned bizarrely aggressive. But not across the board permanently—right now, the birds were normal. Maybe they were just getting their morning dosage, in which case they’d start getting aggressive, and it would be a good idea for me to get my ass out of here.

  But another memory was intruding, and while I couldn’t make it fit, I couldn’t shake it off, either. The first time I’d seen Gunnar Kelso, he was watching the vultures fight—and holding a device that I’d assumed was a camera or PDA to record the behavior.

  Click.

  Christ almighty, what if he hadn’t been recording it at all—but causing it? If the powder was a drug with the potential to create aggression—and Kelso had some means of sending a signal to trigger it? Was that what he was working on with such otherwise inexplicable secrecy?

  And if it could be done with animals, could it have similar effects on humans? The cell phone call that made Nick snap, the VoIP calls in the previous days—were those electronic signals that were driving him nuts?

  I braved the swarming bugs long enough to scoop up a cupful of the dust, hiked back out the way I’d come in, and called Dr. Ivy Shin at UCLA Medical Center. She was in her office—I had a feeling she practically lived there—and when I asked if she could spare a few minutes to look at something urgent, she said sure.

  I drove straight to UCLA, and there, the answers started to come.

  Thirty-Eight

  By midafternoon, I’d hopped on a Southwest Airlines commuter flight to San Francisco, rented a car at SFO, and was heading down Interstate 280 to the Stanford University campus. It was a pretty drive along the San Andreas Fault; a lot of the landscape was a wooded, undeveloped wildlife refuge—although the mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, where much of the pioneering work of atom splitting went on, was also tucked in there.

  SLAC, as it was known, was linked obliquely to the reason I’d come here—to have a talk with Professor Hans Blaustein, a nuclear physicist I’d had the good luck to get acquainted with as an undergraduate. I hadn’t seen him in a good ten years, and I’d hesitated to call him; he had to be over ninety now, and his health might be frail. But he sounded fine, sharp as ever and happy to talk. I’d decided to see him personally; this was too important to try to explain over the phone.

  By now, paranoia was also creeping in about any kind of electronic communication. I still didn’t know the real specifics, but I was more and more convinced that those mysterious VoIP phone calls to Nick had figured into his meltdown—and that Kelso’s science was behind it all, with Cynthia Trask masterminding the schemes.

  What I did know, or strongly suspect, was this: Ivy Shin had examined the powder I’d brought her—and quickly identified microscopic nanoparticles that were identical to the ones she’d found in Nick’s cocaine.

  That right there was the all-important factor that started to connect everything together.

  The coke had been given to Nick by Cynthia. He’d inhaled large quantities of the nanos, probably millions, which pervaded his brain.

  I guessed that Kelso had set up the vulture feeding for essentially the same purpo
se—to saturate the birds’ brains with nanos. They weren’t just eating the stuff—they were inhaling it as they fed, stirring it up as they moved around, and carrying it with them on their feathers. This had probably been going on for quite some time, as an experiment for him to refine his techniques.

  And somehow—this was still the major missing link—I had to believe that he’d developed a way to use that to influence behavior. It was a big, big stretch to think that could account for what had happened to me yesterday. But—when Kelso and I had taken our walk through the film set, he’d pointedly led me into the Delphic temple, where I’d spent minutes inhaling the steamy pungent vapor. It could easily have been laced with the nanos.

  That suggested that they realized I might become an obstacle, and they were setting me up in advance. Cynthia would have had no problem getting information from Paul about where I lived and worked and such, and a little covert surveillance would fill in my habits.

  Then—just suppose—after I’d cut Paul off from the money, he’d called Cynthia and she went into action, maybe telling him to keep track of me until she could take over. She was out to convince me that the Gatekeepers were punishing me, and she knew I’d be more likely to believe it if I was attacked in ways that seemed impossible to explain.

  She followed me to Waterton College, and she was already familiar with my workout routine. While I was in the gym, she spread the nanopowder around where I fed the cats, knowing that I’d be passing by. They’d have pounced on it, stirring up the powder and breathing it in, with the nanos immediately pervading their brains. She used electronic signals to trigger their hostility; by the time I got there, they were in a frenzy. Then she’d followed me to Lisa’s, and this time she threw out a direct jolt to my own brain—causing agony rather than aggression, which carried the eerie implication that the nanos were capable of a range of effects.

  It was a lot of trouble to go to—but there was a lot of money and property at stake.

  After I’d talked to Kelso and tentatively bought into the smoke screen explanation about the Gatekeepers, the two of them backed off, figuring they had me where they wanted me.

  Maybe they were right.

  Without doubt, there was much, much more to all this. But one question in particular was gnawing at my heart.

  Was Lisa involved with it in any way? Was our seemingly chance first meeting really staged? Her quick interest and affection for me, just another role? She was the one who’d planted the suggestion that I’d crossed the Gatekeepers, and then urged me to talk to Kelso. Was that all part of the setup?

  The jade bracelet that he’d given her—could that conceal one of the transmitting devices? They could be of different types, working through cell phones, PDAs, and no doubt other means, and they could be tiny. That would explain my flash of rage at Dustin Sperry that first day, my euphoria when I was with Lisa, and my desolation when we separated.

  It was not a pleasant thought.

  I was getting close to the Stanford campus by now. I tried to put her out of my mind and concentrate on why I’d come here.

  Thirty-Nine

  I took the Sand Hill Road exit off the interstate, crossed Foothill Drive into the twisting narrow streets of the original faculty neighborhood, and parked in the driveway of Hans and Frieda Blaustein’s graceful old house—faded ecru stucco, built in a style that suggested both French colonial and Spanish elements, with Stanford’s signature red tile roof. It had a tiny student apartment, just a bedroom and bathroom, that I’d rented during my senior year.

  I’d already known who Hans was by then; besides his scientific reputation, he was a familiar and eccentric figure around campus. He was gnomelike, not much over five feet tall, with a head that looked outsize; he never drove a car, but tooled around on an ancient bicycle with a basket; and he was always impeccably dressed in three-piece suits and bow ties that looked like they were straight from the Weimar era.

  Then I started finding out other things, mostly from his family and friends; he didn’t talk much about them himself. He’d made a harrowing escape from the Nazis, getting out of Germany in the late 1930s. He’d promptly offered his services to the OSS, bringing them his invaluable skills as a well-connected native German and scientist. Besides desk-type intelligence work, he’d done active espionage in Europe that was extremely dangerous, especially for a Jew. After the war, he’d worked with many of the great minds of the era, had known them all, and was considered their equal.

  I stood in awe of him.

  The way we’d gotten to be chums was that Hans had loved doing yard work when I was living here, and he ritually spent his Saturday mornings at it. But he wasn’t physically powerful, and his lawnmower was an obstinate clunker; invariably there was a struggle between this man who’d helped build nuclear reactors that burned hotter than the sun, and about the simplest internal combustion engine ever devised. As soon as I realized that, I started making a point of being around to light it up for him. That had segued into other little chores and this and that, and eventually I became a sort of combination houseboy and shirttail relative.

  There was also the crush I developed on one of his granddaughters, although it was not requited.

  Anyway, Hans and I had connected, in a very odd male bonding between a world-class genius who was both highly cultured and hardened by grim realities I could barely imagine, and a kid who was starting to face the fact that it was finally time to grow up.

  When I rang the doorbell of the house, it was Hans who answered. He was walking with a cane now, but he still looked spry, and his huge luminous eyes were undimmed.

  “Come in, Tom, come in. My, you seem even taller than I remember.” He clasped my hand warmly and looked up at my face. “So long it’s been.”

  “My fault, Hans. I’m bad about letting those things slide.”

  He waved the thought away. “Living in the present is demanding enough. The past takes second place.” He started hobbling ahead of me into the house, then paused. “You’ll wonder about Frieda. We lost her four years ago.”

  I winced. “I’m terribly sorry.” Frieda and I had had our differences—she was old-world German through and through, and I failed to meet her standards in pretty much every way—but she was a sweetheart, and she’d liked having me around because it gave her someone to be exasperated at.

  “She was ready,” Hans said. “Alzheimer’s was making inroads. She knew it, and to lose herself was unbearable to her. Then came cancer—not pleasant, but relatively quick. She welcomed it as a mercy.”

  We walked on into the living room, hung with art that included two original Rembrandt sketches. Hans settled into his chair and gestured at a wineglass on the table beside him.

  “I’m having a drop of sherry,” he said. “Help yourself if you like, of course.”

  “I’m fine for now. Thanks.” I sat on the couch across from him. “You’re looking well yourself.”

  “Vitamin C,” he declared emphatically. “Massive doses every day. You should start, Tom. Linus believed in it, and I believed in him.”

  I wasn’t about to argue; I’d heard that Linus Pauling and Hans had been longtime cronies.

  “I will, I promise,” I said. “The rest of your family doing okay?”

  “Flourishing.” He smiled, a little slyly. “Becky talks about you from time to time.”

  “She does?” Becky was the granddaughter. I’d never thought I’d made that much of an impression. “She married a doctor, didn’t she? An MD?”

  “A good man. A wise choice for her. She was quite fond of you, Tom, but at heart, she thought of you as a project—raw material to be shaped. I must admit I played a part in persuading her that you were not shapable. You may take that as a compliment of sorts.”

  The things you learned.

  He sipped his sherry, with his big shining eyes fixed on me.

  “But you did not come here to humor an old man,” he said.

  I leaned forward, clasping my hands together.
“Hans, did you ever hear of a Swedish physicist named Gunnar Kelso?”

  His eyes turned thoughtful. “Yes, I know that name. As I recall, he was quite promising, but his career took a downward turn. I haven’t heard anything more of him in quite a few years.”

  “He’s in L.A. now—making a film, and he’s also sort of a guru. He’s got a philosophy that’s quasi scientific; it involves quantum mechanics, energy dynamics, that sort of thing.”

  Hans’s eyebrows rose slowly. “Do tell,” he murmured.

  “It gets much stranger.” As I told him about Kelso’s underground trailer and my suspicions about the nanoparticles, his eyebrows kept rising to their peak and stayed there.

  “I know I’m swinging way wild,” I finished. “Right off the top, does it even sound possible?”

  He thought about it for a good minute before he said, “Yeeessss,” drawing the word out hesitantly. “At least, I can imagine a possibility. If Kelso has found a way to activate the particles—by electronic signals, for instance—they could stimulate neurons in the brain, and it’s well established that particular neural complexes affect specific emotions. This could greatly amplify those effects while suppressing normal control. I know there’s been a large amount of research on accomplishing such stimulation by other means, but I haven’t heard of anything quite like this.” He shook his head, now looking troubled. “It brings to my mind the strangest thought. Do you remember the story of King Nebuchadnezzar?”

  “Just the name, I’m afraid.”

  “His armies destroyed the original temple in Jerusalem that Solomon had built. According to legend, God punished him by causing an insect to crawl up his nose into his brain. The agony drove him mad and killed him.”