L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  As I walked through the rooms, I saw that they had taken good care of it physically. Everything was pristine, the kitchen even emptied of perishables; probably they’d been using professional cleaners, and someone must have told them that the place would be vacant for a while.

  If I hadn’t known what I did about the less apparent aspects of their occupancy, I’d have been pleased.

  There were a few items of women’s clothing in the upstairs bedroom I’d seen Cynthia Trask and Dustin Sperry coming out of; probably they were hers, the kind of things she’d keep around for occasional overnight stays. Kelso had spent a lot more time here and occupied the master bedroom, although he didn’t have much in the way of wardrobe or personal belongings, either. On that count, he seemed pretty spartan.

  He’d taken over another room as an office or den; it looked more intended for relaxing rather than serious work. A small wooden troll on the mantel labeled “Maxwell,” presumably Maxwell’s demon, seemed intended as a scientist’s joke. The book collection was mostly intellectual nonfiction like history, philosophy, and abstruse science texts in several languages. A large desk was scattered with stacks of papers and the usual computer accessories, although Venner’s team had seized his laptop. They’d also rifled the room quickly, but this office was just for show, like Kelso’s public persona; he’d kept anything important in his underground lab.

  Well, now I had a rough inventory of the stuff to get rid of—the question was what to do with it. The best course would probably be to tell Paul to come haul it off; if he did, it would be up to Parallax from there, and I’d be out of the loop. My guess was that he’d drag his feet, but then I’d be justified in handling it myself, and if anybody complained later, too bad—they’d had their chance. The clothing and computer equipment could go to a charity outlet, and I’d just dump Kelso’s personal effects; losing the books would be a shame, but there’d be plenty of other copies left in the world for the few people who could make sense of them.

  I spent a couple of minutes flipping through the books, looking for papers, notes, marked passages—anything that might give an insight into his true research. I still didn’t know any detailed specifics as to how his nanotech system worked, and I couldn’t risk trying to get information from experts; I was under Venner’s orders to pretend the whole thing had never happened. Maybe someday down the line I’d try to do some discreet follow-up—get a spectroscopic analysis of the nanoparticles to find out their composition, then take that information to Hans Blaustein and see what he could make of it.

  But I had done a fair amount of private looking around online these past few weeks, working off what Hans had told me, and I’d come up with some ideas that might feasibly be connected.

  There was very little Internet mention of Kelso or Parallax, no indications of where he’d been for the couple of decades before he surfaced in L.A.; he must have been pursuing his research in private, and it seemed clear that he’d intentionally kept a low profile. But he had been at the Planck Institute in Munich in the 1980s, and I came across a few references to his work in resonance theory, which originally addressed phenomena like the motion of clock pendulums and the vibrations of musical instruments. But like so much else in science, it had gotten vastly more complex—and included the study of how resonators, receptive substances, could be caused to vibrate by manipulation of their subatomic energy structures.

  If Kelso’s nanoparticles were resonators—which he might even have manufactured himself, tailor-made for enhanced capability—and they suffused the brain’s neural complexes, then their vibration, caused by a microwave signal via cell phone or other transmitter, might agitate the neurons enough to kick them into high gear. And resonance was only one of many possible mechanisms. My grasp of physics was too feeble to rate their suitability, but electromagnetism, subatomic particle spin, wave motion, various kinds of fields and the forces that operated in them, all overlapping and interacting in infinitely complicated and mysterious ways, also might be candidates for creating the needed effect.

  However it was accomplished, the next crucial step would seem to be where Kelso’s genius really came into play. The brain’s neural structure was well mapped by now, including the complexes that influenced emotions and the wave frequencies they emitted. Kelso would have had to correlate the frequencies of his microwave signals to those of the particular nerve complexes he wanted to affect. Different signals would stimulate different emotional responses—anger, euphoria, confusion—and he’d obviously also figured out how to hit the buttons for just plain pain. He’d have been able to control the intensity of the signal as well.

  And another aspect had occurred to me. Almost all humans have very similar brain-wave patterns. A broad-range frequency blast that was nonspecific might, for instance, stir up anger in any subjects it reached, including a crowd all at once. But the possibility of refinement existed if the signals were correlated to the subtle variations of individual brain-wave patterns—and there were supercomputers that could run those scans within seconds, from a mile away, without the subject ever knowing it. If Kelso had done that when he’d had the opportunity—with Parallax members, or me—he might have been able to create signal patterns precise enough to strongly affect the targeted subject, while someone standing right next to him might feel it only mildly or not at all. These people would all have what amounted to personal theme songs, which Kelso could play and get them dancing to the tune. That might also help to explain why he and Cynthia seemed immune—the frequencies were carefully calculated to stay clear of their own microranges.

  My search through Kelso’s books turned up nothing of interest—most were older texts that he might once have used, but not for many years, like the tomes that lined the walls of lawyers’ offices. The desk was no more help. The drawers contained standard supplies; the papers on top seemed mostly related to the film, with a sprinkling of computer printouts, math and graphics, suggesting that he relaxed by dabbling in the realm of genius. It was all part of the display to impress the Parallax members and cover his secret work.

  Then, as I was riffling through the papers, my gaze was caught by a handwritten name.

  Crandall. It was followed by the number 850K.

  I pulled the paper out of the stack and studied it—a memo related to the film budget, projecting expenses for the month of June. It looked like Kelso had been working out how to cover the costs, maybe talking to someone on the phone and jotting down notes. He’d written several other names, too; a couple had question marks after them, but most were also followed by figures: 500K, 1.2M, 380K.

  There was only one meaning for this that I could think of. These were investors, with the amounts they were contributing toward the budget—$850,000 from Paul, and that was for the month of June alone.

  Fifty

  Exactly one week later, I was sitting in a rented Toyota Camry, parked a block away from Parallax Productions’ West Hollywood offices—waiting for Cynthia Trask to leave work for the day. The late afternoon was sweltering, the air thick with smog, exhaust fumes, and heat swarming up from the pavement. By the time I’d been there half an hour, I was damp with greasy sweat.

  I’d been covertly keeping tabs on Cynthia for the past several days, waiting for her like this in the afternoons and then following her for the next couple of hours; I’d rented the Camry because my beat-up Land Cruiser stuck out like a bolero tie at a black-tie dinner. It was silly to play amateur detective—like representing yourself in court and having a fool for a lawyer—but it was the only way I could think of to get some sense of whether my paranoia about her was justified.

  So far, she seemed to be playing her role exactly according to Venner’s script. She left the office every day around six or six thirty, with a sense of unbroken routine. She didn’t show any furtiveness or extra strain, just her usual cool briskness. Her life outside her job seemed just as ordinary. She was still stringing Paul along—most evenings they met either for dinner or at her place—and
he didn’t seem to have a clue that anything had changed, or that one day soon she would simply be gone from his life.

  Most important, nothing else had happened to suggest that the nanotechnology was in use again. As the days passed, I’d started telling myself that I’d exaggerated the Nhang encounter far out of proportion. They’d been feeling the strain on the set, and they were surly types anyway; I’d just had my own run-in with Sperry, plus the simmering tension with Lisa; and the two anger zones had intersected.

  Still, I’d decided to stay with the surveillance awhile longer. If nothing else, it helped to take my mind off Lisa.

  Cynthia came out of the building a little after 6:00 p.m. as usual. I waited until she left the parking lot and gave her another couple of blocks’ head start, then pulled out behind her, grateful for the cool wash of the Camry’s AC kicking in.

  She was wearing a casual but expensive linen dress, and this being Friday, I expected that she’d meet Paul at one of the swank restaurants they favored, places like Cicada or the Tower. But that didn’t seem to be the plan, and she didn’t head toward her home in Coldwater Canyon, either. Instead, she drove west on Santa Monica to Highland, cut north to the Hollywood Freeway, and got off a few miles later on Barham, headed toward Burbank. Film business, I figured; a lot of studios and offices were located around there.

  But long before she got to the central business district, still in the outlying no-man’s-land of commercial strips and shopping malls shoehorned in side by side, she slowed and pulled into a parking lot—one of those older minimalls that were all over Southern California, respectably maintained but edging toward seedy and perpetually struggling to survive. This one housed a Ramada Inn and a couple of chain fast-food joints, kept alive by budget-conscious tourists visiting Universal Studios.

  What kind of business did the elegant Ms. Trask have in a place like this?

  I wheeled the Camry into an adjoining lot and found a spot with a clear view. She was just getting out of the Hummer, now wearing big round sunglasses and with a serape-type shawl thrown over her dress. She walked straight to the motel and disappeared into the lobby.

  Business? Maybe. But this wasn’t the kind of place that hosted conventions or rented out office space. It looked like business that was more personal in nature—a rendezvous with a lover.

  In itself, that wasn’t surprising except that she would lower her standards to a no-tell motel. But it had implications. If Venner’s people knew this was going on, it must be part of their plans; it didn’t seem likely that they’d allow her to just go sporting around. If not, it meant she did have considerable freedom beyond their watch, and there was no telling what she might be up to.

  I didn’t like either version. But oddly, it was almost a relief, a sense that maybe I wasn’t just swatting at thin air. I settled down to wait, hoping that she and whoever she was meeting would come back out together and I’d get a look at him.

  I’d expected her to be in there for a couple of hours. But either Cynthia was as efficient in romance as in other areas or I’d misjudged the situation completely. Only about forty-five minutes later, she came walking out of the lobby again. It was a precise reverse of the way she’d arrived; she walked straight to her vehicle and pulled out of the parking lot headed back the way she’d come in.

  But she also was alone again, which left me with a snap choice to make—follow her or keep watch here? The motel was getting busy, with people checking in and wandering out for dinner or entertainment. Unless her partner was someone I already recognized, he’d just be one of the crowd; he could walk out and drive away without me ever knowing I’d seen him.

  Still, this was the first promising avenue that had opened up. It was worth the chance.

  Twenty minutes later, it paid—if paid was even close to the right word. A man came walking out with several other people, a guy so ordinary looking my glance almost dismissed him as just one of the group.

  But then it hit, and I sat there feeling like I was glued in place, watching him drive away in a blue Ford Taurus as nondescript as himself.

  Venner.

  Fifty-One

  An image flashed in my mind—the way Cynthia had stared at him defiantly when he’d taken the pendant from her neck, the night he and his team had raided the film set. Was she starting her seduction that soon?

  I stayed right there, trying to get a calm grip on this. The first, really unsettling explanation that came was that the two of them had cut a private deal. Kelso’s research was a gold mine that could make them both rich if sold to the right people, and Venner would know exactly who they were and how to approach them. Maybe she had even conned him into inhaling a dose of the nanos, and now she was controlling him.

  But that didn’t necessarily follow. He could still be in control, like a high-level parole officer; they’d be in contact; a spectrally anonymous place like this would be ideal for a covert meeting. Even if they were having sex, it might be something that she offered or he demanded but that had no bearing on the agenda.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I was about to start driving home when my cell phone chirped.

  My heart started hammering all over again. It was Lisa.

  “I’ve got some things to tell you, if you still want to hear them,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. “You bet I do.”

  I drove straight to her house. When she opened the door, the first thing she did was hold up her wrist to show that Kelso’s bracelet was gone.

  I took her hand and kissed the band of paler, untanned skin that the bracelet had covered. She put her arms around my neck and pressed her forehead against my chest.

  “I’m done with Parallax,” she said.

  Maybe the bracelet had figured into my falling for her to start with, but if so, it was like training wheels on a bike—no longer necessary. That thrill of being with her had taken on a life of its own.

  Maybe the bracelet had been clouding her mind, too. As soon as she’d taken it off, she’d started to see how she had slipped imperceptibly under Kelso’s influence.

  “It was like his mark of ownership,” she said. “Every time it caught my eye, I thought of him. After a while, I just took it for granted that everything he said was right, and I went along with it.”

  I only nodded—grateful that so far, at least, we seemed to be with each other again instead of against. We moved on into the house and settled down on the upstairs balcony, talking while the last of the evening light faded.

  She told me everything she knew about Parallax. I had to shelve the Venner incident until later, and decide how much I could admit to Lisa in return.

  Kelso and Cynthia worked as a highly skilled team, Lisa said, with him providing the charisma and her engineering their plans. They’d been building Parallax for years, concentrating on people with money and influence. The film crowd was largely a face, a cover; most of them were a sort of fringe element, with no real knowledge of the inner workings. But there was a very select group of others—including important public figures—who kept their affiliation secret.

  The powerful draw of Parallax came partly from Kelso’s psychological grip, partly from the pseudoscientific overlay that his message was rational and intellectual rather than cultlike—and largely because it promised a lot in terms of worldly fulfillment, and it delivered. On the surface, this was due to the members learning to control their personal energy and open channels that led to success.

  In practice, it worked more like a Ponzi scheme. The people at the top were already very successful. Covert arrangements would be made for them to do favors for the others—financial help, career boosts—so it seemed like the channeling was effective.

  The top initiates, in turn, were rewarded by Kelso’s Übermensch promise—that they were on their way to becoming superior beings, not limited just to their personal destinies, but tapping into the forces that controlled the universe.

  It all brought to mind the phone call from Drabyak several wee
ks ago—saying there’d been several instances of influential people suddenly and inexplicably having the same kind of meltdown as Nick.

  Did that explain it? Were they Parallax members who had crossed Kelso in some way, and was he punishing them—or bullying them into compliance, just as he’d done with Nick and tried to do with me? Convincing them that they’d angered the Gatekeepers?

  With Cynthia and Venner now planning to continue to run the network?

  Lisa stood up and paced to the balcony railing, standing with her back to me.

  “There was a lot of secrecy, especially at the high levels,” she said. “Always the sense of a big power game, and those people were the players. And if any of them wanted anything, Cynthia made sure they got it.” Lisa swung around to face me, folding her arms.

  “Including me, a few times,” she said. “And you’re right, that’s what happened with you. How it started, anyway.” She gave the railing a fierce slap. “You talked about trust, Tom. Well, there’s mine.”

  She stalked into the house. After a few seconds I got up and followed her, which wasn’t difficult, because she’d left a trail—sandals, dress, bra, and thong peeled off and tossed on the floor as she headed for the swimming pool. By now it was full night, the patio unlit, and she obviously wasn’t worried about voyeurs this time.

  When I caught up to her, she was standing at the pool edge with her toes curled over the rim.

  And then she dove in. It was clumsy, almost a belly flop. But it was a dive, by this woman who not long ago would only ease into the water timidly and was afraid to go deeper than her waist.

  She came up with her shining wet hair plastered close around her head and a pleased, radiant look, like a little girl who’d just learned how to do a cartwheel.