Liquid fear f-1

by Scott Nicholson

  Both guards wore blue uniforms, stripped to short sleeves despite the air-conditioning. The taller one was armed, and Mark, who had traveled to many countries as a CRO executive, had seen his share of airport militia.

  The shorter guard increased his pace and moved alongside Mark. The terminal was filled with the food-court odors of fried onion rings, hot dogs, and hazelnut coffee. The public-address system boomed a change of gate numbers, and a baby was crying in a waiting area.

  Mark took a detour toward the restroom, though his bladder was tight and dry. Hopefully it would be crowded and he could blend in and escape scrutiny, or at least have witnesses for any shakedown. The guards continued toward the front exits, the taller one still trailing.

  Mark stood at a urinal and unzipped, the suitcase propped behind him. Even with Burchfield on his side, other federal agents might have an interest both in Halcyon and Mark’s involvement in the health subcommittee’s deliberations. He didn’t think a public kidnapping was likely, but Burchfield’s political opponents might apply a little extra surveillance and pressure to flush out any subterfuge.

  After standing at the urinal for two minutes, Mark washed his hands, taking his time. When he left the restroom, the two guards were nowhere in sight. An Asian man raced by, arms loaded with baggage. A mother with two small children in her lap read USA Today by a ticket counter. A teenage couple swayed to the rhythm of separate headphones, and Mark couldn’t tell which set was emitting a bass beat loud enough to be heard from twenty feet away.

  He gripped the handle of his luggage and was joining the crowd again when the guards suddenly appeared, one at each elbow.

  The tall guard took the suitcase while the other gripped Mark’s upper arm. “Has this bag been in your possession the entire time?” the tall guard asked.

  “It’s never left my sight,” Mark said.

  “Are you sure it’s yours?” the short guard said. His head resembled a thumb.

  “Yes. It has my name on it, as well as stickers with numbers from other flights.”

  “This way please,” the tall man said, nodding down the corridor toward a less-traveled area of the terminal.

  “Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “Routine baggage check.”

  “It was cleared at Dulles when I boarded.”

  “Please, sir. You wouldn’t want to make a scene, would you?”

  Mark wondered if a scene might be required. The DEA, CID, FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency could all have an interest in Halcyon, or, more likely, the rage drug Briggs had discovered through the back door. Any of the agencies might want to hang a bull’s-eye on Burchfield, particularly if the president viewed him as a rival.

  “Look, I can open this right here if you want,” Mark said. “Someone’s picking me up in a couple of minutes and you know how traffic is.”

  Thumb finally spoke. He even sounded like a thumb. “National security.”

  Mark sighed. No one could fight against those words. Best to go through the dog-and-pony show and let the puppet masters flex their strings.

  They led Mark to a door as innocuous as that of a janitor’s closet. Mark entered to a brightly lit room containing nothing but a wooden table and a chair. Thumb planted the briefcase on the table. “Open it.”

  Mark turned the serrated metal wheel of the lock until he’d dialed the proper combination and stepped back. “Please keep my papers in order,” he said.

  Thumb grunted and opened the lid. The contents looked just as Mark had left them. He tried not to smile. He suspected Thumb wouldn’t trust a smile.

  The tall guard removed his sunglasses and flashed gray eyes. “Mark Morgan.”

  “I didn’t tell you my name.”

  Thumb emitted a guttural noise that might have been satisfaction. He pulled an orange pill bottle from some hidden crevice. “Prescription?”

  “Never seen it before,” Mark replied.

  Thumb gave the bottle a shake. No rattle. Grimacing, he twisted the lid free and a piece of paper fluttered to the tabletop.

  The tall guard picked it up and unfolded it. “‘This could have been ten years in jail,’” he read in a monotone.

  “I don’t know where that came from,” Mark said.

  “A joker, huh?”

  “No joke.”

  Thumb rummaged around a little more, checking every pocket and flap until he was satisfied.

  “Ten years,” the tall guard said, handing the vial back to his partner, who dumped it in the briefcase and snapped the lid shut.

  “I don’t know who you’re working for, but I didn’t put that there,” Mark said. He knew it wouldn’t have mattered, because the note was right. The bottle could just as easily have contained twenty grams of cocaine, TNT, or stolen jewelry.

  “You might want to be a little more careful, then, and quit lying about letting a bag out of your sight.” The tall guard held out the briefcase, his eyes like winter clouds. “You might get yourself in trouble.”

  Mark nodded and headed for the door. Even if there had been no bottle, the guards could have easily planted one. He wasn’t sure if the encounter had been a friendly reminder from Burchfield or a wry warning from his CRO superiors or even Briggs. With the stakes mounting, the players would be pushing their bets. He would be glad when Halcyon was out of his hands.

  He straightened his tie and exited the room, joining the stream of travelers. He glanced at his watch and didn’t wipe the sweat from his brow until he had reached the far end of the terminal. He punched numbers on his cell phone. “Meet me out front,” he said.

  The green sedan with the tinted windows was so modest that it drew attention. Mark glanced around, wondering which of the exhausted, sullen-faced travelers might be an agent of some sort. Then he slid into the passenger’s seat.

  “You’re late,” Briggs said.

  “The flight attendant insisted on a second bag of peanuts.”

  Briggs navigated away from the curb, gaze fixed straight ahead. His eyes were onyx, large pupils ringed by deep brown. The hooked nose gave him the aspect of a bird of prey, and touches of gray hair at his temples suggested a professorial, distinguished demeanor.

  “How’s the senator?” Briggs asked.

  “Is the car clean?”

  “You’ve been watching too many spy movies. I picked this up at Hertz. Cash, no reservation. Therefore, no bugs.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” Mark said.

  “Do I have the go-ahead for the experiments?”

  “Carte blanche. Just don’t harm any innocent bystanders. A little collateral damage is okay, as long as it stays inside the building.”

  Briggs twisted one corner of his mouth in a smirk. “Selective ethics, Mr. Morgan. Maybe there’s a career for you in politics after all this is over.”

  “I work for CRO,” Mark said. “If there are fringe benefits like helping the human race, then fine. But don’t forget who’s boss.”

  “A lesson we should all keep in mind.” Briggs merged off a ramp onto I-40, headed for Chapel Hill. “How’s your wife?”

  Mark froze. “She’s out of this. That was the deal.”

  “Relax. Just inquiring about a colleague, that’s all.”

  “She told me about the original trials. What little she remembers. She thinks you’re a charlatan, or worse.”

  Briggs cackled. “Alexis believed in the goal. You can’t treat people’s trauma until you know where the border lies. We all have different breaking points.”

  “But you enjoyed breaking people, not putting them back together. That’s the difference. And that’s where Halcyon comes in.”

  “What’s that saying? ‘You have to crack a few eggs to make a good omelet.’”

  “Alexis said the trials were a failure.”

  “The real failure was that she didn’t get any credit. She always wanted a breakthrough, and that could have been hers. Don’t you find she’s just a little bit bitter?”

  Mark was annoye
d, because he sensed some truth in the words. “She came out of it just fine. She’s resilient. But she thinks the other subjects might have suffered permanent damage.”

  Briggs took his eyes from the teeming traffic to study Mark. “Anita Molkesky, David Underwood, Roland Doyle, and-”

  “Wendy Leng?” Mark clutched the briefcase. “Handy that three of them are still in the Research Triangle.”

  “We have to finish those trials.”

  “They’re off the books. You know we can’t present any of those old results to the FDA. Stick with the new group, the aboveboard project.”

  “But at least we know Halcyon works. All the subjects dealt with their fear and trauma and have gone on to productive lives.”

  “‘Subjects’? They’re people, Doctor. Alexis had years of therapy to deal with those issues. They nearly ruined our marriage.”

  “Halcyon would have eased those problems.”

  “By erasing whatever happened in those trials. You seem to be the only one that remembers everything.”

  “You make it sound so wrong.”

  “We learn from our mistakes. Flight or fight. If you snip those wires, all you have is a puppet.”

  Briggs turned up one corner of his mouth in what might have been a grin. “Ah, the military application. One of them, anyway.”

  “Above my pay grade,” Mark said. “But this is the kind of stuff I don’t want to monkey around with.”

  “Good choice of metaphor. The amygdala is the foundation of our evolutionary brain, the mysterious center over which all that complex gray matter blossoms. But give it the slightest bit of stimulation and you might as well be a caveman, whimpering in the dark as the beasties roar.”

  Briggs veered off the interstate onto NC 15-501 and began winding along the wooded, gently bending road toward the university. “You know, Mark,” Briggs continued, “there’s a chance for Alexis to make her name in this after all. There’s enough credit to go around for everyone, and it could really advance her career. Grants, peer reviews, all those honorary degrees.”

  “Forget it,” Mark said.

  “Ah, the protective male. Why don’t you let her decide for herself?”

  “I told you the deal,” Mark said. “We’ve already given you the others. That should be plenty.”

  “I’m a mad scientist, remember? I won’t be happy until I accidentally destroy the world.”

  “I’m not so sure it would be an accident. But there’s bigger stuff at stake than just the future of the world.”

  “CRO’s stock value, I know. I hear shares are slipping while all this is cooking, but they’re poised to make a miraculous run after Halcyon is announced and the government invests. And I’m sure they give stock options in your pay grade, right?”

  “I have my own motives. Just like everyone.”

  They had passed the golf course and the turnoff to the Dean Dome, the cavernous gymnasium named for the venerable basketball coach Dean Smith. More university structures began appearing on the wooded lots, identifiable by their brick facades and large windows. They would reach the main campus within minutes.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the next question, but he needed to know. It would reassure him that he still had some vestiges of a conscience and hadn’t become a complete sociopath. “How many more will you need for trials?”

  “I’ve administered mild doses to half a dozen subjects,” Briggs said. “They think they’re in clinicals for a new anxiety treatment. That’s not on CRO’s dime, it’s through a CDC grant with a real professor heading it up. But that’s a cover. We need the original subjects because they’ve already been exposed to Halcyon. The pump is primed, so to speak.”

  Mark didn’t want to think about the neurochemical time bomb ticking in his wife’s brain. Maybe sociopaths couldn’t truly love, but he was deeply passionate about her. He was slightly comforted by the notion that sociopaths wouldn’t have such a thought.

  “So we stop at four? Leng, Underwood, Doyle, and Molkesky.”

  “I love the old part of campus and all those brick sidewalks,” Briggs said. “Too bad they kicked me out. Once I restore my good name, maybe I’ll see about an adjunct position.”

  “Four.”

  Briggs pulled to the side of the narrow road, near an old stone amphitheater girded by oaks and maples. “Is four your limit, or is that a direct order from the senator?”

  Mark slammed his fist against the dashboard hard enough to hurt. “That name stays out of this.”

  “Ah, so you’re the satchel man, or whatever they call it in the movies.”

  Mark opened the door. His wife’s office was half a mile away, and he would be a little late. But he had another stop to make first, one that was long overdue, and one he didn’t want Briggs to know about. “You’ll get your satchel soon enough.”

  Mark collected his suitcase and hurried away without looking back. Briggs called from the open window. “Tell your wife I said hello.”

  Mark turned, his fist unconsciously clenched again. If you weren’t so critical to CRO’s future, I’d give you a dose of medicine you wouldn’t forget for a long, long time.

  “Just kidding,” Briggs said, then rolled up the window and eased away from the curb.

  Traffic was picking up, and the wind sent leaves scuttling over the sidewalk. Mark crunched them underfoot as he jogged up a short rise of stairs. The brittle noise was like the breaking of many tiny bones.

  If Burchfield had ordered Alexis into the Monkey House trials as well, he wondered if he would have nodded in acquiescence.

  He wasn’t sure which master he served anymore. It seemed there were far too many.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “That was a little risky, don’t you think?” Briggs asked, glancing around his office as if expecting to see cops in the shadows. “An open attack on Dr. Morgan in broad daylight?”

  “You said try to embarrass her,” Kleingarten said, tossing a handful of unshelled sunflower seeds into his mouth. “Besides,” he said amid crunches, “only sneaky people come under suspicion. The important thing is I got it done.”

  Kleingarten looked around the bizarre office as he chewed. Briggs had rigged up a temporary lab on one side of the old factory, and he’d stuck most of his gear in what looked to be a zoo cage. It had a hinged grid of steel for a door, with a thick lock, as if Briggs anticipated the need to keep people out. On a low catwalk above, sophisticated equipment of some kind was at work, but Briggs had little more than a computer, some rows of test tubes, an autoclave, and moldering reams of research journals.

  Somebody had sunk a fortune in state-of-the-art video monitors and what looked like a security and light system operated by remote control. The main gate was set on a rolling track, and it appeared Briggs could run the whole show from right here.

  It seemed like a lot of trouble for a building filled with old tractor parts and farm equipment. He’d had a hard time even finding the place, and the closest buildings were about half a mile away. The huge factory was made of light-red brick, the concrete joints gray with age and spotted with moss.

  It seemed like a weird place for a super-secret project, but everything about Briggs and this job was weird.

  A large charcoal drawing of a nude woman was taped to the bars on one side of the cage. It wasn’t one of those boring pictures they usually did in art classes. This was like porn, with her tits stuck out and a smile on her lips as the fingers of one hand trailed between the dark patch between her legs. She looked Oriental, and Kleingarten wondered if it was a self-portrait of the Slant, because it was framed like a mirror.

  But that wasn’t as strange as what hung above it. A Curious George clock, with George’s skinny arms pointing out the hour and minute, was tied to one of the cell bars with baling wire.

  Maybe that’s why he calls this the Monkey House.

  Briggs didn’t fit the criminal type, but he had the glittering, intense eyes down pat. The guy was wired, and Kleingarten had found
over the years that obsessed people tended to make mistakes because all they saw was the finish line, not the track. With his soft hands and pale skin, he looked like he’d melt if stuck under a heat lamp for too long.

  Kleingarten smiled and spat some salty shells onto the stained concrete floor. He’d have to try that sometime.

  “I dosed her close to her office, and I trashed it just like you wanted,” Kleingarten said. “She had time to get there before she freaked out. Plus, I got to admit, I was curious to see what would happen. I’ve been juicing up all these people and I still don’t see the point.”

  “Lucky for you, I’ve worked two time-release mechanisms into the compound,” Briggs said, heading into the cage of his office. “One is the diminishing effect of the chemicals, which occurs naturally as the substance is broken down by the body’s processes. The other is a narrow window of disintegration. The time between breakdown and complete eradication is so short that no trace remains even if the symptoms linger.”

  “Symptoms? I thought you were trying to fix these people.” Kleingarten was bored with the man’s babble. It reminded him of his high school chemistry class and the time he’d had to set the asshole teacher’s lab on fire.

  “Sorry. I meant ‘effects.’ My terminology is a little rusty.”

  “Yeah, a long vacation will do that.”

  Kleingarten always checked on the background of the people he worked with, for, or against. Research was just as important in his line of work as in this headshrinker shit.

  Sebastian Briggs had been bounced from the UNC faculty after that stupid incident with the trials, but the university had tied it up in a nice little bow so that it looked like Briggs had resigned “to pursue other opportunities in private industry.” The Sharpe family had threatened a lawsuit but they got their hush money and everybody lived happily ever after. Except the Sharpe kid, of course.

  “My reputation isn’t your concern,” Briggs said. “Your concern is following instructions to the letter.”