Powder Burn

by Blake Banner

  “One, the Chinese boy is dead.”

  I snapped, “His name was Zack. He had a name.”

  “Yuh, Zack is dead. He was run over on the road by a car that did not stop. They try to follow the car, without success. They go back later and collect the diary and the laptop, and the powder.” He raised a fat index. “Two: Bran the Australian boy, has died of one heart attack, when we know, because we were monitoring him, that his heart was A one OK. And, no, Mr. O’Brian, there is no scientific way the Alpha-G powder could affect the heart.” He raised his middle finger. “Three: Captain Walker finds Hans and Hattie in the wood pile at the Peabodys’ house. I confess that from the beginning, I was suspecting Captain Walker, but by now, I am convinced that he was not responsible.

  “What is clear to us is that somebody has murdered all but one of the test subjects, and Chalie must be our number one suspect.”

  I wondered for a moment if he was going to mention Charlie’s attack on Lucia that night, but he didn’t, and then I wondered if she had told him.

  I said, “So we are placing the blame squarely on Chalie Vazquez, is that right?”

  Troyes shook his head and looked humble. The door behind him opened and the footmen came in bearing five sirloin steaks in black pepper and brandy sauce. To drink, he served three bottles of Domaine de la Vougeraie Musigny 2005, a burgundy I knew retailed at about seven hundred dollars a bottle.

  “No,” he said, as the footman splashed a little wine in his glass for him to try. He swished it around, examined the color and the mantle, stuck his nose in the glass, tested it and gave the nod. Then, while they poured our wine, he said, “We must bear some of the responsibility, because we did not do a sufficiently thorough background check into Carlos. If we ’ad, we would have seen that he ’ad psychotic tendencies. So we must bear part of the blame for the deaths of those poor young people.”

  I stuck a piece of steak in my mouth and sat chewing and watching Lucia. She avoided my eye, so when I’d swallowed, I asked her, “Are you going to say anything? Or are you just going to sit there with your mouth shut?”

  O’Brien frowned at me. “Steady with that mouth there, cowboy.”

  She glanced at me and said, “I am pretty sure you can do more than enough talking for both of us, Lacklan.”

  I nodded once. “So, let me see if I have the story straight. What we are saying here is that the tests were going fine…”

  Fokker interrupted. “More than fine, the results were astonishing.”

  I continued. “The results were going more than fine, astonishing, and because of an error in background checks, Charlie Vazquez went psychotic and killed his fellow test subjects, who were doing fine.”

  Francoise spread his hands. “Charlie, as I understand it, began to display signs of depression and emotional instability. We should perhaps of acted sooner…”

  “There is one flaw in your analysis, Troyes. And that is that they all started to display profound emotional distress and depression right from the start. I know for a fact that Charlie turned to Lucia for help as soon as the second week of the trials, and she tried to manage his depression. I’m willing to bet that the fact that it disappeared as quickly as it came on helped you take the decision to keep going, and when Zack and Bran and Hans and Hattie came to you saying they were getting downers that were hard to handle, you decided to keep going and try to manage their mood swings too.

  “And for a time, it seemed as though they were doing OK, and the benefits in terms of optimized intellectual processes seemed to outweigh the sudden drops into depression and borderline psychosis. But recently, they started getting worse, didn’t they?”

  Troyes stared at me for a long moment. His eyes were hard and unfriendly. “This is news to me. How can you know this?”

  I turned to Lucia. “You’re going to be the fall guy? Seriously? You are going to take the fall for this?”

  She didn’t answer. O’Brien was looking back and forth like he really wanted to know what was going on, but he didn’t want to interrupt. I smiled at Fokker, and then at Troyes.

  “You’re lying. Either you’re lying or you are criminally incompetent. Your call. If you have their diaries, you know that they were suffering regular bouts of deep depression and borderline psychosis. And I know, Troyes, because I have Charlie’s diary.”

  Their jaws sagged open and their eyes went wide with alarm. Fokker was the first to recover. “You have Charlie’s diary? How?”

  “Because he gave it to me, Fokker. After he sent me this message…” I pulled out my cell, thumbed the text messages and read aloud, “My sister Carmencita told me if I needed help, to message you. I think they are trying to kill me.”

  I put the phone on the table and slid it across to O’Brien. He examined it and handed it back to me. When he spoke, his face was dark with anger. “Francois, Wolfgang, I feel I have been badly betrayed here, and I feel you have tried to dupe me. Your attempt to gain my trust by inviting this man has backfired. Because what I have seen and heard here tonight has made me even more adamant in my determination to stop your research…”

  They had both gone very serious. Troyes was the first to speak. “Paul, I cannot express to you ’ow bad I feel about this. There ’as been a deep lack of professional supervision and Wolfgang and I must assume personal responsibility for this.”

  “Yuh…” Wolfgang nodded.

  Lucia sat forward. “As must I. I had weekly contact with the guys, I read their diaries and I spoke to them. I was aware of their down periods, but as Lacklan says, I thought we could manage them, and that was my recommendation to Francoise and Wolfgang. If anybody is to blame, it’s me.” She took a deep breath. “The thing is, the positive aspects of the treatment were so positive, the temptation was there to…” She hesitated. “To play down the importance of the downers.” She turned and looked into O’Brien’s face. She was radiant, beautiful, sincere. “It had transformed their lives. They were, for ninety-nine percent of the time, happy, fulfilled, useful people who were beginning to turn their lives around. They were preparing to make truly positive contributions to society.” She shook her head. “There was no intention to be deceitful or manipulative, Paul. Our intention was to seize a loophole in the legislation so that we could make a positive difference—a real difference!—with the product we were creating.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “Forgive me if I sound brutal, but with what we learned from these five subjects, if we can identify, isolate and neutralize the glitch that is causing the down periods, we have a tool here that can transform lives, and society as a whole.”

  I could see he was drinking it in. I said, “I’m sorry to rain on your parade, Olga Lucia, but who exactly are we saying killed these kids now? We still putting the frame on Charlie? The same Charlie who texted me and told me somebody was trying to kill him? Because I have to say that we are all very carefully ignoring the elephant in the room.”

  Troyes gestured at me with both hands. “I insisted on inviting you tonight, Lacklan, may I call you Lacklan? Because I believe fervently in honesty. I wanted somebody like you, who will show me in my worst possible light before the Secretary of State. I want this transparency, so, please, what is this elephant that is in the room?”

  I looked at him for a long moment, then turned to O’Brien. “The periods of depression and borderline psychosis were becoming more frequent and more serious. Now you have five young people who are becoming emotionally very unstable, whose IQs are seriously off the chart, whose knowledge and intellectual capabilities are truly extraordinary, and who now could be turning against their puppet masters. Who, rightly or wrongly, are perhaps beginning to feel that the program they signed up for was at best misleading, at worst an outright betrayal. How much damage could these five brilliant, eloquent, well informed people do? How important would it be, do you think, to silence them?”

  O’Brien’s face had turned to stone, but Troyes and Fokker were both shaking their heads.

  Fokker
said, “Nonono! Nononono! This has gone too far. We invited you here as a show of good will, and now you are here accusing us of murder. It is too much. It is out of hand. I told you, Francoise, you should not invite this man. He is out of control.”

  I smiled. “And you wouldn’t want people to get out of control, would you, Fokker?”

  Troyes sat forward and lifted both hands. “Enough, my friends! Enough! Please, let us get some sense of perspective and balance. There is truth is what Lacklan is saying. We must face up to this! An investigating detective might think this way.” He gave a small laugh. “Though, even from a simple pragmatic perspective, the financial cost of losing these four young people is enormous! But I do not expect you to appreciate this. So, tomorrow, Wolfgang, we will offer our full cooperation to the NYPD, with full disclosure of all the facts. We ’ave nothing to ’ide.” He turned to O’Brien. “Paul, the day after tomorrow, you are participating in a conference with us, is it not so?”

  “That’s correct, at Columbia. But you might want to cancel that now.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No!” He turned to me. “Our plan was to ’ave an open forum for discussion about the moral aspects of a program like Alpha-G. Paul is a very articulate and intelligent spokesman for the ‘anti’ lobby, so we invited ’im to come and speak, to highlight the moral and ethical problems. So that we, too, can address them. You see, Lacklan, we are not evil conspirators, as you think. We are sincerely seeking a way to get the wonderful benefits of this research without falling into the pitfalls.”

  He turned back to O’Brian. “So I propose to you this. We go ahead with the conference, we invite also the press, and I will tell openly the story of the powder, the apparent side effects, the killing, and then we can debate the whole thing. Will this go some way to reassuring you about our sincerity?”

  O’Brien looked at me, drew a deep breath, and sighed noisily. “I am going to have to sleep on this, Francoise. There is a lot to take in here, and a lot to digest.”

  “Of course, of course. Well, we ’ave come to the soufflé, and I ’ave not convinced you, but we ’ave received some very shocking news, and I truly understand why you are both deeply troubled. I hope in time, we can reassure you about our sincere intentions for good. But for now, my dear friends, we ’ave a wonderful soufflé to enjoy.”

  He smiled. His French caricature of himself was back and he managed to make everybody else smile with him.

  Everybody except me.

  SEVENTEEN

  I drove Lucia back to her apartment. I parked in front of her block and killed the engine. The street was very quiet and dark, apart from the few amber streetlamps that filtered light through the leaves of the plane trees. I moved to get out and she spoke suddenly in the dark. “Come up, I’ll call you a cab.”

  “No need, I’ll get one on West End Avenue.”

  “You’re wrong about them—about us, Lacklan. You’re a very harsh judge. Not everything is so black and white as you see it. Sometimes people with good intentions make mistakes! You can’t dismiss them and sentence them to oblivion because they tried to do the right thing the wrong way!” She paused a moment, then added, “The wrong way according to you! Because you don’t even know it was wrong! You are just assuming it was wrong. But you don’t actually know anything! Except what you have pieced together like a puzzle and jumped to your own judgmental conclusions!”

  Suddenly, she was crying and I was momentarily blindsided. She kept going, in a slightly high-pitched voice with tears streaming down her face.

  “I am scared! I am in fear for my life! A man came into my apartment last night who wanted to kill me, and you…” She gestured at me with her open palm. “You think I deserve it because I am Doctor Mengele! When all I was really trying to do was improve the quality of life of five unhappy people! Maybe I was stupid! I think now I was! But I am not evil!” I drew breath to answer, but she broke down, sobbing, “And you are going to leave me alone, for him to come back and kill me!”

  “Jesus!”

  “Oh, just go! Leave me alone! Leave me to die you… you…”

  She pushed open the door and ran across the sidewalk toward her block. I climbed out my side and called after her. “Lucia…!”

  She stopped and turned to face me. She looked resentful, wiping tears from her cheeks with her fingers. “What?”

  “You left your bag in the car, with your keys.”

  I came around the hood and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed, then looked up into my face. She frowned and started to cry again, struggling to suppress it. “I’m scared…”

  I sighed. “Call the cops.”

  “I can’t call the cops! You know that!”

  “Isn’t there anybody you can stay with?”

  She shook her head.

  I sighed. “Lucia, this can’t go on. Apart from the fact that I am married, I am really mad at you! I think what you did to those kids is subhuman! As far as I am concerned, you may well have colluded in their murder! And you want me to come up and baby-sit you?”

  “Look at me!” She stuck her arms out by her side and actually stamped her foot. “Look at me, Lacklan!” She was still crying, appealing to me. “Even a… a… bonehead like you can see I am not some crazy, evil genius! I am just a stupid university lecturer who got too caught up in a stupid project! I was out of my damn depth! But I am not a killer! Surely you can see that?”

  I stared at her for a while, fighting to stay objective. She was right. It was hard to see her as an evil genius or a Dr. Mengele. She looked like exactly what she said she was, a young, naïve lecturer who got too caught up in a stupid program.

  A program that ended in murder.

  I sighed again. “OK, let’s go.”

  She sniffed, then turned toward the door, pulling out her key, and said quietly, “Thank you.”

  She was quiet all the way up, until we got inside the apartment and she had locked the door. Then she put down her bag and the dresser and stood in front of me, looking up into my face. “Lacklan, please don’t back away from me. I understand and respect the fact that you are married, that you love your wife. I truly respect that and I am not going to… do anything.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I just want to say that I like you.” She gave a small laugh. “I don’t know why, because you are a total pain in the ass. But you are honest and true, and I like and respect you for that. You are…” She shrugged. “…my kind of guy. I don’t want you to think of me the way you do. I don’t want you to think I am a bad person. Please, give me… Give us, but especially me, a second chance. I promise you that I am not a bad person, Lacklan.”

  I nodded. “OK, Lucia, we’ll talk about this in the morning. Just get some sleep now.”

  She looked at me for a long time, then nodded. “OK, Lacklan. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  And she turned, went into her room and closed the door behind her. I stood a moment, staring at the space where she had been a moment before, then I took a glass and the bottle of whiskey from the dresser in the dining area and carried it to the small balcony, where I pulled up a chair and an occasional table, switched off the light and sat with my feet on the railing, smoking, drinking Scotch and working methodically through everything that had happened and everything that had been said.

  The upshot, at the end of three cigarettes and two glasses of Scotch, was that Francoise Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker were two lovable, eccentric geniuses who only wanted to make the world a better place; Olga Lucia Salcedo was a brilliant but naïve lecturer who only wanted to help the under privileged, and Charlie was an unfortunate victim of circumstance, whose latent psychotic tendencies had been triggered by Alpha-G’s unforeseen side effects.

  Charlie, who had messaged me asking for help because he thought somebody was trying to kill him. A symptom, no doubt, of a growing paranoid schizophrenia.

  Hard lessons had been learned. Troyes and Fokker would cooperate fully with the NYPD—and in all probability an eventual
Congressional enquiry—and there would be a hunt for Charlie, who would ultimately take the fall. Troyes, Fokker and Salcedo would have their wrists slapped. Lucia might even lose her post at Columbia, no doubt to be employed at twice the salary within Ceres Corporation. And testing? Well, that would continue, one way or another, more or less legally, with all the lessons learned from Charlie and the gang.

  Nice. Neat, but not too neat. Not so neat you wouldn’t believe it. But there were still questions that had not been answered, at least not to my satisfaction. I pulled my phone from my pocket, found my address book and pressed ‘Sarge’.

  Sergeant Bradley, known affectionately as ‘Bad Bradley’, had been my closest ally for almost ten years in the Regiment. He was probably the soundest, wisest man I ever met. A Kiwi who looked like a 7th century Viking raider, and behaved like one too, he managed to be hard, ruthless, utterly lethal and humane all at the same time. I hadn’t spoken to him for years, but that’s how it is with the Regiment. You see things and you do things together you don’t necessarily want to remember. So sometimes you stay away from each other, but you’re always there, to the end.

  I looked at my watch. It was seven thirty in the UK. He would have been up for at least an hour, probably two.

  He answered on the third ring, with his weird Kiwi accent. “That you, Captain?”

  “Bradley, how you doing?”

  “Never better. You feeling homesick?”

  “Sometimes, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “You’re in trouble, then. I know you’re not calling to say hello, you miserable fucking Yankee bastard.”

  “How well you know me.”

  “Changed your fucking nappy often enough. What’s the trouble?”

  “You still in the Regiment?”

  “Till they shoot me.”

  “Does the name Martin Sykes mean anything to you?”

  He was quiet for a moment, then said cautiously, “Yes, but he’s not one of ours. He was with the Boat Service.”