by Jan Coffey
Lexi shuddered. This couldn’t simply be the information on only eleven children. The files on what must be a legion of victims surrounded her.
The roaring beat of a helicopter suddenly moved directly overhead. As it passed, she could hear police sirens getting closer.
“Please, God.” she murmured. “Let this be over.”
~~~~
Chapter 46
Friday, January 18, 12:22 p.m.
Manhattan, New York
Watching Curtis Wells walk away from him, Geary was certain the businessman was neck deep in something, and he would bet money it was the same shit that his friend Mitch Harvey had been involved with.
Geary’s team had only scratched the surface in their investigation, but it was already clear that the two men had been tightly linked in their businesses and their research efforts for well over a decade. Geary had an excellent knack for reading people, and any rookie could see that the man was also scared shitless.
The FBI Special Agent in Charge didn’t plan to make any appointment to speak with Mr. Wells again. Next time, he’d come back with warrants and they’d be arresting the sonovabitch.
“Call Atwood,” Geary told his subordinate. “I want to know about any reference to this guy in whatever they find in Fullerton, and I want to know it immediately. Also, I want you to book me a flight west. I think it’s time I have a heart-to-heart with Mrs. Harvey.”
Geary heard a child cry out, “Grandpa!” He looked over in time to see the little boy running with a hobbled gait toward Wells. Then someone screamed. People were suddenly scattering in every direction, some dropping to the floor, others trying to find protection along the walls and behind the security booth. He saw the teenager and the gun pointed at the child.
Geary and the other agent reached for their guns at the same instant.
Curtis Wells stepped forward, scooping up the child just as the teenager’s gun fired. The gift package hit the floor, and Wells went down next to it.
Before Geary and his agent could fire, one of the building security guards took down the shooter. The gun was ripped out of the boy’s hand just as Geary reached them. The guards held the teenager down as the SAC identified himself. There was no fight left in the tall, fair-haired boy, who simply kept staring at the body of the older man, sprawled on the marble floor in a spreading pool of his own blood.
As the little boy in Wells’ arms squirmed free, pandemonium broke out in the lobby. Calls were made for an ambulance.
Geary stood over the shooter. The teen’s face was incredibly pale, his eyes were becoming glazed over, almost as if he couldn’t see. He looked to be under the influence.
“What’s your name?” Geary asked.
No answer. Not even an indication that he’d heard anyone talking to him.
He patted down the kid’s pockets. Again, there was no protest, only the blank stare in the direction of the body. The SAC found a wallet in the pants pocket. Inside, a stack of Euros. He looked at the school ID inside one of the slots.
He read the name and then read it again out loud. “Billy Ebbett,”
He stared grimly at the boy. It was the tenth teenager.
“Sonovabitch,” he whispered.
Geary looked over his shoulder at Wells. One of the people who’d been working on him was sitting back on his heels, shaking his head.
They’d given up.
A few feet away, in front of a weeping woman, a little boy stood looking silently on.
~~~~
Chapter 47
Friday, January 18, 10:35 a.m.
Fullerton, California
Two were dead and four were in police custody. An SUV carrying an unknown number of armed suspects—the ones who’d been shooting at them from the fields beyond the fence—was leading the local and state police on a high speed chase right now down Interstate 5. The ambulances arriving on the scene had taken the two wounded FBI agents to the hospital.
Bryan knew they’d been lucky that they’d suffered no fatalities, considering the surprise attack. The mobile FBI lab was already on the scene, going through and removing the contents of the storage unit. Work on the resulting mess from the gun fire would follow.
He’d already been in contact with both Geary and Hank. There’d been a shooting in Manhattan, as well. They had apprehended Billy Ebbett, but not before there’d been a fatality. Thank God Hank had been more successful in Venice Beach. Both teenagers were being flown to Ithaca this morning. Dr. Dexter would definitely have his hands full with patients.
Bryan found the first opportunity to look for Lexi. Last time he’d asked, she was sitting in one of the police cruisers. This time, they told him she was waiting in the storage facility’s office. He went looking for her.
A large handwritten sign that read ‘Temporarily Closed’ was taped to the door of the office. Not that any customers had a chance of coming within five hundred feet of the facility, with all the police cars and vans and SWAT teams and ambulances crowding the street in front of the place.
He tested the door. It was unlocked. Inside, no one could be seen behind the counter, but Lexi was sitting in a chair against the wall, phone in hand. She had dirt and blood on her face and hands and shirt, but her smile when she saw him shone through it all. Bryan couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him feel this way.
“No more worries. I’m okay, really. Hugs to Donna and the girls,” Lexi said, ending the call.
“Brothers,” she said, looking up at him. “They worry too much.”
“With a sister like you, I can see why,” he replied, taking the seat next to her.
“What do you mean, with a sister like me?” she asked. “What’s wrong with me?”
“That’s the problem. Nothing. You’re perfect,” he said, holding her hand and looking into her shining eyes. “Are you okay?”
“You said it yourself…perfect.” She smiled again. “I talked to Dr. Dexter. He had more to report on Juan. He’s improving. He really is. That’s not my imagination. And it’s possible whatever we found here will help, too. When could I get back to Ithaca?”
He frowned, feigning disappointment. “Do you mean you’re not going to hang around here and finish the job? What kind of criminal investigator do you think you’re going to make when you desert your partner at the drop of a hat.”
“Okay, Mr. Pour-it-all-in,” she laughed. “Spit it out.”
“What do you mean?”
She motioned with her hand for him to continue. “Tell me why you really want me to stay. Communicate with me. Use your words.”
“Don’t tell me Hank has been trying to recruit you in his profession, too. Do you want me to lie on that couch over there?”
“Words,” she told him, leaning forward until Bryan thought she was going to kiss him, but she pulled back.
Bryan didn’t have to think about that too long. “I would like you to stay…because you’re beautiful. And because I’m really attracted to you. And I’d like to spend time with you to get to know you better and maybe even give you a chance to see how really scary a person I am. And if I say I like you, I want you to know that would be a gross understatement. How am I doing?”
She smiled. “Not bad.”
“Does that mean you’ll stay an extra couple of days?”
“No.” She leaned toward him again. “But you can come and see me in Ithaca. And all the words you said…back at you.”
And she kissed his lips.
~~~~
Epilogue
Friday, March 16
Ithaca, New York
“All aspects of cognition—seeing, hearing, understanding, planning, et cetera—are carried out using only empirical precedent and confabulation, which describes the data-processing operation in the brain’s cerebral cortex and thalamus.”
Dr. Dexter stood by the screen as the slide show progressed, pointing to the graphics as he explained the findings. The title of the presentation was ‘Neural Networks’.
> “Others have hypothesized,” he continued, “that confabulation is the only information-processing operation used in cognition. Some have even tried to use the theory to explain the cognitive mechanism by which behaviors are initiated.”
Bryan and Hank sat toward the back of the small lecture hall. The purpose of this presentation was to provide the agents and personnel involved in the case with a better understanding of what Dexter’s group had initially been able to deduce from the files they’d uncovered. From the looks of things, most of the audience was already becoming glassy-eyed.
As for Bryan, he was more interested in the criminal aspects of what had taken place than the technical revelations.
The investigation had exposed the workings of a private company founded by Curtis Wells and Mitch Harvey in the late 1980s. Harvey had been in charge of research. Though Curtis Wells had a technical background, he had become the business brains behind the operation. As they’d grown, a small team of scientists had joined them in their work. After they’d looked over the financial records, it became obvious that a huge influx of funding from a variety of investors had triggered a dramatic change in the company’s breathtakingly advanced work in then unnamed field of nanoscience. The money had somehow induced the group to stop testing their research on animals and start using humans…illegally.
“As adults, humans can possess billions of individual items of knowledge,” Dexter continued. “To achieve that in twenty to twenty five years, the rate of acquisition must necessarily exceed one item per second, which of course is totally inconsistent with our current views of intellectual development.”
The files they’d found in Fullerton had provided the entire history of the company, both financial and scientific. There’d been total of fifty-seven children that had been used as test subjects to start with. All of them were acquired through welfare services and foster programs. Basically, they had used babies with no families. The children had been brought in under the guise of free vaccinations and healthcare, which explained why they were never hospitalized. The nano-particles that essentially organized themselves into a kind of scaffolding in the brain were initially inserted into the skull by means of a serum, leaving no marks or scars behind. The materials used in creating the microscopic substance had been classified as ‘Top Secret’ by the government, much to the chagrin of Dexter, who was not done fighting that battle.
Any files having to do with the eleven teenagers who were the last survivors of the experiment, however, were missing from Fullerton. At the same time, going through Mitch Harvey’s phone records, they found another storage facility, in Reno, that the scientist had rented in mid-December. Curiously, the storage facility had burned to the ground the same week that Dr. Harvey disappeared. Bryan guessed that during December, Harvey must have moved those specific files from Fullerton to the new storage unit in Nevada. Unlike Curtis Wells, Harvey appeared to have become remorseful over what had taken place and what was now happening across the country. That was why he’d decided to intervene and try to contact Lexi.
“One must keep in mind that maximum a posteriori knowledge is not a mechanism of cognition,” the scientist at the lectern continued.
Bryan had gone through some of the files himself. During the first year, a large percentage of the children had died of “natural causes,” though Harvey had concluded that the deaths were actually due to the nano-particle injections. The FBI had been able to recover the documentation sent to investors, telling them about the decision to shut down the project. From that list, they knew who the involved parties were. But at the same time, Bryan knew that criminal charges against those investors would be limited, for there was substantial evidence that most of them did not know the testing was being done on live human subjects.
Dexter was discussing some experiment run two decades ago. “For language generation, confabulation is particularly useful. In this particular research project, some 8,000 books of English-language text were fed into a computer-based confabulation structure. When two consecutive sentences within a paragraph seemed topically coherent, they were marked with symbols and linked. After just a few days of ‘reading,’ the confabulation structure had accumulated billions of individual knowledge links.”
The violent episodes of the past year had apparently been the result of an unexpected wrinkle in the experiment. There was certainly no documentation in the older files that predicted that behavior. Billy Ebbett’s encounter with a name that he recalled from his early past, however, was somewhat explicable. A news article about Curtis Wells had triggered his earl memory response.
The boy and his father and the girlfriend had arrived in New York a week prior to the shooting because of a conference. Billy had been fighting the same kind of headaches as the rest of the teenagers. After the shooting, the police had found the article about Wells in Billy’s room at the hotel. The article had included a photograph of the successful entrepreneur. The investigators could only guess how Billy had been able to acquire a gun. Bryan assumed the kid had bought it on some street corner in New York.
“The theory could have profound implications in the areas of medicine, philosophy, social science, education, child development, et cetera. Think of the billions of usable items of knowledge the average human adult possesses. Of course, initially there were no expectations of immediate commercial application. I believe Dr. Harvey’s primary goal was simply the advancement of fundamental knowledge, but something went awry.”
Bryan felt the phone vibrate in his pocket. He looked at the display. It was his daughter, Andrea. She’d sent him a text message. Ready?
He motioned to Hank that he had to leave. His friend whispered to him that he was ready to go, too.
The two agents slipped out of the lecture hall. Bryan stretched. It felt good to stand up.
“How long do you think he’s going to keep going?”
“Probably all weekend,” Hank replied.
“Good, because I’ll be gone the entire time.”
“Did I hear something about skiing?” Hank asked.
“Yeah. Amy and Andrea have it all figured out. They have the van packed with all the equipment.”
His phone vibrated again.
“I’m coming,” he said, looking down at the message. This one was from Amy. “So what are you doing for the weekend?”
“Cathy and the girls are coming up.”
“Hey, you all wouldn’t want to go skiing, would you?”
“No,” his friend said, waving him off. “That sounds too much like exercise.”
“Okay, pal. Suit yourself.” Bryan said goodbye to his friend and headed out. He reached the front door just in time to see Lexi, flanked by Amy and Andrea, pushing Juan’s wheelchair to the van.
Amy and Andrea were talking a mile a minute. Brian got a two-second welcome before the girls refocused their attention on Juan again.
The teenager had undergone two operations at the end of January. The same treatments were going to be used on Billy Ebbett and Donald Tucker. With only minor invasion into the brain, Dexter’s neurosurgeons had removed the remains of the device. The full recovery for Juan would be slow; they all knew that. Still, he was fully cognizant and had gained part of his speech. They still didn’t know to what percent he’d be able to become his old self, but the mother and son had a great attitude and every little step was celebrated.
As the girls started helping the fifteen year old out of his chair and into the car, Lexi looked up nervously at Bryan. “I know that Dexter cleared this trip, but are you sure this is going to work out? Skiing when he still doesn’t have complete use of one of his legs and one of his arms?”
“We’ll go slow and try it.” Bryan motioned to the special mono-skis strapped to the top of the car. “We have the right equipment and trained instructors.” He motioned to his daughters. “The question is, do you trust them?”
She looked that way. The girls were already in the back seat, each sitting on either side of Juan. Their vo
ices loud and enthusiastic.
“Yes, I do.” She smiled. “And he does, too.”
Bryan brushed a kiss across her lips and held the door open for Lexi to get in.
As he closed the door, Bryan spotted a short teenager, dressed in an overcoat, walking slowly toward them on the same side of the street. He felt himself tense for an instant, but then another teenager came running across the street and attacked the first one. A minute later, the two were wrestling in the snow like overgrown puppies.
There hadn’t been any new shootings in any schools this past month. That was a good thing, and Bryan hoped they had seen the end of it. But something inside continued to nag at him. He knew he wasn’t finished with this case.
Not until a teenager named Roy Naves was found.
~~~~
Author’s Note
Since the original publication of this book, tragedies have occurred, including the shooting in Newtown.
Everyone who sends their child or their spouse off to school feels, at one time or another, the fear of what might await their loved one there. An incident of violence, so often involving teenagers, can cause heartbreak. It can destroy families and communities alike.
In our simpler, fictional world, we’re happy to pin it on corrupt scientists and greedy businessmen. As we wrote in the foreword to this edition, we only wish real life could be so simple.
For many of our readers who follow our stories, we hope you enjoyed this second glimpse of the town of Wickfield, where our book FIVE IN A ROW was set. In reality, we live only ten minutes from the town we’ve modeled Wickfield after, and we love the place. The violence we depict there is truly only a product of our imagination.
