Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  Walter had one hand on the door handle and was about to jump out of the car and rush over to the fallen girl when Bell grabbed a fist full of his shirtfront and shook his head.

  “We’re too late,” he said.

  “Maybe she’s just hurt and needs help,” Walter said.

  Nina ignored him, swiftly reversing and squealing backward out of the lot.

  “Hey!” Walter shouted, wrenching himself free from Bell’s grasp and looking back at the receding parking lot through the rear window. “What the hell is the matter with you two?”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Walter?” Nina asked. “Have you forgotten about the gamma radiation the Zodiac leaves behind?”

  “We’re clearly too late to save her,” Bell said, “but not more than three hours late. Remember, Iverson said that the radiation lingers for approximately three hours. We can’t afford to jeopardize our own lives, especially when there’s clearly nothing we can do.”

  Walter slumped down in the back seat, feeling utterly defeated.

  What’s the point of all of this? he thought morosely. The killer was clearly way ahead of them at every turn. They just weren’t cut out for this kind of thing. We might as well just admit defeat.

  * * *

  When they arrived back at Nina’s, they parked several blocks away and cased her house from a distance, on the lookout for feds, the killer, or both. There was no one. The feds may have had Walter and Bell’s personal info, but they clearly hadn’t traced them back to Nina. Not yet, anyway.

  The weary trio stumbled in through the door and found Abby in the hallway.

  “Oh, hey,” she said with a big stoned smile. “You just missed your friend.”

  Walter didn’t think he had any more adrenaline left in his glands, but they somehow managed to pump out just enough to make him feel sick and light-headed.

  “What friend?” Nina asked, scowling.

  “He didn’t say his name,” Abby replied. “But he was very polite. He just stopped by to pick up his notebook. He left a note for you.”

  She reached into a large decorative pocket in her dress and handed a folded piece of paper to Nina.

  35

  Nina opened the note, revealing several lines of code and the familiar cross hair symbol instead of a signature.

  “Abby,” Nina said, not taking her eyes off the page. “Your parents are in Santa Cruz, right?”

  “Yeah,” Abby said. “Why?”

  Nina handed her the keys to the rental car.

  “Do me a favor,” Nina said. “Take my rented LeSabre and go visit them. Stay for a few days. A week maybe.”

  “Gee, that’s awfully nice of you,” Abby said. “Roscoe and I will head down first thing in the morning.”

  “Abby,” Nina said. “Go now.”

  “Now?” A cute little frown creased Abby’s brow. “But it’s after midnight, and my folks go to bed real early. Besides, I can’t leave without Roscoe. Where is he, anyway? I though he was with you guys?”

  “He can take the train down and meet you tomorrow,” Nina said. “Please, no more questions. Just go.”

  The frown deepened, not so cute anymore.

  “Hold on a minute,” Abby said. “I think maybe something funny is going on around here. Where’s Roscoe?”

  “You’re right, Abby,” Walter said. “Something funny is going on around here. Something dangerous. So please, if you value your life and the life of your baby, you’ll do as Nina says.”

  Abby looked from Walter to Nina and back again, still unsure.

  “Is Roscoe okay?” she asked in a small child’s voice.

  “Of course he is,” Nina answered without batting an eye. “Now please, go.”

  Walter looked away, unable to meet Abby’s pleading gaze. Reluctantly, she took the offered key and pulled her shearling coat down off a peg by the door.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you’ll tell Roscoe to call me as soon as he can. He knows my parents’ number.”

  “I will,” Nina said, opening the door for her.

  “Well, all right then...” Abby said, trailing off. She turned and walked away.

  Walter, Nina, and Bell just stood in the doorway, watching her make her slow and steady way down the slanted street, waiting until she got into the car and drove off.

  They were all thinking it, but Bell was the one who said it.

  “Now what?”

  * * *

  The coded note was almost insultingly simple, based off the same keyword as the final section of the last page in the notebook. Walter felt no sense of accomplishment as he dutifully translated it for Nina and Bell to read.

  It would have been so easy to kill the pregnant cow. She is so trusting and so open. Almost too easy. Here’s what I will do instead.

  I will shoot everyone on the Golden Gate carousel at noon on September 25th.

  Have fun trying to stop me.

  “This is completely pointless,” Bell said. “What can we possibly do to stop him? Every single thing we’ve tried has been a complete and utter failure.”

  Neither Walter nor Nina had an answer. It just felt so hopeless, like trying to stop a river from flowing with their bare hands.

  Walter paced, folding and unfolding the killer’s letter over and over.

  There had to be a way. There just had to be.

  Then, just like that, it came to him.

  “What if...” Walter paused, pushing his fingers through his hair. “Just bear with me for a moment, but what if we were to, for lack of a better metaphor, bring the mountain to Mohamed? After all, we know exactly where the killer will be, and at what time, right?”

  “So what,” Bell said. “You’re suggesting that we try to open the gate there?”

  “Exactly,” Walter said. He grabbed another sheet of paper from Nina’s desk. “See, what we would need would be three teams, each one consisting of two trippers and one ground control.” He started to sketch a rough triangle. “We’d place the alpha wave generator here at the center—” He pointed with the pencil. “—and we could use three smaller slave units to boost the signal.”

  “Right,” Bell said, but he didn’t sound as skeptical. Walter could see the excitement building in his face. “Right, of course. Then we sync the teams, triangulate the signal and...”

  “Open the gate.” Walter tapped the center of the triangle. “Right here.”

  “Well, I hate to rain on your little eureka moment,” Nina said, “but where the hell are we going to get these teams you’re talking about? I don’t know if Roscoe and the rest of the band have been arrested or not, but I’m pretty damn sure they aren’t going to want to participate in any more of your ‘exciting experiments.’”

  “Fair enough,” Walter said. “So who else do you know who might be willing to help?”

  “Ideally,” Bell said, “it would need to be people who are intelligent, open-minded, and familiar with the use of biofeedback techniques.”

  Walter immediately thought of the lovely May Zhang, with her charming, gap-toothed smile and bright, brainy banter.

  “How about volunteers from Doctor Rayley’s Institute for Bio-Spiritual Awareness?” Walter suggested. “Students, maybe, or other test subjects who have worked with Rayley in the past.”

  “Great idea,” Bell exclaimed. “Nina, what do you think?”

  “I suppose we could ask,” she replied with a grudging shrug. “But let’s say we are able to recruit enough people for these teams you have in mind. Then what?”

  “Then it plays out just the way we planned,” Walter said. “We chloroform him...”

  “You’ll need to get a new bottle,” Nina reminded him.

  “Yes, yes, but let’s say we have—then we just chloroform him, cuff him, and sedate him like we originally planned. Once he’s under, we radio the teams to start the mental synchronization, and when the gate opens...”

  Nina and Bell both nodded, silent and thoughtful.

  “What about the
psychic bleed through?” Bell asked. “We can’t risk allowing the same kind of deadly telekinetic phenomenon to endanger those innocent people in the park!”

  “When you were in the trip,” Walter said, struggling to remember, “didn’t you notice, about a minute after the gate opens, that it starts to grow these... well, tendrils?”

  “Yes,” Bell said. “I saw that, too.”

  “Well,” Walter said. “I’m almost positive that’s the moment at which the psychic side effects begin to manifest. If we could set up some kind of failsafe that would stop the trip and close the gate the moment those tendrils begin to appear...”

  “A valium injection, perhaps,” Bell suggested.

  “Yes, that would be perfect,” Walter said.

  “Of course,” Nina said, “that leaves us with a pretty short window of time to get the killer through the gate.”

  “It’s the only way!” Walter insisted. “We can’t let this monster continue to threaten—or, God forbid—succeed in killing more victims.”

  “He’s right,” Bell said.

  Nina didn’t respond, but Walter could tell by her grim expression that she agreed.

  “We should prepare individual doses of the special blend,” Walter said. “A sugar water suspension, maybe. Simple to hand out and easy to ingest.”

  “And we’ll need to borrow additional equipment from Rayley,” Bell said. “Do you think he’ll be amenable?”

  “I think we need to get some rest,” Nina said, weary hand over her eyes. “We can head over to the Institute the first thing in the morning.”

  36

  The drive out to the Institute in Nina’s Beetle was tense and quiet, a weighty sense of anxious expectation like a fourth passenger inside the little car.

  There were so many ways their scheme could go apocalyptically wrong, and only one way for it to go exactly right. Walter had been unable to sleep a wink, even though he was so tired he felt as if his eyeballs were made of sand. All he could do was think and rethink the plan, turning it over and over in his mind, searching out flaws and weakness.

  Although if he stopped to really think about it, he knew, the whole thing was absolutely crazy. Impossible.

  Yet it was their only hope.

  When they arrived at the Institute, there was no one at the front desk. Walter couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that May wasn’t there. They found the good doctor in his lab, brewing herbal tea in a large Erlenmeyer flask. He was wearing nothing but fuzzy pink slippers and boxer shorts under his lab coat.

  “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise?” he said with a childlike grin. “Would you like some tea?”

  He gripped the neck of the flask with tongs and poured the tea through a strainer, into several small beakers. He handed a beaker to each of them and then took one for himself.

  “Now, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asked.

  After much debate, the three of them had agreed to let Nina do the talking this time, since they already had an existing friendship, and Nina was by far the most socially adept out of the three.

  “We’ve been getting the most extraordinary results in our early trials of the psychic biofeedback alpha-wave theory,” she said.

  “Is that right?” Doctor Rayley said, leaning one hip back against a tall stool and taking a sip of his tea. “Do tell.”

  “Fascinating stuff,” Nina said. “We’ve been able to achieve near perfect synchronization within a dual-subject model. Including several verifiable incidents of parallel ideation.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful,” Doctor Rayley said.

  “Isn’t it?” Nina smiled over the rim of her beaker of tea, turning up the charm.

  “So what’s your next step?” Doctor Rayley asked. “Something on a larger, more ambitious scale perhaps?”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “We have a plan worked out for a large scale, wide-ranging experiment that, if successful, could very well shatter all preconceived notions of human brain function. But...” She batted her lashes, going in for the kill. “But where could we possibly find such a large number of appropriate and willing subjects?”

  Walter took a swallow of the strange, medicinal tasting tea to cover his excitement. Nina was playing this brilliantly. Setting Rayley up to think helping them was his idea.

  “Why, my morning class on nurturing bio-spiritual wholeness has more than a dozen students,” Rayley replied. “Bright, young, and open-minded, every one of them. I’m sure you could find plenty of willing volunteers from within that group.” He winked and patted Nina’s arm. “I’ll tell them it’s an extra credit assignment. You three are welcome to sit in on the class. It starts in about thirty minutes.”

  “Jeremey, you’re the best,” Nina said, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “Thanks!”

  Rayley flushed and grinned.

  “My pleasure, my dear,” he said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to prepare my notes for the class. Help yourself to any parts or equipment you may need for your experiment. And have some more tea, if you like. It’s specially formulated to encourage digestive regularity.”

  Walter frowned into his beaker as Doctor Rayley shuffled off into another room. Bell arched an eyebrow. Nina smiled and held out her open hands.

  It almost seemed as if they could do this.

  * * *

  While Bell stayed in the lab to make the necessary adjustments to the various machines, Walter sat in on Doctor Rayley’s lecture.

  Rayley seemed like a genuinely decent, intelligent, and progressive man, full of controversial ideas and bold, thought-provoking theories. But his teaching style left something to be desired. He seemed to wander aimlessly from one topic to another, motivated by pathways of internal logic unfathomable to anyone but himself.

  Whenever he seemed about to touch on a topic of particular interest, such as the role of putative neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin in empathic spiritual bonding, he would become sidetracked by some irrelevant tangent, and end up talking about the health risks of wearing pants that were too tight.

  So Walter found his mind worrying at the details of their plan, like a dog chewing a bone. Thinking and rethinking every detail they had mapped out, and searching for weaknesses. All he succeeded in doing was increasing his anxiety.

  The lecture just went on and on, and even though the Zodiac wouldn’t be anywhere near that park for more than another two hours, every passing second felt excruciating.

  He tried to distract himself by studying the faces of the students in the large round lecture hall. It seemed like an interesting and intelligent group. A little bit more than half male, almost all college age, all white with the notable exception of the lovely May Zhang, who was taking dutiful notes in the far corner.

  She was wearing a dress instead of the pant suit Walter had seen her in before. Her legs seemed too delicate for the clunky brown boots she was wearing. She didn’t seem to notice him, as she was completely engrossed in Doctor Rayley’s baffling lecture.

  “So in closing,” Doctor Rayley said, “using biospiritual connectivity to stimulate the production of empathy inducing neurochemicals is the only viable way to break through the jaded modern malaise, and know the kind of pure and unadulterated love for which the human brain was intended. For you see, we must never stop learning, never stop questing into the heart of the mysterious and unknowable.

  “And so I leave you with a quote from the great Albert Einstein. ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.’”

  The members of the class gathered their books, stood, and had begun breaking into small, chatting groups when Rayley waved his hands in the air. Bell appeared in the doorway that led to the lab, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “How was the lecture?” he asked Walter.

  “Interesting,” Walter replied. “But a little frustrating. I think—”

  “Ah yes, just a moment class!” Doctor Rayley called, cutting Walter off. “If I could just have your attention for on
e more minute.”

  The students quieted down and turned back to him.

  “An esteemed colleague of mine is visiting from... MIT, is it? Yes, yes, that’s it. Anyway, he’s been conducting some fascinating experiments involving alpha wave synchronization and telepathy.” Rayley paused dramatically, letting the word telepathy resonate through the lecture hall. “He’s had some truly extraordinary results. Just extraordinary. So, without further ado, please welcome Walter Bishop.”

  Walter looked around, startled. He hadn’t been expecting to be called upon to speak, and had nothing prepared. Nina gave him an encouraging smile as he shuffled nervously up to the front of the room.

  “Um...” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Thank you, Doctor Rayley. I... we... well, that is to say...”

  Pull yourself together, Walter, he told himself. Everything is riding on this.

  He cleared his throat and took his hands out of his pockets.

  “We’re looking for participants in an important experiment,” Walter said. “Nine bright, open-minded people who want to be a part of neurochemical history. This isn’t just hyperbole, I assure you, we are attempting something that has never been done before. We will be using a combination of hallucinogenic chemicals and biofeedback technology to link multiple minds in multiple locations. If you are intrigued, please join my colleagues and me in the lab for a complete briefing.

  “Thank you.”

  To Walter’s surprise, the first person to approach him was May.

  “I’ll admit,” she said, “I’m intrigued. Where do I sign up?”

  Looking at her, with her charming gap-toothed smile and clunky boots, Walter felt deeply conflicted. Of course, he would love to work with her, to get to know her better. But involving her in this deeply dangerous endeavor made him feel queasy. As did the realization that if he didn’t want to involve someone he liked in this experiment, how could he with good conscience involve anyone at all.

  After all, human beings aren’t lab rats, to be used, tested, euthanized, necropsied, and disposed of, he thought to himself. Didn’t May and her fellow students deserve to know what they were really getting into?