Chronic Fear (19 page)

Burchfield growled deep in his chest, and Scagnelli was grateful the man was currently his boss and not his enemy. That could change tomorrow, and probably would, when Scagnelli ended up with the formulas for both Seethe and Halcyon and decided Senator Daniel Burchfield was no longer a necessary evil.

“Nobody stabs me in the back,” Burchfield bellowed.

“Yes, sir.”

“Nobody fucks with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nobody takes away what’s mine.”

“Yes, sir.”

Burchfield grabbed one of the figurines from the mantel, Thomas Jefferson if Scagnelli had to guess, and hurled it into the hearth. It cracked into a dozen pieces.

Let freedom ring.

Burchfield’s BlackBerry buzzed and he immediately relaxed, his face going placid. Scagnelli wondered if Seethe had maybe dug a deeper hole in the senator than he realized.

“Yes?” Burchfield said into the phone, listening for fifteen seconds before clicking off. He spoke to Scagnelli without turning. “They found Wallace’s phone in the weeds near Silver’s laboratory.”

Scagnelli decided to keep the kettle boiling. “He probably ditched it when he went with the Morgans. Didn’t want to be tracked.”

“And you said Wendy called Dr. Morgan?”

“My guess would be they’re planning a little reunion.”

“I don’t pay you for guesses. I pay you for results.”

Damn. You just about had my vote, but now you pull the plantation-owner crap. Oh well, I shouldn’t expect too much. He’s been snouting the trough for so long he can’t smell his own stink.

“I can give you the results you want,” Scagnelli promised. “Far more effectively than the CIA, the defense department, or the FBI.” He thumped the stolen documents. “I don’t leave paper trails or fingerprints, and I offer plausible deniability.”

He wanted to add that he’d already taken care of one problem for Burchfield: Anita Molkesky. Instead, he just said, “It’s possible they will be gathered in one place for the first time since the Monkey House.”

Burchfield connected the dots. “The first and last times.”

Scagnelli glanced around the room and mouthed,
Is it bugged?

Burchfield spoke at his previous volume. “Everything stays here in this office.”

“In that case, you’re in luck. I’m having a half-off sale.”

Burchfield ticked the names off with his fingers. “Alexis…Mark Morgan…Roland Doyle…Wendy Leng…Wallace…that makes five.”

“‘Five’ rhymes with ‘no longer alive.’”

“There’s only one condition.”

“Only one?”

“Wallace failed me, but you won’t. Don’t kill them until you have Seethe and Halcyon.”

“You got it, Mr. President.” Scagnelli flashed a cheesy grin before heading for the door.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll choose me as his new running mate.

Mark’s headache was getting worse.

Luckily, traffic thinned as they left the interstate and began the winding climb up into the mountains, but every sweep of oncoming headlights hit him like a sheet of battery acid laced with jalapeno. Closing his eyes didn’t help, and he couldn’t risk encasing his head in a jacket to muffle the external stimuli.

No, that’s just what they would want me to do. I have to stay awake.

Alexis glanced from the driver’s side once in a while, but Wallace Forsyth, who was in the passenger’s seat, hadn’t spoken in the past hour. In the seat behind them, Mark wondered if they’d devised some plot behind his back, perhaps to wait until he was asleep and take the gun away.

“You look bad, honey,” Alexis said to his reflection in the rearview. She was calm, but the greenish dashboard lights revealed the strain in her eyes.

“I
am
bad,” he said. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Please take the Halcyon.”

“Right. Like I’d trust something cooked up by your hippie sidekick?”

“No, it’s not like that,” she said, and her pleading tone disgusted him.

Amazing how you could live with someone,
sleep
with someone, for years and then one day realize you didn’t know a thing about them. The stranger you loved was the strangest of all.

“What’s it like, then, Lex? What’s the latest reality you’re trying to pitch?”

She glanced at Forsyth. It was just a glance, and though Mark could only see the back of her head and a faint flick of her eyes in the mirror, he knew.

“You haven’t been the same since the Monkey House,” she said. “The Seethe exposure has been eating away at you. The rage, the headaches, the paranoia. I know it’s hard for you to see from the inside, but it’s happening.”

“Oh, yes. Nice sales pitch. Such sincerity. And you want me to see a shrink, right? Get help just like Anita did.” He leaned forward, letting the barrel of his Glock rest on top of the front seat. “But we know what happened to Anita, right?”

“She was different.”

Mark punched the gun against the seat, causing Forsyth to jerk a little. “Of course she was. Because she wasn’t lucky enough to be under the care of Dr. Alexis Morgan. The only one besides the dear dead Sebastian Briggs who is an expert on Seethe and Halcyon.”

“We’ve never had Seethe.”

“Why should I believe you? You lied to me about hiding Halcyon, you never told me you developed it, and you lied to me about the CIA stealing your research.”

Forsyth finally spoke. “She didn’t know we were after it.”

Mark laughed, and the air rushing up from his abdomen was sour and painful. “You’ve probably been working with her since the bioethics council. But it’s all going to fall apart soon. The two of you have been planning this little reunion for quite a while, I’m sure. But I’m crashing the fucking party.”

Alexis slowed the car, and Mark noticed they’d entered the rural foothills, the two-lane highway flanked by tall hardwoods, an occasional farmhouse dotting the side of the road. Mark had spent summer vacations in these mountains as a child, swimming on Watauga Lake, riding the Tweetsie Railroad steam train, and hiking on Grandfather Mountain. In the night, the destination took on a foreboding aspect, as if all the secrets of the Appalachian Mountains had grown deeper with no one looking.

“How much farther?” Mark asked.

“Maybe two hours. It’s beside the Unegama National Wilderness Area.”

So Roland and Wendy had found a hollow hidden deep in the land of legend. That made sense, considering they had played hide-and-seek in the Monkey House so well. And they would be waiting, because all of them had a hand in it. Sure, his wife was the one who’d been dosing him with Seethe, but they were all watching, waiting, eager for him to crack.

But I’m not going to crack. I’m the only one who remembers, and if I’m gone, they win, Burchfield wins, CRO wins, and Seethe wins. I can’t let that happen.

Mark shoved Forsyth’s shoulder. “So, what do you think of the doctor’s theory? If Seethe is causing us to lose it, why are you so rational?”

“I draw my strength from the Lord,” Forsyth said, evenly and quietly, barely audible over the hum of the tires on asphalt.

“If you’ve got a direct line to God, then tell me this: why would He turn Seethe loose on the world?”

“It was prophecy.” Forsyth continued staring straight ahead, not giving in to the exhaustion that probably haunted his old bones. “‘And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.’”

“Falling back on the Bible. The coward’s way out.”

“I can’t judge your soul, Mark. But that day is coming.”

“So, what do you think, honey?” Mark said to Alexis. “Could Seethe be the cause of his religious delusions?”

“Seethe creates individualized responses, based on unique brain chemistry—”

“Shut up and give me the vial.”

“Are you going to dump it?”

“After what happened in the Monkey House, I’d say you’re the last person who should be dispensing little pills.”

“What you said happened…it didn’t happen.”

“You killed him, Lex. You bashed his brains in with a hunk of metal. I saw it. Hell, I see it almost every time I close my eyes.”

She shook her head. Forsyth reached across the front seat and touched her arm, a conspiratorial motion that caused rage to ripple up Mark’s spine.

“Forgive him, for he knows not what he does,” Forsyth said.

Mark put the tip of the barrel against the top of his wife’s spine. “Give me the vial.”

She slowed the car, fished it from her pocket, and held it up. He snatched it away and flicked on the dome light. He shook it once, like a maraca, and struggled with the lid.

“Goddamned childproof caps.”

Finally, he popped it open. Forsyth had turned and was looking over the seat at him. Alexis kept glancing in the rearview.

Mark rolled a few pills into the palm of his hand. They were larger than the Briggs concoction, unmarked, with no hard coating. They were plain white and looked as if they would crumble if he squeezed them.

As a drug-company executive, he hadn’t spent much time on the production end, but pills with such shoddy development were considered counterfeits. They were dangerous primarily because pills might cost only pennies to make, but drug companies claimed they need huge markups to offset the cost of research. Companies like CRO feared only one thing—cheap and plentiful drugs that did the job. Luckily, Congressional members like Burchfield were only too happy to adopt protectionist policies while slipping campaign contributions into their war chests.

But the politics of greed were far removed from this simple choice before him. Did he trust his wife, or did he believe what his admittedly confused mind was telling him?

He rolled down the window, and the moist rush of the mountain air filled the car. He could fling the pills into the ditch and be done with them, at least until Darrell Silver cooked up another batch.

But he’d already tried to push Halcyon out of his life. He seemed intricately bound to it, a junkie who even in abstinence was defined by his habit.

If Alexis had dosed him with Seethe, wasn’t Halcyon the only alternative besides madness?

“I love you, Mark,” Alexis said.

What’s behind door number three?

As far as he could tell, he loved her in return.

And if he could think clearly, maybe he could rediscover what love meant.

And wasn’t that worth a little risk?

He slipped one of the pills into his mouth.

Roland’s first impulse was to destroy the painting.

But even if he doused it with kerosene and torched it, the inherent truth wouldn’t go away. Somehow, Briggs had used Wendy as a living data bank, burying the molecular compound in her memory. If he destroyed this one, it might turn up on scratch paper, the dry-erase board on the fridge, or on a chalkboard somewhere.

The doc was smart. He knew computers weren’t safe, not with all these federal agencies watching. Maybe he knew they’d eventually take it from him before he was ready. And, sick as it was, he wanted Seethe to live on.

But knowledge was power.

Gundersson had made a big deal out of protecting them, promising to spread false information that would move them off the radar. Maybe their chances were better if Roland handled the negotiations himself, played one side against the other, or maybe even took the drug public.

Roland didn’t understand the symbols and structure of the diagram, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t his job to mash molecules together. His job was to keep his wife safe and to secure their future. Apparently running to the remote Blue Ridge Mountains wasn’t far enough. They might have to go overseas, maybe to Tibet.

You trade a painting for two tickets to anywhere. And they’ll just let you fly off into the sunset. Right. You really ARE mindfucked.

Wendy had gone back to bed, but Roland was restless, sitting on the porch and nursing a cold cup of coffee. Dawn pinked the ridges on the eastern horizon, the first birds calling from deep in the woods. The revolver was on the table, but now it seemed ridiculous. Gundersson was right. He was a lousy shot.

An engine roared somewhere down in the distant valley, someone climbing the steep, winding grade. The road turned to gravel near the wilderness area, at which point traffic was limited to the occasional logging truck or maintenance crew.

They’re coming.

Gundersson said bringing them together would give them a fighting chance, allow them to hone their cover stories and make it easier for him to provide protection. But it also made them easy targets for Gundersson’s betrayal.

Roland pocketed his revolver. Gundersson wasn’t the only possible chink in the armor. Alexis Morgan was a Briggs protégé, and Mark had been employed by the pharmaceutical company that funded the Monkey House trials. He couldn’t fully trust either of them.

And that brought him to Wendy.

She might still harbor some sort of twisted loyalty to Briggs. After all, he’d entrusted her to carry the Seethe formula, even if she wasn’t fully aware of what she’d done.

No. You love her. You went through hell for her. And if she turns out to be the devil, at least you made your choice with your heart instead of your head. Because you never COULD trust your head, could you?

He checked the bullets in the revolver. It held six .38 caliber rounds. If he went to his fallback plan, and his aim was accurate, he’d have two bullets left. The one destined for his temple probably wouldn’t miss.

But before he cleaned Seethe and Halcyon from the face of the Earth and tore down the Monkey House once and for all, heads had to be counted. If anyone else knew about it, then their deaths would be wasted.

Roland gave a gruff laugh. David Underwood would survive. David, the most broken of them all, would carry the secret of Seethe’s grim potential.

Kurr-rrrack-uhh.

The morning stillness was shattered by the reverberating gunshot, and its abruptness caused Roland to drop his pistol. He scrambled down to the rough pine boards of the porch, reaching under his chair for the weapon.

He found it and squatted, pointing it over the porch railing in the direction of the shot. After a minute, Gundersson came out of the woods, wearing a camo vest. A dark tuft dangled from his right hand to about the level of his knee.

Without a word of greeting, Gundersson kept walking until he reached the porch. He flipped the object onto Roland’s chair. The foxtail still bled from the upper end where Gundersson had cut it off.

“Nice piece of tail,” Gundersson said.

“Are you one for symbolism?” Roland said.

“Not unless it fits what I need to know.”

“The fox is a creature of the afterlife, a sly messenger who guides people between worlds.”

“So, I guess that means one of us is going to die?”

“We’re all going to die. It’s just a question of when.”

The door swung open and Wendy came out in her bathrobe. She looked from Roland to Gundersson, as if searching them both for bloodshed. “I heard a shot.”

“Roland missed, but I didn’t,” Gundersson said. She looked down at the foxtail lying between them. “Your chickens are safe now.”

“Lex and Mark are coming up the road,” Roland said to her, ignoring Gundersson. “You’d better get dressed.”

She went back inside. Roland picked up his revolver and rested it in his lap.
Talk about your symbolism. Let’s see who’s got the biggest barrel.

“Here’s how we need to play this,” Gundersson said.

“Wait a second. There’s not going to be any ‘play’ here. Lex and Mark are our friends. We’re fellow survivors.”

Gundersson dropped his voice. “You know it doesn’t work that way. If too many people know, then the information is worthless.”

“Alexis knows more about Seethe and Halcyon than anyone alive.”

“But Mark’s a liability. According to my field director, he has too many suspicious connections. CRO Pharmaceuticals, Senator Daniel Burchfield, and a new cover story as a law-enforcement trainee.”

Roland pondered letting Gundersson do the killing. And maybe while Gundersson was busy with Mark, Roland could put a bullet in the agent’s back. Alexis wouldn’t be too difficult to kill. All he had to do was picture her as the depraved savage in the Monkey House, holding a bloody tool as she stood over her victim.

“You’d better hide,” Roland said. The car was nearer, barely a hundred yards away through the woods.

“I’ll wait with Wendy.”

Roland thought of the painting, with its graphic ladder of molecules, leaning against the wall. “It’s too dangerous.”

“They won’t suspect anything.”

“We’ve been exposed to Seethe.” Roland let one side of his lips twitch. “We’re suspicious all the time.”

Before Gundersson could protest, the car came to a stop and its engine fell quiet, still out of sight and far from the yard.

“That’s weird,” Roland said. “The road gets a little rougher, but it’s passable.”

“It’s not them,” Gundersson said, drawing his firearm from a shoulder holster tucked inside his camo vest.

“But we’re expecting—”

“Get inside.”

“Hold on, cowboy, you’re not my boss.”

“I told you I’d protect you, but I can’t do that if you’re going to be a hardheaded jackass.”

“If it’s not them, who else would it—”

Gundersson leapt forward and shoved him just as an explosion ripped across the mountains. Splinters kicked up from the rail as Roland tumbled to the porch floor, pinching his fingers in the armrest of the chair. His revolver skated across the porch and his face was pressed against the foxtail, its pungent, primal mammal scent flooding his nostrils.

Another shot rang out, the report much louder than that from Gundersson’s Glock, and one of the windows behind him shattered.

Wendy!

Moments ago, he’d been contemplating her death, followed by his own, but now that someone was taking the decision out of his hands, Roland was fueled by a savage desire to survive.

Gundersson crouched behind a support post, his pistol arm tracking the forest, looking for the source of the gunfire. “Rifle,” he said under his breath. “Saw the reflection of the scope.”

The door opened again and Wendy stood there, wearing jeans and a bra. She didn’t speak, but her eyes were wide in surprise. Roland waved her back inside then rolled toward the door. Another shot plowed into the wood inches from his head, the bullet’s passage causing his ears to ring.

He scrambled through the door and was about to kick it closed when Gundersson fired twice, duck-walking backward a few steps before rolling into a ball and taking a tumbling somersault through the door.

Wendy slammed it shut behind him and leaned against the wall, breathing rapidly. “Ro?”

“I need answers,” Roland said to Gundersson.

“Do you need a scorecard?” Gundersson said. “Somebody found out, that’s all.”

The agent untangled his limbs on the floor. A red blotch had collected on the outside of his thigh, and Gundersson pressed against it with his palm. The effort didn’t stanch the flow much.

Roland snaked along the wall to Wendy and put his arm around her. She appeared to be catatonic, helpless and vulnerable.
Just like in the Monkey House
. “I thought they wanted us alive,” he said to Gundersson.

Gundersson rose, locking the door and limping to the nearest window. “I guess they changed their minds.”

Wendy stuttered as if wanting to say something, but Roland put a finger to her lips. “Shh. It’s going to be okay, baby.”

He thought about sending her upstairs, but she might be visible through the windows as she climbed the steps. The walls of the cabin were made of thick beams of yellow pine, so she was safer staying where she was.

“How many are there?” he asked Gundersson.

“Hard to tell. The shots came from two different locations, but they could have a backup so they can cut off any escape.”

Gundersson lifted away the curtain with the tip of his Glock, craning his neck to peer out.

“Pretty convenient, don’t you think?” Roland asked.

“What?” Gundersson was barely listening.

“Staging an attack so we would trust you.” Roland pointed his revolver at Gundersson, who didn’t notice. “But you made a mistake. You should have waited until Alexis and Mark got here.”

“Quit the goddamned crazy talk, Roland. They shot me in the fucking leg! My field director warned me that other agencies might be closing in. I just didn’t think they’d be hostile.”

“You guys are all on the same side to me. The
wrong
side.”

Gundersson must have heard the menace in Roland’s voice, because he finally turned. He might have said “Oh, shit” under his breath, or maybe he was wheezing in pain.

Wendy was moving behind him, but Roland didn’t dare move his gaze from Gundersson. The revolver was his one chance to control the situation.

God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference…

“Just tell me one thing,” Roland said. “Who is behind it?”

“We don’t know. My field director was checking into it, and that must have raised some eyebrows. It wouldn’t have been hard to track my location by satellite if you had the right gear.” Gundersson was talking fast but calmly, and Roland almost believed him. But people lied to save their necks. Roland knew all about that.

“According to our information, a rogue element—”

“Well, I’ve got some new information,” Roland said. “I have the formula for Seethe. The candy that everybody wants.”

Gundersson checked outside the window once more. Roland had to admire the guy. Here he was with a pistol pointed at him from six feet away, and he was acting more worried about the guns out there a hundred feet away. Gundersson gave a little nod that Roland didn’t understand, and then Roland’s head exploded in violent flares of electric yellow and solar-flare red.

The dull
klung
filled his skull like a funeral bell, and as he slumped to the floor, his last image was of Wendy, standing there in her bra, a black cast-iron skillet in her hand.