Disturb (23 page)

Manny could remember his reaction to David’s death. How he became withdrawn, violent. Almost as if he was filling the void created by his brother’s absence. Manny became the one who got into trouble all the time. Trouble that continued into adulthood with, arrest after arrest.

But never murder.

Manny bitterly laughed, the action causing the pain in his chest to flare.

“I should have killed you when you asked.”

“It’s too late now.”

Manny shook his head. It wasn’t too late. The next chance he got, he was ending it.

“Won’t work, Manny. First of all, we don’t die easily. But mostly, I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t allow it? It’s my body.”

The face reflected in the garbage can changed. At one moment, Manny was looking at David’s reflection. Then there was a shift, and he could sense that it was David who was looking at him.

“I’m in control now, Manny. You follow my will.”

Manny experienced a feeling of isolation, darkness. He tried to cry out, but he kept getting smaller and smaller, his vision dimming. His own mind was trapping him, shielding him from his own senses. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

A moment later, he was gone.

David sat up. He could feel Manny inside him, struggling to free himself, like a tiny fly in a web.

It was a strange experience, but an understandable one. The mind was a mysterious thing, but science was demystifying it a bit more every day. David knew enough to grasp what was happening to his.

Memory is chemical. He could remember an early lecture from Dr. Nikos, talking about experiments with flatworms. They could be taught simple stimulus/response reactions, and these reactions could be passed on from Group A to Group B by feeding Group B the brains of Group A.

In his free time, of which he had a lot, he’d read about the collective unconscious, and inherited memories known as archetypes. These were common in animals. How could horses walk minutes after birth? How did salmon know to travel upstream to spawn? It was called instinct, a genetic imprint passed on to offspring. A form of inherited memory.

But it was so much more than memory. Every thought was a chemical reaction happening in the brain. Movement, speech, emotion, motor skills; these could all be removed with a scalpel or overridden by an electric probe.

Even the personality was nothing more than a complicated exchange of neurotransmitters. Drugs can alter mood and control behavior. A blow to the head could turn a nice person into a permanent jerk, and a lobotomy could tame even the most savage psychotic.

David was simply a result of complicated chemistry and brain damage. Every time he took N-Som, a residual amount stayed in his brain—a stockpile of other people’s neurotransmitters. It literally took root, changing his chemical structure, allowing Manny’s violent thoughts to grow until they’d taken over the core of his personality.

A maniac is born.

David sat up, ignoring the pain. He no longer needed thoughts of revenge to compel him to kill. The compulsion existed without logic; it was an emotional response. And David’s overriding emotion was hatred. He didn’t question it. He just went with the flow.

David got to his feet, wobbling a bit. A coughing fit brought up quite a lot of blood. He took a few tentative steps until he was sure he could trust his legs.

His ax was waiting for him, near the security desk.

Then he headed for the emergency staircase.

“A hunting we will go.”

He was just opening the front door when he saw someone walk into the lobby.

S
pecial Agent Smith didn’t consider himself crooked.

He’d entered the Bureau out of college, young and full of energy. The FBI had been his dream job. The pulse-pounding training he’d gotten at Quantico promised him a career filled with thrills and shoot-outs and manhunts and TV interviews.

But real life conspired against him.

He broke his ankle tripping down a flight of stairs just one week after graduation.

Three operations later, Smith still didn’t have full use of his foot. He was assigned to the Chicago office, riding a desk. Smith had become a bureaucrat, which was a fate he’d been purposely trying to avoid when he joined the Feds in the first place.

So he pushed papers for three long years, secretly jealous of the agents around him who saw action. Agents who actually got to draw their guns on the job. He debated the pros of drinking himself to death versus the cons of eating himself to death. It was during the mayor’s holiday party, while Smith was attempting to do both, that he met Albert Rothchilde.

Smith knew from the start that he was being fleeced. Rothchilde was looking to buy a friend in the Bureau, and Smith was the perfect candidate; pathetic, angry, needy. The president of American Products pushed Smith’s buttons with the skill of a cult guru; asking questions, listening closely, offering praise and reassurance.

Rothchilde sent him Cuban cigars, expensive wine, concert tickets, high priced call girls. He invited him to the country club, took him golfing, let him use his condo in Florida for vacation. Smith was courted by Rothchilde for almost two months before the man asked him for a tiny favor—some information on organized crime that only the FBI was privy to.

Smith provided the info. Not because he felt he owed Rothchilde for his kindness, or because he was under the spell of his Svengali-like manipulation. Smith did it for a single, selfish reason; it was exciting.

Being bribed to steal FBI documents was a thrill, like being a double agent. The extra money was nice, but Smith would have done it for free. The more outrageous Rothchilde’s request, the more fun Smith had figuring out how to pull it off.

What began as simply buying information had become much more dangerous. Smith routinely sent agents out into the field to secretly run Rothchilde’s errands. Only Smith knew the true reasons behind the missions, and he’d climbed high enough within the Bureau to be able to cover his own tracks.

It was like a chess game. Smith stopped drinking, lost weight, and actually began to enjoy work again.

But everything in the past paled next to that moment, the moment Smith entered the DruTech Building.

This wasn’t just stealing files and sending agents on fake missions. This was the real deal. Smith was actually in the field himself. When he saw Rothchilde’s chopper outside, he got even more excited. His mind filled with fantastic scenarios, saving Rothchilde in a hostage situation, neutralizing the targets, being able to actually shoot somebody.

Smith couldn’t run the hundred in less than thirty seconds, but for the very first time he felt like a real Fed.

He scanned the lobby, overhead, then at eye-level, and finally sweeping the ground. His pulse broke into a rumba when he saw the guard’s body. Smith moved in for a closer look, favoring his good leg. He wanted to shout out in excitement when he saw the head wound.

This was it, what he’d waited his whole life for. Real danger. He knelt down next to the corpse and felt for its pulse, knowing he wouldn’t find one, doing it anyway because that was what they always did in the movies. He could imagine telling this story later, people hanging on his every word.

“He’s dead.”

Smith spun, knees bent in a crouch, both hands on his weapon in a perfect Weaver stance. Just like he’d practiced a hundred times. But none of his training prepared Smith for what was standing fifteen feet away from him.

At first, he thought he was looking at a corpse. The man was caked with dried blood, which seemed to streak out of the four bullet wounds in his torso like fireworks. Any one of those wounds should have been fatal, but the guy was standing there, obviously alive, with a goofy grin on his face. And an ax.

Smith went by-the-book. “Drop the ax! Hands on your head, get down on your knees!”

The man lifted his hands above his head, but he raised the ax with them.

“Drop the ax!”

The man didn’t drop the ax. He did something that Special Agent Smith wouldn’t have ever expected. He held it like a lumberjack and threw it.

Smith’s reflexes took over. If he were a seasoned pro with plenty of field experience, perhaps his first instinct would have been to fire the gun. But since he wasn’t, Smith did what anyone would have done when an ax came at them. He put his arms over his face and ducked.

The ax handle hit him across the forearms, sending his gun flying.

Smith got up out of his crouch and was seized by an overwhelming feeling of giddy delight. He’d been absolutely sure that the ax was going to bury itself in his head. The fact that he’d escaped with only bruised elbows was amazing.

But it wasn’t over yet.

The bloody man was walking towards him, his arms wide open. Like a giant bird of prey, swooping down.

Smith knew he needed to find the gun, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle before him. When he returned to his senses, it was too late. All he could do was run.

But Smith and running weren’t good buddies.

He took off through the lobby in a comical hobble, his bad ankle unable to fully bear the weight of his body even after all of the therapy. It was like trying to run with a ball and chain on his leg. Smith pushed past the pain of bones rubbing against each other, but it just didn’t work right.

He chanced a look over his shoulder and saw the bloody man following in a brisk walk. Not even running, but quickly gaining ground. He’d picked up the ax.

Ahead of Smith was a dark hallway, doors at the end. He was sweating now, fear and pain pushing out his prior thoughts of glory and excitement.

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

Smith concentrated on the doors. If he could just make it there, maybe he could lock them somehow, keep the bloody man away. It wasn’t that far. Smith forced himself to move faster, ignoring the fire in his ankle, pushing himself harder than he ever had in his life.

He made it! The bloody man was only a few steps behind him now, and Smith grabbed the door handle, turning it, pushing forward with his shoulder.

Locked.

But it wasn’t over yet. He still had his training. Hand to hand combat. Martial arts. He hadn’t practiced regularly, because there hadn’t been a need. But he still knew enough to defend himself, even if his opponent did have an ax.

Special Agent Smith spun around, feet planted a shoulder’s width apart, arms out in a defense stance.

“Keeeyaaa!” Smith’s battle cry echoed down the hallway.

The echo lasted longer than he did.

“I
s it damaged?”

Rothchilde was referring to the thalamus, hypothalamus, corpus callosum, and other parts of the brain that were harvested to produce N-Som. In the head he’d brought, all of these parts were intact. The bullet had only done damage to the motor cortex, central and longitudal sulcus, and occipital lobe.

“It’s fine.”

“There’s enough to make N-Som?”

Theena nodded, removing a section of the medulla oblongata. Bill raised an eyebrow at this, but kept his mouth shut. Theena was grateful for that.

They ground up the tissue with a mortar and pestle, and then began the laborious task of making it into a pill.

Theena didn’t bother with precise measurements this time. She also abbreviated the suspension in the acetonitrile and eyeballed the amount of the dimethylformamide dispersant. Rothchilde didn’t know any better.

Since DruTech contracted out for the actual pill manufacturing because it was a complicated process, the way to make ingestable N-Som in the lab was to simply add some hydroxypropyl methylcellulose and sodium starch glycolate, then spoon the mixture into empty gelatin capsules.

The work, although forced, had a calming effect on Theena. This day had been a trip to hell, with no end in sight. She was happy to lose her mind in a familiar chemical procedure. But as it neared the end, she began to worry about what would happen next.

“Those don’t look like N-Som.” Rothchilde was eyeing the capsules suspiciously.

“We can’t make tablets here. We don’t have the proper equipment.”

Rothchilde pointed the gun at Bill. “Take one.”

Bill shrugged, reaching for a capsule. Theena had a terrible moment of mind-bending panic, and made her decision immediately.