Falling Awake (6 page)

She had considered turning on the air conditioner but thought better of it after a short review of the state of her finances. A dollar saved on the electricity bill was a dollar that could go toward the payments on her precious furniture.

“We’ve got a big problem, Sphinx. I’ve made all the cuts I can.
I’ll cancel the gym membership and drop the insurance on the furniture first thing in the morning, but that’s not going to be enough to bail us out. There’s only one answer.”

The cat ignored her. He was on the floor in the corner, hunched over a saucer of cat food. He tended to be extremely focused at mealtime.

“Given your expensive tastes in cat food and my outstanding credit card debt, we have no choice,” she informed him. “The folks at the Psychic Dreamer Hotline are very nice and I could probably get my old job back, but, to be honest, it doesn’t pay well enough to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed. Got to think of the furniture. If I don’t make the payments we’ll find a repo man at our door one of these days.”

Sphinx finished the last of his meal and padded across the floor to where she sat. When he reached her he heaved his bulk up onto her lap, hunkered down and closed his eyes. The sound of his rusty, rumbling purr hummed in the quiet kitchen.

She stroked him, taking a curious comfort in his weight and warmth. She liked animals in general but had never considered herself a cat person. When she thought about getting a pet for company, she usually thought in terms of a dog.

Sphinx was not what anyone would call cute or cuddly. But there was no getting around the fact that during the past year, the two of them had become colleagues of a sort. It had been Sphinx who alerted her to the fact that Martin Belvedere was dead.

She had spent that fateful night in her office, as she often did when working on a rushed dream analysis for one of the
anonymous clients. Belvedere, an insomniac who usually spent his nights at the center, had wandered down the hall sometime around midnight to chat with her about the case before she went into her dream state. Everything had seemed so
normal,
she thought, or at least as normal as things got in her new career. Belvedere brought a container of lemon yogurt with him when he came to her office, just as he always did when he visited at that hour. He ate a portion of the yogurt while they discussed her latest project. Then he left with his unfinished snack to return to his office.

Shortly before two in the morning some small sound awakened her. It brought her out of a disturbing dream full of symbols of blood and death, typical of the sort she interpreted for Clients One and Two.

She was still somewhat disoriented when she opened the door and found Sphinx pacing back and forth in the hallway. His agitated behavior was so unusual she knew at once that something was wrong. She picked him up and carried him back to Belvedere’s office, where she discovered the director slumped over his desk.

That kind of experience invoked a bond, she told herself. She wasn’t sure how Sphinx felt about her but she knew there was no way she could have let him go to the pound.

“Looks like I’m going to have to do what I swore I’d never do.”

Sphinx gave no indication that he was in any way concerned with their financial future.

“It must be nice to be so Zen,” she muttered.

Sphinx’s purr got louder.

She reached for the phone and slowly, reluctantly, punched
out the familiar number. While she waited for an answer, she thought about the two anonymous clients of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research. Their consulting requests were erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes weeks passed between assignments. She wondered how long it would be before either of them learned that her services were no longer available.

Most of all she wondered if Client Number Two, otherwise known as Dream Man, would miss her when he discovered that she was gone.

F
REY
-S
ALTER
, I
NC
., R
ESEARCH
T
RIANGLE
P
ARK
, N
ORTH
C
AROLINA

y
ou’re still worrying about Ellis, aren’t you?” Beth asked.

“Yeah. He’s not getting any better. Worse, in fact.” Jack Lawson absently registered the familiar squeak in the government-issue desk chair when he leaned back to plant his heels on the aged government-issue desk.

The squeak had come with the chair. Both had been new some thirty-odd years ago, when he was assigned to establish Frey-Salter, Inc., the corporate front that concealed his small, very secret government agency and its highly classified dream research program.

Frey-Salter was located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, an area conveniently situated in the heart of a triangle formed by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The park was home to a heavy concentration of cutting-edge pharmaceutical and high-tech enterprises. Frey-Salter went unnoticed among the large assortment of companies and businesses that operated there.

It wasn’t only the chair that had been new three decades ago, he thought. He himself had been new back then. Young and eager and ambitious. He had also been madly in love with Beth Mapstone, the woman on the other end of the phone connection.

A lot of things had changed in the past three decades. The chair was getting old and so was he. His youthful zeal had taken on a cynical edge, although he still believed passionately in the importance of his work. He was no longer ambitious, either. He had built his empire. His goal now was to hang onto it until retirement and then see to it that the program passed into good hands.

Technology had changed a lot over the years, too. He was proud of the way he had adapted. The fancy, high-tech phone he was using today with its specially designed scrambling and encryption software was a far cry from the telephone that had come with the desk thirty years ago.

But one thing had not changed. He was still in love with Beth. Nothing could ever alter that. She had been his partner right from the start. He could still recall their first meeting at Frey-Salter’s pistol range as though it were yesterday. Her hair was cinched
back in a cute ponytail and she wore a pair of jeans that fit her so tightly he wondered if she’d used a shrink-wrap machine to put them on that morning. She outshot him by a country mile. He knew he was in love before they reeled in the paper targets.

“His fixation with the notion that Vincent Scargill is still alive has turned into some sort of obsession,” he said. “It started with the incident at the survivalists’ compound. Some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome maybe. Hell, he damn near died that day.”

“I know,” Beth said quietly.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like what’s happening to Ellis.” Lawson picked up a tiny hammer and struck the first of several small, gleaming, stainless steel balls suspended in a row on his desk toy. The first ball struck the next one in line, which clanged into a third. The effect rippled down the line of balls and then reversed. He always found the
ping-ping-ping
sound soothing. “I ordered him to talk to one of the shrinks here at Frey-Salter.”

“Did he do it?”

“No. You know he doesn’t take orders well. Never did. Always been a lone wolf.”

“He needs a distraction,” Beth said, sounding thoughtful. “Something to take his mind off Vincent Scargill.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Jack watched the silver balls bounce gently off one another. “Got an idea. A situation has developed out in California. Belvedere collapsed and died a few days ago. Heart attack.”

Beth sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that. Belvedere was a strange duck and not exactly Mr. Personality, but his lucid dream research work was far ahead of the curve. Too bad it went unrecognized in his lifetime.”

“Tell me about it. Anyhow, as it stands now, Belvedere’s son, Randolph, has taken over the Center for Sleep Research.”

“Don’t worry, even if he discovers that there is an anonymous Client Number One, he won’t be able to trace you or Frey-Salter. I made sure of that when I set up the e-mail contact system between you and Belvedere.”

“I’m not worried about Randolph locating me,” he said impatiently. “The problem is that one of his first official acts was to fire Isabel Wright.”

“Damn. Not good. You’d better not lose her, Jack. You need her.”

“Hell, I know that. Seems to me the best way to handle this now that Belvedere is gone is to bring her back here to Frey-Salter and tuck her away in a nice, quiet little office.”

“Makes sense. You’ll have better control over her that way.”

“So here’s the plan.” Jack drank some coffee. “I’m going to send Ellis to bring her in. You said he needs a distraction, right? Let him play recruiting agent.”

“Good idea. Just might work, too. I’ve had a feeling for a while now that he’s rather intrigued by her. In fact, if this thing with Scargill hadn’t blown up, literally, a few months ago, I’ve got a hunch Ellis would have looked up Isabel Wright on his own by now.”

Jack smiled, pleased with himself for having impressed her. “Maybe I’ve got some heretofore undiscovered matchmaking talent.”

The instant the words were out of his mouth, he cringed, mentally kicking himself. That had been a stupid thing to say under the circumstances.

“You’re good, Jack,” Beth said coolly. “But when it comes to figuring out relationships, you’re as dumb as a brick.”

He rocked back and forth in the squeaky chair a couple of times, gathering his nerve. “Are you ever gonna forgive me, Beth?”

“I still can’t believe you slept with that woman,” she muttered.

“I still can’t believe you actually went to a lawyer to see about a divorce. Give me a break, Beth, you’ve never pushed it that far before. I thought you had left me for real that time. I was a basket case. I was cracking up inside. I was vulnerable.”

There was a short pause.

“Vulnerable?” Beth repeated, sounding as if she had never heard the word before. “You?”

“I read one of those advice books for people who are involved in failed relationships. It said that people are vulnerable when a mate walks out. They’re inclined to do dumb things.”

“You actually bought a book about relationships?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate.” He banged the first ball on the desk toy so hard the steel spheres crashed into one another. “Look, Beth, I didn’t know there was a rule against sleeping with someone else once your wife has gone to a
lawyer. That sounded like the end to me. Thought we had split up for good. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“You thought it was okay to have an affair with Maureen Sage just because I’d consulted a lawyer?”

“Like I said, I thought it was really the end for us that time. I was trying to drown my sorrows with Maureen, so to speak. It was a mistake, okay?”

Beth fell silent. He dared to hope.

“Go call Ellis,” she said finally. “I’ve got a full schedule this morning. I’ll talk to you later.”

She ended the connection.

He sat there for a while, glumly gazing through the window that separated his office from the main lab and work areas. On the other side of the glass two agents were meeting with a couple of white-coated members of the research staff. Elsewhere people were busy at their computers. There was an air of purposeful activity about the place. Important work was being done. Crimes were being solved. Lives were being saved. Cutting-edge science was happening.

His empire, Jack thought. And he had built it with Beth’s help. If he didn’t get her back, the rest of it would cease to be important.

He hit the phone memory code that would connect him with Ellis.

S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA

w
e’ve got a very big problem,” Jack Lawson announced from the other end of the phone. “Martin Belvedere dropped dead of a heart attack several days ago. His son has taken over the Center for Sleep Research. One of his first official acts was to fire Isabel Wright. She’s gone.”

The news hit Ellis with the shock of a small earthquake. Okay, he thought, get a grip here. This isn’t the end of life on earth as we know it. But it was a hell of a jolt.

Tango Dancer was gone. He cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and set the frying pan down on the stove with such force that the two frozen soy sausages he had been about to cook bounced a couple of times from the impact.

“Everything okay there?” Lawson asked with casual concern. “Sounded like something fell on that end.”

“Just put a pan on the stove.” He was careful not to allow any indication of his reaction to the news show in his voice. Lawson was already worried enough about his mental state as it was. “It’s lunchtime out here in California, remember?”

“Yeah, sure,” Lawson said vaguely. “Forgot.”

Lawson was fifty-seven, wiry and compact, with a completely bald head, a gravelly voice and the haggard, drawn features associated with lifelong smokers and marathon runners, although he did not smoke and never moved any faster than absolutely necessary. Ellis thought about him sitting in his cluttered office deep in the bowels of Frey-Salter, several time zones away in North Carolina.

“That’s because you have no life outside Frey-Salter,” Ellis said. Ignoring the soy sausages, he leaned against the counter and looked at the photo he had attached to the door of the refrigerator. “Time is meaningless to you.”

Lawson snorted. “Time is everything to me. That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to find Isabel Wright and bring her into Frey-Salter. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but there was no reason to rush into such a move. Things were working just fine the way they were. But with old man Belvedere gone—”

“Hang on, let’s start at the beginning. Belvedere’s dead?”

“Yeah. Several days ago.”

“And you just found out?”

“Haven’t had any reason to contact him for a couple of weeks.” There was a shrug in Lawson’s voice.

“Neither have I. Been busy with a new start-up project.” And with his ongoing research into an old problem, but he sure wasn’t going to mention that bit. He didn’t need any more of Lawson’s well-meant but really annoying lectures on the dangers of obsessing over the Vincent Scargill issue.