Near Death (27 page)

Before he’d spoken to Sam that morning, his ideas had been cloistered; now, after hearing them strung into fully formed notions, he felt emboldened. They didn’t sound like the ravings of a lunatic, did they? He sounded reasonable, rational, measured. He could do this! He could step up onto the stage his science had created.

Or was it a pulpit? He smiled to himself.
They’re not so different, are they?

“Okay, my friends,” he began. “It’s time for me to fill you in on some of the ideas I’ve been having. They’re big ones—maybe even courageous. But they’re ideas that
can’t be transformed into action without your help. You are the vanguard of the Inner Peace Crusade.” He laughed. “God, the name does sound a little much, doesn’t it? But I think we’ll grow into it.”

He rehashed the message he’d delivered earlier to Sam. While he did, he studied the expressions around the room, the stray comments and sharp inhalations, looking for signs of understanding, approval, resistance—and concluded it was, at best, a mixed bag. These were good people who wanted to do good things. The prospect of being agents of disruption and despair wasn’t sitting well. Before he laid out his actual plan, his full agenda, he needed to convince them, really convince them, like a salesman who needed to close the deal.

“Before I go on,” Alex announced gravely, “I have a confession to make. It’s about Thomas Quinn. You all read about it, you all talked about it. His murder. I hope you won’t think differently about me when I tell you this, but I was there when it happened.” He waited for the gasps, which came. “It wasn’t murder,” he said. “It was suicide.”

He told them that Thomas had been confiding in him that he was distraught about a failed relationship. He’d been struggling mightily with depression. After a tearful telephone call, Alex said he’d become so concerned that he
left work and drove up to Thomas’s house in New Hampshire where he found him on the floor of his bedroom unresponsive, a needle stuck in his arm and a vial of potassium chloride on the dresser. Quinn was without a pulse but still warm. Alex administered CPR but realized he was beyond resuscitation. As a neurologist, he knew. There were no doubts.

“So, don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you,” Alex cautioned his audience, “but I made a split-second decision to make something positive from Thomas’s own decision to end his life. You know that the Uroboros compound, Bliss, came from my work studying the brains of oxygen-deprived animals. Here was an opportunity to see if it also was made by humans at the point of death. I didn’t call nine one one. There was no point. I took Thomas’s needle and syringe out of his arm, I flushed it of chemicals in the bathroom sink, and I used it to extract a sample of his cerebrospinal fluid. There, I’ve said it.”

Jessie was crying and Erica too.

“But he was dead … right?” Davis asked, trembling.

“Irretrievably at the point of death, yes,” Alex answered.

“Then I don’t see that you did anything wrong,” Steve Mahady said emphatically. “If he was dead, he was dead.
You’re a doctor, you should know.”

“Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. Obviously, I couldn’t leave him there after the procedure I’d done on him, so I put Thomas in my car and left him in a place where he’d be found. And then I processed his precious fluid. I found the Uroboros compound. Without Thomas we wouldn’t have Bliss.”

Alex looked down guiltily and started to weep. Then Jessie rose and stood by his side. She kissed him and asked if he was okay. Then others rose, one by one, and told Alex they still loved and supported him. Joe just shrugged and muttered that he didn’t know the chap but it didn’t seem that big a deal, blokes kicked it all the time.

Alex thanked them and motioned for them to sit. “Please … there’s more to the story. You need to know that I personally sampled compound isolated directly from Thomas’s fluid. Jessie, you tried it too, though I spared you knowledge of its source. It was different from the Bliss you’ve all taken.”

“How?” Sam asked.

“It was much more potent. The experience was more intense, more significant. The chemical Bliss you’ve taken is amazing, but the natural compound is beyond it. It leaves you with no doubt, none whatsoever, that God is
there, waiting for us with our loved ones. I call it Ultimate Bliss. I’d like to find a way for you to try it. Only then will you fully appreciate the mission we’re on and only then will you fully appreciate that the end will completely justify our means.”

Sam understood what Alex was saying before it registered with the others. “Jesus, Alex,” he said softly. “That’s what your lab in the basement is for.”

Melissa Cornish raised her hand then stood up, stretching out her tall frame. Her lips were trembling and she spoke haltingly. “Ginny Tinley was my friend. I’ve thought … a lot … about what she did after she took Bliss … I’ve thought that way too. Whenever I take Bliss I see my mother. I was fifteen when cancer took her. I’ve missed her every day. I’m happiest when I see her on the other side of the river … My only question, Alex, is … will it hurt?”

“I’ll make it like falling asleep,” he promised her. “And when you wake up you’ll be on the other side in your mother’s arms forever.”

Thirty-five

30 DAYS

Avakian was trying to rub a spot of red sauce off his tie when Cyrus barged into his office. “Want half?” He pointed to his meatball sandwich.

“Weller’s disappeared,” Cyrus said.

“I didn’t know you were looking for him.”

“I’m trying to keep the heat on, keep the questions coming, get him to slip up. But no one’s seen him in his lab. He told the Neuro department at Children’s not to book any new consults. The mail’s piling up at his house in Cambridge, his girlfriend’s not around. He’s flown the coop.”

“Christ, Cy; aren’t we busy enough? There haven’t been any more drill bit murders, we’ve got nothing hard on the guy, and if you haven’t noticed, we’re up to our asses in alligators.” He pointed at the copy of
The Herald
on his desk.

The headline blared, BLISS-KRIEG: IT’S ALL OVER NEW ENGLAND, SPREADING AROUND THE COUNTRY.

Cyrus was well aware. Bliss was becoming a mini-epidemic. The drug was plentiful and getting cheaper. No one knew where it was coming from but it was everywhere. New England was the epicenter, with growing pockets in New York City, Newark, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles—and everywhere the drug went there were consequences: kids dropping out of college, people not showing up to work, sporadic suicides. Bliss rapidly had become one of those cultural memes that appears out of nowhere, hits the Internet and spreads like a brush fire. Talk shows were all over it, dinner tables, church groups, Sunday sermons.

“If you don’t think Weller is masterminding this whole thing, you were born yesterday, Pete,” Cyrus said.

Avakian took a huge bite of his sandwich and Cyrus had to wait for him to chew. “It’s not what I think … it’s what Stanley and the U.S. attorney think. First of all, we still have nothing beyond circumstantial pieces of evidence linking Weller to the Quinn murder and the other head drillings. And beyond the fact that Weller admitted to discovering the drug, what do we have there? We pretty much know Frank Sacco ripped him off. We know Frank got hit by Abruzzi, we know the Abruzzi crew got the chemist in Woburn to make more of it, and if this guy could make it, others
can too, I imagine. How’s this lead to Weller?”

Cyrus poked his own chest twice. “In my heart I know it does.”

“That’s generally not persuasive in the courts,” Avakian told him, chomping away.

Cyrus’s mobile rang. The caller ID startled him. Emily Frost. She’d never called him before. He sat down numbly at Avakian’s conference table.

“Emily, hi … how are you?”

“I’m fine Cyrus. You?”

“Okay …” Fear bubbled up. “Are you calling about Tara?”

“Oh, no! I’m not. How is she?”

He was able to breathe. “She’s okay. Nothing new.”

“Cyrus, I was calling about the website. Have you seen it?”

“What website?”

“The one that popped up this morning; everyone’s talking about it around the hospital. Alex Weller’s on it.”

As he listened to her, he got up and shooed Avakian out of his seat to access his computer. The URL was
innerpeacecrusade.net
and clicking on it launched a video with a smiling Alex Weller standing in front of a purple curtain.

“Okay, got it,” Cyrus said. “Let me take a look at this and call you back.”

“What’s this?” Avakian asked.

“In my heart, Pete, remember?” He poked his chest again for effect and turned up the volume.

“My name is Alex Weller. I’m a doctor and a scientist. I discovered a drug that’s become known as Bliss. I want to talk to you about it. And I want to talk to you about what I think it means for you, your friends, your family, for all your loved ones, alive and departed. We’re at the dawn of an amazing new era. Have you ever driven through a bank of fog, struggling to see where the road is taking you, and then the fog clears and you can see your path with great clarity? That’s what Bliss is doing. It lifts the fog of our ordinary life on earth and reveals a bright, amazing path to something much more important. A joyous life after death, a certain wonderful afterlife populated with dear ones who have made the passage and something more. God!”

Avakian was stooping over Cyrus, literally breathing on his neck. “Holy shit, Cy. You were right about this guy.”

In the video, Alex continued to speak for five more minutes, laying out his grand vision for a post-Bliss world, the treatise he’d presented to his followers. He
then concluded with the following. “So I’m asking you to join me in a new movement, the Inner Peace Crusade, to nudge mankind toward a happier, more meaningful and yes,
blissful
path, where we will stop forever the usual practice of making ourselves and our fellow man miserable: where we will stop conflict; stop war; stop suffering. Stop worrying and start living in the absolute knowledge that this life of ours is only a transition to something truly magical, truly wonderful—truly blissful. And today, the Inner Peace Crusade is beginning a countdown to a day I call Ultimate Bliss Day. My friends, let the countdown begin!”

The video went dark and a red-numbered digital display appeared below it: 29 DAYS, 22 HOURS, 18 MINUTES, 44 SECONDS …

They watched the seconds tick off then heard Stanley Minot running down the hall, calling their names.

Thirty-six

28 DAYS

The first recorded episode of someone receiving Bliss against his or her will occurred in Homestead, Florida. Two female factory workers at the Homestead Lamp and Shade Company were on lunch break at a picnic table behind the factory. It was a sunny day, the temperatures hovering around 80. Phyllis Stevenson smoothed suntan lotion on her neck and shoulders while her friend, Meg Street, sat across from her and opened a Tupperware box.

Meg pointed over Phyllis’s shoulder and grunted. “The Fred man is coming.”

Phyllis rolled her eyes.

Their foreman, Fred Farquar, waddled toward them, his fleshy pink arms poking out of a short-sleeved shirt.

“This ain’t the beach, girls,” he called out. He drew up behind Phyllis, stood over her and stared down her cleavage. “You missed a bit. Want me to help?”

“Get lost, Fred,” Meg said.

“I could get lost in between those,” he replied with a
leer.

Phyllis stood up and almost hit him on the chin with her head. “Leave me alone! For once and for all, just leave me alone!”

“I’ll leave you alone for twenty minutes, honey,” he shot back, startled by her vehemence. “Then get your butt back inside. Don’t forget to enjoy your lunch, now.” He ambled back to the factory, chuckling.

Phyllis sat back down again and pounded the table with her fist. “I hate that man. If it weren’t for this damn job I’d hit him with a sexual harassment claim. But you know how those things go: you make ’em from the outside looking in.”

“How ’bout we get even with him?” Meg said. “How ’bout we give that sonuvabitch an attitude adjustment?”

“You mean cut off his ding-dong?” Phyllis giggled.

“No, I’m serious. My brother-in-law’s been taking this new drug, Bliss. You heard about it, right? It’s had an amazing effect on him. He used to be a lying cheating scumbag, sort of like my Ronnie but worse, and he’s completely turned around since he begun taking it. He don’t curse no more, he don’t drink no more, and I even seen him at church. I say we slip some to the Fred man.”

“That’s got to be against the law,” Phyllis said.

“Maybe, but who’d know? We’d be careful.”

“What if it killed him?”

“It won’t kill him … at least I don’t think so. You sleep on it.”

The next morning, Meg brought in a stick of Bliss. With a nod from Phyllis, she sneaked into Fred’s office off the main shop floor and poured the contents into an open can of Pepsi on his desk, gave the can a little shake then casually walked out.

Throughout the morning the two women laughed nervously among themselves while they soldered lamp bases. An hour before lunch they heard shouting coming from Fred’s office and hurried over with other workers.

Fred’s boss, the general manager, was standing over him yelling for someone to call an ambulance. Fred was cross-legged on the floor yammering about his mother, Ruth.

“I think he’s having a stroke,” the boss declared.

Fred was carted off to the hospital for a battery of tests. Everything checked out and he returned to work the following Monday. Phyllis and Meg spent an anxious weekend more worried about being caught than anything else. First thing Monday morning, they knocked on his office door to see how he was doing. He looked up, happy to see them.

“Come in, ladies. Have a seat.”

They eyed each other. He’d never offered the slightest civility in the past.

“How you doin’, Fred? You gave us a scare,” Meg said.

“I’ve never been better. I feel terrific. I honestly do.”

“You do?” Phyllis wondered.

“I do. Something happened to me last week, I don’t have a clue what, but I believe I had a visitation by God Almighty. I feel cleansed and purified.”