The Devil's Dream: Book One (6 page)

"He wants to write
another book." Allison said.

"Well, I'm not
privy to the future, all I know is what Mr. Dillan asked me to
deliver to you. Does the agreement sound acceptable?"

"To me? No. Not at
all. I'll need to run it up the ladder though and see what others
think."

"Certainly,
certainly. Well, feel free to call me back whenever you have the
details sorted out. Take care, Agent Moore."

Then the prick was off
the line just as Dillan had been, leaving Allison still holding her
own phone to her face.

Jesus
Christ, was this guy going to be worth it?

Before she could even
consider answering the thought, someone knocked on her door. She
placed the phone down, looking up to see Dr. Riley. He'd left with
her last night at around midnight and had walked in with her this
morning around six. The forty-hour work week was over for Dr. Riley,
at least until they caught Brand. She thought Riley understood he
needed to come up with some reasons for how Brand walked away from
The Wall or he would be out of a job soon.

She waved the doctor
inside.

"How are you?"

"I'm well,"
he said, sitting in a chair across from her desk.

"What can I help
you with? Got any news?"

"Well, we haven't
unmapped everything. To be honest, we haven't unmapped that much over
the past day. But if you think about it, the man was in there for ten
years, and looking at it all now, apparently his brain had virtually
become one with the system. We never even considered that a
possibility, and we're checking the other two inmates now. So far
they're showing up nothing. You mind if I pull out my computer?"

"Of course not."

Dr. Riley opened his
bag and lifted the laptop from it, placing it on the desk so that
they both could see it. It fired up immediately to a computerized
image of a man lying in one of the Silos.

"Is that him?"

"No, no. This is
just a mock-up of what happened. It's fairly accurate though. Seeing
this through a visual is much better than me trying to tell you what
happened."

"Okay, let's see
it," Allison said.

The man in the image
was floating, a pale gas circling him, exactly the same as the men
outside.

"Now, this is what
the human eye sees if it's looking at the Silos. But this," he
pressed a button on the computer, "is what is actually
happening."

Tiny wires grew out of
the egg's casing. They extended inside, about ten in all, fitting
into the man's nose, his mouth, his ears, trying to squirm their way
into the holes on his head.

"That gas, it's
used as a preserver, but it also contains electronic pulses that
you're seeing as wires here. The pulses travel through the gas,
always one way, and it allows us to keep the prisoner's brain from
waking up. We can slow the brain down if we need; we can speed it up,
actually stimulate it. The brain may try to tell the muscles to move
from time to time, not out of any action from the individual, but
from an instinctual need to move when the muscles have been dormant
for too long. Instead, the brain will make contact with one of the
electrical pulses and the signal to the muscles is discarded. You
see? We are actively keeping the brain from dying and the body from
living with the gas and the pulses."

Allison nodded. "All
you're going to see when you look at it is the gas though?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"And the street is
supposed to be one way."

"That's the way
this was theorized. We can see inside their head if we need, although
we rarely need to. In the beginning, I used to look a lot at Brand as
he was so different from the rest and I was curious what went on up
there. As time progressed though, our technology adapted and his mind
slowed down in its ability to think and dream. Or that's what I
thought was happening at the time. We simply never imagined that
the...pulses, I guess, could go both ways. Now watch."

He pressed another
button.

The lines that had
moved inside the man's face were orange and they remained. However,
coming back out were purple tendrils, growing from the man's eyes,
ears, mouth, and nose. Some even stretched out of the pores on his
face. They doubled, then tripled, the amount of chords that had
entered him. Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty tendrils coming out of the
man's face. They grew around his body, encircling it in a cocoon
before firing off into the egg itself. Attaching themselves to the
glass.

"What was that?"

"That was, I
believe, the course of three to four years of work where Brand sent
his own electric pulses, actually built out pathways from his head
that traveled along the gas just as we had designed ours to do. I
don't know if he learned it from us, by somehow feeling the pulses we
sent at him, or if he did it on his own. Regardless, we never saw it
happening." Dr. Riley leaned back in his chair and stared at the
screen.

"Yeah, doc, but
what do those pulses do? The one's he is shooting out from his face,
how do they matter?"

"I think they
allowed him to hack the entire system. It took him five years, but
with constant two way communication with his mind—what we thought
had slowed down—he was able to compromise everything and in the end
let himself out."

Allison looked at the
tiny lines hanging in the Silo. Brand mapped the entire system. He
knew it well enough to take control, to use it for himself.

"In all of that,
did we get any more insight into his mind? Since he knew us in and
out."

"Yeah, of course
our pulses alone do that—although not as well as we'd like
apparently—but the access he gained gave
us
access to his thoughts. The problem is we don't understand how to
read them yet and that could take some time."

"You need help?"
Allison asked.

"The F.B.I. have
brain surgeons and computer mathematicians?"

"We can get you
whatever you need. Make a list."

* * *

Allison was sure police
work was happening somewhere. Somewhere outside of her office,
through the glass doors and outside of this building, police were
trying to catch Matthew Brand. Allison was a glorified press agent at
this point. She was making calls on Jeffrey Dillan's behalf, to get
him the best deal she could. There were reports to look at, maps to
see, and other
real
calls to make, but instead she dialed up Art's number to see how much
information she could give this asshole.

"Hello," he
said, sounding like his mouth was full of food.

"I talked to your
writer pal. Then I talked to his lawyer. He's a real swell guy."

"Told you. What
did his lawyer say?"

"That Mr. Dillan
would be on vacation for the foreseeable future and that we should
contact him, the lawyer, with our answer, not Dillan. He said if we
share our day to day case information with Dillan, then he'll work
with us on the criminal profile. He'll share his papers, which Dillan
said had been thrown out, and his knowledge."

"Seriously?"
Art hadn't stopped eating just because Allison was on the phone.

"Yeah. That's his
deal."

She listened to him
chewing while he thought.

"You give him
stuff when he asks for it. Not before. And you never give him
everything. Use your discretion."

"Lawyer said he's
not coming back from vacation. He's going to be on some island
accepting my collect calls."

"Obviously not
ideal, but there isn't much we can do. If we told him no, we'd limit
ourselves a lot and that could lead to unnecessary deaths. Could also
lead to press leaks that we denied help that in turn could lead to my
job. We have to work with him, just make sure you are in control of
this relationship."

"Yes, sir. I'll
call his lawyer here in a minute although I doubt he'll answer this
late, but we should be in contact by tomorrow."

"Fine. Anything
else?" Art asked.

"You were on this
before? On the Brand case the first time?"

"Yeah, more or
less a foot soldier."

"Were you there at
the end, when they caught him?"

"I was," Art
said.

"We're not going
to catch him like that again, huh?"

Art gave out a low
chuckle. "Malone was the luckiest son of a bitch to ever live.
The guy caught Brand and then retired to acclaim from everyone. Yeah,
I doubt anything like that is going to happen this time. If it does,
then I'll go on record as saying Brand's intelligence is simply
overrated. That he might actually have some mild retardation. We're
both going to have to put more work in than Malone did, I'm sure of
that."

Allison was smiling,
listening to her superior talk about someone who could be looked at
as a legend or as a joke, depending on how much you knew about the
original Brand case.

"Just one more
thing, sir. Did you see him when you caught him?"

"Yeah." The
laughter disappeared from Art's voice.

"What did he look
like?"

"Insane. He looked
insane."

Despite the climate
controlled storage units, Jeffrey was sweating. Had been sweating for
the past ten hours. A gallon jug full of water sat on the flimsy
table he had his chair pulled up to. This was his second session, the
first ending the day before at ten p.m., and this one beginning
twelve hours later. He was about half through his files, reading
every single word he wrote down all those years ago. He listened to
tapes, of the victims, of the cops that had chased Brand, of the
officers testifying in court who were accused of murdering Hilman.
Jeffrey was building up the story again, building up all the layers
that had allowed him to write his novel, remembering what each person
felt and the rage that had fueled the country back then.

Jeffrey was also
remembering what he hadn't known he could forget, the feelings Brand
inspired. One could not read his story, understand his passion, and
simply discard it as a disturbed individual. Jeffrey had loved a part
of Brand back then, had understood him perhaps as well as any human
could and with that understanding came a degree of caring.

With all of this, he
would be able to track down Matthew Brand.

The phone on the desk
rang and he looked down, pulling out of the daydreams consuming him.
His lawyer's face showed on the screen.

"Frank. What's
going on?"

"We got good news,
buddy. The F.B.I. says it's a go. Says they'll feed you information
if you answer their questions and tell them what you think. Do we
have a yes?"

Jeffrey looked out at
the open boxes before him. Plastic bins containing a hundred lives,
people that somehow opened up to a Columbia educated journalist who
wasn't even that nice of a guy. People who told their stories and all
of them centering around one murderer. That's what the F.B.I. wanted
from him, all these people's lives, the parts that he had not put in
the book. Those lives would give him the ability to see around
corners and they wanted to do that. Jeffrey wanted to write down
everything the F.B.I. knew and begin filling up another room like
this one.

That's what he was
trading. His knowledge of Matthew Brand for a book, and in doing
that, he would shorten the length of time he would have to gather new
information. He could, literally, give them four states right now
where Brand might be heading, and actually narrow that down to one if
he wanted. Then what? Then he sends the cops and every F.B.I. agent
in the country down to Florida and this thing ends much, much quicker
than he wanted. He needed time; he needed it to stretch out; he
needed Brand to get to work. If they caught him in the next week,
there would be no book. There would be no other room for more legal
pads and recordings.

"Jeffrey?"
Frank asked.

"I'm here, just a
sec."

All he needed to do was
keep his mouth shut. He could give them access to all of this. They
could bring four people in here and have everything read in two days
and still not really know what it all meant. They hadn't lived it,
and it was four people with four separate amounts of information, not
all of it combined to one person. They could create a story just like
he had but they wouldn't be able to see around the corners. He would
be on his vacation and they could call all they wanted, ask him
questions about what they found, and he'd answer them. As best he
could, obviously, and the best he could do would be to not let them
simply track down Brand.

More than his own
selfish reasons though, what sitting here and reading all day had
reminded him, was that he might owe Brand more than that. Brand had
given him a life that ten books might not have done. An argument
could be made that Jeffrey owed Brand a part of all his wealth, and
to simply give him up—did Brand deserve better than that?

"Tell them I'm
in," he said.

"Sounds good. Let
me know if you have any more problems with them, okay?"

"Will do, Frank.
Thanks."

Jeffrey hung up the
phone. He would be done in here by tomorrow night. Then he would buy
his ticket to Florida. They really didn't even need to read all this
stuff to understand what was happening here. Jeffrey had found a
tidbit in the boxes that confirmed it, but it wasn't actually
necessary. Brand loved to talk back then, to tell the world what he
was doing. He felt the cops had flaunted their innocence at trial and
he would flaunt his guilt just as much as he could. He met a guy in a
bar one night that never went to the police, that had kept quiet
until Jeffrey showed up asking his questions. The man was some kind
of loon anarchist, didn't believe the police were worth much, and so
hadn't volunteered them any information. Or he had been lying, which
was why Jeffrey never put what he said in the book.