Wormhole (24 page)

As the black sedan drove out through the gates of Fort Meade, Gertrude cast one more glance over her shoulder.

“Would you like to stop for something to eat or should I take you directly to the airport?”

Gertrude shook her head.

“Just take me to BWI.”

She hadn’t eaten today, but a wave of nausea wiped away all traces of hunger. All she wanted to do was get on her airplane, take an antidepressant, go to sleep, and hope she didn’t still hate herself when she awakened.

If there was a US airport that moved at a slower pace than Baltimore Washington International, Freddy Hagerman hadn’t been there. But what could you expect from a union town? Just getting to the security checkpoint was a nightmare that forced you to fight your way down an endless hallway barely wide enough for one person, just to turn around and join the end of the line of people coming back the other direction.

On his trip out, Freddy had fought that fight for thirty-seven minutes before finally making it to the TSA screeners. Then, just when he thought that hell was over, he’d been forced to wait at the damned machine while one TSA woman chatted to the one at the next machine about her cheating boyfriend and did Sheila think she should dump him or just beat the crap out of him. When Freddy decided he’d had enough and made that fact loudly
known, he’d been singled out for a detailed pat-down that caused him to miss his flight.

Now he was back, waiting in the run-down baggage claim area along with about three hundred other people, trying to decide if today was a baggage delivery holiday. After all, it was Wednesday and who really worked on Wednesday, right? It reminded him of a line in one of the
Lethal Weapon
movies: “They screw you at the drive-through.”

Maybe so, but BWI screws you coming and going.

Not that it really mattered, the way he’d been spinning his wheels trying to follow up on the Dr. Jennings tip. Three days in Manhattan trying to shake some information out of his UN sources had been a total waste of time. Combine that with everything he’d been able to dig up in DC and he had a bag full of nada.

At that moment, the warning horn blared three sharp bleats and the baggage conveyer rumbled into motion. Five minutes later, Freddy pulled his spotted vinyl suitcase out the sliding glass doors, turning right toward the bus that would take him to the rental car center. He’d taken a half-dozen steps when he spotted the government sedan. The driver got out of the car and moved to the trunk to help a slender, dark-haired woman lift her computer case from the trunk.

Freddy stopped. Where had he seen her? He never forgot a face, but the fact that he was having difficulty remembering where he’d seen this one meant he’d only seen it in passing. Her driver was clearly some sort of federal agent. The way his jacket bunched along his left side as he hefted her bag meant he was packing more than her valise.

Setting the wheeled case on the sidewalk, the agent gave a curt nod, got back in the car, and pulled out into traffic. As Freddy redirected his attention to the woman, now pulling the lavender
case through the same sliding glass doors Freddy had just exited, it came to him. Her hair, pulled back so tightly she’d never need a face lift, triggered his memory. She was the psychiatrist in the
Newsweek
article about the three missing high school kids from Los Alamos. Freddy had read the piece several months ago, while he was working on the Henderson House story.

So why was a small-town psychiatrist from Los Alamos being escorted around the DC area by the feds? She hadn’t looked too happy about it either. Come to think of it, why had they dropped her off at the baggage claim area instead of departures?

Fifty yards down the street, the rental car bus pulled away from the curb. Damn. He’d stood around so long trying to figure out where he’d seen the woman, he’d missed the bus. Now he’d have to wait for the next one and, this being BWI, that meant he’d be cooling his heels for another half hour.

Glancing back at baggage claim, Freddy spotted the psychiatrist standing in a line at the lost baggage counter. Well, that explained the drop-off location.

“Hey, buddy!” Freddy’s gaze shifted to the speaker. A fat white guy with a rumpled suit and two suitcases glared at him. “You gonna stand there blocking the sidewalk all day or you gonna move?”

Freddy returned the glare, but stepped back and let the wide load pass without comment.

Once again Freddy shifted his gaze back to the woman. She was clearly upset and Freddy didn’t think it had anything to do with her lost luggage. The McFarland girl had been her patient. And according to the news coverage of the raid on the Ripper’s Bolivian hideout, she and her two high school friends had died during that raid, along with fourteen special ops soldiers. That would certainly account for the anguish he read on the psychiatrist’s face.

But it didn’t account for her being here with federal agents, a dozen miles from NSA headquarters. Why would the feds want to talk to McFarland’s psychiatrist if she really was dead? The parents, maybe. Psychiatrist? He wasn’t buying it.

Standing on the sidewalk on what was destined to be Baltimore’s first hot day of the year, Freddy felt a hot lead tug at him, the first such feeling he’d had since his meeting with that NSA spook, Jennings. Maybe it wasn’t the same story, but it grabbed his attention.

Reaching for his cell phone, Freddy speed-dialed his admin assistant.

“It’s me. Listen, Lisa. Change of plan. Book me on the first available flight from BWI to Albuquerque. Yeah. Rental car in Albuquerque, hotel room in Los Alamos. I’m not sure how long. Better make it for a week.”

Ending the call, Freddy slid his iPhone back in his pocket and grabbed his bag. Feeling a scowl tug at the corners of his mouth, Freddy trundled back toward ticketing. The military had an acronym for this. BOHICA: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. It looked as if BWI was going to get one more go at him today after all.

The room held a faintly acrid scent, a hint of recently dried adhesive plus something else. Heather turned her head so she could see her vital signs on the monitor, memorizing them at a glance. The drugs were affecting her thought processes, but before she did something about that she needed to know what her drugged readings looked like so she could keep those in the same range.

The body’s autonomic nervous system was an amazing thing. Without a single conscious thought it kept her heart beating, lungs breathing, and blood circulating, adjusted bodily cooling, digested food, and on and on. These things continued whether she was sleeping or awake. One of the many advantages she, Mark, and Jen enjoyed was the ability to enforce a high degree of control over these processes.

Heather shifted her attention to the haze that affected her thinking. This wasn’t the high-powered tranquilizer they’d stuck
in her thigh in Bolivia. Neither was it Thorazine or any of the other phenothiazine-derivative antipsychotic meds Dr. Sigmund had tried on her back in Los Alamos. Taking a deep breath, Heather executed Mark’s meditation trick, pulling forth the perfect memory of how it felt to be clearheaded and alert.

Within Heather’s brain, underutilized neurons compensated for her drugged state, remapping her neural net to achieve the desired mental acuity. Another glance at the monitor rewarded her with the knowledge that no one would detect the fact she’d just rendered the drugs ineffective.

Once again Heather turned her thoughts to the smells that hung on the air. Remodeling smells. The spot where white padded walls butted up against the ceiling’s acoustic tiles still showed evidence of recent installation. A stainless steel toilet and sink occupied the center of the rear wall and a rudimentary shower drained into the left rear corner. Those, her bed, with its scratched frame and railing, and the small video camera in the upper right front were the room’s only decorations that weren’t freshly installed.

Heather brought up the room dimensions, forming a 3-D model in her head. She rotated it, stripped away the asylum padding from the walls. Removed the acoustic tiles from the ceiling. Replaced the front wall and door with tempered steel bars, an electronically controlled sliding steel gate, and a chuck hole for pushing in meals.

This wasn’t Henderson House, and it wasn’t a psychiatric facility. It was a recently converted solitary confinement cell in a supermax detention facility.

So why had the government gone to all this effort to throw together this fake? Obviously, Dr. Sigmund had been flown in to establish early credibility, something the drugs were intended to augment. They’d pulled Heather’s records, identified a mental weakness, and now they were determined to exploit it.

There was a certain irony to it. By trying to exploit her weakness, her captors had provided her with an advantage she could play to. She felt the leather cuffs binding her hands and feet to the bed, flexed her muscles just enough to build an estimate of their tensile strength. Breaking free from her bonds wouldn’t be a problem, but she wasn’t going to do that while they were watching her with that camera. Before she made her break for freedom, she had a lot to learn about the routine, this facility, and the people behind this operation.

The thought of Mark and Jennifer worried her, but she knew their capabilities and training. The best way she could help them was to handle her own situation.

A distant sound caught her attention, the scuffing of two pairs of rubber-soled shoes on concrete. The noise had a reverb echo that indicated a long hallway, an impression that was reinforced by the amount of time the footsteps took to reach her door.

With an electric click, the door opened to admit two men in medical scrubs, a tall, blue-eyed blond wearing a stethoscope around his neck and a short bald man holding an Apple iPad. The one with the stethoscope stepped up beside her bed.

“Hello, Heather. My name is Dr. Jacobs. This is my physician’s assistant, Frank Volker. It’s good to see you decided to come back to us.”

Heather let a slight slur creep into her voice. “Did I?”

Jacobs smiled. “Yes, and you should be proud of that accomplishment. Most people in your condition never find their way back.”

Heather glanced down at her hands. “Why am I tied down?”

Jacobs patted her right hand, giving it a slight squeeze. “It’s for your own protection, at least until we’ve formed an understanding of just where you’re at.”

“For my protection?”

Jacobs sat down in the chair next to her bed. “Just until we’re sure you’re stable, that you’re not going to suffer an immediate relapse. It’s why we’re keeping you mildly sedated. Do you remember anything at all about your stay here?”

Volker tapped away on the iPad’s touch screen.

Heather frowned. “I remember Bolivia.”

“I’m not talking about your alternate reality right now. I’m talking about the months you’ve been in this facility.”

“The first time I ever saw this place was when I woke up to see Dr. Sigmund standing over me. Like I told her, I want to see my mom and dad.”

A serious expression settled on Dr. Jacobs’s face. “Believe me. I want that for you too. We all do. But you’ve been through a hell of a mental trauma these last few months. And, as hard as it is for you to understand why, we’re going to go slow and careful about reintroducing you to the real world. For now that means no TV, no radio, no Internet, and unfortunately, no friends or family.”

Heather squeezed her eyes shut. “So I’m just supposed to lie here, drugged and chained to the bed, and trust you?”

“I didn’t say this was going to be easy.”

A bitter laugh escaped Heather’s lips.

“Tell you what,” Dr. Jacobs continued. “I’ll get you out of these restraints as soon as we finish a battery of tests. Then, if you work with me and learn to recognize the difference between what’s real and what’s not, then we’ll get your parents out here to California for a visit. But Heather, you’re going to have to trust me.”

Dr. Jacobs rose to his feet, patted her hand again, and turned toward the door. Volker switched off his iPad and followed.

“Can I at least go to the bathroom?”

“I’ll have a nurse bring a bedpan.”