Gil took two steps forward, then stopped, his knees threatening to give way beneath him. The sound of Anna’s low wail and Linda’s sobs turned him around. There on the leather couch the two women clung together, their heads pressed into each other’s shoulders. Beside them, Fred stood staring at the door, hands clenched so firmly at his sides that the veins bulged in his arms. And as Gil watched rage and frustration chain his best friend in place, he felt his whole world crumble around him.
The dream was an old one; at least it had that old, worn-out-shoe feel to it, easy to slide into, but not particularly comfortable once you were inside. It unspooled in Heather’s drug-induced sleep, her perfect memory somehow warped and amplified until each heartbeat sounded like the pounding of a bass drum.
In the small gym was a mirrored wall. Along that wall ran a dancer’s balance rail. Across the room was a weight rack, Mark handcuffed to it.
Four brutes held her pinned to the floor, legs spread, Don Espeñosa kneeling between them, fumbling with his belt, button, and zipper, ripping open her blouse, grabbing her breasts. He was taunting Mark. A husky laugh escaped the drug lord’s lips as he turned his attention back to his pecker.
KATHOOM.
She could feel Mark’s heart hammer his chest clear across the room.
KATHOOM.
How could these men fail to hear it? Heather had seen this in her vision, the inevitable consequence of spitting in Espeñosa’s face. She’d had other options, but none quite as exciting or satisfying as this one. So she’d spit a wad between the drug lord’s eyes and let the dominoes topple one onto the next.
Then Mark was among them, crushing, ripping, tearing, their screams drowned in the bloody downpour. But Mark hadn’t killed them. Heather had. And God help her, she’d enjoyed it.
The dream shifted. Glass exploded into the comm center as Heather pressed the laptop’s gunmetal gray ENTER key, sending a rack of 2,000-pound bombs raining down on the American SEAL team. Blood and fire. Again she’d chosen the path.
Jack’s plan had called for them to divert the SEAL team, then move through the same secret tunnel he and Janet had taken, setting off the explosives that would turn the Frazier compound into an inferno, leaving little for the SEAL team to investigate. But Heather had overridden that plan, opting instead for the path of death and destruction. She’d known the risk. She’d known she’d be killing Americans.
She felt herself lifted, flung into the air, wrapped in sticky goo that ensnared her body so completely she never hit the ground. Stunned, Heather hung in the rapidly solidifying web until this drug-induced fog replaced the sharp pain of the tranq dart in her thigh.
“Doctor. She’s coming around.”
The voice wormed its way through the mist. Heather opened her eyes, blinking at the brilliant white surrounding her. She was strapped to a bed in some sort of hospital room. Check that. Her surroundings included some hospital room characteristics. An IV bag hung from a steel stand, dripping its contents into the clear plastic tube connected to the needle in her arm. A portable monitor displayed her vital signs. But there the similarities stopped. This room was soft white with padded walls and white rubber flooring.
Heather glanced at the nurse, a plain blonde woman, slightly overweight, with a white nurse’s uniform, even an old-fashioned white nurse’s hat. The doctor stepped around the nurse and into Heather’s field of view. That face, framed by dark hair, pulled back in a severe knot.
Heather’s breath caught in her throat. What the hell was Dr. Gertrude Sigmund doing here? Wherever here was.
The psychiatrist smiled down at her, that familiar, concerned smile that always preceded a prescription change to a more powerful antipsychotic drug.
“Hello, Heather. Good to see you’ve returned to us. How’re you feeling?”
Heather fought to clear her head, but the fog refused to lift. Her glance shifted to the plastic IV bag. The white tape that normally held an identifying label was blank.
“What’s that?” Heather’s words came out slightly slurred.
Once again Dr. Sigmund smiled. “Don’t worry about that right now. The important thing is that you are lucid.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re a very fortunate young lady. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, you’re a patient in the finest facility of its type in North America. The Henderson Foundation Psychiatric Research Hospital.”
“Henderson House?” A wave of dread swirled her mental fog.
Dr. Sigmund laughed, a soft chuckle, meant to be reassuring, that failed to produce the desired effect. “That name has suffered a bit of bad press over the past few months, hasn’t it? Let me put your mind at ease. The psychiatric wing is completely separate from the experimental facility that housed Dr. Frell’s research, although it shares the same grounds. It’s sad that a man like Frell could damage this fine institution’s reputation.”
Heather closed her eyes, trying to bring the facts into focus. “Why am I here? Where are Mark and Jennifer?”
Dr. Sigmund pulled up a chair and sat down beside Heather’s bed. She reached out to pat the back of Heather’s right hand, just below the leather cuff that secured it to the stainless steel rail.
“Heather. You’ve experienced a severe psychotic episode, brought on by the fact that you stopped taking your medication. For the last several weeks, you’ve been locked deep in one of your trances. Until you were transferred here, I was beginning to think we’d lost you forever. As for your two friends, they’re still back in Los Alamos, of course, finishing out the school year. I hear Marcus is quite the basketball star.”
Lies. But how could Dr. Sigmund be involved in all of this? It didn’t make sense.
“But Mark was banned from sports. And what about Bolivia?”
“Well, as for Mark’s suspension, the local communities of Los Alamos and White Rock raised such a fuss the school board ended up rescinding the school activities ban for all three of you.”
“Prove it to me. I want to see my parents. I want to see Mark and Jen.”
Dr. Sigmund pursed her thin lips. “I’ll discuss it with your doctors, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up, at least not right away. Any little variation in your treatment could send you right back into deep psychosis and, next time, we might not get you back.”
“My doctors? Aren’t you my doctor?”
That laugh again. “Me? Thank you for thinking of me in that light, but you’re now under the care of some of the world’s finest mental health researchers. They only flew me out here so that you’d see a familiar face welcoming you back to reality. Someone to ease the stress. Now that I’ve accomplished that task, I’ll be returning to my Los Alamos practice.”
“But...”
Dr. Sigmund rose to her feet. “But nothing. You need to rest and focus on getting better. Trust me. Trust your doctors. They really are the very best.”
Dr. Sigmund paused at the door, her gaze lingering on Heather’s prone form. For a moment Heather thought she would speak again. Then the psychiatrist turned and walked out of the room.
As the door closed behind her, Heather heard the heavy electric lock snap into place.
The two federal agents who met Gertrude at the next door led her down a long hallway and then a shorter one on the right, stopping to punch an illuminated elevator call button. It turned red, but she noticed the lack of floor indicator lights. If this whole episode hadn’t been so surreal, she might have thought that odd.
As the elevator doors whisked open, the taller of the two men, the one who’d introduced himself as agent Sampson, stepped in beside her, pressing the topmost of five unmarked buttons. The doors closed and the elevator accelerated upward. When it stopped, the doors remained closed.
Agent Sampson extended his hand. “Dr. Sigmund. You’ve done your country a great service.”
“Have I?”
“And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you not to mention your visit here, subject to severe
punishments specified under the Patriot Act.”
Gertrude ignored the hand and Agent Sampson withdrew it.
“May I go now?”
He pressed the middle button and the door slid open. Walking her to the guard desk, Agent Sampson waited as she turned in her temporary security badge and signed out.
As Gertrude stepped out of the building into the underground parking garage, she let her gaze wander to the waiting government sedan. Agent Sampson let her slide into the backseat and closed the door, slapping the roof to signal the driver he was clear to go.
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.
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