0% FEAR FACTOR—SERUM EFFECTIVE
The last photo was a picture of her fighting off Josh and his thugs. It had obviously been taken through the window of Sam’s dorm room. There was a handwritten subtitle at the bottom:
SUBJECT AT SEVENTEEN YEARS, SIX MONTHS, TEN DAYS
“My source has been sending me the additions to the file for seventeen years,” Oliver said. “Your whole life.”
Gaia turned back to the group photo with her father. “What is this?” she murmured, mostly to herself.
Oliver stared at the binder. “This …,” he uttered, staring regretfully at the binder. “This is what your father has done to you.”
Small Tears
HE WAS STILL SO GODDAMN SEXY.
Even after everything they’d been through, after all of it was over and done with, Heather still found herself hesitating at the door to MacGregor’s class and watching Ed Fargo through the window.
Apparently they’d both arrived at school a full fifteen minutes before first period.
She traced the lines of his shadowed profile set against the shaft of sunlight pouring through the classroom window. There was still something about the contrast of his chin and his scruffy dark brown hair … all the force of a man, mixed with the freedom of a teenage boy….
Wait a second.
Heather leaned closer to the door’s window to confirm what she thought she saw. And yes, she was right. That was a tear streaming slowly from his left eye as he stared blankly out the window. She snapped out of her pointless, voyeuristic gaze and stepped into the otherwise empty classroom.
“Ed?” she whispered gently. “Are you okay?”
Ed jumped. He threw her a crooked fake smile. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Heather answered, dragging another chair next to his and leaning toward him. She examined his face further in the awkward silence. She could think of no tactful way to ask the question, so she just came out with it. “Were you crying?”
“No,” Ed replied quickly. He twisted his head back toward the window.
Heather knew why there was so much pain in his eyes. She was just avoiding the obvious. Gaia Moore. Only Gaia could elicit that kind of raw emotion from Ed at this point, and that fact left Heather with a muddle of conflicting thoughts too complicated to dissect.
She knew that Gaia was knee-deep in some kind of crisis, although she didn’t totally understand the situation. Something to do with Gaia’s father and Sam. That was about as much as she knew. But nonetheless, just the day before, Heather had decided to help Gaia with her crisis—to reach out to her in spite of all the prior hatred.
Someone was apparently stalking Gaia, and as insane as it might have been, Heather had agreed to help her carry out a little antistalker plan. Heather, along with all of her friends, had actually found the courage to dress up like Gaia Moore and scurry out into the street just to confuse whoever was watching her, baiting him into a full-blown wild-goose chase. They’d all pretty much done it just as a lark, but deep down Heather knew better than that. Nothing involving Gaia was ever just a lark. Some part of Heather had known that it was probably the bravest, most heroic thing she had ever done. And for a girl who was supposedly her sworn enemy, no less.
Heather still wasn’t totally sure why she’d done it. Maybe it was just for Ed’s sake, because he’d asked her to help, because she felt so guilty for being such a selfish bitch to him all these months. But she liked to believe that it was something nobler. She’d sworn to herself and to Ed that she was turning over a new leaf, becoming a far less selfish person from now on. And she’d been reveling in the fact that her new leaf was more than just another one of her empty self-help resolutions. This time she’d actually backed it up with some legitimate action. Helping Gaia was the first thing Heather had done in months that had made her feel truly unselfish. Truth be told, she’d been glowing with pride about it for the rest of last night.
But there was no point in celebrating her new-found altruism if her little maneuver hadn’t in fact helped Gaia. And judging from the look on Ed’s face, it seemed that might be the case. Much to Heather’s amazement, she was genuinely worried as well.
“What happened?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Ed muttered.
“Last night” she pressed. “What happened last night?”
Ed turned back to Heather, offering her some fleeting eye contact, and then he began to unpack for class. “I have no idea,” he said, void of any emotion.
“What do you mean …?” She darted her eyes back toward the door and lowered her voice. “What do you mean, you have no idea? What happened with Gaia?”
“I have no idea,” Ed repeated.
Silence again. Ed’s sudden hostility felt like a sucker punch right to the face, and Heather wasn’t sure how to react. She watched him fiddle with his bag, taking out a different pen and flipping blindly through his copy of Heart of Darkness, the book they were currently reading in MacGregor’s class. Small tears streamed from his eyes again, even though his face revealed no feeling.
“You are crying,” she confirmed. “Jesus, what’s going on? You have to tell me.”
“There’s nothing going on,” he insisted, wiping the tears from his cheeks again as if they weren’t there. But clearly something was either very wrong or else Ed was just sickeningly in love with Gaia Moore. Most likely it was both.
Heather’s usual resentment was still too dampened to really erupt. “Look,” she said, checking the doorway of the classroom again, “I put my neck out for her, Ed. The least you can do is tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Where is she now?”
“I don’t know!” Ed snapped, finally looking her in the eye and giving her a glimpse of just how much pain he’d been working so hard to mask. “I don’t know where she is. I haven’t heard from her since yesterday. I don’t know….”
Heather stared at him. She loved him more than ever for those few short seconds. And then she was unimaginably jealous of Gaia for the next few. Gaia didn’t deserve to be loved this much. What had she done to deserve this kind of love? But then again … what had Heather done to deserve that kind of love? Nothing. Nothing at all.
“I’m sure she’s all right” Heather heard herself say as she placed her hand tentatively on Ed’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ed replied automatically. He shifted his shoulder almost imperceptibly, moving it just far enough to avoid Heather’s touch without being obvious. Heather felt a gaping hole open up in her stomach.
“I—I just …,” Ed stammered. “I can’t … I gotta go,” he finished, shoving his stuff back into his bag and picking up his crutches. “Tell MacGregor I got sick, okay?” He hobbled by Heather and headed for the door.
“Ed,” she called to him as he opened the door. “Really. You know you don’t have to worry about her.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he muttered, letting the door swing closed behind him.
“I’m sure Gaia will be fine,” she said. But she was speaking to an empty classroom. “I, on the other hand …”
There was no need to finish her sentence. No one was listening.
Government Guinea Pig
“THEY CALLED IT PROJECT INTREPID” Oliver said, sifting through the thick binder’s pages. “They knew a lot more about genetics and molecular biology than they were letting on in 1983—”
“I don’t want a history lesson,” Gaia stated. “Just tell me what this all means.”
“This isn’t just history,” Oliver said. “This is your history” He glanced at her to be sure she wanted to hear more. She confirmed with her silence.
“They were certain a war with Russia was just around the corner,” he went on. “And they wanted to arm the American soldiers with every possible advantage. It didn’t take a genius to pinpoint the greatest disadvantage for any soldier: fear. A good soldier was a br
ave soldier—a man who’d cross enemy lines and sacrifice his life without an ounce of hesitation. Without a second thought. Excuse me, I should have said a man or a woman.”
Gaia was both sickened and mesmerized. Every word out of her uncle’s mouth made her more ill and somehow colder, as if she were being slowly dipped in ice water. But she was dying to hear more.
“I’ll get to the point,” Oliver said quietly. He’d obviously noticed the pain he was causing her. “The point is, the government had been studying fear from a biological standpoint for years, and by ’83 they’d finally mastered the biochemical process. So much so that they were confident they could reverse it. So they engineered a serum—a serum that would, in effect, block the chemical reactions that cause fear. And it worked, Gaia. It worked on rats, and it worked on chimpanzees. It was time to test a human subject.”
Oliver flipped back to the first photo he’d shown Gaia. The picture of her father and those men in white coats . And that small baby.
“Tom Moore had been selected to assist the scientists on Project Intrepid,” he said, “and Tom Moore had just had a daughter. The perfect human subject …”
Gaia’s hand latched onto the binder and slammed it closed. It was a reflex that surprised her almost as much as it seemed to surprise her uncle. “That’s enough,” she announced, backing away from the desk coldly. “This is all bull. You’ve put this whole thing together. My father wouldn’t have done this, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have lied about it.”
Gaia wanted to believe her own words. She said them as if she believed them, as if she was sure of them. But the fact was, she didn’t trust her father any more than she did her uncle at this point.
“Now, you listen to me,” Oliver said, rising out of his chair and approaching her with determination. “You wanted the truth, so I’m giving it to you. These are the facts: your fearlessness is not genetic. That is a lie your father told you as a child. Your fearlessness is chemical, injected into you at birth before you could have any say in the matter. The truth is your father offered you up as a government guinea pig with no regard for your feelings or your safety. He stole your humanity before your life had even started. He turned his own baby daughter into an experiment.”
Gaia was unable to talk back. Now was the time to lash out, to hurl a long list of expletives and accusations at her uncle. To defend her father’s honor and recount his twelve years of perfect parenting before everything had gone so miserably wrong. But all she could muster was some halfhearted verbal resistance.
“That could be any baby in that picture,” she said “You could have doctored that picture with my father’s face.”
“I could have, but I didn’t.” He moved a step closer. “And you know I’m telling you the truth. I can see it in your eyes. You’re starting to understand what he’s done to you. All those years of training you for battle. All those years of programming your mind and your body … and then he leaves you to fend for yourself at age twelve? He’s testing you, Gaia. They’re still testing you, do you understand that? He’s not interested in how his daughter is doing. They just want to see how their fearless specimen will react to ‘adverse stimuli.’ It’s disgusting. It’s dehumanizing.”
Gaia wanted to hide from her uncle’s diatribe and avoid his penetrating stare. She wanted to climb under the huge mahogany desk. Her perfect childhood memories were her only remaining solace. She’d turned to those glorified memories of her mother and father time and again whenever things got unbearably dark or too existential. The distant past was really the only thing in her life that had stayed intact. And now it seemed that, too, had been slated for immediate demolition. But it all made sense. Gaia couldn’t deny that. Every word out of his mouth rang true. And here were the pictures to prove it.
“You could have had a normal life,” Oliver stated coldly. “He stole that life away from you. And that’s why I’ve brought you here….” Finally his dark expression began to ease up. The veil of menace in his eyes peeled away. “To give it back.”
Gaia stared blankly at her uncle. She could muster nothing other than puzzlement at this point. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about an antidote,” he replied. Suddenly his mouth spread into a wide grin. He smiled at her like a proud father holding out the largest of all her Christmas presents. “That’s why you’re here, Gaia. That’s why I’ve been trying to steal you away from Tom all this time. I thought they’d have to administer it in Germany, but they’ve agreed to come here.”
“Who?”
“The doctors,” he said, trying to enlist her excitement. “I’ve had them examining the file for years, trying to develop a compound that would reverse the effects of the initial serum. And they’ve done it, Gaia.” Oliver’s grin was so generous and gleeful, it barely fit his face. “We can undo all the damage Tom has done. With this antidote you could start from scratch. You would feel fear. You would finally know what it feels like to be a member of the human race instead of a fugitive from it….”
All his words began to melt together in her ears. He might still be talking, but a loud drone had taken over as Gaia watched him tempt her with his overflowing optimism. She was in suspended animation, free falling somewhere between reality and fiction, and she didn’t know where to land. She’d just had her entire life chopped into jagged pieces, shoved in a blender, and refed to her in a few painfully surreal minutes. And now she had no idea what she should be thinking. Slowly her uncle’s words began to cut through the haze again.
“But I’m not Tom,” he said with an intense stare that demanded her attention. “Unlike him, I wouldn’t dare to make this choice for you. I know I’ve brought you here by force, but that was only to bring you safely to this point.”
He reached for Gaia’s hand. She let him have it. She could hardly feel it right now, anyway.
“The choice is yours,” he said. “If you don’t want the cure, I’m not going to force it on you. You have to tell me what you want. Do you want a chance at a normal life? We can give it to you right now.”
Gaia’s mouth began to open, but she froze before she uttered a word. The answer to his question was so obvious, it was unnecessary even to speak it. But to reply so easily, without a hint of further consideration, was undoubtedly wrong. She could hardly process what was happening at this moment, but she knew at least that much.
Here she was again with one of those unbearable choices. It was the most bizarre catch-22 she’d ever encountered. Perhaps if she could feel fear—if she could just be terrified by his offer—then she could say no. For all she knew, “no” was probably the correct answer. But she couldn’t know that unless she felt fear. And the only way she might feel fear … was to say yes.
Once again, being fearless made her decision-making process feel utterly detached. The facts as she saw them were these: If her uncle was lying, if he’d fabricated this entire story as a manipulation of some kind, it really didn’t matter. He’d already captured her. She was trapped no matter what her answer was. But if he was telling the truth … if her father and the Agency really had done this to her, if they really had made her into what she was today … then this would be a legitimate chance to start again—to fill in everything that was missing. Her fearlessness had become more of a curse than anything else. She wanted nothing more than to scrap it. To scrap her entire life and start over with a new name and some version of a real life.
Any way she looked at it, there was nothing else to lose and at least something possibly to gain. Logic had left her with only one answer.
“I’ll do it,” she said. She let her mind and her body go numb, relaxing into the possibility that she’d just voluntarily made the biggest mistake of her life.
A wave of celebratory relief passed over her uncle’s face as he pulled her into his arms for a hug.
“I’m so glad,” he murmured. “I’m so glad, Gaia. I’ll go get Dr. Kessler.”
Gaia was neither elated nor sad. Nor was she
particularly confident about her decision. She simply felt at the end of her rope and tired of running. It was either time for a new beginning or it was time for the end. Gaia didn’t much care which one at this point. She really felt nothing other than the distinct desire for her uncle to remove his arms from around her shoulders.
Maximum Force
“WE STILL DON’T HAVE A LOCK, SIR.”
The voice was barking through Tom Moore’s cell phone, penetrating his eardrum with each harsh consonant. He felt his throat constrict.
“What do you mean, you don’t have a lock?” he shot back. “I thought we had location confirmed.”
Tom yanked his steering wheel to the right and screeched onto Seventh Avenue, heading downtown. He’d been leaning hard on every single government agency at his disposal—the CIA, the FBI, even the NYPD, pushing them incessantly for leads on his daughter’s whereabouts. There had been nothing for hours, not since surveillance had lost her in the early morning when she’d jumped into a black limousine in front of Ed Fargo’s building.
It was bad enough that he’d been forced to waste an entire night clearing up his mistaken identity with the Agency. The Agency had actually allowed Loki to escape and had taken Tom into custody. It had taken hours of code checking before they’d finally confirmed that Tom was in fact Enigma and not Loki. But by the time Tom had been released, Gaia was already gone.
The fruitless search had left Tom in a state of panic, but finally the last hour had produced a legitimate lead. They had a building confirmed on West Twenty-ninth Street. At least that’s what they’d told him.
“Sir, yes, sir,” the voice replied through the insufferable digital static. “The building is confirmed, but we can’t secure visual contact. No chance from outside the location, and he’s got the inside fortified with seven to ten armed guards, sir.”
“Contain the guards and get your team in there!” Tom ordered. A taxi cut right in front of him with no warning. Tom slammed on the brakes and nearly swerved off the street, trying to recover without a full-blown ten-car pileup in the middle of Times Square. He ignored a circus of blaring horns and street rage, staying focused on the one goal of making it to Twenty-ninth Street in as few minutes as possible.
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