by Glenn Cooper
They drank and chatted excitedly for a few minutes until Sam piped up and asked, “So, Alex. I’ve got one question: You got any Bliss?”
Alex laughed and replied, “Actually, Sam, I’ve got a shitload of it!”
Most of them took Bliss that night and the household didn’t become active until late morning as people began filtering down from the upper floors.
Alex awoke with Jessie in the large corner master bedroom. There was a sound of seagulls and waves and the room was flooded with light. He got out of bed, careful not to wake her, and went straight for the windows. The scene beneath him was breathtaking, a strip of snow-covered lawn giving way to a sheer cliff face. Large waves pounded and sprayed against smooth dark boulders on a stony beach. The ocean was heaving and swelling all the way to the horizon where it seemed to merge with a hazy sky. Seagulls swooped past the window, fixing him with one-eyed stares.
From another window he tried to get a look up the coastline but found the view obscured by thick pine woods that surrounded the property.
He got dressed and descended the grand stairway, sliding his palm over its smooth walnut banister polished by generations of children’s backsides.
The house was coming alive. In the dining room, Sam and Leslie were on their laptops. In the kitchen, Erica, Davis, and Melissa were cooking eggs. In the great room, Joe was making a fire, regaling Sam and Vik on the fine points of disarming roadside IEDs.
Alex greeted each one, exchanged hugs and cheek kisses, eventually making his way to the coffeepot. He helped himself to a giant mug and pulled Erica aside. “The house is brilliant. Thanks.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“You’re sure it’s safe? Your parents won’t be showing up unexpectedly?”
“They’re in Spain for the winter. It’s all ours.”
He sought out Sam and Joe, had them get their coats and led them through the French doors of the great room onto the wraparound porch at the rear. The sun was poking through a gap in the clouds and the air felt mild. If the Adirondack chairs and rockers hadn’t been encased in a hard crust of snow, they might have sat to take in the view. Instead they stood at the railing and marveled, raising their voices to hear one another over the waves.
“It’s fabulous, isn’t it?” Alex said.
“Amazing,” Joe replied.
“Look, over there.” Sam pointed to a cluster of islands covered in evergreens out in Frenchman’s Bay. “Erica said those are called the Bald Porcupine Islands. And out that way is Egg Rock. You gotta love these names. Nothing like that in the Bronx.”
“When’d you get here?” Joe asked.
“Just a couple of days ago. We’ve kept to the house. Laying low.” He pointed at Alex’s chest. “Waiting for orders from the big guy.”
Alex chuckled. “I’ve never been called big guy before.”
“Get used to it, man,” Sam said. “I’ve got a feeling a lot of people are going to know you pretty soon.”
“I think you already see where I’m going with this, Sam. That’s why I wanted to talk to you and Joe alone. I do have big plans. If things play out as I hope they will, this movement’s going to get big, fast. So even though we’re going to try to keep our group small, we’ll need some organization, some hierarchy. That’s where you two come in. I want you to be my go-to blokes: my right arm, my left arm.”
Joe shrugged. “Whatever you want, Alex.”
Sam, though, anxiously asked, “Why me? I’m new. Why trust me?”
“Instinct. I liked you and trusted you from the day we met. You’re smart and you’ve got personality. I want you to help me with information. We need a web presence. We need to communicate. I need you to spearhead that for me.”
“Sure, Alex,” Sam agreed. “I can do that.”
“And you, brother of mine, warrior. I need you to head up security. We’re going to be wanted men soon enough. We’re going to be hunted. You’ve got to see to it we survive long enough to get our job done. Will you take that on?”
“Headbanger in chief? Yeah, no problem. Born to the job.”
Alex relaxed and allowed himself a satisfied smile. “Now we can get serious,” he told them over the crashing surf. “God, I love the ocean.” Then he put his arms around both men. “Let’s go inside and see if anyone wants to take more Bliss.”
Thirty-four
The basement seemed to go on forever, a rabbit warren of finished and unfinished spaces. The house had a stone foundation with an unheated basement so Alex had to work with the fingers cut off a pair of gloves. He set up in a chilly room that once had been a woodworking shop, though all that remained were the wooden workbenches now, which well suited his purposes. After stringing extension cords and power strips, he plugged in one computer and analytical machine after another, waiting for the blown fuse that never came. Satisfied he had the power he needed, he moved on to setting up tubes and racks and beakers in the way he was accustomed.
Sam came down and watched him work. “It’s creepy down here, man,” he said.
“Well, it’s got atmosphere, doesn’t it? It’ll do.”
“Do for what? What’s the plan?”
“Who knows how long we’ll be here? I can’t be idle. There’s still work to be done on figuring out how Bliss works, what it’s doing in the brain. I can’t do all of it with these instruments but I can do some of it.”
“You’re a workaholic,” Sam observed. “For me, I’m happy to ditch school and do something different.”
“You won’t be idle either, Sam. I’ve got a lot planned for you.”
“Yeah, I’ve already been scoping out servers around the world where we can burrow in and hide. When they shut us down in one place, we’ll be up and running in another. We’ll always be a few steps ahead.”
“That’s why I wanted you, mate.”
“When are you going to tell me—us—what it is you want to do, Alex?”
Alex sighed. The time had come to let the thoughts crowding his mind spill out. He was a scientist, not an evangelist, and the newness of the role felt like a suit of ill-fitting clothes.
“Do you like the world we live in, Sam? Does it make you proud to see all this cruelty, greed, selfishness, and violence around you? Does it make you feel good that children grow up having their goals defined for them by advertising men? Western society has hollow values. It’s amoral. We’re a rudderless ship. And if someone’s going to tell me that it’s not so bad, that I’m exaggerating, then what about the rest of the world? Without the veneer of decadence, in places where there is real poverty, you can see even more clearly how base and futile most people’s lives are. Mankind desperately needs spiritual guidance.”
“That’s what religion’s for, no?”
“Well, yes! But religions accomplish almost nothing. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a deep cut. Religions give rules of conduct, simple, easy-to-understand guidelines. Thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that. And they hold out some abstract concept of God and heaven to induce people to toe the line. It’s not enough! Very few, maybe only handfuls of mystics through the ages could truly comprehend on a visceral and intellectual level the enormity of two absolute truths. Number one: God exists. Number two: there is an afterlife. Bliss is like truth serum. Everyone who takes it experiences the holiest of holies. It cuts through all the crap and delivers the truth, plain and unvarnished.”
“I don’t disagree with what you’re saying but what do you want us to do about it? Do you want the whole world to take Bliss?”
“That would be wonderful, but not very practical! But you’re on the right track.”
“What then?”
“I think we can help mankind achieve spiritual reorientation if just—I don’t know—just a few percent of adults take Bliss. Maybe that would be sufficient to permanently change the status quo.”
“Where’s all that drug going to come from?” Sam asked incredulously.
“I don’t know for sure. My friend in Mexico is
probably cranking away. And others will follow. Profits will speed the way for prophets.”
“Okay, so we sprinkle the drug around and get a good chunk of the population to use it. What do you think happens then?”
“This is theory, of course, hypothetical, but I think we’d achieve a critical mass of spirituality, enough to destroy our degenerative foundations, the worst trappings of civilization. They’d crumble. We’d have a simpler, purer way of living.”
Sam laughed nervously. “What about all the chaos, man? Destruction? Death? A crumbling civilization means farmers not farming, factories not making shit, power stations not making power. We’d have some kind of postindustrial toilet bowl, a twenty-first-century Dark Ages.”
“I agree there’ll be some chaos and death. But you’re making the incorrect assumption that death is a bad thing. You see, that’s wrong. Our life on earth is not permanent. Everyone can agree on that. The act of dying is a transition state, merely a bridge from the physical world to the spiritual world. There’s nothing bad about death. There’s nothing to be feared. I think Bliss teaches that.”
Sam looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know, man. This seems pretty radical.”
“Before Bliss I would have agreed; but one’s perspective changes fairly dramatically, doesn’t it? It’s hard for me to even remember what the old state of mind feels like. You might hear the word Death, I hear Deliverance. You might say Dark Ages, I hear Enlightened Ages. A world saturated with Bliss would certainly be more primitive from the standpoint of technology but it would not be Dark. Perhaps people would choose to live simpler, moral lives, forsaking petty disputes and war, and preparing themselves for the inevitability of an eternal afterlife in God’s grace.”
Alex saw the look of skepticism in Sam’s young face. “Come on, Sam, let’s go outside.”
They got their coats and went out back, crunching through the thin snow to the edge of the cliff. Below them, it was low tide and thirty yards of rocky beach was exposed. Cut into the cliff was a narrow but even stone stairway with rails leading down to the beach. Gingerly, they made their way down the icy stairs to sea level where they found a flat dry boulder, sat, and watched the rolling breakers. Alex chose this moment to remain silent and let the power of nature speak. The two men stayed there, side by side, watching the tide come in. Then finally, unable to contain himself any longer, Alex announced to Sam, “I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Thirty days. A month is going to be long enough to change the world forever. I want to start a countdown.”
In the evening, after supper, Alex assembled his followers in the great room. With a glass of wine in hand he looked relaxed, confident. Jessie sat nearest to him, lovingly looking up.
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?”