Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

by George C. Chesbro

  Judy moaned, whispered, "They'll pay you ... a great deal of money if you ... let us go."

  "Sorry, lady," I replied, straightening up. "I'm incorruptible in my quest for truth, justice, and the American way. Now, I think you get the picture. I'm going to ask you some questions, and the two of you are going to answer them. Answer them truthfully, and you get to go on to the next set of questions. Simple. But if my friend Emily tells me you're fibbing, then I will ask the ladies to step out of the room, I tickle you with your own little toy, and you do the electric boogaloo. Frankly, I'd enjoy that. It doesn't matter which one of you lies; you both get zapped. So, for your sakes, I hope you're fond of each other."

  I started with a few simple questions about Lorminix, the Chill Shop, and Rivercliff that I already knew the answers to—a test for Emily as well as the two assassins. Punch and Judy got the answers right, and after each one Emily looked at me and slowly nodded her head. My human lie detector seemed to be in good working order, and my subjects reasonably cooperative, so I got serious.

  When I asked for the names of the personnel at BUHR, Judy told me they didn't know, that they'd been hired by a middleman. Emily looked at me, shook her head. I clucked my tongue, then asked the psychiatrist and Emily to go into the kitchen. That was all it took. Judy started giving names, from the director of the operation right down to the various secretaries. Emily just kept nodding.

  Twenty-five minutes later I had exhausted my repertoire of questions. I not only had the goods on BUHR and key people at Lorminix, but also the names of virtually every outfit and government agency Punch and Judy had ever worked for, as well as the identities of their victims. The information on the tape was going to keep a lot of law enforcement agencies in a number of countries busy for some time, but it was of only limited use to me at the moment. I was happy to hear that Philip Mayepoles had been the only patient the assassins had found, less pleased that nothing they had told me was going to help me solve the problem of obtaining a fresh supply of the patients' medication in the time I had left. Punch and Judy knew the names of a lot of players, because they'd been plying their trade for some time, but they knew almost nothing about the technical details of Rivercliff, nor did they know if any more of the drug could be found in the United States—or anywhere else, for that matter.

  I turned off the recorder, set Punch's gun down next to it, then called Felix MacWhorter to tell him what he could have if he cared to send some of his people downtown. I also suggested he send a paramedic or two. Then I hung up and turned to the two women. "Let's get out of here."

  "Where are we going?" the psychiatrist asked.

  "To a safe place."

  Chapter 11

  At first Michael was speechless when he saw Emily and their psychiatrist, but then he let out a whoop of joy and rushed over to them. There were lots of hugs and kisses, and a few tears, and then it was time to get down to the business of organization.

  The brownstone was getting crowded. After introducing the new tenants to the old, the guards, and Francisco, I left it to Margaret and Michael, who enjoyed seniority, to work out sleeping arrangements. I explained the house rules about staying away from open windows, not answering telephones or the door, and then I took Sharon Stephens with me down to my office, closing the door after me. I sat down behind my desk, and she sat stiffly, her knees close together and her hands in her lap, in a chair by the wall to my left. Her green eyes at once mirrored both relief and anxiety.

  "Thank you for rescuing us, Dr. Frederickson," she said with a quick, nervous smile that showed the fine white teeth Peter South-worth had mentioned.

  "You're welcome, I'm sure," I replied evenly.

  "I . . . have so many questions."

  "I know the feeling."

  She clasped and unclasped her hands, looked down at them. "You don't think much of me, do you?"

  "I don't know what to think of you. You saved those people's lives, and you've been going to a lot of trouble and risking your own life to try to keep them alive. On the other hand, if it hadn't been for you, and people like you, they wouldn't have been prisoners in danger in the first place. What was a nice girl like you doing in a purgatory like Rivercliff?"

  "I didn't know what kind of work I was going to be doing when I was assigned there, Dr. Frederickson—and I'd only worked there a short time. I answered an ad in one of the medical journals; it said the CIA was looking for physicians, especially psychiatrists. I wrote them a letter, filled out an application, and went for an interview. I'm sure thousands of government employees have done the same thing. Psychiatry is a very difficult branch of medicine to make a living in these days. I assumed I would be treating CIA personnel and their families. I was never told anything about this BUHR, this 'chill shop.' To me, the CIA was just the CIA, with everybody focused on the same mission, which was to protect the nation's security. I was excited, thinking I was actually going to be doing important and worthwhile work for the government."

  "The CIA is a whole other country unto itself, lady. They have some very strange customs and notions there."

  "I was naive. By the time I realized what was going on, and what I was expected to do, it was too late. I was already in place at Rivercliff. I'd signed what seemed like dozens of security pledges, and I assumed they had me. I felt like a prisoner myself. I was afraid. A number of times I thought of quitting, and even mentioned it to my supervisor once, but he made implied threats that the CIA would make a great deal of trouble for me if I quit, and that I would have difficulty going back into private practice. Somebody else I talked to about quitting said there could be legal consequences because of the papers I'd signed."

  "That was absurd. They were the ones committing illegal acts. You were recruited by a particular department at the CIA, and if I have my way they're definitely going to be put out of business when this is all over. Michael told me you warned him and the other patients that people might be sent to kill you. I have to ask how, if you hadn't realized by then just how rotten and ruthless your employers really were, you guessed that they might go so far as to kill all of you in order to cover up the Rivercliff operation."

  She shrugged her shoulders. "I guess I did realize it by then— especially after what they did with a man named Raymond Rogers."

  "I know about Raymond. What did they do with him?"

  Her emerald-colored eyes clouded, and she averted her gaze. "When I first started working there, I did feel that I was doing something very worthwhile, working on the cutting edge of research that could radically change the lives of so many sick people for the better. But I was just a junior staff member. I didn't know for some time that nobody was ever released, and it wasn't until a month and a half ago that I realized the real purpose of Rivercliff."

  "Studying the side effects of the medication supplied to you that was given to them."

  She looked back into my face, slowly nodded. "That's correct. How did you learn so much in such a short time?"

  "You have to be a chess player who's kind to street people."

  "I don't understand."

  "Never mind; it's not important how I know what I know. I need to know more. Is there a name for the drug you gave the patients?"

  "If there is, I never heard it. We all just called it 'meds,' like the patients. If the senior staff members who ran Rivercliff had a name for it, they never told me."

  "You were willing to medicate patients with a drug you didn't even know the name of?"

  Sharon Stephens flushed slightly. "It wasn't exactly like working at General Hospital, Dr. Frederickson."

  "I can believe that. You never asked what this drug was?"

  "Of course I asked. I was simply told I had no need to know. There were no labels on the bottles that came up to the infirmary."

  "What about the shipping cases the bottles came in?"

  "If the bottles came in shipping cases, I never saw them. For the past week and a half I've been talking to drug company people, trying to find out t
he name of the manufacturer. We have to get more of the medication."

  "I'm aware of that."

  "When you questioned that man and woman, you asked if Lorminix made the drug, and they said yes."

  "Knowing that isn't necessarily going to help us get a fresh supply

  of the drug in the time we have. Lorminix is going to stonewall and deny any knowledge of the drug—for years, if they have to. Clandestinely supplying dangerous drugs to the CIA for illegal human experimentation is the kind of secret corporations pay lawyers and PR agents millions to safeguard. Lorminix has manufacturing plants and distribution centers all over the world. Making that stuff for the CIA was a relatively tiny operation, and probably done at one site, say in Brazil. By now they've probably shut down that operation, shredded records, and maybe even destroyed whatever supply of the drug they might have had on hand."

  Tears glistened in the psychiatrist's eyes. "Are you saying it's hopeless? All of the patients are going to die?"

  "I'm saying Lorminix is going to be less than cooperative."

  "We only have two and a half weeks left."

  "Less than that. My friend Margaret upstairs only has thirteen capsules left, counting the dose she has to take tonight."

  Sharon Stephens frowned. "Margaret is schizophrenic?"

  I nodded.

  "How did she get the capsules?"

  "Philip Mayepoles slipped them to her just before he was killed by Punch and Judy. He may have dropped a few while he was handing them to her, or maybe he didn't have that many to begin with. Also, I had to take a few to use for my own purposes. The point is that Margaret isn't going to make it to Christmas Eve. It would really have helped if you'd seen a label on a shipping carton, so we'd at least know where to look to find out if there is any more of the drug left."

  "I'm sorry."

  "So am I, but it can't be helped."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "I'm working on the problem. Tell me more about the operation at Rivercliff. Besides handing out meds once a day, what were your duties? Did you test the patients?"

  "No. All the testing was done by senior staff doctors, people who'd worked for the Company for years. Junior staff members were only to observe patient behavior, looking for side effects, and write daily reports on a certain number of patients we were assigned to track. The side effects could be broken down into three broad categories. Some patients experienced a marked amplification of some natural sense— like smell, taste, hearing, or eyesight."

  "That would be my friend Margaret. She's got the nose of a bloodhound and the palate of a gourmet chef."

  The woman nodded. "Emily also falls into that first category. We all know that some people are naturally hypersensitive to other people's feelings, empathic. The medication pushed Emily's hypersensitivity way beyond the range of anything that could be considered natural empathy. She's like a sponge, soaking up what other people are feeling from the way they speak, the tension in their voices or bodies, body language, facial expressions; she picks up on the slightest cues. That's what makes her potentially so valuable to the CIA— she can tell when people are lying, apparently even sociopaths and psychopaths, people who can sometimes beat polygraph tests."

  "The CIA trains its own agents how to beat the polygraph. So do other intelligence agencies. Sometimes all it takes is a little Miltown or Valium."

  "I don't think they could fool Emily. She would be invaluable in certain types of situations, like negotiations, or interrogations of enemy prisoners. It's why I took her with me when I went to question the drug company executives. It's what Rivercliff was all about—trying to develop people with very specialized skills that could be exploited by the Company. There weren't many of these; Emily was one of the few."

  "I thought you said nobody ever told you anything."

  "Emily and some of my other patients told me about the tests they were put through, I saw what went on around there, and I guessed what they wanted. You have to give me credit for a bit of intelligence, Dr. Frederickson. If all I was supposed to do was observe the side effects of a single medication, then that must have been all they were interested in. My guess that they found very few patients of use to them is simply based on observation. Just because somebody suddenly can learn to play the piano and begins composing music doesn't mean he or she is going to be of any use as a spy, does it? Also, I have to assume they would have taken out anybody they thought could prove useful to them, and none of the patients I worked with were ever released."

  "What about other patients? Were any of them ever released— harvested?"

  "I have to assume so, if the particular side effects they were exhibiting were deemed useful. My point is that there couldn't have been many."

  "Michael was there for years, and he told me nobody was ever released."

  "He wouldn't necessarily know if a patient had been harvested, as you put it. There were different groups of patients in separate sections of the complex, and each group was kept totally segregated from the others. Also, even if a patient in his group had been harvested, Michael might have been told that the person had died. Like I said, I'm just guessing. I doubt the agency would have kept spending all that money over the years if they didn't occasionally get somebody they could use. Like Emily."

  "You're probably right. If BUHR had deemed Emily useful to the Company, why wasn't she harvested?"

  "Probably because she can't cope with other people's negative feelings; in case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of negativity in the world."

  "I've noticed."

  "The medication treated Emily's symptoms of schizophrenia, but she was—is—always on the edge of a different kind of breakdown. Imagine constantly experiencing not only your own fears and pain and anger but those of everybody else in your immediate vicinity as well. All those things enter Emily's mind and tear at her. She can't tolerate, at least for long, being around other people who are stressed, or angry, or sad, and since there was always the risk that she would run into those feelings if she mingled with the others, she preferred to spend all her time in her room. They—we—couldn't put her on tranquilizers, because that would dull her hypersensitivity, the one thing that might make her useful to the Company in the first place. She became my sole responsibility. I was supposed to develop some kind of nonchemical therapeutic program that would stabilize her emotionally. If I'd been able to do that, I believe she would have been taken out."

  I nodded. "The second category of side effects is the amplification of natural talents?"

  "Yes," she replied with a faint smile. "Observing that was the most satisfying part of the job. To see people who had been hopelessly mentally ill and delusional most of their lives suddenly not only be able to function but also discover they had some extraordinary talent was wonderful. People who'd only talked to trees were suddenly able to do remarkable things, assuming the natural talent had always been there, buried under the schizophrenia, in the first place. We had mathematicians, musicians, painters, poets."

  "And at least one budding chess master."

  "It was kind of magical, watching these people. It could also be very funny. We had ourselves quite an assortment of jugglers, comedians, ham actors, you name it. We could have mounted our own Broadway show."

  Considering the fact that Dr. Sharon Stephens's show folk had been prisoners, kept sane and alive, like all the others, only so that they might one day serve as indentured servants for the CIA, I wasn't amused. I asked, "What was the third category?"

  Her smile vanished. "Monsters," she replied in a voice that cracked.

  "Like Raymond Rogers?"

  She hesitated, frowned slightly. "Yes and no."

  "Let's do the yes part first. Rogers was turned into a killer, a homicidal maniac totally out of control. Did that happen a lot?"

  "Not a lot. There were only a few cases like Raymond's that I observed while I was there. It would happen suddenly; a patient would appear to be a category one or two—sometimes for w
eeks, or even months—and then one day go berserk. It was totally unpredictable. There was always at least one male nurse on duty at all times who was armed with a tranquilizer gun in case that happened."

  "That danger exists for the patients who are out there on the streets now? And the people upstairs?"

  Again she hesitated, then slowly, reluctantly, nodded. "Yes. Percentagewise, the risk is minimal, but it exists. Raymond exists. They have to be monitored constantly. I'll have to talk to the guards you introduced me to, tell them what signs to look for. They must watch out for your friend and the patients as well as intruders."

  Terrific. Felix MacWhorter had been dead-on, much more so than either of us could have realized about the risks I was undertaking when he had warned me against trying to obtain more of the drug for the patients. It was risky even shielding these people. My neck was stretched a long way out on the chopping block, along with the necks of more than seven million other people in the city. My particular good deed could conceivably set an all-time record for tragic consequences. My mouth had suddenly gone dry, and I swallowed in an attempt to work up some moisture. I felt a crush of responsibility, and for a fleeting moment I wished I had less time to deal with the problems of Margaret and the patients, not more. "What happened to the people who went homicidal?" I asked.

  "They were tranquilized and taken to a secure lockup facility in a separate wing."

  "And?"

  "Raymond was the only one of them I ever saw again. I don't know what happened to the others."

  "And that's why you say Raymond is different?"

  "Yes," she replied in a voice that was becoming increasingly stressed and halting. "As part of my training, I was allowed to observe a couple of his training sessions. I think he was . . . the only one they could . . . control. Or whom they thought they could control."