by Mark Russell
THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
Mark Russell
Published 2012 by Mark Russell
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Russell
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or the publisher.
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DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my father.
PROLOGUE
San Francisco, USA.
October 1969.
The alarming sounds of forced entry filled his ears. He sat upright and looked about the shadowy room. Bleak plaster walls. Stacked and tumbled cartons. Disused single beds.
Where was he?
The only door to the room shuddered from a violent blow. He flinched and hugged his knees to his chest, heard muffled voices on the other side of the weakening door. A straight-back chair was braced under the doorknob. Had he put it there? He didn't know. He rocked back and forth on an unmade bed, his breaths sharp and shallow. A medicine cabinet had been pushed against the door. Was he responsible for the makeshift barricade? Again he didn't know ...
The strange room pressed in on him and uncertain memories plagued his mind: bright hallways peopled by cold, distant faces; his unkempt hair lashing his eyes as he searched for someplace to hide.
The door protested from further blows. He dug his feet into the mattress and pushed himself along the bed. His eyes welled with tears as the solitary door shuddered in its frame, assaulted by the brute force of those outside. He heard more voices. Determined. Impatient. By the commotion it sounded like a small army was about to burst in.
In no time the wood jamb splintered and the door blew open. The braced chair shot aside and the medicine cabinet skidded across the linoleum floor. Men swarmed into the room. Flashlights bathed him in agonizing light. He gasped and scrabbled back until hitting the plaster wall at the head of the bed, its chill seeping into his spine. How could he escape this wide-awake nightmare?
'Leave me alone!' He snarled like a cornered animal savaged by a steel-jaw trap. He screamed. The piercing vocalization of terror caused several men to step back. The youth slid down on the bed with rapid birdlike breaths, the whites of his eyes showing from between drooped lids.
The wide-eyed intern could only stare at the crumpled creature before him. The youth's laboured breaths breaking the silence.
'Get on with it, Stewart,' snapped the silver-haired doctor-in-charge. 'Administer the Benzodiazepine before he goes into toxic psychosis!'
'Okay, okay.' Stewart stepped forward with a solution-filled syringe, its needle aglint from the flashlights pointed at the bed.
How much BZ had been pumped into him? Stewart wondered. Way too much by the look of it. He was probably double-dosed. What a screw up. The young intern remembered the federal secrecy oath he'd signed, as well as the lousy pay that was part of the deal. Christ, why couldn't the army test its own goddamn stuff?
Stewart stood over the boy and prepped the plunger of the syringe.
'Sedate him now!' ordered the doctor-in-charge.
'Okay,' Stewart whined. He held the boy's shaking leg and raised the needle in prelude to a thigh muscle injection.
The dark-haired youth spasmed on the bed. His limbs flapped like wind-tossed garments on a clothesline and a light foam coated his lips. Two orderlies moved forward to constrain him. His head shot up from the pillow and his eyes snapped open. His dilated pupils inky black, starless and Bible black, his pale blue irises all but disappeared.
Brimming with preternatural strength, he grabbed Stewart's wrist and slammed the syringe into his face. The young intern staggered back and grasped at the needle poking from his acne-scarred cheek, too shocked to make a sound. The teenage boy shrieked and leapt from the bed, knocking Stewart to the ground. Stewart howled with pain as the plunger-end of the syringe struck the floor. Injected as such he fell into a drooling stupor, his bleeding cheek lanced by the emptied needle.
Like a crazed street brawler, the youth attacked the men about him. He swung bunched fists at them and kicked the oldest man in the groin, his kneecap shooting upward with blurring speed. The silver-haired doctor howled and dropped to the floor, to writhe beside Stewart, his world reduced to paralyzing pain. The youth broke through the circle of men and bolted from the disused supply room like an Olympic sprinter leaving the block.
He ran along the bright corridor outside. The powerful hallucinogen in his veins took hold. His teeth chattered, his hairs stood on end, his heart pounded and writhed like it would burst from his chest. Otherworldly sounds pierced his ears while serpentine shapes slithered on the edge of his vision. A nightmarish force had rent the fabric of his sanity as surely as he plunged forward at breakneck speed.
A spectral light shone at the end of the hallway. Its alluring pulsations pulled at his mind, even as riotous distortions danced every which way about him. The contorting walls mocked gravity and the linoleum floor pitched and swayed like a ship deck on rough seas.
Still he couldn't stop running, it seemed all he could do to escape the nightmare unfolding about him. Everything chopped and changed and shifted from under him with each crashing blink of his eyes. He shoved people aside. A dishevelled man mumbling to an unseen friend. Alarmed women in white uniforms. An old woman with distant eyes slumped in a wheelchair. An unshaved man in a dressing gown crying into upturned hands.
The boy pushed ahead. The cries of the men chasing him looped about his ears like so many angry bees. He looked down at the blur of his stampeding feet. Hideous little creatures burst through the linoleum and snatched at his ankles with sharp, claw-like hands. They screeched like bats and tried to pull him down into an infernal pit. He shook the black-scaled monstrosities free and reeled forward.
He lashed out at a doctor who held up a clipboard for protection. The startled doctor crashed into a medicine trolley. Plastic cups and sheets of foil-sealed pills spilled across the floor. The trolley skidded on its side, its small black wheels spinning uselessly in the air.
The teenage student continued toward the fanciful light. His heart lifted as cherubic voices trumpeted his salvation. He'd found a way out of this railroading hell. Damnation wouldn't claim him after all. He ran with outstretched arms sinking into the will-o'-the-wisp light.
Without breaking his superhuman stride, he dived through the fourth-floor window of the psychiatric treatment centre. He crashed through impact-resistant glass and his slender form arced across the grey autumn sky, pellets of frosted glass trailing him like a silvery cape.
Falling, falling ...
He thudded onto the concrete spout of the grounds' outdoor fountain. A silver bracelet slipped from his askew wrist and sank into the murky waters of the fountain, before curtains of falling glass perforated the water's lily-clad surface. Bright sparking colours and excruciating pain overcame him before he died, his final electrifying moments dispersing into the ether ...
PART ONE
THE ENTRAPMENT
Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need –
Nathaniel Branden.
CONFIDENTIAL SPECIAL MILITARY COMMUNICATION
10/20/80 REC-PENT/MC5/WINTEL
TO:
POST COMMANDER OF SILVERWOOD CHEMICAL CENTRE, ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, MARYLAND.
BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES KAPLAN
FROM:
DIRECTOR OF DEFE
NCE INTELLIGENCE, DEFENCE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY HQ, THE PENTAGON,VIRGINIA.
GENERAL ALEXANDER TURNER
This office has learned that Scott Goldman has violated the federal secrecy agreement of his work contract at your centre.
Subsequently I have authorized the audio-surveillance of his Towson apartment. As this agency has already commenced an investigation of this person your assistance only need be to report to this office any incident or matter you consider important in this regard.
Unfortunately I am unable to offer any further details at this early stage of the investigation.
ONE
Maryland, USA.
Thursday, 23rd October 1980.
The sky was a crisp cloudless blue and oak trees stood like silent sentries along the asphalt drive that led to Silverwood Chemical Centre. General Kaplan braked at the front gate of his workplace in the south sector of Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Unresolved issues played on his mind. Was his teenage son Dean using recreational drugs? Was that sonofabitch Goldman smuggling classified compounds from the centre?
The general nodded to the sentry in the guardhouse, then drove into the grounds. He wheeled sharply into his reserved space, killed the engine, and checked his features in the rear-view mirror.
"... that low pressure front will probably produce rain and desultory conditions for much of the eastern seaboard north of Norfolk. Hmm, doesn't look good for the weekend. It's 8:05 on Easy Listening 104, and now a pretty number from Burt Bacharach and ..."
Kaplan turned off the radio and leaned across to unfasten his seatbelt. A seam split in the shoulder of his dark green uniform. The abrupt tearing sound and the accompanying release of pressure from around his shoulder blade made him want to slam his fist on top of the dashboard.
'Damn.' He clambered from the government-issue sedan, pushing down on the open door's burgundy armrest, the engine ticking like an erratic clock as it cooled down. Kaplan was angry. After following a strict Glycaemic Index diet he and his wife had been hard-pressed to complete, he couldn't believe the paltry weight he'd lost.
He locked the Cadillac and headed for his upstairs office in the administration building. The asphalt lot about him filling up with cars, jeeps and trucks. General Kaplan had taken command of Silverwood Centre five years before. Since 1947, the army base had stockpiled an array of battlefield agents, for the most part chemicals and gases made on site by enlisted chemists. Furthermore, Silverwood Centre boasted an extensive research laboratory.
Kaplan was indifferent to the picturesque morning about him: its gilded light, gentle south-east breeze, and the red-breasted robins flitting about a hedge near the administration building. He glanced at his reflection and pushed open the plate glass door. Dust motes danced in a gold bar of sunlight before the door slipped shut behind him. He gripped his briefcase and marched along the freshly buffed corridor leading to his upstairs office.
At the other end of the passageway, Troy Reid nursed a steaming cup of coffee. Corporal Reid was Silverwood's Records Management Officer. He was also General Kaplan's son-in-law, having married the general's daughter, Lucinda, shortly after his AIT graduation from Fort Jackson in South Carolina. Before he sipped his coffee the general was upon him.
'Good morning, Troy.'
'General.'
'That damn Wordstar program of yours is more trouble than it's worth. I've got scraggly bits of text at the bottom of my printouts ... and that's not half of it.' Kaplan shook his head dismissively and continued along the corridor.
He heard Reid's reluctant footsteps behind him. Kaplan knew his son-in-law wasn't a morning person and that Reid was having his share of marital problems with Lucinda. Increasing fights about her long hours away as an air hostess and her unwillingness to bear a child. Yes, the general knew about these things and more as his daughter had been in his wife’s ear about it on the phone the night before.
'Listen, James,' Reid said, falling in step with the general and balancing his untouched coffee. 'You've got to use Control K or Control KC to properly delete text.'
Before Kaplan could reply he winced from the fiery pang of heartburn. He popped a fresh antacid into his mouth and chomped down on the tablet. The general turned into an adjoining corridor. What he saw only aggravated his discomfort.
Scott Goldman looked about him as he gripped the shoulder strap of his work bag. Rod Haslow swiped a card through a scanner on the wall and a nearby door swished open. Goldman's eyes widened at the sight of General Kaplan. He dashed forward and the two chemists stumbled into their workplace.
Kaplan called out to Goldman but gagged on pieces of antacid, his raspy outcry undermining his authority. The one-star general quickened his step but the laboratory door slid shut as he and Reid breasted it.
'What you just witnessed, Troy, was a direct violation of internal security.' Kaplan jabbed a pudgy finger at the scanner on the wall. 'Card scans are for attendance records and to prevent unauthorized persons from entering classified areas. Did you see the look on Goldman's face before he ...'
'Come on, James,' Reid said, with an easy smile. Kaplan recognized the all-too-familiar expression for what it was: Reid comfortable and confident in his role as son-in-law. 'That's Goldman's lab, after all. We all know, he's a bit brash sometimes, but ...'
'Don't lecture me,' Kaplan said. He glanced at the uniformed men and women spilling into the passageway, then stared with disapproval at Reid's coffee, as if the stimulating drink signified a lack of character, a lack of assertiveness.
Not caring for the general's brusque manner, Reid looked off into the distance. ‘Well, I hardly think Goldman's worth getting flustered over ...'
'I don't care what you think, Troy. I have it from a reliable source that Goldman is a security risk.' Kaplan looked uneasily about him. He was in a hell of a mood, and wanted nothing more than to go fly-fishing in the Catskill Mountains for a week; but there was little chance of that. A shapely blond officer and a ruddy-faced serviceman walked past. The couple's easy stride suggested more than a professional or platonic relationship, and their unbroken laughter over some shared exchange only heightened Kaplan's mood. Army Chemical Corps workers also shared high spirits as they passed. The four workers readying to don full-body inspection suits for a routine inspection of the base's Mustard Agent Storage Yard.
With a sudden lull in foot traffic, Kaplan said, 'Listen Troy, as of now I'm upgrading security. It'll be a week until the new administration computer is on-line. So until then I'm posting you on guard duty.'
Reid almost sputtered from the unlikely command. 'General, you can't be serious?'
'Listen,' Kaplan said. 'I know your office can get by without you for a week.' The general's blunt remark underlined what he'd learnt about Reid's clerical performance. 'Jesus, Troy, surely you'd welcome a break from paper shuffling?' A part of Kaplan felt sorry for his son-in-law who due to a lower-back injury had been forced to work behind a desk.
'Check the IDs and bags of everyone going to and from this building. Keep your eyes and ears open.'
'You mean in relation to Goldman?' Reid stared at the linoleum floor, clearly riled by this new development which had been thrust upon him.
'Yes, him particularly. I want anything you can come up with. And Troy ...'
Reid let out a slow, controlled breath, raised his face.
'Don't tell a soul that I have more than a passing interest in our Australian friend.' Kaplan waved contemptuously towards Goldman’s lab.
The corporal nodded. 'Right, not a soul ...' Reid soon succumbed to curiosity. 'You seem a bit worked up, James. Is something going down?'
Kaplan remembered the special-communication from General Turner. 'Well, I think Goldman better tread carefully from now on.' His poker face broke into a pinched grin. 'He's being watched.'
Reid brightened at being privy to the general's confidence on an official matter. 'Hmm, the DIA, eh?' He finally sipped his coffee and the warm brown fluid coursed agreeably inside h
im.
Kaplan nodded and told Reid to visit him in an hour's time. He headed for his office, comfortable with what he'd set in motion. But any pleasant feeling was short-lived, however, for he sensed Reid's eyes on his back, and imagined Reid laughing inside at the tell-tale sign of the general's torn armpit.
TWO
The laboratory door swished shut and barely stopped Goldman's nervous laughter from spilling into the corridor. He cupped his mouth in an attempt to curtail his tomfoolery. Haslow took off his coat and picked lint from its sleeve, before hanging it with an impulsive finality on the wood rack beside the door.
'For God's sake, don't manhandle me like that again.' His sharp expression cut through Goldman's lingering merriment.
'I didn't manhandle you,' Goldman replied, scrambling for sobriety. 'I simply lost my footing.'
'Your footing?' Haslow sighed and rolled his eyes. 'Listen, don't pull stunts like that in front of General Kaplan. He can be a nasty piece of work if you rub him the wrong way, and I don't think it's in anyone's interest to do that.'
Rod Haslow was Silverwood Centre's chief research chemist and had been for more years than he cared to count. He was in his mid-forties with a round face and smooth, ruddy cheeks. He sported a head of wavy brown hair, though a peppering of grey at his temples and a slight paunch spoke of his advancing years. He was recently divorced and not yet reconciled to his status as a single man. Goldman knew Haslow's ex-wife lived with a younger man and imagined this made Haslow's nights alone at home that much more uncomfortable. In any case, Haslow threw himself into his work by day, and now, tugging at his shirt cuffs, he seemed well and truly rankled by the carefree antics of his younger colleague.
'He just appeared out of nowhere, Rod. Jeez, the last thing I want is Kaplan knowing I've left my card at home again.'
'Well now he definitely knows you have!'