Chronic fear f-2

by Scott Nicholson

  Burchfield softened slightly at the compliments. He flapped the newspaper, folded it, and tossed it on the back ledge. The driver, a Secret Service agent named Abernethy, was separated from them by a layer of soundproof glass. The back of the limousine had become an informal Command Central for the campaign, although the official headquarters were in Burchfield’s hometown of Winston-Salem.

  They’d be setting up satellite offices around the country, but North Carolina was one of the few Southern Red states that occasionally swung Democratic. It was important for Burchfield to make a stand on his home turf, even if he had to fend off a pack of well-heeled conservative challengers in his own party first.

  “Any news on the Morgans?” Burchfield asked.

  Forsyth fished his cell from the inside of his jacket. It was some fancy BlackBerry and did all kinds of tricks that scared him half to death. Burchfield had forced him to learn to text and operate the pager system, but that was about all Forsyth could handle. He was afraid he’d hit the wrong button and send out some top-secret memo or one of those slips of the tongue that the media would twist out of shape.

  But since it wasn’t government-owned, Burchfield had assured him, nobody could file a public-records request on his messages.

  “Why don’t we just check up on them, if I can figure this thing out,” he said.

  “Careful you don’t trigger the Star Wars missile defense system,” Burchfield teased.

  “Maybe I could send a bomb into San Francisco and make the world a better place.”

  “Now, Wallace, they’re American citizens just like the rest of us. If there’s any killing to be done, let’s keep it in the Middle East where it belongs.”

  “California’s a lost cause, anyway. Unless you hog-tied Schwarzenegger as your running mate.”

  Burchfield smirked. “You know the rules, Wallace. Never pick a sidekick who’s more macho than you are.”

  “If I was younger, Daniel, I’d be mighty offended.”

  “Don’t worry. The ‘elder statesman’ thing is in. Cheney, Biden, people kind of like a VP who stays in the background.”

  Forsyth laboriously punched in the numbers. The limousine ride was smooth, but Wallace hadn’t eaten since the Rotary Club ham biscuits, and his blood sugar was a little low. When he thought he had the numbers right, he waited for the ring and the terse response: “Scagnelli.”

  “It’s Wallace. What you got going on?”

  “Doing my job.”

  “That’s reassuring. And what exactly do you imagine that is today?”

  “One thing I need to know. Do you have other agents on this job?”

  “Just the CIA agents were brought into play.” Which was true, if Wallace considered the “job” to be keeping the Morgans under surveillance. “How did she react?”

  “The doctor’s just going about her business. Well, she was. Then hubby went a little over the top.”

  “Damn,” Wallace hissed, drawing a cocked eyebrow from Burchfield, who rarely heard him cuss. “Is he violent?”

  “Well, not quite. He’s apparently stolen a car belonging to the Durham Technical Institute where he’s taking his cop classes.”

  “That’s all we need, for the local police to get in on this.”

  “No problem. Just call up the head of the program, tell him it’s a matter of national security, the whole bit. They won’t be too anxious for the media to get hold of the story. Talk about a black eye for your cop program.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “The Morgans are together, traveling away from town in the stolen car. No stops since he picked her up in Chapel Hill. I’m tailing them, but it’s not high-speed.”

  “Good. Keep it below the radar as long as you can.”

  “Let me handle it solo, and I can guarantee it. Bring in any others and it’s not my problem.”

  “Do you know where they’re headed?”

  “They’re heading north out of Chapel Hill.”

  “Stay with them and call me when you find out the destination. Is he armed?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “That means Dr. Morgan’s at risk. She must be protected at any cost.”

  “Yesterday you wanted her dead at any cost.”

  “That was yesterday. Those records the CIA hacked suggest she may be onto something. I want to know what it is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any cost.”

  “I heard you the first time.” A pause. “Sir.”

  Forsyth rang off and prepared his response, wondering how much he wanted to tell his friend and political ally.

  “That didn’t sound so good,” Burchfield said.

  “Dr. Morgan probably has Seethe. Her husband’s as addled as a frog in a butter churn.”

  “Goddamn it.” Burchfield punched the back of the seat with the bottom of his fist, causing Abernethy to slow and check the rearview. Burchfield gave an impatient wave forward and the driver accelerated again. “I didn’t trust them to destroy it, but I didn’t think they’d start playing with it.”

  “Maybe this is a good thing, Daniel. If she’s cooked some of it up, then it didn’t die with Sebastian Briggs.”

  “But we’ve searched her labs and her house and her office, checked up on all her associates, and tracked down every web search she’s made and every journal article she’s checked out. Lots of pieces, but no goddamned puzzle.”

  You don’t know about the piece named Darrell Silver.

  “Dr. Morgan learned a lot from Sebastian Briggs,” Forsyth said. “And she learned that you can’t trust nobody, especially when you’re in the business of scrambling people’s brains.”

  “I want it,” Burchfield said. “And I want them buried.” He stared out the window. “I should have dealt with all this last year. That industrial accident could have just as easily claimed half a dozen more lives.”

  “‘The quality of mercy ain’t strained, it drops like the gentle rain from heaven.’”

  “Shakespeare? I didn’t know you could quote from anything but the Bible.”

  Forsyth actually was quoting Barney Fife from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, but he let it go. Someone like Burchfield valued book smarts over real-world wisdom, and it was one of his weaknesses. But Forsyth was cunning enough to exaggerate his slow drawl and backwoods upbringing, because it always led people to underestimate him, especially his opponents.

  And Burchfield might be one of them soon enough.

  “Scagnelli’s one of the best,” Forsyth said. “And he won’t talk once it’s over.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  He couldn’t. But he’d given the consultant enough amphetamines from the labs of Darrell Silver that Scagnelli would gobble just about anything Forsyth handed him.

  “I’ve known Scagnelli since his DEA days,” Forsyth said. “He can play both sides of the fence as good as anybody.”

  “Okay. Keep him close. Everybody who gets near this stuff seems to want a piece of it.”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  “And if this new Seethe works as good as the stuff Briggs made…” Burchfield trailed off, apparently casting about for dim memories of the Monkey House calamity. Forsyth’s own memories of that night were of a lurid encounter with Satan, a vision that fully convinced Forsyth that the final days were upon them. Satan not only walked the Earth, but he was drawing ever closer to the nation’s capital.

  “Dr. Morgan is quite talented, Daniel,” Forsyth said. “And she’s also smart enough to know we’re watching. That’s why she’s kept her guinea pig close to home.”

  “Mark?”

  “That would explain a lot. He used to have a lot of sense. We had high hopes for that boy, despite him having an uppity liberal for a wife. But if she’s been feeding him that monkey juice, it’s no wonder he cracked.”

  “You don’t think she’d do that to the man she loves, do you?”

  “No. Only the one she married.”

  “What’s t
hat supposed to mean?”

  “Seethe. If ever the devil was put into a pill, that’s what he would look like. There ain’t no morals with that stuff, and that’s why the world better not get a hold of it.”

  “Wallace, I respect the hell out of you, but sometimes you’re just a little too holier than thou. You don’t have to frame everything as a moral issue.”

  “Well, somebody better. The only place the government’s able to use the word God anymore is on money.”

  Forsyth was loyal enough to deliver Burchfield a powerful weapon for his Oval Office arsenal, but he wanted to ensure his own place in the administration first. And he wanted collateral in case Burchfield backed off his plan to start a war in Pakistan, igniting the tinderbox of Afghanistan and Iran, opening the door to massive U.S. military involvement and God’s final battle. That’s why he’d triggered the CIA investigation into the Morgans while making it appear Burchfield had started the inquiry.

  “If Dr. Morgan has Seethe, how do we get it without killing everybody in sight?” Burchfield asked. “And what do we do with her afterwards?”

  “There won’t be any ‘afterwards’ this time,” Forsyth said. “Scagnelli will make sure of that.”

  Alexis Morgan had been his philosophical adversary on the president’s bioethics council, defending the benefits of what she considered “humane neurochemistry” to treat mental conditions. Forsyth saw the brain as God’s domain, the seat of reason and choice, and its sole purpose was in making the decision to believe in that which had created it.

  Intelligence existed to manifest temptation. Logic existed to lead humans to faith.

  And God had shaped Wallace, guided him toward this destiny, and the president’s council seemed like a distant dream on a long-forgotten night. Wallace had a role to serve, and he’d been placed in the perfect position to fulfill the prophecies.

  After all, revelations weren’t an option if God put them right into your head.

  Which is where Dr. Morgan had it all wrong. Believing in God was not only natural, it was the highest purpose of brain function, whether that brain had evolved from monkeys or whether it had sprung full-blown into the world.

  But she’d answer for that, for she’d never repent of her sorceries.

  “You’ve got a campaign to worry about,” Forsyth said to Burchfield. “Leave Seethe and Halcyon to me.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alexis figured she’d better just play along.

  The pistol was in the seat between them, but she ignored it. Mark was in the gray T-shirt and baggy athletic pants he called his “Dirty Harry warm-ups,” and he wiped at his forehead as if cobwebs had collected there. He focused his gaze on the road ahead with an intensity that alarmed her.

  “Class end early?” she asked.

  “I was on call.”

  “Is that part of the training?”

  “Everything’s part of the training, honey.”

  Even his voice was slightly off, a clipped monotone that he might have used if talking to himself. She glanced at the mock police radio that had been installed below the dash. Wires had been ripped from it and the handset was lying in the floorboard in three pieces.

  “Nice of them to let you take the car home,” she said.

  “We’re not going home.”

  She glanced at him, but he didn’t blink. “I have to be back in the lab this afternoon.”

  “They’ve been watching the house.”

  “We don’t know that, Mark. We have a lot of research that corporate spies would love to get their greedy little paws on. I think the lab raid was about something else, not Seethe.”

  “It’s always about Seethe.”

  They had crossed Franklin and Rosemary streets and were heading into the suburban outskirts of Chapel Hill, where Colonial-style homes were tucked behind fences beneath old oaks and towering pines. They passed a county patrol car coming from the other direction, but it didn’t slow, much less follow them.

  “Where are you going?” Alexis asked.

  Mark’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles were white, and he looked at her for the first time since he’d insisted she get in the car. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Where it all started.”

  A second surge of panic rolled through her. A hundred stories and images fought for attention, but they were like broken strips of film reassembled at random: the original Monkey House trials, where she’d been nothing but a diligent graduate assistant; the trials themselves; and one bloody and battered face-had she been part of that?

  No. Remember it the way it happened. You were Briggs’s assistant and that woman fell down the stairs and struck her head. A tragic accident and nothing more.

  But the fresher waves of memories were harder to fend off. The events of a year ago had been carefully reconstructed, both externally and internally, and they stirred beneath a gently roiling surface. If Mark took her back to the Monkey House-or what was left of it-then they might rise in a psychotic tsunami and sweep away the levees and bulkheads of her defenses.

  And nobody wanted the truth, least of all her.

  “Mark, we can’t do that. They might think we know something.”

  “Do we?”

  “They’ve split us all up. Anita’s hanging by a thread. David’s locked away. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wendy and Roland are out of the way, too. Maybe their move to the mountains wasn’t voluntary.”

  She glanced at the gun. She couldn’t risk provoking him in this state. The effects of Seethe could spin him in several unpredictable directions, and she realized how foolish she’d been in thinking she could treat the unknown.

  I’m just as arrogant and deranged as Sebastian Briggs.

  The realization stunned her because she’d been acting through a coherent scientific method. But if she couldn’t trust her own motives and thought processes, how could she be confident she was doing the right thing? Maybe Briggs had been his own guinea pig, the first subject of the Monkey House trials, and his contamination by Seethe had led to his later madness.

  God, what if I’m running past the fun-house mirrors myself? What if Seethe and Halcyon changed me in ways I can’t even recognize?

  “Lex?” Mark said, his tone normal but concerned. He took his right hand from the wheel and, for a moment, she had the image of him grabbing the gun and putting the barrel to her temple. Instead, he gave her a reassuring stroke on the forearm. “What do you remember about that night?”

  “Just like we told each other. Briggs tricked us into coming back to the Monkey House and then he tried to kill us. But the federal agents got there first. There was an explosion and four people died.”

  “And we took the last of Briggs’s Halcyon. They thought it was all destroyed, but we had it, didn’t we?”

  Her pulse accelerated, and she wondered if the lie would somehow show on her face. “You flushed it. You didn’t trust anybody with it, even me.”

  He looked at her, dangerously ignoring the lunchtime traffic on the highway. “I can’t remember. I might have given it to you. I love you, remember?”

  He squeezed her arm with passion, but then the grip tightened until it hurt. She moaned and tried to pull free, but he dug his fingers into her soft flesh. He yanked her closer and the car swerved, causing car horns to blare around them.

  “You’re sick, Mark. Seethe did something to you. You don’t see it, but you’re changing.”

  He shoved her away and she bounced against the door. As he regained control of the cruiser, he took an exit ramp onto I-40, heading west.

  “Why in hell should I believe you?” he said. “You think I don’t know you’ve been in bed with them ever since Briggs revived the experiments? You think I didn’t see the hunger in your eyes when you thought you could steal his work? And the goddamned government had you right in their sights, because they saw it, too. How goddamned hot for it you were.”

  Her lungs hurt and she could barely force a
ir into them. Paranoia. He’s cracking apart and he doesn’t even know it.

  “You’re not making any sense, honey,” she said. “You said yourself the government was watching us.”

  “No, not ‘us.’ Just me. You’re right about one thing. I’m changing, and I can’t think straight anymore.” He pounded the wheel with one fist. “If only I could think straight, I’d figure this out.”

  The interstate traffic moved steadily, with consistent spacing. Otherwise, Mark’s erratic driving might have drawn more attention. As it was, the weaving combined with the car’s official appearance kept other motorists both well away and near the speed limit.

  “Slow down and pull over,” Alexis coaxed. A neurochemist by profession, she’d had her share of psychology classes. The first step was to calm him and then maybe he’d listen to reason.

  If the Seethe exposure had permanently affected him, then he’d become more unstable by the minute, especially if his amygdala was hyperstimulated by anger or fear. And her Halcyon supply was on the middle shelf of the refrigerator back home. If she could get him there in one piece, they might have a chance.

  “I have to know what happened,” Mark said.

  “The Monkey House is gone,” she said. “The explosion caused a toxic spill and they had to level it.”

  “Maybe, but the truth is there somewhere.”

  “But we don’t even know how to get there.”

  “I do. I remember more than I ever admitted.” His face was dotted with sweat, his jaw tense, eyes wide and lit by a manic gleam.

  “How could you remember, Mark? Halcyon wiped most of it away.”

  “That’s what they all say.” He cast a demented grin. “But since you’ve been dosing me with Seethe, it’s all coming back to me.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “Honey, honey, honey,” she whispered, scared and sad.

  Signs of paranoid schizophrenia, manifesting as sociopathic rage. One of Briggs’s suspected outcomes of end-stage exposure.

  And not just “suspected.” Desired.

  They exited a side road into the Research Triangle Park, and the first of the glass-and-steel research and manufacturing facilities came into view.