Chronic fear f-2

by Scott Nicholson

  Forsyth didn’t want to ask who did the “deeming,” but he was sure the taxpayers were footing the bill for some egghead to write big words that added up to either “Nuts” or “Probably guilty.”

  Darrell Silver was seated at a table, shackled to a steel bar that was welded to the table’s edge. He appeared calm and was relatively clean, although Forsyth was surprised the man was allowed to keep his beard and unhealthy-looking dreadlocks. He could have passed for a street musician if not for the orange scrubs and his spasmodically twitching right eyelid.

  “Where’s my lawyer?” Silver asked.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Silver,” Redfern said. “We’re not interrogating you. Mr. Forsyth is touring our facilities. He’s a member of the president’s bioethics council.”

  “Are you being treated well, Mr. Silver?” Forsyth asked, sitting at the table across from him. Redfern joined him while the guard waited at the end of the room.

  “Not too bad. They have some awesome drugs in here,” Silver said.

  “I understand you worked with Dr. Alexis Morgan,” Forsyth said, watching the way Silver’s eyes narrowed like those of a cornered animal’s. “She served with us on the council for a while.”

  “Yeah, I did some research for her.”

  “What were y’all working on?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to ask any questions.”

  Forsyth held up a palm and smiled. “Just making conversation, Mr. Silver. No need to go getting riled up.”

  “Well, if you ask me, she ought to be the one in here, not me.”

  “Is that so?”

  Dr. Redfern gave Forsyth a sympathetic look, as if Silver had just revealed his own paranoid delusions. “Mr. Silver also believes he’s involved in a secret government conspiracy,” Dr. Redfern said.

  “Sounds like a contagious idea,” Forsyth said, staring fully into Silver’s eyes. “What did Dr. Morgan do that was so terrible?”

  “She did it. She gave me the formula, asked me to cook it up for her.”

  “A formula? Some secret government drug?” Forsyth gave Redfern a surreptitious wink.

  “Yeah. She called it Halcyon. It’s supposed to make you forget stuff. I played with it, put my own spin on it. That’s my style.”

  Dr. Redfern cut in, speaking as if the inmate wasn’t present. “Mr. Silver has a record of illegal drug manufacturing. LSD, meth-amphetamine, OxyContin. His diagnosis states chronic drug use has damaged his perceptions of reality.”

  “You call it ‘damaged,’ I call it ‘superduperfied,’” Silver said, swinging his dreadlocks in his exuberance. “What’s in a name, right? I mean, if they called MDMA ‘Funny Puppy’ instead of ‘Mad Dog,’ everybody would be taking it. It’s all about marketing, man.”

  Forsyth ruminated while Silver finished his rant, and then said, “Do you think you could recreate this Halcyon?”

  “No prob, dude.”

  “You have a vast range of experience, Mr. Silver,” Forsyth said. “I think we can work something out.”

  He gave a lopsided grin. “You think I don’t know what’s going on here?”

  “What?” Forsyth asked.

  “You guys are in on it. This Halcyon stuff. She said I had to be careful because important people were watching. People all the way up to the top.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Forsyth said. “If people in the government have secret drugs, then they can take away anybody’s rights at any time by making you think a certain way. By changing your mind. Why, they can even make you crazy, right?”

  Silver’s eyes narrowed again, as if he was figuring Forsyth’s angle. “I tried some of that stuff. I can’t remember what it was like.”

  Dr. Redfern’s face furrowed in deep concern and solemn sorrow. Forsyth was sure she’d refined that look in a mirror.

  “Did Dr. Morgan ever mention a drug called Seethe?” Forsyth said.

  “No, but it sounds cool,” Silver said. “Upper?”

  “It doesn’t exist,” he replied. “But we got reason to think Dr. Morgan may be under a bit of…strain. As you can likely appreciate, her previous post as a presidential advisor means her actions reflect on all of us. If she needs help, she deserves the finest treatment and…” Forsyth turned to Dr. Redfern. “What did you call that?”

  “Continuum of care,” she said, pleased to contribute.

  “She didn’t talk about Seethe, but she did seem a little freaked out,” Silver said. “I offered her some weed to help her chill, but she said she didn’t do drugs.” He gave a sudden bark of laughter. “Doesn’t do drugs. Now that’s what I call crazy, man.”

  “Thank you for the information. Mr. Silver,” Forsyth said, rising from his chair. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you with the federal prosecutors.”

  “But this wasn’t an interrogation, right? If it was, I’d have had a lawyer and stuff, right?” As they retreated, he raised his voice to yell at their backs. “Unless my lawyer’s in on it, too.”

  After the guard let them out, Dr. Redfern said, “We have more secret government drug conspiracies per square foot than any facility in the country, it seems.”

  Forsyth gave an understanding smile, one full of paternal concern and a veiled promise of support. “Just between you and me, I think it’s the aliens and their little mind-scrambling ray guns.”

  Dr. Redfern granted him a coy and unprofessional titter.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Roland checked the entire cabin, which wasn’t large, but he had to be careful not to arouse Wendy’s suspicions. The cabin was basically one open floor with a loft bedroom. While Wendy collected painting supplies for her afternoon session, Roland searched under the bed and the tiny closet.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been in the cabin. It didn’t make sense, because they hadn’t been anywhere except for their usual afternoon walk. They would have heard a car on the long gravel driveway, and the remote rural area held little attraction for burglars and thieves.

  His laptop was on the table where he’d left it, and they didn’t have a television or other items easily pawned for cash. And they certainly didn’t have any money or jewelry.

  The gun.

  He jogged toward the loft stairs, nearly slamming into Wendy at the landing.

  “Hey!” she said, gathering her paints in her arms.

  He ran to the bedside table, cursing himself for letting down his guard. He should have been carrying the gun on the walk. However close or far away, somebody was watching them. And they could be very close.

  “What are you freaking out about?” Wendy called from below.

  “Shh,” he hissed, sliding open the table drawer. And there it was.

  He pulled out the gun as Wendy joined him in the loft. “Did you see the fox?”

  “Yeah.” He hurried back down to the open door and gazed into the woods, feeling a little stupid. A breeze played through the leaves, making a sound like faint laughter.

  After a moment, he sensed Wendy behind him. “Maybe you should practice with that thing,” she said. “You’re not going to get many more chances.”

  She nudged past him and he made room for her, looking at the. 38 revolver. As she spread her paint tubes around the easel, he glanced back at the table.

  The laptop.

  It was still there, but was it in the exact same position he’d left it? He tried to recall his last online activity. He’d been working on some lettering for a proposal. That had been before lunch.

  Roland opened the laptop and powered it from its sleep. The Photoshop file came up, just as he’d last saved it. He knew the hard drive contained fingerprints of all commands the computer had ever performed, but such a search was well beyond his technical skills.

  He looked at the USB ports on the side. Someone could have slipped a zip drive in and quickly downloaded his files.

  But why? Maybe Wendy’s right. You’re getting paranoid.


  But the e-mails were real. Even if it was the aftereffects of Seethe that were making him paranoid, that didn’t change the fact that someone knew about the Monkey House. And probably that he was a murderer.

  National Clandestine Service, Burchfield, the enemy within.

  God, grant me the serenity to Ah, fuck it.

  He went out on the porch, the gun concealed in his pocket. Wendy made graceful strokes with her brush, powerful and confident gashes of dark red. She was in one of her moods.

  Maybe it was guilt, subconsciously revealing itself in the figure huddled in a dark corner.

  “Wendy?”

  “Just a minute,” she said in that distracted, annoyed manner of the self-absorbed artist. She’d changed her style, slapping out lines and curls in a type of calligraphy. She worked until she was satisfied with the red, then she dabbed her brush in a jar of water.

  She turned and put an impatient hand on her hip, the brush dripping onto the porch. “I hate it when you interrupt me.”

  “This is important.”

  “So is this.” She stabbed the brush toward the painting. “I’m getting close, I can feel it. What I’m trying to say.”

  “I know what you’re looking for in there.”

  She laughed. “You’re not going to start that stuff about conspiracies, are you?”

  He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her awake, describe how the drugs slept inside her like a pair of evil twins, one committing dark deeds and the other enabling. But his few attempts at honesty had ended with his feeling slightly unhinged, like a drunk emerging from a blackout in total denial of all the accompanying sins.

  “No,” he said. “I was just wondering what you were painting.”

  “What I’m always painting,” she said. “The monkey we left behind.”

  “I see that. Can I ask you something?”

  Wendy made a pantomime of looking around to see if he might be talking to anyone else. “Just between you and me?”

  “Yeah. I got an e-mail yesterday. And another one this morning.”

  “You get lots of e-mails.”

  “The first said, ‘Every four hours or else.’” He watched her face to see if her expression was any different this time.

  “I know. That book cover you’re working on.” She appeared bemused but slightly annoyed at having her work interrupted.

  He tried the next one on her. “‘Surely you didn’t think we could let you live, after what happened.’”

  “Is that from the book, too?”

  Wendy was genuinely confused. Roland relaxed a little, willing to let her off the hook. Of all the survivors of the Monkey House, she was the most detached and innocent. Alexis had explained the drugs caused individualized reactions, not surprising considering Briggs had been scrambling with a big chemical spatula, but even Alexis didn’t seem to remember the real effects of Seethe and Halcyon.

  Roland sure as hell did. Because he could still feel them inside his skull, fighting for control. Seethe commanded him to wipe that naive look off his wife’s face forever, because the mask disguised all her hideous, carnal behavior. Halcyon kneaded his memories like Play-Doh until he was no longer sure exactly which sins she’d committed.

  He wondered if his alcoholism had created a special response to the two drugs. He often thought of his alcoholism as a living entity, a shadow creature lurking inside him and compelling him toward self-destruction. His addictive nature might have opened up inviting paths, and just as an alcoholic was one drink away from a lifelong binge, lying might be keeping the drugs active inside him.

  Maybe it was time for a little honesty.

  “It’s from the Monkey House, honey,” he said. “That night in the Research Triangle when I killed Sebastian Briggs.”

  She grinned as if he were joking. “You couldn’t kill a fly.”

  “Somebody thinks we know something,” he said. “That we remember.”

  “Well, they’re wasting their time.”

  “I think they’re after us.”

  “Are you okay, Ro? You’re looking a little pale.”

  He felt a little shaky, but he refused to believe the chemicals in his head were changing him and causing delusions. Compared to a decade of heavy drinking, this was even scarier, because with drinking, you could always stop one day at time. But this-this tap stayed wide open forever, gushing barrels and barrels of its poison.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I tried sparing you from it.” He staggered toward her, his arms wide. She stepped back from his embrace.

  “Whatever it is, we can face it together.” Awareness flashed across her face. “Oh, God. You started drinking again, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. It was natural for her to assume the worst, because with a drunk like him, the worst was just a matter of time.

  He reached for her as she withdrew. “They’ve been sending me e-mails, and I think somebody was in the house while we were gone. You told them, didn’t you?”

  “Stay back,” Wendy said, holding up her brush like a weapon. “Alexis said this might happen.”

  “Have you been talking to her?”

  Wendy’s eyes gave a furtive flick left and right, looking for the correct lie. “She’s been…coaching me. About how we could make it through this.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” He could feel the cords tighten in his neck as the sudden rage swept through him.

  “Look at you,” she wailed. “You’re a goddamned time bomb. How am I supposed to tell you anything?”

  He stopped, two feet away. She was pinned against the porch railing beside the easel. “You’re one to talk about trust,” he said, hissing the last word like an accusation.

  “You said you loved me the way I was.”

  “The only fucking lie worth telling.” The anger was a live, palpable force, a red entity invading his limbs. He panted as his pulse accelerated. He was dizzy, high, disoriented to all except that one bitching, conniving face in front of him.

  The courage to change the things I can…

  Her eyes widened in fear, her small mouth an O of shock and disappointment.

  Roland had one last fleeting thought-it’s not me, it’s the Seethe, it’s always the Seethe-but just as whiskey trumped reason every single time, his self-righteous fury infected him with the obsessive fever of revenge.

  “Alexis was right,” Wendy said.

  That’s not what I want to hear, honey. What I want to hear is that you’re sorry, that you didn’t mean to make me murder for you. I want you to apologize for being a slut, even if you can’t help it.

  He thrust his hand toward her face, meaning to grab her hair and twist until she submitted, but she was faster. She scooped up the jar of rinse water and splashed it toward him, and the dark gray liquid slapped him in the face like a rag. She shoved past, knocking over the easel as she fled.

  Roland wiped his face with his shirt sleeve and let out a bellow of anger. Eyes stinging, he kicked at the painting, and the toe of his leather boot went through the huddled monkey on the canvas.

  He drew the pistol as he ran, but she was already in the woods by the time he regained his vision.

  The bitch painted me. Well, there’s a price for that. Yeah, we’re going to have us a talk about respect and submission and surrender.

  A long, long talk, the kind that would make Sebastian Briggs proud.

  Leaves rattled ahead of him. So he’d be hunting a tiger instead of a fox. Seethe didn’t care one way or another.

  As he entered the woods, he forgot all about government conspiracies, mysterious e-mails, and death threats.

  It was the worst of both worlds, but then again, with Roland, the worst was always just a matter of time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Gundersson had been caught by surprise when the couple returned early. Their walks were usually twenty minutes, and over the last three days, he’d taken the opportunity to search the downstairs and the bathroom. He’d been searching th
e loft, looking for any signs of Seethe, when Roland’s boots banged on the porch below.

  Gundersson had lifted the screen from the window above the bed, swung it up on its hinges, and climbed through, dangling by his fingers to lessen the distance of the drop. Still, it was good twelve feet, and when he hit the ground, his ankle twisted on a tree root. The chickens had squawked in alarm, and Gundersson hissed a quiet curse of pain.

  He heard them talking inside the house, ignoring the chickens, and he made his way into the woods. The pain was worse by the time he reached the trail. He crouched beside the creek and massaged his ankle, waiting to see if someone would notice the window. He was good at leaving no trace, a real Boy Scout.

  The forest immediately around the cabin was dense with laurel tangles, crabapples, and blackberry vines, pocked here and there with old-growth oaks and maples like the one he used as a surveillance post. He didn’t have time to reach the tree, and he wasn’t sure he could climb it with his game leg, anyway.

  Then the argument had started, and he figured he might overhear something important despite the gurgling of the water over stones. He caught “Sebastian Briggs” and he figured “Alexis” referred to Dr. Morgan, which suggested the couples had been in contact. But the sudden explosion of Roland’s anger caught him unaware, and now Wendy was running right toward him.

  He rolled to his feet and lightning raced up his leg. He put weight on the injured ankle and realized he’d never make it to concealment.

  Might be broken.

  His orders were clear: Avoid detection at any cost. He couldn’t afford to blow this mission through overconfidence. And he’d been warned what would happen if he was forced to leave corpses.

  I’ll chew your ass like bubble gum and leave you stuck on the director’s toilet seat, Harding had said.

  Wendy was coming up the trail about twenty yards from Gundersson, slapping at limbs and panting hard as she ran. He glanced around and saw a tiny recess where water had washed away soil beneath a hemlock’s roots. He lay down in the cold, shallow water and wriggled into the damp crevice. He wasn’t completely concealed, but he hoped they were too preoccupied to notice.