by J. M. Lanham
The conversation went silent for a moment—something that would have made her extremely uncomfortable without the help of a little vino. Now, the quiet didn’t bother her so much. Her hair draped like a dirty-blonde curtain between her and her glass as she twirled it to pass the time.
Tsomo couldn’t ignore her beauty, but he was doing a good job of hiding his approval (for the most part). There had been a couple of times over the last two days where Michelle had caught her newly-acquired bodyguard checking her out, but he was always quick to avert his eyes. It was only human nature, and Michelle wasn’t going to hold it against him.
He broke the silence as he stood to refill his tea, asking along the way, “Did Dawa mention when they’d be back?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
Tsomo shook his head no. “There have been a few times over the last decade or so where Dawa’s asked me for help, but each time’s the same. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell. Honestly, I like it that way. I basically owe the guy my life, so when he needs something, who am I to start asking questions?”
Someone who could be implicated in a laundry list of felonies, thought Michelle. And weren’t Buddhists supposed to strive for honesty and avoid deceit anyway? Maybe Dawa was slipping. Michelle was about to play judge and jury, but she quickly stopped herself. Dawa was probably just looking out for Tsomo to begin with. The less he knew, the better.
“Well,” Michelle said, “it’s very nice of you to stay with me. But really, I don’t need a babysitter. I’m a big girl who’s seen a lot of shit. Believe me, I can take care of myself.”
Hearing Michelle cuss brought out Tsomo’s giddiness. “Seen a lot of shit, huh? Go on . . .”
“I was an E.R. nurse for five years before taking a leave of absence to take care of Aaron.”
“Oh, really? What hospital?”
“Grady. Downtown.”
“I know the place. That’s a rough scene.” His eyes drifted to the ceiling. “Man, I bet you really have seen some shit.”
“Stab wounds. Gunshot wounds. Auto accidents. Husbands beating their wives and wives beating their kids. All in a day’s work.”
The two took a moment of silence as they both sipped their drinks. Finally, Tsomo asked, “So how are you and Mr. Freeman? I noticed you two didn’t talk much before he left.”
Whatever feeling of comfort Michelle had had in the room evaporated immediately. She stood up, turned up her wine glass for that last remaining sip, and proceeded to the archway leading back into the hall.
“Listen, Tsomo. No offense, but I’m not going to sit here and go down this road with someone I just met—”
“I’m sorry”—Tsomo turned and put his hands up, blushing, and feeling like an absolute jackass—“I really didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It’s okay. I’m not offended. I’m just not going to talk about it.” She got a little further and Tsomo piped up.
“Wait. Before you leave. Let me make it up to you.”
Even that sounded creepy.
“Excuse me?”
Tsomo stood but didn’t move closer. Just stood by the island while nervously trying to figure out a way to salvage the situation; make up for his antisocial comments; and get rid of this damn embarrassment that was washing over his body and making him sick. He saw the empty wine bottle and blurted it out.
“The wine. I can run to the store. Get you another bottle. Would you like another bottle, Mrs. Freeman?”
Michelle stopped and turned. Get another bottle. As in, no more bodyguard. She nodded in agreement, hiding cheerfulness behind stern eyes and a straight mouth. “Sure. Another bottle. That would be very kind of you, Tsomo.”
“Okay. Good. Great.” He looked around frantically and patted his front pocket for his keys and his back pocket for his wallet. Everything was there. “Okay, I’m going to run, Mrs. Freeman. I’ll be back soon. And please, I’m really sorry if I intruded—”
“No need to keep apologizing, Tsomo. Better hurry, before the stores all close.”
“Yes. You’re right. I’ll be on my way then.” He rushed out the door and left Michelle standing at the entryway to the kitchen. She waited to listen for Tsomo’s car to crank up and head down the driveway.
Soon, the monastery was silent again. She looked down the empty and dark hallway, then back toward an empty kitchen, and thought of being left behind once again. A flood of emotion almost overwhelmed her, but she cut it off short. After everything she’d been through, she knew she was stronger than that.
“Fuck this,” she murmured.
She sped-walked back to her room where Aaron was sleeping and called to him,
“Aaron! It’s time to wake up, sweetie!”
Chapter 28:
Junk Food
“Pull over at this exit,” Fenton said as he sat wedged in between Paul and Claire in the backseat. Dawa hit his blinker to get over while Donny rolled his eyes. “Jesus, kid. What’d I say about you having to piss every thirty minutes? If you can’t hold that golf-ball-sized bladder of yours, then lay off the Red Bulls. Got it?”
It was just after midnight on I-95, and already Dawa had wheeled into half a dozen gas stations on the dark northbound road to Skyline, Virginia, easily turning an eight-hour drive into a trip closer to ten just to appease a teenager’s unhealthy soda habit. They were supposed to be using their time on the highway to polish up Claire’s plan, but three hours into the overnight drive and they were still coming up short. Maybe that’s why Dawa had no problem pulling off the interstate at Fenton’s every ridiculous thirty-minute request. For whatever reason, everyone kept looking to the detective for answers. Unfortunately, he had none, and stopping at every other gas station took the pressure off him to come up with a feasible plan (if only for a minute or two).
The car veered off the exit before turning into the brightly lit twenty-four-hour Speedtrack gas station, coming to a stop in a space near the front door. Dawa threw it in park and looked over his shoulder. “Make it quick, Fenton. We have a lot of miles to cover tonight.”
Fenton nodded, then crawled over Paul before he had a chance to move out of the way. “Sorry, dude,” he said as he opened the door and piled out of the car. Paul shook his head and wondered if he had been that annoying during his teenage years. “Just hurry up, Reed. We can’t keep stopping like this.”
Bright fluorescents contracted Fenton’s pupils the moment he walked through the automatic door. A sign hung from the ceiling that pointed to the bathrooms in the back. He walked between two candy aisles, browsing the shelves on the way, stopping short near the endcap. Something to his left caught his eye. There, among an endless selection of chocolate bars and gummy bears and bubble gum, lay his favorite guilty pleasure of all: an almost-full box of king-sized Baby Ruths.
He picked it up with his left hand, checking his pocket for loose change or a wad of cash with his right. The feel of the white plastic wrapper thinly draped around a bar of bumpy peanuts and nougat brought a sense of revelation to the forefront of his consciousness. Suddenly, he wasn’t in the store anymore. He looked up and into the bright fluorescent lights, searching for something here, in the gas station, not there, in his mind. But, it was no use.
A wave of vertigo set in as he turned around to find himself back on River Street, back in Savannah, talking to Donny Ford and shooting the breeze like old friends while munching on Baby Ruths and sipping on twenty-ounce sodas. The scene was lucid, unclouded, plain as day, as real as anything Fenton had ever experienced on this side of life.
And as suddenly as it had come on, it was gone. The warm sunlight faded back into fluorescent white as the sounds of River Street were traded for cheesy elevator music playing inside the convenience store. The tall brick buildings lining the Savannah riverfront morphed into a long stretch of beer coolers, glowing that bluish white and humming refrigerated tones that spoke to cold refreshments just a few steps away.
Fenton turned to look out of the store window and back at th
e car to make sure Donny hadn’t been transported to River Street. Sure enough there he was, still sitting in the passenger seat of the sedan, tapping his wristwatch and saying something Fenton couldn’t hear (but was almost surely something along the lines of hurry the hell up).
Fenton nodded, put down the candy bar, and walked to the bathroom. Inside, he rid himself of his last two Red Bulls, then walked to the sink to wash up. Looking in the mirror, he thought about the vision.
It was a repeat of the dream he had had days earlier. The dream where he’d met Donny Ford in Savannah. The dream where he’d told Ford how to find him. About the files. About the jump drive in Dawa’s possession.
Donny and Fenton had spoken to one another in a dream. As the teenager let the cool water from the tap cascade over hands shaking with excitement, he knew exactly how they could get to the CIA. How they could take down Asteria. How they could all get their lives back.
He shook his hands dry, running out of the bathroom without grabbing a paper towel. He’d had an epiphany, and he couldn’t wait to tell the others.
***
“And how is Mrs. Everly on this fine Saturday morning?” Ramírez stood next to the dazed patient and gently nudged her arm as she slowly regained consciousness.
“Where—where am I?”
“You’re safe, Mrs. Everly. That’s all that matters.” Ramírez began to break down the equipment, starting with the headset, then her monitors, then her drug port. Kovic stood back in the room, cupping his chin and keenly observing the new process.
Mrs. Everly licked her lips, then asked, “Is it time for my cookie now?”
“In a moment, Mrs. Everly. After we get you back to your room. Then you’ll get your treats.”
“Milk, too?”
“Of course, Mrs. Everly. What would cookies be without a little milk to go along with them?”
Mrs. Everly smiled and closed her eyes. Ramírez looked back at a confused Kovic, and nodded in assurance that everything would be explained in due time. He returned to Mrs. Everly and bid her goodbye, then called two techs to come and escort her back to her holding cell. No need for handcuffs or shackles or armed guards.
Kovic followed Ramírez out, and when they were back in the main laboratory and out of earshot he said, “Okay, you’re going to have to explain to me what that was all about.”
Ramírez chuckled, “That, my friend, is how you properly handle an outlier. In the beginning, we would just put patients to sleep using a narcotic cocktail once they returned from an Ocula-induced event. But as I’m sure you know, people dream on narcotics, too. This led to the incidents with the detainees in Costa Rica and Guantanamo. So, we elected to treat the remaining four outliers in a way that would ensure something like that would never happen again.”
“By doing what, lacing their milk and cookies with coke?”
“Close. MDMA.”
Shocked, “You’re giving them Ecstasy?”
“It sounds unconventional, but the treatment has worked so far. Patients get a nice little high the moment Ocula wears off, then they eventually fall asleep. And the icing on the cake, compadre? We don’t have to worry about them dreaming when we don’t want them to.”
Kovic was well aware of the fact that mind-altering drugs like LSD, Ecstasy, and cocaine led to dream suppression due to their inhibitory effects on R.E.M. sleep. He was also aware that as soon as withdrawal from these drugs set in, vivid and nightmarish dreams were sure to follow.
“Aren’t you worried about withdrawal effects? Contraindications?” he asked Ramírez.
“At this point, no. They are only taken off the meds when they are being prepped for an event. Ocula is running through their veins long before any withdrawal symptoms would take place. The treatment is working, and until we find a better way to keep the outliers under control, this is how we handle it.”
Kovic nodded, and together he and Ramírez began preparing for round two of Project THEIA: Ramírez with a renewed passion for the project, and Kovic with a soldier-like obedience that was in direct conflict with the voice in the back of his head telling him he should be completely freaked out.
In a nutshell, round one of Project THEIA had been an extraordinary success. They hadn’t even reached the twenty-four-hour mark following Mrs. Everly’s carefully managed dream sequence, and already the head of the FDA was legitimately spooked, trading internal memos and freaking out in restaurant bathrooms and working to remove Ocula from the government formulary. The content of the CIA broadcast had effectively reached its intended target almost a hundred miles to the east by way of poor Mrs. Everly’s beautiful brain. Skyline had received confirmation late Friday night, and by early Saturday morning they were already prepping Mrs. Rogers for their next target: the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Ramírez was like a kid on Christmas morning, going over the next steps with the other lab techs and doling out high-fives and sneaking off to his office every hour to take a pull off the high-dollar tequila hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Kovic was a different story, only going through the motions and pretending to be fully involved in the process. Didn’t matter; Ramírez and Co. seemed to know what they were doing anyway. The way he figured, he was only there to supervise the project—not become another working gear in a machine that had become far too powerful for any government to safely deploy.
The lab buzzed like a beehive, whitecoats scurrying to and fro, some with their heads in their tablets, others swiveling in their rolling stools from one work station to the next. Ramírez returned from his office with tequila fresh on his breath and noticed Kovic staring off into the distance near the observation area. He wiped his mouth (as if that would’ve masked the smell), walked up and gave him a nudge.
“No time for daydreams, Colin. We’ve got work to do.”
Kovic blinked hard and shook his head. “Of course. It’s just been a long one.”
“Venga ya,” Ramírez grumbled in his native tongue, telling Kovic to give him a break. “You’ve had it easy, strolling in at halftime. As for me, I haven’t had a wink of sleep since I got here.” Ramírez turned to face Kovic and lowered his voice. “Which reminds me: how did everything go in Costa Rica?”
“How do you think it went? I was forced to hand off my asset to Cline. The guy hasn’t worked in the field in over a decade.”
“What about the facility?”
Kovic shook his head, and Ramírez knew that the Costa-Rican chapter of the Ocula saga was finally closed. “Well, at least we can put that place behind us. That is what’s important, no?”
“To some extent, yes,” Kovic replied. “But not at the cost of innocent American lives. I had a plan in place, and Cline blew the entire operation, calling in drones before giving my asset a chance to gather intel and get out in one piece.”
“This asset,” Ramírez replied coldly, “was his life more important than taking a necessary step to keep Ocula 2.0 out of the hands of a foreign government?”
“No, but her life didn’t have to end the way it did.”
“Her?” Ramírez’s curiosity was piqued. “And who was this mystery woman?”
“That’s privileged,” Kovic snapped. Ramírez patted him on the shoulder and tried to break the tension, but his apathetic attitude and boisterous laugh only pissed Kovic off even more. He pulled away from the man and left the lab.
In his office, resources were scarce, but Kovic still had everything he needed to communicate with the outside world. He circled his mouse to deactivate his screensaver, then went straight to his email. He had dozens of accounts, many of them used only a handful of times before being replaced with another, cleaner, account.
But there was one account in particular that was on his mind.
He opened a new window, pulled up the throwaway account, and logged in. Right at the top, above a lengthy exchange of read messages, was a new email sporting that fresh bold text that was the calling card of unread messages, dated Friday, August
20th, 2021.
It was from Claire Connor, and she wanted to meet.
Chapter 29:
Preparations
An eight-hour drive up the I-95 corridor through Virginia was hardly considered the scenic route (not that it would have mattered anyway, since they had been driving through the night). But once the car full of outliers hit its exit and veered off onto highway 33, the pre-dawn sky was already painting the Saturday-morning sky with a burnt-orange horizon that blended upward into a palate of pinks and blues and purples that shed a mixture of warm and cool colors over the earth-toned Appalachians around them.
Dawa rubbed his eyes and checked the rearview mirror. Paul and Claire were both fast asleep in the backseat, heads propped hard against their respective windows, with Fenton wedged right in the middle, passed out and drooling on Claire’s unsuspecting shoulder. The driver was tempted to wake them up, but that would’ve been cruel. They needed the sleep.
So did Donny, but sleep was the last thing on his mind. He rode shotgun, thumbs twiddling, restless in his seat, still wide awake after two nights without any meaningful rest.
Dawa had seen him like this before. He leaned over, never taking his eyes off the road, and whispered, “You are fidgeting, Donald.” He nodded toward the passengers in the back. “Perhaps you should try and get some rest, too.”
Donny deployed his classic what-are-you-talking-about look, a look he reserved for people he was trying to hide things from. Dawa knew it all too well.
“Come on, Donald. The twitching. Red eyes. Restless legs.”
Defiantly, “I’m not tired.”
Dawa pointed to the mess in the passenger-side floorboard. “You are practically drowning in coffee cups and energy shots. If you are not careful, you are going to crash, just like the kid in the back. If this plan is going to work, Donald, I need you awake and coherent. Otherwise, we may be putting Paul and Claire in more jeopardy than they are already getting into.”