Hidden in Dreams

by Davis Bunn

  There was a long silence, then, “What am I looking for?”

  “We are working on a thesis that goes as follows: Under certain circumstances, your drug creates a hypnotic state so powerful it can dominate even the most basic subconscious urges. Including the formation of dream states. We need evidence to prove this is correct.”

  Rachel moaned softly. Perhaps in denial. Perhaps in dismay at what Elena had uncovered. “What brought you to this?”

  “That’s not your concern, Rachel.” That was also the sort of question the enemy would be asking. Elena fought against the terror that threatened to swamp her. But she could do nothing about the metallic tone of her voice. “You want me to trust you? Then find me the evidence that confirms what we already know. Give us what we need to take this public. We have to stop them before it’s too late. And Rachel.”

  The woman responded with a voice both ancient and deep. “Yes?”

  “Don’t call back unless you have what we need.”

  28

  When Elena returned to her living room, Dorothy was seated at one of the breakfast stools, her knitting piled on the counter beside her mug. “Your tea’s gone cold.”

  “I’ll make another.”

  The television was on and showed an excited reporter being drenched by torrential rain and wind. Dorothy said, “The hurricane’s moved over the southern islands of the Bahamas. Our own forecast is coming up. I’ll cut it off if you want.”

  “No, it’s fine.” She poured out her mug and reheated the kettle. Over the breakfast counter she watched as the weather forecasters explained why Hector’s path was still impossible to predict. A high-pressure zone over the Midwest states might or might not move eastward. The high-pressure zone was potent enough to hold the hurricane offshore. The weather forecaster was almost apologetic as he explained the difficulty they were having in predicting movement of both weather systems. Then the channel switched to an advertisement. Elena muted the sound and set Dorothy’s cell phone and her own on the counter next to the policewoman’s knitting. “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Why I’m here.”

  “Whatever happens, whatever I might say,” Elena told her solemnly, “don’t let me use any phone.”

  • • •

  Elena slept and did not dream. Or rather, she dreamed and all of the dreams were her own.

  She awoke to a remarkable sense of calm. The clock read a quarter to seven. She had not bothered to set the alarm because she had not expected to sleep so long or so well. Jacob was due to pick her up in just over an hour. If she hurried, she had time for a brief workout.

  When Elena emerged from the bedroom in jogging shorts and T-shirt, Dorothy greeted her with a smile and a lifting of her coffee mug. “Good night?”

  “The best. Nothing happened. What about from your end?”

  “Your phone rang once. I answered, and they clicked off.”

  “Did you make note of the number?”

  “Caller withheld. I called a pal on the force, they ran a check. Disposable phone assigned to one Mr. Jones.”

  Elena entered the kitchen and poured herself a mug. “A lie.”

  “Happens all the time. The salespeople will forgo the ID check for a ten-spot.” The policewoman sipped again. “Do you recall our little conversation?”

  “You mean, we talked last night?”

  “You showed up. Sleepwalking again. Started across the living room, I assume for your phone. I told you to go back to bed. Said it a second time.” Dorothy pointed into the living room with her mug. “You touched the place where you set down your phone. Sort of grabbed at it with your hand, then you turned and walked back into the bedroom.”

  Elena released a breath she had not realized she had been holding. “Thank you.”

  “Just doing my job.” Dorothy refreshed both their mugs. “Sorry I can’t run with you. Hip replacement.”

  “The development has a small gym. I can put in a half hour on the elliptical before Jacob gets here.”

  “I’ll come down and keep watch.” Dorothy spooned in half a sugar. “Jacob, that’s the fellow who dropped you off?”

  “Yes. Jacob Rawlings is a clinical psychologist from Atlanta.”

  “Smart and handsome both.” She sipped and nodded approval. “There’s some who’ll tell you marrying into your profession only guarantees you’ll take your work home. I married a cop. Good man. We had thirty-one great years before his heart went.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She finished her mug and set it in the sink. “Jacob says he wants to be my beau. But he’s not.”

  Dorothy liked that. “You got a thing against handsome men?”

  “No, I . . .” Elena was almost grateful when the phone started ringing. “Is that one yours?”

  “Believe so.” Dorothy walked to her purse on the sofa, answered, listened a moment, then reentered the kitchen and said, “Your friend Rachel sounds in a bad way.”

  “She must have made note of your number when I called her last night.” Elena started out onto her screened-in porch, then entered her bedroom and asked, “Are you calling from a safe place?”

  “The basement of a man who died four years ago.” Rachel’s voice was both low and unsteady. “A man my company murdered.”

  Her relief at having taken a proper risk left her weak at the knees. Elena seated herself at the desk by the window and reached for a pad and pen. “Tell me everything.”

  • • •

  Rachel spoke in fits and starts, interrupting herself to add details and to regain her fractured control. Her predecessor’s name was Larry Kroom. He had started the search for a new ADHD treatment, and led it from day one. His motive was simple and very personal. Both of his children suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Two boys. Identical twins. Eleven years old when they lost their father. At this point, Rachel had to stop and set down the phone. Elena listened to the woman try to stifle broken sobs, and knew with an expansive relief two great truths. First, they had the smoking gun. And second, Rachel Lamprey was on their side.

  When she finally came back on the line, Rachel went on, “His wife said SuenaMed security came and cleaned out his office. But the records I’m holding weren’t in his office. They were hidden in a box behind the children’s infant clothes, at the back of a cluttered and dusty basement. On top was a note to his wife that said simply, ‘Only give this to someone you can trust, and only if they ask for it.’” Rachel had great difficulty forming the word trust. As though just speaking it left her convicted of some vast wrong.

  Larry Kroom had discovered the drug’s potency as a manipulator of the subconscious by accident. The results did not appear on any report, because the tests were not performed in the lab at all.

  He had given the drug to his children.

  Both of his boys’ symptoms were growing increasingly severe. At points in virtually every day, they had become almost uncontrollable, and the standard treatments had proved only marginally effective. The situation had grown so serious that both boys were assigned to a special school, which effectively meant they were relegated to a lower strata for life.

  But Larry Kroom knew they were intelligent and good-hearted. It was all there in his journals, Rachel told her. Kroom’s agonizing, the love he felt for his boys, the helpless frustration. The lab results and animal testing had shown remarkable potential. To wait another two or three years until the clinical trials were completed would mean the drug would come online too late to have any impact on his children’s crucial teenage years.

  So he did what many other parents would have done. He stole samples from the lab.

  Larry Kroom started with the boy who was older by eight minutes, because he was the worst off and was showing alarming signs of growing violent. Most ADHD patients leveled off at the approach to puberty, but in his son’s case the symptoms were becoming increasingly severe, as though the only emotion he could freely express was rage. So he became SuenaMind’s first
human test subject.

  The change was overnight.

  Within seventy-two hours, the boy was laughing again. And not in the manic rage-filled manner that had marked his former outbursts. The boy’s laugh was almost musical. In a week, he discovered the joy of reading. The scientist’s personal journals recounted the astonishment and joy both parents felt, emotions that had been absent from their home for what seemed like years.

  Three months later, Larry Kroom administered the drug to his younger son. Again the change was drastic and immediate.

  Then, two weeks later, Kroom noticed a different change. One that was far less welcome. And extremely worrying.

  The younger boy lost his ability to filter suggestion from reality. The older son read the younger boy a story at bedtime, and the next morning the child treated the story as part of his reality, part of his overall worldview.

  Larry Kroom was a trained psychologist as well as biomedical scientist. He knew the patterns of hypnotic abuse, when ideas were force-instilled into the patients. The risk of manipulating a patient’s subconscious was one reason so many clinicians refused to practice hypnosis at all. In normal cases, any patient over the age of four or five had a subconscious strong enough to filter out what was genuinely false, or in opposition to the patient’s concept of self. Yet with some weaker patients, particularly those suffering from psychoses or showing evidence of schizoid tendencies, the risk was that any hypnotic suggestion would be adopted as truth.

  Larry Kroom’s journals described in exact detail how his younger boy lost the ability to tell the difference between inserted truth—including stories told to him or seen in movies and television shows—from reality. Once he had the opportunity to sleep, and to dream, the boy woke up assuming the fiction was fact.

  At first Kroom had suspected it was a side effect of the new drug. And so he took two weeks off of work, to remain with his son through the period that the initial dose remained active, so as to buffer the child from any such further psychic insertions. But his older boy continued to show astonishing progress. And his younger son’s behavior also improved. It was as though the drug was working, despite the side effect. And as was the case with most identical twins, the boys’ bloodwork was almost identical. Which led Kroom to wonder if perhaps the problem lay not with SuenaMind, but with the combination of his new drug with something else.

  There were basically two different patterns to ADHD treatment in young patients. The two boys had alternated between them. A number of children showed best results by moving from one to the other, and side effects were minimized. At the point when Kroom had administered the new drug, the older boy was going off one medicine, while the other had already started on the second.

  Kroom took his younger boy off the other drug.

  The result was a total and immediate cessation of all side effects.

  The two boys never looked back.

  At this point, Rachel began weeping so hard she could no longer breathe, much less speak. When she finally regained control, she said, “Kroom took his findings to the company’s managing director. I checked. That man is now president of one of the banks involved in the One World scam.”

  Elena found herself glad that one of them was capable of shedding tears. “Rachel, I hope you’re listening, because what I want to say to you is very important. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so sorry. I apologize with all my heart.” Elena felt the band of sorrowful tension unwind from around her heart. “I distrusted you. I was wrong.”

  The words helped restore Rachel to a semblance of calm. “My career is a sham. Trevor Tenning has duped me from the first day I entered the building.”

  “SuenaMind is still a major breakthrough. The lab results and the help it gives children are all real. The side effect can be controlled. Your work is vital. None of this has been changed.”

  “But they used me.”

  “They used us both. Right now, I need you to focus. Can you do that?”

  Rachel took a long breath. “Yes.”

  “Good. Now I want you to call Reed Thompson and tell him everything you told me. He’s a friend and our ally in all this.” Elena read off Reed’s number. “Will you do that?”

  Each moment drew Rachel further from the brink. “Yes. All right.”

  “Good. Then I want you to gather up all those journals and go somewhere safe. Call when you arrive. Don’t phone me. My cell isn’t safe. Ask Reed for a number you can use. Does anyone at SuenaMed know where you are?”

  “Only my assistant, Reginald. I phoned him before I called you. I can’t go in today, I—”

  Alarms of electric clarity went off in her head. “Rachel, gather the journals and get out of there now!”

  29

  Elena tried to reach Reed, first on his cell and then at home. When the voice mail answered on both, she called his office and let it ring a dozen times and more. She then tried the university operator, who was clearly coming to the end of a very long shift. “Ma’am, nobody is ever in those offices this early on a Saturday.”

  “I’ve tried his home, he’s not there.”

  The operator stifled a yawn. “He must be on his way in.”

  “Listen, you’ve got to help. This is an emergency.”

  “Hold on, then. I’ll put you through to security.”

  “No, that’s not—” But the operator was already gone. Elena paced to the closet and put back the clothes she had laid out for the day. When the security’s voice mail came on, she cut the connection. Elena checked the bedside clock, which read ten minutes to eight. Jacob should be arriving at any minute. She tried his phone, and was switched immediately to voice mail. She ended the call and threw the phone at her pillow.

  Elena opened her bedroom door far enough to tell Dorothy, “I’ve got to forget the workout and head straight to the university.”

  “Thought so. Personally, I never answer the phone in the morning, not until I’m ready to let the day in.”

  Elena dressed in a blouse of light gray silk and a slate-gray gabardine skirt. And pearls. She had decided on the ensemble while still on the phone with Rachel. This day would require all the solemn authority Elena could muster.

  Or so she thought.

  She was buttoning up her cuffs when there was a knock on her door. Dorothy set down her mug, walked over, and checked through the front door’s spyhole. She turned to smile at Elena. “Looks like the beau who’s not your beau got here early.” She unlocked the door and said, “Always did like a man who knows how to be on time.”

  Dorothy was caught by the door crashing back. She was slammed against the wall with such force it overturned the vase on Elena’s side table.

  They had obviously planned their entry to the max. This much was clear in Elena’s first milliseconds of shock and fear and dismay. They powered in together, their movements precise and deadly.

  The taller of the two bodyguards held Jacob as a human shield. Jacob’s eyes were the only part that moved of their own volition. He watched Elena with a look of visceral terror, fathomless and bleak.

  The man directly behind the puppet master was a fireplug. Elena recognized him as the bodyguard who had cleared away the reporters as she had entered SuenaMed’s headquarters. He aimed around Jacob and his mate, and shot Dorothy with a Taser.

  A hallway connected the kitchen and the bedroom and the living-dining room to the front door. The foyer held a narrow side table and a chair. From the doorway it was possible to look down the hall, past the kitchen entry and through the living-dining room to the porch and the sparkling waters beyond. Elena watched the policewoman’s seizure from the bedroom doorway, frozen with dread, until Reginald Pierce aimed a second Taser at Elena.

  She slammed the bedroom door shut and raced to the window by her desk. A metal plate kept the window from sliding more than ten inches. Elena hefted the desk chair and threw it at the glass just as the door splintered. The fireplug of a guard did not so much break o
pen the door as turn it into kindling. The entire frame broke apart in his fury.

  Reginald stepped into the room, took aim, and said, “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

  Nothing could have prepared her for the experience of being Tasered. The electric current did not hurt at first. The shock was too great to permit pain. Her entire body arched at an impossible angle. Only after Elena toppled onto her desk and then fell to the floor, after her lungs unlocked, when she drew her first screeching breath, did the agony come.

  30

  They lashed the three prisoners to chairs from the dining table. They took no chances. They used four plastic ties per person. Reginald paced in front of Elena while the two guards bound and positioned her according to his exact instruction. They strapped her wrists to the base of the chair back, which cocked her elbows at odd angles and left her feeling even more vulnerable. Which may have been Reginald’s intention.

  Dorothy was settled into the chair closest to the door. The policewoman had been Tasered a second time. Reginald had done this clearly as a warning. Dorothy looked at Elena but could not keep her eyes from tracking upward as her body spasmed again. Reginald called Dorothy the cop. “Make sure the cop can’t budge.”

  Reginald watched Elena. He knew when the Taser’s aftershock dimmed enough for her thinking to clear. He leaned in tight and said, “One move and I shoot you again. You want another spark, Dr. Burroughs?”

  “No.” Definitely not.

  “Then stay still and wait your turn.” He remained like that, tight in her face, while they fastened Jacob to a third chair. Reginald made no attempt to hide his pleasure at having her under his control.

  “The bonds on my wrists are too tight,” Elena complained.

  “Tough.”

  “My hands hurt.”

  “Not for long.” He glanced over. “You about done?”