by Jason Briggs
“Why didn’t you tell Lana any of this?”
“Because I didn't have any answers. It only would have scared her and she would have started asking questions and poking around too. I didn’t want to do that to her.” Treadwell tossed his hands out. “But our relationship ended up a casualty of it all anyway.”
I asked Marcus to describe the man who came to his house.
“Average height. Black hair. He was clean-shaven. I’m pretty sure his eyes were blue, and he had a strong jawline. Why?”
“Because I killed him in D.C. two nights ago.”
Treadwell slowly turned and looked at me. “What?”
“Whoever is running this show,” I said, “he was their cleaner. He was the guy with the mop. Except he finally got sloppy. The night I killed him he murdered a man who worked in the Pentagon, and my former commander the night before that.”
“Good lord.”
“Marcus, I need a better way to reach you. I’m sure I’m going to have more questions for you as this investigation moves forward.”
“I’ll keep an eye on this tract of ground. If want to get in touch, come by at 3 PM. And come alone. You bring anyone else back with you, you’ll never see me again.” He left my weapons on the ground where he had laid them and disappeared into the brush.
I brought down my hammock and gathered my things. Five minutes later I was back in the skiff, navigating my way back to civilization, thinking through what I had just heard. They would have to kill me too, if they wanted the truth to stay covered up. Short of that, I wasn’t going to stop until I had blown the doors off and exposed every person involved with this despicable crime.
My greatest obstacle was that I still didn’t know who had used America’s most elite soldiers as guinea pigs for their potential product.
But I knew just how to find out.
“That pisses me off more than anything I think I’ve ever heard,” Brad said. He was gripping his beer bottle so hard I thought it might burst. Brad and I were both former military, but he had spent years in MARSOC, and that gave him a true affinity for our special forces that even I couldn’t possess. “And Sergeant Treadwell just went off the grid? He’s living in the Everglades?”
“Yeah. He didn’t want them coming after his ex-fiancée.”
We were sharing my Boston Whaler’s double-wide helm seat, bobbing in the water a mile off the coast. There were only a few stray wisps of clouds to the east; other than that the blue mantel of the sky was unbroken. I needed to clear my head and think, and there’s no better way to do that than on the water with a cold drink in hand.
“What did you find on this Dr. Parker?” I asked.
“Wayne Parker,” Brad said. “He works at MercoKline’s lab, at their headquarters in Sarasota. From everything I can see he’s a lead researcher in what they call their ‘Special Project’ division. Strangely enough, he’s the only researcher in that department. I actually had to get Spam to help me with that bit of info.”
“So I think we can conclude that whatever Parker concocted while he was at DARPA, he took it to MercoKline and they found some application for special forces soldiers. Only the test went wrong and they’ve been covering their tracks.”
“Someone within MercoKline has to be connected to someone in the Armed Services,” Brad said. “There’s no other way to know the unit movements and deployments otherwise. And then there’s the actual administering of the drug. Someone had to do that, which means they had to be close to the operators.” He looked over at me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I need a place on the mainland that no one knows about. A secure place out in the woods. Know of anything?”
Brad smiled knowingly and bobbed his head. “As a matter of fact, I know just the place. Why… what do you have planned?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
He turned the corner and saw the fire hydrant fifty yards down the sidewalk. He put on more speed until his forty-nine-year-old body was running at maximum speed. He turned the corner and stayed on the sidewalk as he reached the park on the far end of his neighborhood where intermittent streetlights punctuated the darkness. The muscles in his legs, already warm and loose from a lengthy run, were burning now, working as fast as they could go as he finished his route with his mind and body going all in.
As soon as he reached the fire hydrant he pulled up and transitioned into a fast walk: his cool-down period. After running three miles he always finished with a strong sprint. He could feel his chest thumping hard inside his chest and he blotted at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist.
He had never been much of a runner, but the events of the last year had almost forced him to be. Over the past year, the stress had continued to mount, moving him closer and closer to the edge of a mental breakdown.
But he couldn’t allow that to happen. He had to stay both physically and mentally strong; he couldn’t afford to allow anything to blur the absolute clarity with which he had to greet each and every day.
Another runner was coming up on his left, and he moved to the right to give the other man a wide berth. They passed just beneath a street lamp and the runner smiled at him as he ran by, raising his hand in greeting. A second later he heard his name.
“Wayne Parker?”
He turned around. The runner had stopped and was looking at him expectantly.
“Dr. Wayne Parker?”
“Do I know you?”
The runner approached. “No, no you don’t. But boy, do I know you.” And before Parker could react, the man had snuck in behind him, grabbed a wrist, and leveraged his arm up. Parker’s head went down as he bent at the waist. He gasped from the pain. “Please,” he croaked. “What do you want?”
He heard the growl of an engine just before a truck suddenly whipped around the corner and squealed to a stop along the tapered curb. Parker’s assailant opened the rear door and forced him into the back of the crew cab, barked at him to slide over, and then joined him inside the truck before shutting the door. The driver punched the accelerator, and the truck growled again as it jolted back into the road.
Parker grabbed at his aching arm. “Who—who are you?” he stammered. “What do you want?”
“I want you to take a nap. Are you tired?”
“What?”
His assailant brought up a large fist and sent it right into Parker’s face. The doctor’s head rocketed backward into the window glass and then rolled loosely on his shoulders before his chin came to rest on his chest.
Brad grimaced as he shook his hand and rubbed at his knuckles. “Dude’s got a bone structure made of granite,” he grumbled. I watched in the rearview mirror as Brad grabbed a blue Walmart canvas bag and slid it over Parker’s head.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“What?” he said. “It was all I could find. We work for Homeland. It’s not like we kidnap people all the time and have a shelf full of black hoods in the weapons closet.”
He had a point. “He can probably see through that,” I said.
“He can’t right now. He’s sleeping.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I grabbed another beer from the small refrigerator and returned to my seat at the circular pine table. Brad was sitting across from me examining his hand.
“You might want to hang up the badge and find a different line of work,” I said. “If you can’t even punch a guy’s lights out without—”
“I’m fine. I just don’t know why it hurts so bad. This is nuts.”
Next to me, Wayne Parker stirred. He groaned beneath the canvas bag and his head listed to one side before his senses returned and he sat bolt upright. We had his hands tied behind his back. “Hello?” he called out weakly.
Brad looked at me. We were still wearing our ski masks, but I could see him grinning behind his.
“Hello?” Parker put a little more gusto into it this time. He struggled against his bonds for a while and then gave up.
“Hel
lo!!”
Brad leaned in close to him. “Hiya.”
Parker jerked in a fit of fright. “Who—who are you?”
Chuckling, I plucked the eco-friendly shopping bag off his head. The yellow lighting in the cabin wasn’t bright, but he squinted nevertheless.
“Dr. Wayne Parker,” I began. “You were out for a long time. I was starting to think that my associate here had hit you a little too hard.”
He took in his surroundings. The small cabin was just two rooms—a bedroom with an adjoining bathroom, a living area with a kitchenette along another wall. No TV, not even a phone. It belonged to a Marine buddy that Brad had served with in the Corps. His old friend was still active duty, but he had inherited the place from his father and told Brad he was happy to let him use it whenever he wanted. Parker’s eyes moved from the room, to me, and finally, to Brad, which is when his recognition flipped on. “You. You took me—”
“Yes. I took you,” Brad replied. “Kidnapped you—call it what you will. But that’s behind us now. We’re here, and that’s what matters.”
“What do you want?”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate you asking. And since you asked, I will tell you.” I took another swig of my beer and placed the bottle on the table. “I want to play a game. That’s what I want. I say a name and you tell me what you know about that person. Fair enough?”
Parker didn’t answer, only glared at me with nervous suspicion.
“Don’t worry,” Brad said, “this will all become very clear to you in just a second.”
I looked at Parker and held his stare. “Douglas Peterson.”
A brief look of panicked recognition passed into his face but faded as quickly as it came. He didn’t answer.
“Douglas Peterson,” I repeated.
“What does this have to do with me?” he blurted out.
I picked up my beer and held it up. “I’ve got all night. I’ve got a refrigerator full of these, a soft bed in the other room, and a cupboard full of canned tuna. Now, I’m not super partial to canned tuna, but I could manage.”
“I think,” Brad said, “that you should tell us what you know about Douglas Peterson. Because”—he jerked a thumb toward me—“he knows that you know him, and I know that you know him.”
Parker finally broke beneath our expectant stares. “He was a colleague of mine when I worked at DARPA. You couldn’t just send me an email and ask me that?”
“No,” I said, “I couldn't. But let’s continue. William McCleary.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“Charlotte McCleary.”
“No.”
“GRM Research.”
“No—what is this?”
“Sergeant Marcus Treadwell.”
Bingo. Parker’s eyes flared momentarily, and the little color he had drained from his face. His eyes wouldn’t meet ours and he stared at the tabletop.
“Sergeant Brice Coleman. Sergeant Reggie Diaz.”
“Stop it.”
“Sergeant Joseph Gaskin. Sergeant Major Hopper Carlson.”
“Stop it.”
“Major Dennis Archer.”
“Stop! Stop it!” Parker was trembling in his seat now. His eyes were a blaze of torment, and his chest was rising and falling as he struggled to catch his breath. It was a full two minutes before he calmed.
“You want to tell us what that was about?” Brad asked. I could hear the anger seated in his voice. “You want to tell us why hearing those names made you so upset?”
Parker swallowed hard. “Because… because… no, no I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell us?” Brad let out an irritated chuckle. “You’re a coward, you know that? And there’s nothing more despicable on this planet than a coward.”
“He’s right,” I said. “And we have a way of dealing with cowards.” I stood up and walked to the other side of the room where a small duffle bag lay on the floor beside the wall. I brought out Brad’s tactical knife. With a 7-inch steel blade and leather-wrapped handle, the KA-BAR had been used in every U.S. war since World War II. If you weren’t the one holding it, it could easily be the most intimidating thing you ever encountered.
I unsheathed it and walked over to Parker. I set the tip of the blade against the top of his thigh. “Start talking.”
He stared wide-eyed at the knife dimpling his skin. “I—I can’t tell you.”
“I’ll do far worse to you than they will.” I pressed down and the blade punctured his skin and entered his muscle. Parker screamed. I left the blade in place. It was in a centimeter, hardly enough to do major damage. “More?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Then talk.”
He shook his head again.
I pressed in on the knife and it slipped in further, severing the muscle and making its way toward the bone. Parker let out a blood-curdling scream. His face was bright red now and beads of sweat had popped up all along his forehead.
“Okay! Okay….”
I slipped the blade out and his body relaxed.
“You have five seconds to talk,” I said. “Five...four...three...two—”
“I killed them!” Parker blurted out. “I killed them and I hurt them.” His face pinched into a sob and his whole body shook as he began to cry. Brad and I watched him, disgusted but with far too many questions to just sit there and watch him wallow in self-pity.
“How?” I asked. “Were they your little petri dish, a few lab rats that you could test your science on?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But it wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
Now that Parker’s voice was well-oiled, I set the knife on the table beside me and sat back down.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Brad said. “And give us the full picture.”
He swallowed and took in a deep breath. “At DARPA, I had been researching the effects of how certain amino acids bonded to a very specific protein, under certain conditions, and the effects of it on the cognitive center in the brain. What I was seeing was extraordinary and I started to understand just what I had discovered. It was groundbreaking. So instead of carrying on as usual, I started to alter my research logs so as not to leave a trail of my findings. And then I reached out to a drug company and pitched me coming to work for them and bringing my research with me.”
“You got greedy,” Brad said.
“Yes. John Brooks is the senior vice president at MercoKline. I knew him from ten years ago when we both were on a softball league together. So I brought this to him directly. He offered me a great salary and a truckload of shares in the company, all with the condition that I keep my research quiet. Basically, I was working secretly for Brooks, trying to perfect the research and its practical uses.”
“Let’s dial in on that last part,” I said. “Why test it on our soldiers? On our best soldiers?”
Parker’s shoulders hung limply at his sides; his chin sagged toward his chest. He looked every part the defeated man. “That was Brooks’s idea. He’s a driven man—I guess that’s how you get into the kind of position he has. All along I had envisioned a drug that might curb the way we experience depression, and even—forgive how this sounds—make us smarter. All my research showed that it could enhance our cognitive functions. But Brooks, as he studied my reports, saw something completely different. You see, depending on the way the drug is constructed, it can have certain negative effects. It’s like this with any drug, of course. But what he saw buried in my research logs was a drug that could harm in subtle ways. He saw the market potential in that. MercoKline already makes billions off the treatment of PTSD. Where I saw a cure, Brooks saw a poison.”
“Then all he had to do was provide the cure,” I said.
“And MercoKline makes out in the market,” Brad finished. A quick glance across the table and I saw that my best friend was smoldering. The Marine Raider was taking Parker’s words extremely personal.
“Yes,” P
arker said. “It’s basically a way to manufacture a synthetic version of PTSD—which is generally the result of not only experiencing terrible trauma but also the loss of a shared identity when you return home to those who weren’t there and can’t understand. We found a way to introduce this drug at the cognitive level, bypassing the endocrine system altogether. Brooks started with special forces soldiers because if they show signs of this new syndrome, this new synthetically induced PTSD, then no one is immune. From there he plans to take it to the everyday soldier.”
“Unbelievable,” I said. I wanted to haul off and knock that man’s head clean off his shoulders with a single punch. I leaned in, getting my face closer to him, and lowered my voice into a snarl. “Did they bother to tell you what happened to those warriors whose names I listed off to you earlier?”
“Yes. They told me.”
“And what did they tell you?”
“That a squad was on patrol in the desert and made camp for the night. That two of them never woke up and that three of them woke up with developmental issues. They said Treadwell was the only one who made it out without any negative long term effects.”
“Two of them never woke up?” Brad muttered under his breath. “That’s a big fat lie. Why don’t I go ahead and share with you what really happened that night?”
Parker looked confused, as though it had never crossed his mind that he would have been lied to. “What do you mean?”
Brad proceeded to relay Treadwell’s account of that night, how the two troop leaders had indeed woken up, how they had self-mutilated and then, finally, had taken their own lives. Brad told him about the other three warriors, how all three were suffering from various degrees of mental challenges to this day, and would most likely never recover.