Chronic Fear (2 page)

“Are you sure Burchfield’s behind it?” Mark asked.

They were having dinner at their wooded ranch house just outside Chapel Hill, which provided convenient access to the university, Raleigh-Durham International, and CRO’s headquarters in the Research Triangle Park. But since Mark had been axed and Alexis had resigned from the ethics council, they had traveled little, although Alexis still made occasional speaking appearances to support her new book on personality-altering drugs.

“Who else would it be?” Alexis responded.

“The deal was that everyone forgets the Monkey House. All the Seethe and Halcyon was destroyed, and the facility was leveled. A minor chemical leak contaminated the property, the health department condemned it, and CRO leveled the facility and took the tax write-off. It all looked good on paper.”

“Even the four deaths.”

“Only three, remember?”

Alexis frowned. She and Mark had discussed the events of that night many times, but they could never quite put all the pieces together. The Seethe exposure had induced bouts of fear and rage, and Halcyon had punched holes in their memories. Alexis would have happily believed the whole thing never happened except both of them still bore scar tissue from fighting to stay alive in the Monkey House.

While Mark’s scars were on the outside, including the jagged purple line on his cheek, hers mostly remained hidden.

“That doesn’t matter now,” Alexis said, pushing at the mashed potatoes and salmon on her plate. “We trusted Burchfield to keep it quiet. He has more to lose than any of us.”

“He wasn’t running for president then. Now the stakes are higher. The first task of any campaign is to run a minesweeper and see if any explosives are waiting to detonate. Maybe he’s decided it won’t stay quiet on its own.”

Daniel Burchfield chaired the Senate health committee, and Mark had been one of his Washington allies. As a CRO executive, Mark’s job was to encourage the senator to back legislation favorable to the pharmaceutical giant. Not that Burchfield needed much prompting. Generous campaign contributions would have been enough, but Burchfield also saw the potential to exploit personality-altering drugs for political gain.

Alexis understood the stakes were higher now. Since Burchfield was running for the Republican presidential nomination, maybe he’d decided he couldn’t risk a potential bombshell from his past. As long as the bomb wasn’t ticking, everyone was happy. But if someone had started the countdown, wouldn’t Burchfield seek to defuse it completely? If he couldn’t wipe it away from their memories, the only response left was to wipe their existence from the face of the Earth.

“Yeah, I understand he might want us out of the way,” Alexis said. “But what would he want with my research?”

“Maybe he thinks you’re still pursuing Halcyon.” He said it with the cruel sarcasm he’d developed since the Monkey House. The sneer and the scar worked together to arouse in her a mixture of guilt, sorrow, and anger.

I’m doing it for YOU, Mark
.

But, as always, she failed to completely convince herself. She pursued Halcyon for many reasons, and some of them scared her more than Mark’s frightening decay had.

Because you want to be its mother. You want to own it and be responsible for it. You want to be first banana.

Alexis glanced at the front door, wondering if Mark had locked it. She’d never felt this vulnerable, even in the immediate aftermath of the Monkey House trials, and their home’s relative isolation now was a worry instead of an asset.

“You destroyed all the Seethe and Halcyon,” she said, trying to hide the big lie behind her bitterness.

“You saw what that stuff turned us into.”

She dared him with her eyes. Her memories of the Monkey House tangled in oscillating bands of terror and violence, but she was incapable of such terrible acts. His accusations were even more proof that his condition was deteriorating.

“I saw a drug that had a potential to help ease people’s suffering,” Alexis said. “But you had to play God and take it out of the hands of science. You had no right to make that decision.”

“Making people’s lives better by helping them forget? It hasn’t helped
ours
very much, has it?”

“Two months of law-enforcement training, and suddenly you’re the world’s morality cop.”

“If it wasn’t for you and your Frankenstein complex, I would still have a career. But at least you have
your
career, right?”

“Mark, you know why I stayed on in the neurosciences department. It was our best chance to find a treatment for—”

Mark slammed his fist down on the table, causing his glass to jump. Mark and Alexis watched the white wine quiver a moment before settling down. Then he looked at her.

“Sorry,” he said, lifting his palms in supplication. “I’m not angry. Not anymore.”

At least this time he noticed his outburst. I don’t know if that’s an improvement or not.

“We’d better stop fighting each other,” Alexis said. “Soon we might be fighting to save our lives.”

They fell into silence at the thought. They both lifted their heads as if expecting to hear something in the woods outside. A truck rumbled down a distant street and a jet swept over on its way to RDI.

“If it was Burchfield, what could he possibly want in your lab?” Mark asked, taking a half-hearted bite of salmon. “Halcyon’s dead. Seethe’s dead. Briggs is dead. There’s nothing left.”

“That’s what has me stumped. We’re working on fear response, sure, but nothing like what Sebastian Briggs was doing. All those brain scans I’ve been looking at, all that mapping? That’s just tracking basic emotional and motor responses, grunt work.”

“I don’t see what Burchfield would want with that, unless he plans on clubbing his Republican challengers over the head with a budget ax.”

“Exactly.” Alexis wondered if she should tell him the rest. But his rages had become more sudden and uncontrollable over time, and she was increasingly reluctant to risk riling him.

If he found out I’d been lying to him for the past year, there’s no telling what he might do.

“Okay, maybe there’s another possibility,” Mark said. “I just can’t see Burchfield adding a couple of corpses to his resume. At least not until the primary’s over.”

“Very funny. You do gallows humor so well.”

“I’ve had lots of practice tying my own noose. So, is there anyone else from your closet of horrors that might be popping up now?”

“You know about the other Monkey House subjects. Anita is struggling…” Alexis twisted her napkin in distress.

“Is David Underwood still in Central Regional?” Mark asked, not allowing her to wallow.

“Yeah.” The state’s largest hospital for the mentally ill was in nearby Butner, where Alexis had conducted some post-grad research. “He’s probably being blasted with psychosocial modalities, and they’re still doing pharmacological clinical trials for schizophrenia. Sort of like what Briggs was doing, except this is sanctioned and funded by the state.”

“You think his shrinks found out about the Monkey House?”

“Even if David remembered anything, I doubt if he could communicate it clearly. If they asked a question that hit too close to home, he’d probably start singing ‘Home on the Range.’”

Mark shuddered, no doubt recalling the man’s incessant broken warbling after enduring years of Briggs’s sadistic research.

“Okay, so Anita and David haven’t spilled the beans—or the pills. That leaves Wendy and Roland. Are they still together?”

“Unless they lied, they headed for some peace and quiet in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

“I thought you and Wendy stayed in touch.”

“We did for a while. I haven’t seen her since we had them over for dinner last year. But she quit calling a few months ago. Unfriended me on Facebook and everything. She even took down the website where she was selling her art.”

“Not surprised. I figured Roland would turn into one of those survivalist nut jobs and head for the back country.”

“You barely even know him.”

“When you kill people together, you kind of learn a thing or two about each other.”

“Nobody killed anybody. I don’t know why you hang onto that particular delusion when there are so many others to choose from.”

“Because it makes me feel better about being a heavily armed lunatic,” Mark said.

They’d had this argument so often that she might as well have read straight from the script. “Briggs and the others were killed by Burchfield’s bodyguard.”

Mark pushed his plate away and stood, going to the window. “You remember it different every time, so there’s no point in talking about it now.”

She studied his reflection in the glass as he looked out. The scar zigzagged from his mouth where he’d injured his face during their escape, later explaining that the pain from the self-inflicted wound had helped him focus. He was still handsome, maybe even more so than before, because his cuteness had taken on a hard, bad-boy edge. However, his eyes were dark and troubled, and occasionally they flared as if some black magic potion was bubbling away inside his skull.

“You think they’re watching the house?” she asked.

“Depends on who ‘they’ are. I don’t think Burchfield’s people would, but the CIA and FBI were watching him. That was a year ago, though. I don’t know what the hell’s going on now. I’m so far out of the loop I might as well start believing the Internet.”

“There’s one other possibility. One of my research assistants was doing some work on frontal-lobe activity. She was measuring response to various stimuli, showing violent, erotic, romantic, or pastoral photographs and then noting the electromagnetic activity resulting from each.”

“Let me guess. The neurons got busy when they saw the dirty pictures. Always works for me.” Apparently satisfied no one was approaching the house, Mark turned away from the window and went to the closet to check his firearms. It was a nervous compulsion he engaged in with increasing frequency. Alexis wondered if his decision to become a cop had merely been an excuse to pursue a higher grade of weaponry.

“It wasn’t controversial, but if somebody got wind of it, they might have thought I was trying to revive Halcyon,” she said.

“They can’t be that dumb. They know you know they’re watching. Therefore, they should be looking for the things they don’t see.”

“Wow, you
did
spend too much time in Washington.”

“In a way, we’d be lucky if these guys are federal,” Mark said. “At least then, they’d be reporting to someone, which would mean accountability up and down the chain.”

“But what if it’s rogue? A terrorist group or a tech company? Maybe even CRO?”

“Fuck CRO.” Mark pulled his Glock from the top shelf and checked the clip. “And terrorists aren’t that patient, whether they’re domestic or foreign. Part of their gig is to make a big splash. ‘Subtle’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the training manual.”

“So they’re teaching homeland security at community college now?” She knew she was provoking him, but she was on edge, and in a sick way, mutual uneasiness had become a comfort zone. Once they fell into the routine, they both relaxed a little. Fear had become safe.

Their marriage had remained solid through the crazy travel schedules and their hectic careers, but the past year had taken its toll. Alexis missed her romantic, goofy, ambitious husband, who had been replaced by this tight-jawed, nervous gun freak. The man she’d married had somehow become a stranger.

One more casualty of the Monkey House.

“Here’s all the homeland security you need.” He took a weapon from the closet that looked like a machine gun from a war movie and spoke in an instructional tone, as if she might actually have to use it one day. “This AR-Fifteen is the perfect weapon for home defense. Flip this little knob here—that’s the safety—and then just press the trigger as fast as you can. You have thirty bullets. This little baby can really clear a room.”

The gun repulsed her, or maybe it was Mark’s sudden glee as he cradled it. “They wouldn’t be that brazen, would they? To break in here?”

“They broke into your lab, right? And they didn’t find what they were looking for, because you aren’t hiding anything, right?”

Alexis glanced away from his intense stare. “Right.”

“So they’re not going to believe you have nothing to hide. That means they’ll keep looking.”

“Why won’t they just leave us alone?”

“Because Burchfield tried to buy me off,” Mark said. “Wanted me to join his security team or take an advisory role. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ and all that.”

“Yeah. And I’m sure my job offer from the CDC was just a coincidence, too. Maybe I should have taken it. Then I could be teaching teens about the dangers of mood-enhancing drugs.”

“You know the problem with that? The word
enhancing
. There’s no way to talk about drugs without making them sound good.”

Alexis knew about enhancements. Mark didn’t. She’d hoped her refinement of the original Halcyon formula would allow Mark to be able to turn his anger off and on. That was one of the big flaws in Briggs’s synthesis of Halcyon that had resulted in Seethe—Seethe turned the tap all the way open and every nightmare in Pandora’s box would bust free at once. And then only Halcyon could close the tap by suppressing memory and emotional response.

She hadn’t mentioned the other possible source of the surveillance, because Mark didn’t know about Darrell Silver, the underground chemist she’d hired to develop her version of Halcyon. Silver had delivered the one batch in liquid form, saying he needed more time and more money, but he’d been arrested for dealing drugs two months ago. From the outside, it looked like just another dopehead getting busted, and Silver didn’t know anything about the drug’s provenance.

But she didn’t know what records or chemicals he’d left lying around, or whether he was clever enough to use her as a bargaining chip if someone pressed. Some of his charges had been federal because he’d been trafficking across state lines. But despite his obvious genius, his basic personality was childlike and innocent, failing to comprehend why The Man would frown upon the act of spreading joy and escape from the square world.