Chronic Fear (9 page)

Alexis figured she’d better just play along.

The pistol was in the seat between them, but she ignored it. Mark was in the gray T-shirt and baggy athletic pants he called his “Dirty Harry warm-ups,” and he wiped at his forehead as if cobwebs had collected there. He focused his gaze on the road ahead with an intensity that alarmed her.

“Class end early?” she asked.

“I was on call.”

“Is that part of the training?”

“Everything’s part of the training, honey.”

Even his voice was slightly off, a clipped monotone that he might have used if talking to himself. She glanced at the mock police radio that had been installed below the dash. Wires had been ripped from it and the handset was lying in the floorboard in three pieces.

“Nice of them to let you take the car home,” she said.

“We’re not going home.”

She glanced at him, but he didn’t blink. “I have to be back in the lab this afternoon.”

“They’ve been watching the house.”

“We don’t know that, Mark. We have a lot of research that corporate spies would love to get their greedy little paws on. I think the lab raid was about something else, not Seethe.”

“It’s always about Seethe.”

They had crossed Franklin and Rosemary streets and were heading into the suburban outskirts of Chapel Hill, where Colonial-style homes were tucked behind fences beneath old oaks and towering pines. They passed a county patrol car coming from the other direction, but it didn’t slow, much less follow them.

“Where are you going?” Alexis asked.

Mark’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles were white, and he looked at her for the first time since he’d insisted she get in the car. “You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Where it all started.”

A second surge of panic rolled through her. A hundred stories and images fought for attention, but they were like broken strips of film reassembled at random: the original Monkey House trials, where she’d been nothing but a diligent graduate assistant; the trials themselves; and one bloody and battered face—had
she
been part of that?

No. Remember it the way it happened. You were Briggs’s assistant and that woman fell down the stairs and struck her head. A tragic accident and nothing more.

But the fresher waves of memories were harder to fend off. The events of a year ago had been carefully reconstructed, both externally and internally, and they stirred beneath a gently roiling surface. If Mark took her back to the Monkey House—or what was left of it—then they might rise in a psychotic tsunami and sweep away the levees and bulkheads of her defenses.

And nobody wanted the truth, least of all her.

“Mark, we can’t do that. They might think we know something.”

“Do we?”

“They’ve split us all up. Anita’s hanging by a thread. David’s locked away. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wendy and Roland are out of the way, too. Maybe their move to the mountains wasn’t voluntary.”

She glanced at the gun. She couldn’t risk provoking him in this state. The effects of Seethe could spin him in several unpredictable directions, and she realized how foolish she’d been in thinking she could treat the unknown.

I’m just as arrogant and deranged as Sebastian Briggs.

The realization stunned her because she’d been acting through a coherent scientific method. But if she couldn’t trust her own motives and thought processes, how could she be confident she was doing the right thing? Maybe Briggs had been his own guinea pig, the first subject of the Monkey House trials, and his contamination by Seethe had led to his later madness.

God, what if I’m running past the fun-house mirrors myself? What if Seethe and Halcyon changed me in ways I can’t even recognize?

“Lex?” Mark said, his tone normal but concerned. He took his right hand from the wheel and, for a moment, she had the image of him grabbing the gun and putting the barrel to her temple. Instead, he gave her a reassuring stroke on the forearm. “What do you remember about that night?”

“Just like we told each other. Briggs tricked us into coming back to the Monkey House and then he tried to kill us. But the federal agents got there first. There was an explosion and four people died.”

“And we took the last of Briggs’s Halcyon. They thought it was all destroyed, but we had it, didn’t we?”

Her pulse accelerated, and she wondered if the lie would somehow show on her face. “You flushed it. You didn’t trust anybody with it, even me.”

He looked at her, dangerously ignoring the lunchtime traffic on the highway. “I can’t remember. I might have given it to you. I love you, remember?”

He squeezed her arm with passion, but then the grip tightened until it hurt. She moaned and tried to pull free, but he dug his fingers into her soft flesh. He yanked her closer and the car swerved, causing car horns to blare around them.

“You’re sick, Mark. Seethe did something to you. You don’t see it, but you’re changing.”

He shoved her away and she bounced against the door. As he regained control of the cruiser, he took an exit ramp onto I-40, heading west.

“Why in hell should I believe you?” he said. “You think I don’t know you’ve been in bed with them ever since Briggs revived the experiments? You think I didn’t see the hunger in your eyes when you thought you could steal his work? And the goddamned government had you right in their sights, because they saw it, too. How goddamned hot for it you were.”

Her lungs hurt and she could barely force air into them.
Paranoia. He’s cracking apart and he doesn’t even know it.

“You’re not making any sense, honey,” she said. “You said yourself the government was watching us.”

“No, not ‘us.’ Just me. You’re right about one thing. I’m changing, and I can’t think straight anymore.” He pounded the wheel with one fist. “If only I could think straight, I’d figure this out.”

The interstate traffic moved steadily, with consistent spacing. Otherwise, Mark’s erratic driving might have drawn more attention. As it was, the weaving combined with the car’s official appearance kept other motorists both well away and near the speed limit.

“Slow down and pull over,” Alexis coaxed. A neurochemist by profession, she’d had her share of psychology classes. The first step was to calm him and then maybe he’d listen to reason.

If the Seethe exposure had permanently affected him, then he’d become more unstable by the minute, especially if his amygdala was hyperstimulated by anger or fear. And her Halcyon supply was on the middle shelf of the refrigerator back home. If she could get him there in one piece, they might have a chance.

“I have to know what happened,” Mark said.

“The Monkey House is gone,” she said. “The explosion caused a toxic spill and they had to level it.”

“Maybe, but the truth is there somewhere.”

“But we don’t even know how to get there.”

“I do. I remember more than I ever admitted.” His face was dotted with sweat, his jaw tense, eyes wide and lit by a manic gleam.

“How could you remember, Mark? Halcyon wiped most of it away.”

“That’s what they all say.” He cast a demented grin. “But since you’ve been dosing me with Seethe, it’s all coming back to me.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. “Honey, honey, honey,” she whispered, scared and sad.

Signs of paranoid schizophrenia, manifesting as sociopathic rage. One of Briggs’s suspected outcomes of end-stage exposure.

And not just “suspected.” Desired.

They exited a side road into the Research Triangle Park, and the first of the glass-and-steel research and manufacturing facilities came into view.

“It all makes sense,” Mark said, and his newfound rationality was even more unsettling than his earlier rage. “You and CRO and the feds get rid of Briggs, who was in everybody’s way and uncontrollable. You take over, and Burchfield ties everything up with a nice bow so it looks like Seethe and Halcyon never happened. And the work goes on without a hitch, except now you’ve got all the backing you ever wanted and you’ve got your test monkey where you can keep an eye on him at all times.”

“No, Mark, that’s the Seethe talking—”

“Of course it’s the fucking Seethe talking! That’s what I am. That’s what I do. That’s what you’ve turned me into. You didn’t need a fucking Monkey House, all you needed was a monkey.”

His roar caused her to shrink away, and she considered opening the door and taking her chances on the grassy shoulder. But she was
his
only chance. She loved him so much, she could never abandon him when he needed her most.

Even if he didn’t know it.

When you loved somebody, you lifted anchor and rode the tsunami with them.

Mark drove with purpose, the route apparently still clear in his mind although she only dimly recognized the scenery. She wondered how many times he might have driven out here, seeking answers as the lesions in his brain pulled apart all the memories and experiences that had shaped his life and made him Mark Morgan.

Alexis risked a glance at his profile, the sheen of his moist forehead, his unkempt hair, his curled upper lip.
How much of my husband is still left in there?

He fell silent after his eruption. His mood swings were getting more erratic by the minute. She’d miscalculated terribly. The Halcyon she’d been administering had not been helping him. Instead, it had only masked his deterioration and allowed her the placebo of helpfulness.

He turned off the highway onto a narrow, crumbling access road. Visible through the surrounding pine trees was a chain-link fence running parallel to the road. It was topped with barbed wire. Alexis strained to see beyond it, but the foliage was too thick.

Still, she knew they were approaching the Monkey House.

“I was telling the truth,” she said quietly, trying to sound reasonable.

“We’ll see about that.”

“If I was working for the government, do you think they’d let you kidnap me? Wouldn’t I be far too important to take the risk of your killing me? And would I have told you about the lab raid?”

Mark glanced in the rearview mirror. Then he shook his head. “Here’s the deal. They need you, but they need me, too. Right? You know how the brain processes it, the theory behind it, the molecular structure, but I am living and breathing the shit. I
am
Seethe.”

They came to a steel cable strung between two poles embedded in concrete. Beyond that was a gate set in the fence, tangled with honeysuckle and poison sumac. It hadn’t been used in a long time.

Not since the cleanup a year ago.

Mark stopped the car, collected the gun, and motioned her out. When they were both standing by the steel cable, Mark said, “In there’s where it all happened.”

“There’s nothing here, Mark.”

“Then you don’t need to worry, do you?” He knelt and rolled up the leg of his athletic pants, revealing a holster strapped inside his ankle. He slid the gun into it and smoothed his clothes.

Alexis followed him through the weed-choked entrance to the gate. Beyond it was a stand of scrub pines, and in a clearing was a blackened circle, a few piles of masonry rubble, and deep gouges in the red clay. A dented “No Trespassing” sign leaned to one side in the center of what had once been the Monkey House. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“That’s what happened to the people we used to be,” Mark said. “That’s where we died and didn’t know it.”

Butner was a small town about fifteen miles north of Durham. It had been known as Camp Butner during World War II, an army training facility that later became a home for injured veterans. The town of nearly six thousand people had maintained that institutional identity ever since, housing several prisons, a federal correctional facility, some state agency headquarters, and the largest mental hospital in North Carolina.

Forsyth had driven himself to Butner after leaving Burchfield in Winston-Salem. He could have used Abernethy and the limo, since Burchfield planned to spend the night at home, but Forsyth didn’t want anyone to know of his movements, especially the Secret Service.

He was just exiting I-85 when the cell phone rang and he had to fumble through several jacket pockets to find it. “Forsyth here.”

“Scagnelli.”

“Do you got anything?” Forsyth didn’t bother with correct grammar when he was away from the press.

“No. They headed out to the Research Triangle Park, and I figured they were working with somebody out there. Thought I’d get lucky and they’d lead me right to the secret lab.”

“You might as well expect a wild hog to grub up a truffle and drop it on your dinner plate,” Forsyth said. “You ought to know by now that ‘secret’ means everybody don’t know about it.”

“Well, the Secret Service has a Twitter account. That’s hardly a good way to keep secrets.”

Forsyth knew Twitter was some kind of Internet thing, and he was happy to stay away from it. As far as he could tell, all it did was get people in trouble when they said things they shouldn’t.

“You don’t have to worry about what the Secret Service does. You’d better be worrying about what Dominic Scagnelli does. Don’t forget who you work for.”

“You say that a lot.”

“Because you work for
me
. Where are the Morgans now?”

“They’re walking around an abandoned lot. I checked out the property on my laptop. It’s owned by CRO Pharmaceuticals but apparently it was shut down after a fatal industrial accident last year.”

“You don’t say.”

“Morgan worked for CRO. Real high up the ladder, a guy just doing his job. And he gave it all up to become a cop?”

“No, he gave it up for his wife. He just didn’t know it at the time.”

“Women. They sure know how to fuck up a good thing. The most selfish creatures on God’s green earth.”

Forsyth winced a little. He’d been married once. He’d lain his lovely Louisa to rest fifteen years back, and he’d never found her equal. He was content to finish up his time here and be reunited in heaven with his monogamy still intact.

Scagnelli sputtered on, the amphetamines fueling his tirade. “After the nuclear holocaust when all the dust settles, first will come the cockroaches, and then some cats will pussyfoot out of their holes. And then a few women will crawl out of the rubble. If ever you want to learn about self-preservation—”

“Did the Morgans see you?”

“Of course not.” Scagnelli sounded offended, which was exactly what Forsyth intended. “He looks a little jittery but otherwise they’re just hacking through the weeds like they’re looking for a way inside the fence.”

“Monitor them but don’t take no action.”

“What if they find something?”

“There ain’t nothing left to find.”

“Okay, I’ll just send you a text.”

“Why don’t you Twitter it?”

“Tweet.”

“Whatever. Or ram it up a carrier pigeon’s butt and have it sing ‘Dixie’ on the way over.”

Scagnelli laughed, taking Forsyth’s gruffness for folksy humor. Forsyth could tell Scagnelli was underestimating him. Just the way he liked it.

He clicked the cell phone dead and turned into the parking lot of Central Regional Hospital. It had once been named Umstead Hospital after one of the state’s endless series of mental-health reformers dating all the way back to Dorothea Dix, whose own namesake hospital was nearly dead.

Two and a half centuries of meddling in people’s heads and they still ain’t got things right.

The hospital was two stories at ground level, although it was set on a gentle slope that allowed for a lower floor at the back end of the building. The flat roof and glass façade suggested a 1990s-era design, back when architects didn’t realize how quickly their futuristic designs would look bulldozer-ready. The lot was relatively empty, since the hospital didn’t get a lot of visitors. Many of the patients were of the sort that no one wanted to acknowledge, much less spend time with.

The assistant director was waiting by the front desk, wearing a crisp pants suit. She was of late middle-age, her hair white and fluffy, although her face was relatively unlined. She greeted him with a smile and shining blue eyes that suggested unflagging optimism in the face of her grim duties as a shepherd of the lost and hopeless.

“Mr. Forsyth,” she said, shaking his hand like a man. “I’m a fan of your work. Except for that proposal to cut federal support for mental health services. I’m Paula Redfern.”

“A real pleasure, Dr. Redfern. And about that—”

“I know you’re a busy man, so let’s not waste your time. Besides, I don’t vote in your district.”

As she led him down the hall and into the labyrinth, Forsyth found himself admiring her spunk as she described the various missions of the hospital. He liked the graceful way she moved, too, but he was wise enough to keep it on an aesthetic level, like a man watching someone else’s thoroughbred gallop through a meadow.

“We focus on interdisciplinary approaches individualized to each patient’s desired therapeutic outcomes,” she said.

“I ain’t sure what that means,” he said, “but your funding just went up a million dollars.”

She laughed and kept on with the tour. Forsyth was pleased the hospital had honored his request to keep the tour private. Because every entity receiving public funding was now in intense competition with all the other entities, people grabbed any advantage they could. Everybody in the country was in favor of smaller government until it came time to take a pay cut themselves.

“We’re not just a treatment center, we have research and forensic wings as well,” Dr. Redfern said. “UNC and Duke conduct research work here.”

“I know a few researchers down this way,” Forsyth said. “As you know, I’m a close friend of Senator Burchfield’s and—”

“I vote against him every chance I get, but I am sure he’s an honorable man in private.”

They were entering the Acute Adult Unit, where psychiatric patients with little hope of release were confined. Dr. Redfern continued on with her chipper presentation in wholesale denial of the fact that the ward wasn’t much of an upgrade from the mental asylums of old. The main differences were better lighting and a diverse array of designer drugs, plus the fact that the public couldn’t pay admission to derive some cheap entertainment.

Forsyth signed in with an armed guard while Redfern blathered airily about the “pathophysiology and psychosocial precipitants of mental illness,” getting an extra lift when she started in on “comprehensive community-based intervention modules.”

The first patient they passed, a shuffling young man in paper slippers with a strand of drool dangling down to his chest, looked like he could care less what the community thought.

Forsyth nodded at him out of rote politeness but the man simply took another sliding step away from reality and toward whatever mercy God granted the deranged.

The patients in open confinement were largely clean and passive. A bald black man sat playing checkers with himself, although there was no board on the coffee table. A woman in street clothes stood looking out the barred window as if waiting for a bus that would never come. Another woman with palsy muttered to herself over and over, and it took Forsyth a moment to realize she was faithfully reciting the Gospel According to Luke.

Then they entered the ward with the private rooms. These resembled regular hospital rooms, although through the doors of the unoccupied ones, Forsyth saw padding on the walls and restraint devices made of steel and leather. An occasional wail reverberated from a distant hellhole, a sound as lonely of that of a barn owl in the October night.

“What’s your interest in Mr. Underwood?” Dr. Redfern asked.

“One of those researchers I spoke of asked me to look in on him,” Forsyth said. “A cousin. Just between you and me, I suspect he’s afraid that sort of thing runs in the family.”

A few howls stitched themselves together into a caterwauling melody. It wasn’t until the sounds repeated that Forsyth made it out. The old western folk song “Home on the Range.”

“Mr. Underwood is one of our more…
interesting
…cases,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s clinging to a persistent delusion that he’s the subject of a secret government experiment. He was connected with a clinical trial during his college years, and one of the subjects died. Apparently the guilt and trauma lingered, triggering a latent schizophrenia.”

Forsyth probed her a little in case David Underwood’s psychotic ramblings had aroused any suspicion. “I thought schizophrenia was genetic.”

“There are certainly links,” she said. “But current research is focusing on neurobiology. Drug use could worsen such a condition.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Anything mind-altering or mood-altering.”

Then they were outside the room from which the wailing came. Forsyth wondered if Underwood would remember him. But the great thing about a nutcase, nobody believed anything they said.

They peered through a glass observational window. Underwood sat on a cot, hunched forward and staring at the floor. His hair was clipped close and his ill-fitting gown was draped over his gaunt frame.

Forsyth noted that Underwood’s present circumstances were not that different from when he’d been held captive in Sebastian Briggs’s lab and used as a test monkey. The only thing that had changed since then was the name of the zookeeper.

“Is he responding to medication?” Forsyth asked, making conversation.

“He’s on several new antipsychotic drugs,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s also presenting anxiety and depression, and because he’s such a risk, I’m afraid he doesn’t have much hope for release. He’s got the major first-rank symptom of schizophrenia.”

“What’s that?”

“The belief that his thoughts are controlled by an external force. In his case, he believes he’s been brainwashed by the government.”

“I could make a grand joke of that, but it doesn’t look like a laughing matter,” Forsyth said.

“Still, he deserves the same compassionate care that Central Regional aspires to administer to all its patients,” Dr. Redfern said, once again lapsing into a robo-cheerleader for her facility.

“Of that, I’ve no doubt,” Forsyth said. He took one more glance at David Underwood and was surprised he didn’t feel a twinge of sympathy for the man.

Too goddamned long in politics. Your heart is the first thing to go, and then you lose your soul. God help me. God help us all.

“Did you want to see him personally?” Dr. Redfern asked, eager to please.

“No,” he said, making a show of glancing at his wristwatch. “Is Darrell Silver available?”

Redfern’s mood darkened a little. “Of course. Federal inmates under treatment place a particularly heavy burden on a facility like ours, as you can imagine.”

Add another million to that funding request, Doctor
.
Maybe we should put you on Daniel’s staff. You would make a mighty fine health secretary and I’d bet you’d say whatever it took to make the administration look good.

And being pretty don’t hurt a bit.

“I understand Silver’s been charged with drug manufacturing and conspiracy,” he said.

“This way.” Redfern led him down the hall and around a bend, passing rooms in which involuntary patients spent their time until the next dose, meal, or change of underwear.

Alone with nothing but their thoughts. Satan has truly been loosed for a season and his millennium is coming up.

Forsyth’s Pentecostal upbringing had softened a little in the face of political realities, melding into a more palatable fundamentalism as he became entrenched in Congress. Extremes of every kind tended to get blunted by the forge and hammer of the corporations, lobbyists, and party leaders.

Still, he felt Armageddon was near—not in the literal sense of a climactic battle in the Middle East, but in a general erosion of the human spirit. Where others saw Satan’s armies attacking from the field, Forsyth believed Satan delivered destruction from the inside out.

Just like those drugs, Seethe and Halcyon, did.

Forsyth wondered if that was more than a coincidence.

Redfern was blithely enumerating all the funding challenges in the face of rising costs and the threat that national health care posed. Forsyth mumbled assurances that one of Burchfield’s top priorities was to revise the landmark legislation, although they all knew that entitlements were nearly impossible to take away once people got used to them.

Soon they came to a thicker door with a security camera and keypad. After Redfern logged in and was identified, they were buzzed into an antechamber where an armed and uniformed guard staffed a desk, surrounded by security monitors and alarm systems. Both of them had to sign another log, and then they entered a second door.

The rooms on this floor were a cross between prison cells and hospital rooms. Another armed guard patrolled the hallway, a tall, sunburnt man who greeted Redfern by name and gave Forsyth a sideways grin.

“Tell Senator Burchfield I’m voting for him,” the guard said. “I’ve voted for him in every election since he ran for the State House, and I’m not about to stop now.”

“I’ll do that,” Forsyth said. “And thank you for your vital service here. Is Mr. Silver ready?”

“In interrogation like you requested.”

Redfern beamed in satisfaction at the show of efficiency. The guard led the way to the room as Redfern explained, “Usually lawyers meet their clients here, and if the inmates are deemed competent, they are sometimes asked questions by investigators.”