Endorphin Conspiracy, The (21 page)

“That son-of-a-bitch, Balassi. A drug problem?” Geoff’s mind was whirring at a fast clip. He had forged that pharmacy log, but not because of a drug problem. The morphine was for Sarah, poor suffering Sarah. But he had never told anyone that.

Chapter 36

Geoff slammed the journal closed and placed it along with the documents and Suzanne’s digital recorder memory card in the manila envelope. He had to act right away, get this incriminating information to someone who could help, someone he could trust.

There are some pretty powerful people involved here with a lot more to lose than yourself, doc.

Geoff pondered that statement over and over. Should he call O’Malley and hand over all the information to him, and let him deal with it? What the hell could this New York cop do against the CIA, a huge multi-national corporation, and the Director of the New York Trauma Center? Would he even understand it all?

Geoff made a decision. He reopened the envelope and removed the piece of paper on which he had jotted down the phone number of the person Suzanne told him to contact. Suzanne was in the ICU still critical. He had to trust she was telling it to him straight when she thought it was over for her. It was Geoff’s best bet.

Geoff dialed the number and waited. Strange electronic tones, then a women’s voice came on the line. “Are you calling for Director Bennington?”

Geoff was shaken by the unexpected female voice on the other end. He hesitated, hoping Bennington would pick up. He didn’t.

It’s his private, secure line Geoff. He’ll help you.

“Yes, I am.”

“The Director is out of the country right now. Please identify yourself.”

Geoff’s heart sank.

The voice on the other end persisted. “Excuse me, sir, did you say something?”

“Uh, no, I didn’t.”

“Perhaps Deputy Director Lancaster, his assistant, can help you? Your identification, please.”

Geoff was desperate. If the man was his assistant, he had to know what was going on. “The Sigma Project. Just tell Mr. Lancaster it’s about
Sigma
.”

“One moment, please, sir.”

All of the sudden, Geoff wasn’t feeling so secure, and the line didn’t seem so private. More electronic sounds, then an icy male voice on the other end. “Code name?”

“I have information on the Sigma Project. Do you want it?”

Seconds passed in silence. “Who is this?”

“A friend of Suzanne Gibson’s. She was murdered and asked me to deliver the information she had acquired to Director Bennington.”

“Director Bennington will be unavailable for an extended period of time. I’ve assumed his responsibilities. Tell me where you are, and I will have a courier pick up the information.”

Suzanne hadn’t said anything about his being unavailable.

Geoff felt increasingly uncomfortable. Was the call being traced?

“Is there any way he can be reached? I was instructed to speak with him directly.”

“I’ve told you that’s not possible.” Lancaster’s voice had lost its hardness. “It sounds by your tone like you’re doing more than conveying information. Sounds to me like you’re in trouble, in need of assistance. I can help you. Just tell me who you are and where I can find you.”

Geoff hung up the phone. He held onto the receiver and stared at it, waiting to see if it would ring back, if they had traced the call. Seconds, then minutes passed. Nothing.

They must have gotten to Bennington.

Chapter 37

Geoff now had no other options. He needed an ally, and O’Malley was the only one left. He reached into his wallet, retrieved the card O’Malley had given him, punched in the number, took a deep breath, waited.

“Yeah, O’Malley here.”

Geoff paused, then answered. “Detective O’Malley, this is Dr. Geoff Davis.” He exhaled.

“Well, doc, you’ve had a pretty busy twenty-four hours, haven’t you now?”

“That’s an understatement, detective. Listen, remember the conversation we had at my apartment the other day? The endorphin conspiracy I told you about? I’ve got some pretty incriminating evidence about who’s behind it all, the same ones who tried to murder Suzanne Gibson.”

“I’d be very interested to see your evidence, doc, but first I’ve got a question for you.” O’Malley’s tone changed, became more grave. “Where were you between the hours of eight and ten p.m. last night?”

The question was not unexpected, but Geoff didn’t know what to answer. “Waiting for Suzanne Gibson and my brother Stefan. I think you must know the rest of what happened.”

“Doc, my instincts tell me I have no good reason to believe you to be a murderer, no
motive
to explain the deadly assault on your friend Suzanne Gibson. I have a few problems with this situation, though, that the chief keeps bringing up to me, and I don’t know how to explain them. Maybe you can help me out.”

Geoff didn’t like the way the conversation was heading. He wondered if they were tracing his call. He checked his watch. He’d been on about a minute. He’d have to hang up before another minute passed. “I’ll try.”

“My first problem, I should say
your
first problem, has to do with why your ID badge was found in the morgue in a pool of Suzanne Gibson’s blood. She was carved up pretty skillfully, like whoever it was knew what they were doing, you know?”

Geoff knew all right. He had been so worried about finding his gun, he hadn’t even realized his ID badge was missing as well.

“The second dilemma, the unfortunate murder of one of the security guards who was near the morgue at the time. You see, the murder weapon was a Colt 45, registered to a Lieutenant Geoffrey Davis, military issue.”

Oh, my God.
Balassi’s cohorts must have picked it up from the morgue. Geoff felt his face flush with anger. “What the—”

“I’m sure you have a good explanation for these things, doc.”

Goeff thought about Walter. Surely, finding his body there would help support Geoff’s explanation. “Walter Krenholz savagely attacked Suzanne and left her for dead. He attacked me in the morgue after I discovered her near death, tried to kill me as well. I killed him with his own knife in self defense. My gun fell out of my belt during the struggle. Surely your forensic team is sharp enough to confirm this as the cause of Walter’s death. “

“Doc, I’d have a hell of a lot easier time believing you if you’d tell me where his body and the knife you speak of are.”

Silence. “What do you mean?” Geoff asked. “He was on the floor near the front of the morgue with a knife in his neck.”

“The only fresh stiff in the whole place was the dead guard.” O’Malley cleared his throat. “What do you say you and I get together here at the station house and talk about it all over a cup of coffee? You might want to call a lawyer, but that can probably wait until we chat a bit. If these people are as dangerous as you say, you’d be a hell of a lot safer here than wherever you are. Where’s your brother, Stefan who you say you were with later that night? And where are you, anyway, doc?”

Geoff hung up the phone. Shit. It was a tight, professionally orchestrated scenario. They had set him up without leaving an escape hole big enough for a lab rat.

Chapter 38

Geoff walked the five blocks from Kapinsky’s apartment in the shadows, his hooded sweatshirt bunched up around his neck and the side of his face, concealing his identity as best he could without looking too suspicious. It was five-thirty. Though sunrise was just a half-hour away, the thick cloud cover gave Geoff a little more darkness than he would have had otherwise.

Geoff crossed Cabrini Boulevard and stayed about ten paces behind an old man walking his dog, then stopped in front of the Cabrini Arms apartments. Geoff scanned the area. He was alone. He walked to the entrance, climbed the three steps leading to the stained glass door, quietly turned the brass handle. Locked, as he thought it would be.

Geoff slipped into the shadows around the east side of the building, looked up. The fire escape was his only ticket into the building. Only problem was, the bottom of the ladder was at least ten feet off the ground.

Geoff continued to the service entrance around back, looked for a large box, a small step ladder,
anything
that could give him a few feet of reach. He searched the area around the dumpster. Nothing. Quietly, he lifted the metal lid, looked inside. The stench made his nostrils flare. A large plastic milk crate caught his attention. Geoff reached in, pushed aside a foul-smelling garbage bag, pulled out the crate, set it down. Perfect.

Geoff carried the crate to the east side of the building, placed it beneath the fire escape ladder. He stood on the crate, extended his reach as far as he could. His fingertips scraped the rusted bottom rung, but he couldn’t grab hold.

Geoff relaxed his outstretched arm, shook it off. He took a breath, bent down, and with a grunt jumped as high as he could, knocking over the crate in the process. “Yes!” he said as his hand gripped the fire escape ladder.

Geoff pulled himself up and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Short of breath, he paused, listened for any activity. No sounds, no movement.

He followed the fire escape to the back of the building. Apartment 4G. Geoff paused, felt for Kapinsky’s switchblade, removed it from his pocket. Geoff looked through the bedroom window into the familiar apartment to be sure he was at the right place. The target was sleeping soundly in bed.

Geoff used the knife to pry open the window, slid into the room, landed quietly on the floor next to the dresser. The man snored, shifted in the bed. Geoff approached from the back side, knife in hand. He inched closer until he could hear his target’s respirations, then put the knife to his neck, indenting the skin.

Josef Balassi raised his arm to swat away the object on his neck, awoke with a start. He tried to turn his head around to look at his assailant, but Geoff pressed his face into the pillow with his opposite arm.

“What the hell—”

“I wouldn’t make any sudden moves, if I were you.” Geoff released him slowly. “Now get up. Very slowly.”

Balassi sat up, turned toward Geoff, looking dazed, confused. “Geoff? What are you doing in here? How’d you get in?”

“Thought I’d drop by for a cup of coffee, talk about the Sigma Project.”

Balassi’s pupils dilated in surprise. “Ah, you’ve heard of the project. Must have been through Suzanne Gibson. You two were quite close in the end, weren’t you?”

“Cut the bullshit, Balassi.”

“Patience, Geoff, patience. We have all the time in the world here.” He smiled.

“Have you ever heard of the MK Ultra experiments, Geoff?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“In the late fifties, a visionary group within the CIA formed a top secret research project known as MK Ultra. The Agency, at the height of communist paranoia, wanted to develop mind-control drugs that could be unleashed to reach the populace of the Soviet Union and perhaps ultimately their leaders. An admirable goal at the time. The strategists behind this project went to Montreal and recruited a young neuroscientist, an émigré from Yugoslavia.”

“You?”

“That’s right, Geoff. I was a foreigner in a strange land. U.S. Immigration had turned me away in New York, and like many others I was sent to Canada. Well, these men from the Agency—I didn’t know who they were at first—offered me a position as assistant director of a new research facility called the Human Ecology Institute and connected me with a brilliant neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Schmidt, who was studying the chemical basis for schizophrenia.

“He had discovered that LSD given in high doses could induce a schizophrenic-like condition and wondered whether giving this drug at varying doses could bring the neurotransmitters in the brain to normal balance. Dr. Schmidt had a sizeable clinical practice in Maryland, and we had plenty of subjects on which to try out our theory.

“The Human Ecology Institute was the control center of this project, but MK Ultra had tentacles that extended throughout the U.S. and Canada. There were over eighty sites, some at major universities, Geoff,that participated in one way or another.”

“Well, as I said, we experimented primarily with LSD at the time. Only we were haphazard and crude in our methods. We had no way to physiologically monitor our results. We didn’t have the PET scanner we have today. Short of normal subjects we could monitor closely, we tried our theories on some of our own agents, who were slipped the drug at a CIA retreat. One poor fellow had endless hallucinogenic flashbacks and eventually committed suicide by jumping out a window.”

The newspaper clipping of Suzanne’s father’s suicide burned through Geoff’s consciousness. Now another generation carried the torch. Balassi had to be stopped. Death was too high a price for scientific advancement. With Suzanne in the hospital recovering from her injuries, Geoff felt he was the only one left to carry out the mission, to stop it all for good. Suzanne’s brush with death had sealed that for him.

Balassi gave a morbid laugh, then his tone suddenly became serious. “The higher ups in the Agency got wind of what happened to that agent and abruptly closed down the project—or so they thought.”

“So you gave people who were normal or simply a little depressed LSD, made them crazy without their knowledge, then tried to make them normal again?” Geoff was incredulous, the story so horribly fantastic he could barely believe what he was hearing. Even knowing what was happening now.

“In a manner of speaking, that’s correct. I know the whole thing seems ridiculous, and it was a ridiculous failure on one hand. It was doomed from the beginning. But at the same time, it was a great success. It failed because we really didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know exactly how we were altering the brain. Schmidt died a short while later, but I preserved his files in spite of the Agency’s directive, and a core group of us who were involved went underground. We kept in touch, indirectly at times, until it was safe to resurface.

“A short while later, with the help of those connections I went to the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore, where I developed the PET scanner and created one of the greatest advances medical science has known! With PET, we study the living biochemistry of the brain. We can actually
see
the neural pathways for love and hate, determine the brain patterns of a future concert pianist or a serial killer, make the necessary corrections early in life to either foster or suppress these potentials. Perhaps with proper resources we can develop a substance to change the brain’s chemistry to create a class of strong political leaders, another for brilliant physicians, and so on. It’s a window to the workings of the human brain like no other, Geoff. PET’s potential is limitless.”

“Who else is in on this with you, Balassi?”

Balassi brushed his disheveled hair back with his hand and continued, his dark eyes dancing with excitement. “The core group of MK Ultra
is still together, Geoff. It never truly disbanded. We now have support from people higher up in the CIA and more powerful government agencies than we ever dreamed possible.

“They’ve funded my research for the last thirty-five years, created a corporation—PETronics—solely for this purpose. Without them, PET would not be here today. There’s no way I could have developed the sophisticated technology to this level in that short a period of time through the usual means, begging the NIH for piddley handouts, living from year to year, not knowing whether or not I would have to close down a project, justifying my research.

“PETronics has given me complete control over my research with unlimited funds funneled through the corporation and all they ask in return is for me to develop and test compounds for them, leaving me to spend the majority of my energies on the PET scanner. It’s the ideal situation.”

“You’re mad, Balassi.”

“You think small, Geoff, like most physicians. Why don’t you join us? We can be even greater with you on board. You can remain on staff here and follow Pederson as Chairman of the Department. We can see to that. The professional rewards will be great, not to mention the phenomenal financial return.”

“Dr. Pederson had so much more to lose, Balassi. Why did he do it?”

“Ah, what do you think, Geoff? Ego, of course. He wanted to have his name associated with these new endorphin compounds we’re working on, ones that will cure chronic pain and schizophrenia. You see, Geoff, we can do so much good.”

“Except you have to induce these conditions in innocent people before you can study them and find a cure.”

“Don’t be a simple-minded fool, Geoff. The testing phase of the study won’t go on forever. Oh, the Agency may want us to periodically synthesize and test a new neurotransmitter here and there—”

“Talk about simple-minded, don’t you realize you’re the one being manipulated by this renegade group? They jerk you around like a puppet on a string. You’ve prostituted yourself to them.”

“I guess that means no, doesn’t it?” asked Balassi with regret.

“Kapinsky didn’t commit suicide did he?”

“According to the police, you killed him,” said Balassi with a smile.

“You ordered Walter to kill him, didn’t you, and forged the suicide note? He was just an innocent fool. Or was he about to spill the beans and expose you? I know how you and Pederson blackmailed him, how you held the constant threat of exposing his homosexuality over him.”

“I’m impressed with your resourcefulness, Geoff, I really am. You must have a good source for such private information. Was it personal experience?”

“Far better than that. I came across Kapinsky’s personal diary. It spells out your involvement and Pederson’s all too clearly. I also have—
had
I should say—a packet of information given to me by Suzanne Gibson before Walter tried to butcher her.”

“Excellent work, Geoff. You’d be a real asset to the project. She could have been, too, but like you, she was a small thinker.”

“Not as small as you might think, Balassi. You almost destroyed a second generation when Walter tried to kill her.”

Balassi’s eyes narrowed. He seemed confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Cameron Daniels was her father,” Geoff said.

The blood drained from Balassi’s face, leaving his complexion a chalky white. His jaw dropped. It was a name he had not heard in many years. “That’s not possible,” he whispered.

“It’s true, Balassi. Suzanne Gibson, Daniels at the time, was just an infant when her father jumped to his death. I’ve seen the newspaper clippings, Suzanne’s documents.”

“This, this evidence you speak of, it must be in a secure place—”

“All of the information is on its way by courier to Washington as we speak.” Geoff’s thoughts returned to Stefan. He had to know. “Why did you have the security guard killed, Balassi? He had nothing to do with this.”

“He simply stumbled into a scene he should have not been a witness to and needed to be taken out of the picture. When your gun turned up in the morgue, well, it was felt to be too good an opportunity to miss.”

Geoff tensed. “Pity about Walter.”

Balassi grimaced in anger, his fist stabbing the air. “The project will continue, Geoff, regardless of what you do! There are very powerful people involved, not only here but in Washington. We have the support of visionaries at the highest levels of government, Geoff, far beyond just the CIA. They will be able to make your piddley evidence disappear.”

Director Bennington will be unavailable for an indefinite period of time.

“You had great promise, Geoff. It’s truly a shame to waste your life in prison. Two murder convictions, more if they find enough evidence to link you to Walter, the little girl and Smithers. You’ll be put away for well over a hundred years!” He gave a loud belly laugh; his dark eyes shifted in their sockets. “They have quite a watertight case against you, Geoff, dating back to the mercy killing of your beloved wife—”

“You filthy scum!” Geoff lunged toward Balassi, grabbed him by the shirt, slammed his back to the wall.

“What’s another thirty years behind bars, eh Balassi? The judge will just tack it on.” Geoff rammed the point of the knife firmly under Balassi’s chin. “I wonder what a knife track in the brainstem would look like on PET scan.”

Balassi stared at the knife. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, ran down the slope of his nose, landing on the coarse, grey hairs covering his upper lip.

Geoff pushed the knife further upward, causing Balassi to let out a choking sound. A drop of blood trickled down the blade, landed on the carpet.

Balassi struggled to get out the words.  “Please, Geoff. Please. We can work—”

A police siren sounded faintly in the distance.

“I don’t make deals with the devil. I should kill you now and save humanity, but I’ll let you bring yourself down. It’s only a matter of time.”

Geoff withdrew the knife and bolted out the window and down the fire escape.