Falling Awake (36 page)

“That’s not true. It can’t be true. Why would she rescue me and then try to keep me from dreaming?”

“If I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I am, she’s got two goals,” Isabel said. “The first is to get control of her very own lab. She’s accomplished that, more or less. The second is to destroy Lawson and his operation. Tonight she intends to use all of us—you, me, Ellis and even poor Yolland—to do that. What’s more, she’s going to make sure we’re all dead by morning because she can’t afford to leave any of us alive.”

“You’re wrong,” Scargill snapped. “This is all about proving to Jack Lawson that Cutler has gone rogue. Lawson trusts that bastard. He won’t listen to the facts. Cutler has convinced him that I was the one who went bad and kidnapped and killed a bunch of people. That’s why I’m playing dead. I’ve got to stay out of sight until we get Cutler and the proof we need to show Lawson.”

“She lied to you, Vincent. I told you, that’s what she does. She lies. She is also very flexible.” Isabel paused, gathering her thoughts, aware that she had only one chance to try to convince him. “Let me go back to the start. Amelia’s first scheme involved seducing Lawson in an attempt to gain control over him and, through him, the Frey-Salter dream labs. That plan failed when Lawson ended their affair and transferred her to another agency.”

“But—”

“Ever resourceful, Amelia promptly came up with Plan B. She decided to go after a privately owned sleep research lab and, in
essence, set herself up in competition with Lawson. But to be successful, she knew she would need at least a couple of Level Fives. They aren’t easy to find, as you well know. So she set out to steal one from Lawson.”

Scargill leaned heavily against the counter, clearly struggling to keep himself upright.

“That would be me?” he asked, his disbelief clear.

“Yes. She suckered you into thinking that you were solving all those kidnappings on your own and then she played on your pride and sense of competitiveness, feeding your ego. When the time was right, she was going to convince you to resign from Lawson’s operation on the grounds that you were underappreciated.”

“And then put me to work for her?” he concluded skeptically.

“Uh-huh. After she got kicked out of Lawson’s agency, Amelia set her sights on gaining control of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research. She knew enough about the facility to realize that if she got it, she would also get a second Level Five.”

“You?”

“Yep. With the two of us, plus her own talents, she could give Lawson some major competition, maybe even bring him down. She could become the most important researcher in the field of extreme dreams. Who knows what she could accomplish? But there was a major problem.”

“Cutler.” Scargill breathed deeply and tried to straighten his trembling shoulders. “The doc said he was jealous of me.”

“He wasn’t jealous, but he also wasn’t buying your brilliant dream sleuthing. Amelia knew he was suspicious, and after a year
at Lawson’s agency, she also knew that he wasn’t going to give up and go away. She realized that she had to get rid of him before he discovered that she had orchestrated the kidnappings and murdered a few people in the process.”

“No,” Scargill muttered. “No, damnit.”

“It wasn’t going to be easy. She was well aware that Lawson and Ellis had been friends for a long time. If anything happened to Ellis, Lawson was sure to conduct an investigation. She decided to have Ellis die in the line of duty.”

“If you’re talking about that day at the survivalists’ compound when everything went to hell . . .”

“She staged that whole event knowing that Ellis would recognize another suspicious kidnapping and try to intervene,” Isabel said quickly. “She intended for him to die in a firefight with the people at the compound, even if she had to pull the trigger, herself. Who would know the difference afterward?”

Scargill was shivering more violently now. He huddled in on himself, gun clutched in his hand. “I don’t understand. Damnit, I can’t think. There’s something wrong with me. I’ve got a splitting headache.
I can’t even think straight
.”

“Things went wrong that day at the compound when the ammo shed exploded. Amelia tried to kill Ellis but failed. You, her only major asset at that point, were badly injured.”

“The explosion,” Scargill whispered. He rubbed his temples with one hand.

“Amelia grabbed you and got you to the hospital. Later she changed all the computer records to make it appear that you had
died. Then she took you, along with plenty of stolen CZ-149 to control you, and split for California. There she seduced Randolph Belvedere and plotted his father’s death.”

“Stop it.” Scargill raised the nose of the pistol. “I don’t want to hear any more. You’re trying to confuse me.”

She had nothing to lose, Isabel thought. All she could do was keep talking and hope that some of what she was saying penetrated the haze that the CZ-149 had created in Scargill’s brain.

“Amelia achieved her second goal, more or less. Through Randolph Belvedere, she got control of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research,” she said. “But things went wrong again when Randolph fired me. That’s Amelia’s big problem, you see. She’s brilliant but she keeps miscalculating because she doesn’t understand other people’s motivations. She assumes everyone is driven by the same things that drive her, but she’s wrong. I think that’s probably making her crazy.”

Scargill looked at her with a strange expression on his face. “Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy.”

“Always a possibility, of course.”

a
melia checked the screen of her phone. The tiny moving dot that was the Maserati was slowing. Angrily, she hit the redial button.

“You’d better keep your speed up, Cutler. You’ve only got an hour and twenty minutes left. At the rate you’re going now, you’ll be late, and you know what that means.”

“The fog is getting worse,” Ellis said evenly. “I can’t see five feet in front of the car. I’m using a back road to avoid traffic. That means occasional stop signs. In fact, there’s one coming up and I just passed a police cruiser. I’ve got to stop. Can’t afford to get pulled over for a ticket.”

“It’s your choice, of course,” she said sweetly, watching the blip on the screen halt. “But if you’re late, you know the penalty.”

“I won’t be late.” Ellis cut the connection.

She hated that he felt in a position to treat her so rudely. Nobody gave her the respect she deserved. She started to punch redial but paused when she saw that the dot was moving again, faster than it had been a moment ago. That was a good sign. Cutler was running scared. She liked that. It was very satisfying.

But not nearly as satisfying as watching Lawson go down.

e
llis parked in the trees, collected the gym bag and went the rest of the way on foot. He had thirty minutes until the deadline. There was still a little light left but the Roxanna Beach Amusement World was enclosed in an impenetrable gray fog. The only sound was the steady pounding of the unseen surf. It echoed eerily in the mist, creating a disorienting sensation. With luck it would mask any noise he was forced to make.

He approached the amusement park from a point that was farthest from the main entrance, chose a spot that was concealed by the wall of an aged restroom and went to work with the wire cutters.

a
melia checked the dot on the phone screen again and hit the redial.

“What do you want now?” Cutler asked in low tones.

“You’re pushing the envelope,” she said, her anger building again. “You’re at least thirty minutes away from town. If I were you, I’d worry.”

“I told you, the fog—”

This time she cut the connection before he did, taking a great deal of fierce pleasure in the small, savage punch of the
end
button.

She had made the right decision, she thought. They were all badly flawed. It had become obvious in the past few weeks that Scargill’s basic temperament wasn’t going to change. He still wanted to be a hero, another Ellis Cutler, for crying out loud. She couldn’t work with such a major personality defect.

Isabel Wright was another mistake. She hadn’t turned out to be a meek, dithery little dreamer who would do as she was told.

As for Cutler, well, she had known all along that he wasn’t going to stop being a problem until he was dead.

The only answer was to get rid of all of them and start from scratch. With the resources of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research, she would be able to find her own dream talent.

Meanwhile, if everything went as planned, tonight she would not only get rid of her mistakes, she would start the first smoldering embers that would eventually burn down Jack Lawson’s precious empire.

a
t the far end of the park, Ellis dropped the phone back into the pocket of his windbreaker, making sure it was still set to vibrate, not ring, and continued working his way through the eerie landscape. The hulking shapes of the long-silent rides loomed like the ruins of an alien civilization in the mist.

He was fairly sure that Amelia had called him from somewhere near the cliff side of the park. He had heard the surf quite clearly in the background. In addition, although he had listened closely, he had not heard her voice except through the phone. That meant she was not in the immediate vicinity. He had been careful to keep his voice low and to muffle his phone with the thick canvas of the gym bag.

First things first, he thought, moving past an old bumper car platform. Amelia had probably set a guard, either Scargill or another one of her behavior modification program success stories. Whoever he was, he would be somewhere near the entrance to the park.

y
olland heard the footsteps on the pavement behind the ticket booth. A jolt of alarm went through him. Automatically, he reached for the nearest fuse. Then he realized that whoever he was, the guy was approaching openly from the interior of the park.

Scargill.
The doc had sent her doped-up pal to check on him.
Rage replaced alarm. Didn’t she know he was a professional? He didn’t need anyone checking up on him, especially not some dope fiend.

He leaned out of the booth.

“Tell the doc I said for you to take care of your job and I’ll take care of mine—” He stopped when he realized he could not see Scargill in the heavy fog. “Where are you?”

He thought he heard a slight sound behind him but by the time it registered it was too late.

There was searing pain at the back of his head and then he plummeted into a bottomless pit of night.

e
llis left the guard bound and gagged inside the ticket booth. He had twenty minutes left. He wondered if Amelia would call again. If she did, he would not be able to risk answering the phone because she or Scargill might be close enough to hear him talking and realize he was inside the park.

He made his way along the back of a row of empty arcade and concession booths, listening intently for the telltale murmur of voices. He knew Isabel. If they hadn’t gagged her, she would be handing out plenty of free advice to Scargill or Amelia.

But he did not hear her as he moved among the rows of shuttered arcades and stands. That silence scared him more than anything else that had happened so far.

He turned a corner at the end of a line of food stalls and stopped suddenly when he realized the rear door of one of the
booths was partially open, sagging on its hinges. He watched for a moment and thought he saw a shifting in the shadows inside.

Someone was in the booth.

He had fifteen minutes left when he switched on the phone in the pocket of his windbreaker and kicked open the sagging door at the back of the stand.

“Freeze, Scargill.”

Scargill had his back to him, keeping watch at the front of the stand. He jerked at the sound of Ellis’s voice and then went very still.

Ellis stepped into the booth and took in the interior in one quick glance. Despair knifed through him. His worst nightmare had just come true. Scargill was alone. There was no sign of Isabel.

“So you managed to pull off one of your tricks after all,” Scargill said in a dull, flat tone. “Why am I not surprised? But it doesn’t matter. You lose, pal.”

“Put the gun down and move away from it.”

“Sure. Whatever.” Scargill obeyed.

When the gun clattered loudly on the counter Ellis realized that Scargill was shaking badly.

“Where is she?” Ellis asked. He was in a place that was so cold and so impossibly bleak nothing else mattered. He knew he could kill without any hesitation at all from this realm. He
wanted
to kill.

Something of what he was feeling must have showed on his face because Scargill looked both ill and scared. He had to try twice before he could speak.

“Hey, hey, take it easy, Cutler.”

Ellis raised the pistol two inches. “Where is she?”

“Right here,” Amelia said.

She appeared outside the booth, standing on the other side of the counter. Ellis realized she must have been hiding in the stand across the way. She had Isabel. Amelia gripped her forearm in one hand. With the other she pointed a pistol at Isabel’s head.

“I don’t know how you did it, Cutler. According to the data from the GPS indicator, you’re still ten miles away. But when I couldn’t raise Yolland a few minutes ago, I realized you were probably inside the park. You always were unpredictable.”

Ellis allowed himself to breathe again. Isabel was still alive. Her hands were bound behind her back but she looked amazingly calm and composed and she was still alive.

“Hello, Ellis,” she said quietly. “I knew you’d get here in time.”

“Shut up,” Amelia ordered. She kept the pistol aimed at Isabel’s temple while she smiled ferociously at Ellis. “Drop the gun.”

“Better do as she says,” Scargill said. With a trembling hand, he picked up the pistol he had placed on the counter and pointed it at Ellis.

Ellis looked at Amelia. “You’re going to kill Isabel anyway, aren’t you?” He shrugged. “I might as well take you out at the same time.”

Amelia looked baffled by that logic. “Vincent will shoot you dead before you can make a move.”