Falling Awake (38 page)

It had seemed so easy at the start, she reflected, cracking the last of a full dozen eggs into a bowl.
I’ll just whip up some breakfast. You all just drink your orange juice and tea while I get this on the table. No problem. Be ready in fifteen minutes. Hah.

It wasn’t until she realized that between them, Dave, Ellis and Vincent were going to go through a full jug of orange juice that she knew she might be in for more than she had bargained for when she volunteered to cook breakfast. Good thing she had bought an extra carton of eggs and a large loaf of sourdough bread in anticipation of feeding Ellis.

The men took up a lot of space. They did not simply sit or stand, rather they lounged, leaned or sprawled around the counter. The fourth male, Sphinx, watched the proceedings from his perch atop the wide windowsill. He did not seem perturbed by the commotion. Isabel knew that was because he had decided to tolerate the new arrivals.

She was relieved to see that Vincent looked a little healthier this morning. He was still very wan and washed-out from the effects of the CZ-149 withdrawal but he was no longer shivering
uncontrollably. Dave was quiet and a little sad but he seemed calmer, as if he had begun to come to terms with his grief.

“According to the dream log,” Ellis continued, “Amelia-Maureen couldn’t understand why Lawson ended the affair. After all, she was several years younger and a lot prettier than Beth. In addition, she was very, very smart and she and Lawson were both dedicated to the same kind of research. They made a perfect team in her view. She just could not deal with the fact that he did not want her.”

“It was right after the affair with Lawson ended that she went to work on me,” Vincent muttered. “She set up those special kidnap cases and used her knowledge of Lawson’s and Beth’s operations to make sure they got to me. At the same time, she approached me secretly and started giving me the injections of CZ-149.”

Ellis’s brows rose. “That stuff had the effect of making you believe your own press, I take it?”

Vincent grimaced. “Along with anything else she told me. But she understood real quick that you were standing in her way, Cutler. Not only were you suspicious about the string of kidnappings I was busily solving so brilliantly, you had Lawson’s ear.”

Dave downed what had to be half a pint of orange juice and looked at Vincent. “She convinced you that Ellis had gone rogue and that only you could stop him because Lawson refused to see the truth?”

“Like I don’t have better things to do with my time than go rogue,” Ellis said.

“Don’t forget she was giving me regular fixes of that damned dream drug,” Vincent said, sounding pained. “She told me I tolerated it well and that it would make me—” He stopped suddenly, flushing.

“An even better dreamer than me?” Ellis drank some tea and lowered the mug. “The only thing that’s going to make you as good as me is experience.”

“Yeah, well, it sounded like a great idea at the time,” Vincent muttered.

“Don’t worry, Vincent,” Isabel said bracingly. “Ellis told me you are very, very good. Someday you are going to be a legend back at Frey-Salter, too.”

Vincent appeared somewhat cheered by that prospect. Ellis looked amused.

Isabel tossed a handful of fresh chopped parsley into the huge mound of creamy scrambled eggs she was preparing. “Sounds like Amelia-Maureen craved what every serious researcher craves, namely unlimited funding and the freedom to conduct her work without interference. And she was prepared to go to any lengths to reach her goals.”

“Her notes in the dream log imply that she was, in part, inspired by her work at Brackleton,” Ellis said. “She did a lot of her early experiments on the inmates with a primitive version of CZ-149. She discovered that she could control her subjects to a certain extent if she gave them hypnotic suggestions while they were under the influence of the drug. She also found out that the stuff worked best on people who were inclined toward lucid
dreaming. She never got any Level Five subjects at the prison, but she got a couple of Threes and a Four. Those experiences made her aware of the potential of the drug.”

“How did she learn about Lawson’s agency?” Isabel asked.

“She didn’t, not at first. But she was well connected in the world of dream research and she certainly knew about Frey-Salter. She applied for a job after the Brackleton project was shut down, and Lawson grabbed her. After she got her security clearance and found out just what went on at the agency, she was ecstatic.”

“Must have looked like a dream job for a while,” Isabel said dryly.

“Yeah, but it all came apart after the affair with Lawson ended,” Ellis said. “When he transferred her out of the agency, she set out to gain control of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research. That’s when she realized just how useful her old Brackleton subjects would be.”

“Those poor men.” Isabel sighed. “None of them were very stable. They never stood a chance against her.”

“Why was she so determined to keep her identity hidden while she was at the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research?” Dave asked softly.

“Two reasons,” Isabel said. “The first was Ellis. She realized that he was going to persist in his investigation of Vincent. She knew that if he turned over enough rocks, he might figure out the connection to one Maureen Sage.”

“So she made Maureen disappear and created a new identity for herself.” Vincent grimaced. “She was really good with computers.”

“Certainly good enough to get past the rather shallow employment background checks that were the norm at the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research.” Isabel poured more tea. “The only people who had to go through serious background checks there were the ones who worked on Lawson’s secret projects. Namely me and Dr. B.”

Dave wrapped both hands around his mug of tea and studied her. “You said there were two reasons why Amelia took a new identity. What was the second?”

“The second reason she wanted to keep a low profile, at least at the beginning, was because she knew the center depended on Lawson’s funding,” Isabel explained. “She was afraid that if he discovered she intended to go into competition with him, he would cut off the money.”

“Which is exactly what he would have done,” Ellis said knowingly. “Lawson doesn’t take kindly to rivals and competitors, inside or outside the government bureaucracy.”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, well, just imagine Amelia-Maureen’s surprise when, after she went to all the trouble to seduce Randolph and get rid of his father, one of Randolph’s first official acts was to fire me. She knew that without me, Lawson would quickly lose interest in funding the institute.”

“But she had to be careful about how much she told Randolph,” Ellis said. “She didn’t want him to understand the real connection between the institute and Lawson’s operation any more than Lawson did. She wanted to stay in the shadows. She certainly did not want Lawson to discover that his ex-lover had
changed her name and was about to become the person who would be manipulating one of his most vital assets: Isabel.”

“Hah.” Isabel was incensed. “What made her think I could be so easily manipulated?”

“It was a big mistake on her part,” Ellis assured her. “In fact, it was the one that led to her downfall. Because after you took off for Roxanna Beach, everything went wrong for her again.”

“Very true,” Vincent agreed. “Before she could figure out how to get you back, Gavin Hardy disappeared. She knew he must have found something interesting on Belvedere’s computer. She reasoned that it probably had to do with the anonymous clients.”

Isabel made a face. “She must have freaked when she realized that you were one of them.”

“She sure did.” Vincent swallowed more orange juice. “I made the mistake of telling her I had contacted Dr. Belvedere personally. I probably blabbed about the meetings with him after one of those extra-heavy doses of CZ-149. At any rate, not only was she really angry, she was afraid that if you and Cutler discovered that there were
three
anonymous clients, Cutler would start asking even more questions and maybe conclude that I was Number Three.” He looked at Ellis. “As you just said, Cutler, it’s a small world when it comes to extreme dreamers.”

“She had good cause to be worried,” Isabel said. “Ellis did jump to the conclusion that you were the third client.”

Vincent exhaled wearily and picked up his tea. “I didn’t realize that she murdered Hardy. She never told me that part.”

“Of course not,” Isabel said soothingly. She moved another tall
stack of toast onto the tray at the bottom of the oven to keep warm. “She didn’t want you to find out she was killing people because she knew that you were, at heart, still one of the good guys.”

Vincent’s hungover expression eased a little. He looked at Ellis. “I take it there is no next-generation version of CZ-149?”

“No,” Ellis said. “Lawson killed the program.”

“Yeah, well, what can I say?” Vincent shrugged. “I believed the doc. I was pretty damn desperate by then.”

“Desperate enough to contact Dr. B. secretly,” Isabel said, setting plates of scrambled eggs, soy sausages and toast in front of each man. “I take it he couldn’t help you, though.”

“Useless.” Vincent perked up at the sight of the massive quantity of food. He grabbed his fork. “Like I said last night, all he could tell me was that the red tsunami was a blocking image of some kind. I had already figured out that much for myself.”

Dave tried a bite of eggs. “What was last night all about? I mean, aside from getting rid of the three of you?”

“It’s obvious from her dream log that Amelia-Maureen was nothing if not adaptable.” Ellis ate some toast. “She changed her plans to fit the changing circumstances. Her goal last night was to set the stage at the amusement park to make it look like Scargill and I had both gone mad. She picked the Roxanna Beach Amusement World because she knew that my gateway dream involves a roller coaster. It was no big secret back at Frey-Salter. She assumed that using that backdrop would help convince Lawson that I really had fallen victim to a weird obsession of some kind.”

“She intended for everyone, including Lawson and his rivals, to believe that you two killed each other and burned down the old park, taking me and an innocent bystander, Yolland, with us,” Isabel concluded.

“Even if that plan didn’t have the effect of destroying Lawson’s personal empire, it would certainly have created enormous problems for him,” Vincent pointed out. “She would have, in effect, cost Lawson three of his best dreamers—Ellis, me, and you, Isabel.”

“Make that four dreamers,” Dave said in a flat voice. “She also killed my sister, remember. Katherine was a Level Five, too.”

There was a short, heavy silence.

Vincent looked at him. “I’m sorry about Katherine,” he said quietly. “I really liked her. I swear I had no idea that Amelia had contacted her using my game-playing identity, convinced her to bug Lawson’s phone and then murdered her in cold blood.”

“Katherine left a clue,” Dave said quietly. “Ellis and I assumed initially that it was a message telling us that you were the killer. But we misinterpreted it.”

“That was the one murder we know of that Amelia-Maureen handled personally,” Ellis said. “According to her dream log, she couldn’t locate an ex-con from the Brackleton program in the Raleigh-Durham area and she didn’t want to waste any time importing one.”

“So she shot Katherine in cold blood, herself,” Dave whispered.

Ellis looked at him. “In those last moments of her life, Katherine
was thinking very fast and very clearly, like the trained agent she was.” His words were rough with genuine admiration. “She couldn’t find a way to tell us the name of her killer but she knew that if we kept looking for you, Vincent, we’d find Amelia-Maureen. So she pointed us toward you.”

“She was right,” Isabel said quietly.

Ellis kept his attention centered on Dave. “Katherine is the one who will become a legend back at Frey-Salter.”

Dave blinked quickly several times. Moisture glinted in his eyes. Then he nodded, not speaking.

Isabel poured more tea into his mug. Thoughtfully, she set the pot down. “Did she ever suggest that you apply for a job at Frey-Salter, Dave?”

Everyone looked at her. Dave was the only one who understood. He smiled wryly.

“Sure.” He ate some toast. “She thought I might like the work. She was probably right. But I’m not a huge fan of rules and regulations and all the rest of the hassle that goes along with a job in government.”

Ellis lowered his fork, frowning. “Are you telling us that you’re a Level Five?”

“Uh-huh.” Dave cautiously cut a slice of soy sausage with his fork and examined it with a wary expression.

Ellis looked at Isabel. “How did you know?”

“When Dave mentioned that he and Katherine were twins, I assumed there was a very high probability,” she said modestly.

Ellis laughed. “Lawson is going to fall all over himself trying to convince you to work for him, Dave.”

“Maybe I’ll think about it,” Dave said slowly, thoughtfully.

Vincent reached for another slice of toast. “I know I’m not exactly a poster boy for Frey-Salter at the moment, but the truth is, I really liked the work and there weren’t many rules and regs because Lawson pretty much runs the place his way.” He hesitated in mid-bite and exhaled heavily. “Guess I’ll be job hunting now, though.”

“Nope,” Isabel said with great assurance. “Lawson will take you back in a heartbeat.”

“Why would he do that?” Vincent picked up the bottle of anti-inflammatories Isabel had placed beside his plate and shook out two tablets. “He probably thinks I was an idiot to fall for Amelia’s pitch.”

“You were not an idiot,” Isabel said firmly. “You were just very eager to prove yourself against the older, alpha male of the group.”

Vincent and Dave looked at Ellis.

“Yeah, him,” Isabel said. “It’s a common syndrome among young men who are moving up fast.”

“That so?” Vincent asked, popping the pills into his mouth. “I’m glad to hear that because I gotta tell you, in hindsight, it sure looks like maybe I was an idiot.”

“You were an idiot,” Ellis agreed. “But don’t worry, you’ll get past it.”