Falling Awake (7 page)

“As I was saying, the old man’s son, Randolph Belvedere, took over as director of the center the day after he buried his father,” Lawson continued.

“Didn’t know Belvedere had a son.”

“Beth looked into it. Turns out Belvedere and Randolph were what folks like to call ‘estranged’ for years. But the son was the old man’s only heir. He got everything, including the center.”

Beth Mapstone would know, Ellis thought. She owned Mapstone Investigations, a quasi-private security firm with affiliates in several states.

Beth was not only Lawson’s wife, she was his partner in every sense of the word. The pair had enjoyed, or endured, depending on your point of view, an on-again, off-again relationship for over thirty years. At the moment, they were off-again. But when it came to their professional relationship, they were always a team.

The formal relationship between Mapstone Investigations and Frey-Salter was officially that of corporate security firm and corporate client. In reality, however, Mapstone served as both an investigative arm for Lawson’s secret agency and a convenient cover for his agents.

“What does Randolph Belvedere think of his father’s theories of Level Five dreaming?” Ellis asked.

“Thinks they’re pure crap, of course. He’s into sleep research, though. Got big plans for the center. Needless to say, none of those plans involve Isabel Wright.”

“But you have plans for her.”

“I do, indeed,” Lawson said fervently. “I want her right here where I can keep an eye on her.”

“What did you mean when you said she was gone?”

“Gave notice to the manager of the apartment complex where she was living out there in LA, packed up her belongings and took off.”

“I assume this phone call is not because you can’t locate Isabel Wright.”

“Hell, no. Beth found her right away. That’s not the problem. The problem is convincing her to come back here to Raleigh to work at Frey-Salter. I don’t want to take a chance on losing her to some other outfit.”

“That’s where I come in, I take it?”

“I’m counting on you to sell her on the idea of working directly for me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“That hurts, Ellis. That cuts real deep. Our association may have started out on a business footing, but I like to think that we did the macho male bonding thing after you came to work for me.”

“Was that what you call it? Felt more like me working my ass
off in your lab every night while you conducted your Frankenstein experiments.”

“What are you complaining about? All you had to do was go to sleep.”

There had been a little more to it than that, Ellis reflected. He had not exactly slept his way through Jack Lawson’s experiments, he had
dreamed
his way through them. And those dreams had not been sweet. He usually awoke from them in a state of physical and mental exhaustion. It sometimes took days to recover. The really bad ones still took that long.

He had been in the middle of his sophomore year in college when Jack found him. On the point of dropping out of school because the budding business analyst part of him was reluctant to take on any more student loans, he volunteered for a sleep research experiment.

He had not been keen on the idea of being hooked up to a lot of electrodes while he slept but he told himself that the money was good and he needed the cash. Deep down, however, he knew that was not the real reason he had decided to offer himself up as a research subject. The truth was that the extreme dreams had become increasingly disturbing. It had gotten to the point where he avoided going to bed, dosing himself with caffeine and other stuff to stay awake. But sooner or later he always crashed, and when he finally went under, the dreams were waiting for him.

The chronic sleep deprivation, combined with the unsettling effects of the surreal, ultra-vivid dreams, had left him too edgy to study. If he hadn’t dropped out, he would surely have flunked out.

What he had not known was that Lawson’s tiny, secretive government agency paid for the experiments using Frey-Salter as its guise. The sleep research conducted on the campus where Ellis was attending college was one of many such projects that Lawson had commissioned. Lawson was looking for people like Ellis.

Forty-eight hours after the results of the sleep research project were on Lawson’s desk, Lawson himself was at Ellis’s door, a dazzling contract in his hand. But it was not the promise of a lucrative job offer, tantalizing as it was, that swept Ellis off his feet; it was Lawson’s reassuring conviction that, whatever it was that happened when Ellis dreamed, he was not going crazy.

Lawson had tossed out a second lure as well. He gave Ellis the chance to join a small, clandestine organization that was doing exciting work. For a nineteen-year-old who had been orphaned at twelve and who had spent his teenage years bouncing from one foster-care home to another, the offer was irresistible. For the first time in a very long while, he felt that he belonged somewhere.

Looking back, Ellis thought, it was probably no big surprise that Lawson had become a sort of father figure to him.

“You know, I’m going to miss the old man,” Lawson said, sounding unusually wistful. “Martin Belvedere could be a pain in the ass but he was brilliant and he knew how to keep secrets.” There was a short, meaningful pause. “At least, I think he knew how to keep ’em.”

“You’re worried that he might have said too much about you and your agency to Isabel Wright, aren’t you?”

A rhythmic series of small squeaks and squeals sounded on
the other end of the line. Ellis could almost see Lawson leaning back in his government-issue chair, swiveling slowly from side to side while he talked into the phone.

“It’s a possibility I can’t afford to ignore,” Lawson admitted. “Let’s face it, she worked closely with Belvedere for the better part of a year and she’s obviously damn smart. Got to assume she picked up a few clues.”

“I don’t think you need to panic here. You’re very good at keeping Frey-Salter in the shadows. Ms. Wright could not have learned much and even if she did make a few insightful guesses, what harm could she do?”

“Problem is, with Martin Belvedere gone, the situation has gotten real murky. I need to get Isabel Wright back under control and I need to do it as fast as possible. I can’t afford to lose her. Also, I need to know if she’s told anyone about the kind of work she did while she worked for Belvedere. Might be necessary to do some damage control.”

Ellis gave a short, harsh laugh. “What are you afraid of, Lawson? Think Isabel Wright might take her suspicions to the media?”

“It could complicate things for me.”

“Not a chance. The only news outlets that would pay attention to such an off-the-wall story are the supermarket tabloids. I can see the headlines at the checkout counter now: ‘Secret Government Agency Tracks Killers in Dreams.’ ”

“I’ve got my funding to protect,” Lawson growled. “I don’t need that kind of publicity. You know how much heat the CIA
and the FBI take whenever some enterprising reporter discovers yet again that they occasionally use psychics. Hell, they had to shut down the remote viewing project at Stanford back in the nineties because of the embarrassing press. Duke University closed its parapsychology research lab for similar reasons.”

“The government has a long and extremely lurid history of financing psychic research,” Ellis reminded him. “It’s no secret.”

“Yeah, but it isn’t always fashionable. In the current funding climate, I can guarantee you that if certain people in Congress find out what’s really going on here at Frey-Salter, they’ll start screaming about how I’m wasting taxpayer dollars and I’ll end up with serious budget problems.”

“I’ve got great faith in your ability to secure funding. You’ve been doing it for over two decades. You’re a survivor, Lawson.”

“So are you,” Lawson shot back a little too smoothly. “And the bottom line here is that we both need Isabel Wright.”

“Yeah, I know. You don’t have to remind me.”

“I’ll make this job worth your while, like I always do. Easy money, pal. All you have to do is track her down, feel out the situation to see if she’s talked to anyone and then convince her to come work here at Frey-Salter. How hard can it be?”

“What makes you think she’ll want to work for you?”

“Not a lot of openings for fired Level Five dream analysts,” Lawson said. “Hell, most people don’t even know there is such a thing. She’s thirty-three, never been married and, according to Beth, hasn’t dated seriously in months. All indications are that she’s a
meek, lonely, nervous little spinster who lives for her work. Martin Belvedere once told me that she often spent her nights sleeping on a cot in her office. She’s probably anxious as hell now that she no longer has a nice little office to call her own.”

Ellis did not take his eyes off the photo. “A meek, lonely, nervous little spinster, huh?”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“She might be meek. She might be lonely. She might be a spinster. But whatever else she is, I seriously doubt that she’s the nervous type.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Hell, Lawson, given the kinds of dreams you and I have asked her to decode this past year, she must have nerves of steel.”

There was a short pause on the other end. Somewhere in the midst of the long silence, Ellis became aware of an unpleasant, burning smell.

The soy sausages. He had neglected to turn off the burner.

“Damn.” Straightening suddenly, he seized a towel, wrapped it around the handle of the frying pan and whipped the singed phony sausages off the stove. Smoke wafted across the kitchen. Alarmed that it would set off the detector, he opened a window.

“Everything okay there?” Lawson asked.

“I just burned lunch.”

“You still sticking to that mostly vegetarian diet you started a while back?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t see how you can stand all that healthy green stuff. Doesn’t seem natural, you know?”

“You get used to it after a while.” Sort of. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the fake sausages.

“A man’s gotta have protein. How can you survive without the basic nutrients in good barbeque?”

“I still eat a little fish. Could we get back to the subject of Isabel Wright?”

“I was about to say that I’ve had a lot more experience with the research-oriented personality type than you have. Trust me, that kind can deal with stuff that would make a hardened agent shudder as long as they only have to look at it in a lab setting. Put them in the field and they fall apart, sure, but they’re happy as Santa’s little elves when they’re surrounded by their computers and their instruments.”

Jack Lawson was right ninety-nine percent of the time when it came to judging other people, Ellis reflected. It was one of the things that made Lawson so good at his job.

But one percent of the time he was wrong. When Lawson did make mistakes, they tended to be big ones.

Ellis was pretty sure that Lawson was wrong about Isabel Wright. He had picked up enough telltale hints and nuances to know that when she decoded his dreams, she didn’t do it from some safe, detached academic place. He did not think she was immune to the violence embedded in the really bad dreams he sent to her to analyze.

“What if Isabel Wright doesn’t want to work for you?” Ellis asked. “Got a fallback plan?”

“Don’t need one. You’re going to convince her that Frey-Salter would be a terrific career move. Tell her about the medical benefits.”

Absently Ellis rolled his right shoulder, trying to ease the dull ache. He’d already had two operations on it and the orthopedic surgeon was talking enthusiastically about eventually doing a complete joint replacement. The doctors had assured him that there was a high probability that arthritis would set in a couple of decades earlier than normal because of the damage done by the bullet.

“Forget it, Lawson, you don’t want me to go into the details of Frey-Salter’s fabulous medical benefits. My viewpoint on that subject is a little skewed, due to the fact that I nearly got killed working for you.”

“So push the retirement plan, instead. I don’t care what you have to promise her to convince her to come into Frey-Salter. Just don’t let her get away. I can’t afford to lose her.” Jack gave it a beat before adding, “Neither can you.”

He couldn’t argue with that. “Got to admit, she’s a business asset for me.”

She was a lot more than that, but damned if he would admit it to Lawson. He was having a hard enough time acknowledging the truth to himself.

“All right. I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But no guarantees. Got a new address for her?”

“Beth faxed it to me a few minutes ago. Hang on a second. It’s here somewhere.” The sound of papers and files being pushed around on top of a desk filled the phone line for a time before Lawson spoke again. “Here we go. Town called Roxanna Beach, somewhere on the coast out there in California.”

“I’ve heard of it. Never been there. Somewhere north of LA, I think.”

“She’s got some family there. Sister and a brother-in-law. Beth says she’s renting a house. Here’s the address. Ready?”

Ellis reached for a pen and a pad of paper. “Yeah.”

“Number Seventeen Sea Breeze Lane.”

“Got it.”

“Get moving on this, Ellis. As things stand, Isabel Wright is a loose cannon. I want her back under control as soon as possible.”

Ellis tossed the pen aside. “Uh-huh.”

“Call me after you find her.”

“Right.”

He hung up the phone, folded his arms and contemplated the photo on the refrigerator.

It was a picture of a slender woman dressed in a white lab coat. She had excellent shoulders and a proud, determined way of holding herself. She also had an interesting, intelligent face with big, mysterious eyes veiled by a pair of black-framed glasses. Her dark hair was pulled straight back into an elegantly severe twist that called attention to the delicacy of the nape of her neck.

In the photo she was smiling joyously, almost glowing, as she examined a vase of orchids that sat in the middle of her desk. He had no trouble at all imagining the passion hidden behind the lab coat and the glasses.