GRAY MATTER (30 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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She started away. “That’s your problem.”
He caught her arm. “N-no. It’s too much of a coincidence. I’m t-telling you we’re c-connected somehow. Maybe we were out of hand, and they did some kind of lobotomy or s-something on us.”
Nicole’s eyes got very small, like ball bearings. “You’re nuts. You’re also a faggot.”
“No I’m not.”
“You’re a goddamn faggot, and that’s what this is all about.” It was the first time he heard a tinge of emotion in her voice. But he wasn’t sure if it was anger or fear.
“No.”
I’m nothing
, a voice in his head whispered.
“Between the desire
And the spasm …
Falls the Shadow”
“That’s not it.” He pulled his pants back up and zipped his fly.
“You’re gay, and you’re giving me all this other shit.”
“No, I’m not gay.”
I am a hollow man.
“Then you’re a chickenshit virgin. The big love-poetry guy can’t get it up for a first-class BJ.”
It wasn’t her bluntness that surprised him, but the edge in her words.
As she started away again, he said, “What about you? Is it worth it?”
Her head snapped around for an explanation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know why you’re doing this, because I saw you with your teacher. This is your way of b-b-buying my silence.”
Nicole opened her mouth to protest, but caught herself.
“If the word got out you were having an affair with your teacher, you’d lose your grade, and the award, and he’d be out of a job. That’s what this is all about. Not because you like me, or even sex.”
Expressions flitted across her face like the things that scurried under a rock in damp soil. In a low menacing voice, she said, “Don’t you dare say anything.” When he didn’t respond, she said,
“Ever!”
And she gave his genitals a hard squeeze.
The wincing pain nearly took his breath away. She wrapped a towel around herself. “You d-d-d-don’t even enjoy it.”
“Enjoy what?”
“S-sex.”
“What do you know?”
“I th-think you don’t. I th-think you don’t enjoy this. I th-think sex is just how you g-g-get what you want. How you end up number one.”
“I’m where I’m at because I’ve got a brain and know how to use it.”
“But you don’t feel anything.”
“Get out of here.”
“You weren’t even breathing hard. You weren’t even excited.”
“Because you don’t turn me on. Because you’re a fat ugly shit.”
“M-m-maybe so, but I think you’re a f-f-fake. I think you’re like me—impotent. Dead. That you j-j-just go through the motions like a robot, pretending, experimenting with other people’s emotions because you’ve got none of your own.”
“I have emotions,” she said. But her voice was void of protest. Dead.
She started to leave, but he took her arm. “Nicole, somebody messed with our heads. I don’t know who or why, but we’re different. I’ve got a brain that won’t let me forget anything. I can quote you a hundred poems from start to finish but I can’t feel them, Nicole. I CAN’T FEEL THEM! I can’t feel anything. Like I’m emotionally dead. Like I’m another species.” He fought down the urge to confess how he actually contemplated killing Richard just to see if he’d feel remorse.
“That’s your problem.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He slid back the mirrored panel on the side wall and pulled out a bag full of prescription vials—all
serotonin-reuptake inhibiting (SRI) drugs : Luvox, Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Anafranil—drugs for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, seizures, for “bad thoughts”—all with her name on them, all old friends to Brendan. “It’s why we’re taking all this crap: We’re damaged goods, Nicole. We’re freaks. We’re
freaks.”
She swiped the bag from his hand and tossed it on the shelf. “Get out of here!” Her eyes clouded over but not with tears, because she was incapable of them—something else.
He stepped out onto the landing at the top of the stairs. “They did something to our heads and left us dead inside.”
She did not respond—as if someone had pulled her plug out of the wall.
He stepped back from her, and for a long moment before he started down the stairs, she glared wordlessly at him through unmoving orbs of ice.
“One must have a mind of winter to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is …”
“
M
iddlesex University English professor Vanessa Rizzo Watts and her son Julian, fourteen, were found dead in their Hawthorne home in what police say appears to be a murder-suicide initiated by Professor Watts …”
Lucius Malenko muted the radio as he rolled down the window to pay the toll. It was the middle of the next morning, and he was at the New Hampshire border on northbound 1-95. In seconds, he had the Porsche purring at eighty-five in the fast lane again. He unmuted the radio as a country club official claimed that the Blake excerpt was not part of the original sent by the university. “My only guess is that somebody swapped videos with the intention of embarrassing Professor Watts. We don’t know who or why, but we’re looking into it.”
“You do that,” Malenko said and changed stations.
The world was abuzz with the story—headline news in
The Boston Globe
and
The Boston Herald
, the radio-news lead. Throughout the day experts on criminology and psychology would try to make sense of “the terrible family tragedy” that had hit affluent Hawthorne where such things just don’t happen. Fuzzy-haired pundits would speculate about the severe competition to publish within institutions of higher learning; others would hold forth on the evils of the patriarchal academic establishment whose excessive pressure on women invariably led to such disasters. Others still would wonder why so bright and talented a woman as Professor Watts would need to plagiarize.
Malenko had expected a resolution, but not a double death—convenient as it was. The intention was to send her a definitive statement that her actions
must desist immediately. He knew that the woman was fragile, at the edge with misgivings about her son. Clearly the public humiliation had pushed her over—more than he had hoped for. And it took the proverbial two birds with one stone.
Eighteen months ago, she had complained that Julian was not right, that he could not free himself of his obsessions—how he would slice his food into neat little cubes before eating them; how he had to do things just so, according to his little odd rituals; how he counted everything—cars on the street, birds, houses, telephone poles, dots. The worst of his obsessions was his pointillist paintings. She complained that he’d work hours on end, sometimes skipping sleep. That he wore his teeth to stumps.
Malenko could not be certain that such obsessions were the consequence of enhancement. In spite of his suspicions, he claimed that Julian’s OC behavior was genetic.
Yes, they had had their failures—mostly from the early vintage of clients, before Malenko had perfected multiple stereotaxic insertions. Although they had been rendered brilliant, some developed unfortunate behavior problems. Three years ago, the son of an airline executive committed suicide, apparently having developed temporal lobe epilepsy. Another, a female, died of an embolism. Another still was convicted of murdering his parents, claiming that beetles were eating his brain.
But those were sad exceptions. Most enhanced children developed into highly intelligent and socially adjusted people—the
summum bonum
of the species. In his office, Malenko had a private photo album of “his children” who were scattered across the continent and beyond. Only a few lived in the area, and they were doing well. One was still at Bloomfield—Nicole DaFoe, whose high cerebral wattage was matched by genuine beauty. She wanted to be a physician when she grew up, possibly even a neurosurgeon. There was also young Lucinda MacPhearson—another prodigy, skilled in computers.
Because the brain is a black box of wonders, something went wrong with Julian Watts—perhaps some collateral damage from probes into the right frontal lobe. Nonetheless, the symptoms were treatable with medication, and Malenko had prescribed a variety. But the boy had refused, complaining that they just dulled his senses and diffused his focus. Then his mother threatened to take him to other neurophysicians to see what could be done. Although enhancement was too subtle to detect by any scans, he feared she would tell all. That could not be, and Malenko had reminded her of their contractual
agreement, her escrow bond, and her willingness to accept any risks to enhance her son.
“I don’t care about that
!” she had declared.
“I want my son back!”
That was when they sent the anonymous package to Professor Joshua Blake containing side-by-side photocopies of his book and hers.
Experience had taught him the hard way to protect his security against bigmouthed parents. Some years ago, after a difficult couple made noise about going to the authorities because their little darling was acting oddly, Malenko resorted to Oliver’s “wet work” skills. They were eliminated in a car accident one icy Christmas Eve. From that moment on, there were no more mistakes.
Now in screening candidates, they investigated strengths—ideological and financial—as well as useful weaknesses—legal, financial, marital, psychological, even medical—as backup insurance against sudden impulses to blow the whistle. Dirty little secrets—fathers who liked young girls or who had some business indiscretions; mothers who cheated or who had problems with drugs or alcohol. Whatever would dampen impulses to blab.
The background check on Vanessa Rizzo Watts had revealed that as a graduate student she had been suspended for plagiarism. Because she had been a popular TA, the episode made the student newspaper, a copy of which was attainable from the archives of the
L. U
.
News
by Malenko’s private investigator Oliver Vines, a doggedly persistent agent. Although Ms. Rizzo had been reinstated, that episode told the story of a bright but driven woman who needed to prove herself, who needed to excel, perhaps to overcome deep-seated suspicions that she was not as clever as she appeared on paper. And human nature being what it is, Malenko had a hunch that she would revert to her old habits in pursuit of recognition and easy success.
When her book was published, they parsed the entire text for key words and phrases. Then using a Boolean search engine, they scanned the Web for database matches to key word strings including the name George Orwell. In a process of elimination, one solitary record had multiple hits—the Web site of Mr. Joshua Blake who had included with his curriculum vitae a link to his doctoral thesis for perusal by interested scholars. It did not take long to realize that Vanessa Watts had lifted whole chunks from Mr. Blake.
As the Porsche hummed its way up the coast, Malenko’s mind turned to the Whitmans. With the same degree of scrutiny they had investigated the husband’s financial dealings with Cape Ann Banking and Trust where he had
filed a fallacious claim about the worth of SageSearch on his bank loan application. The other useful piece of information was that Whitman knew nothing about the wife’s TNT past or her guilt. To his mind, their son’s disabilities came up in the genetic dice roll. But not a clue how Mom had loaded them. All of which meant that he had some goods on each of the Whitmans.
A little before one, Malenko turned onto Exit 7, which would take him to smaller routes that would eventually branch off to an ancient logging road that led to the compound.
Camp Tarabec was nestled in the woods at the edge of Lake Tarabec, a large and private body of water with its own woodland island about a half-mile offshore. The place was Maine-idyllic, with neat log cabins, a central meeting ground, flagpole, playing fields, climbing apparatus, and a little beach which was barricaded a hundred yards offshore to keep swimmers and canoeists from wandering into deep water.
Only seven years old, the camp was operated by a private organization founded and directed by Lucius Malenko. Although it was advertised as a summer camp for “special” kids, to those few in the know it was a “genius camp”—where gifted children went for in-depth, hands-on learning in disciplines from astronomy to zoology.
It was a little after two when Malenko arrived, so it was “free time,” which meant that the kids were engaged in outdoor activities—canoeing, swimming, tennis or baseball, archery, et cetera. After that it was snacks and back inside to the computer labs or science projects. Because the children here were gifted, the counselors sometimes had to pry them away from their terminals or labs to go out and be physical. Malenko parked the Porsche and went into the main office.
A boy about sixteen behind the reception desk smiled as Malenko entered. “Hey, Dr. M.”
“Hello, Tommy. How’s the boy today?”
“Pretty good. How’s the Red Menace? Still doing zero to sixty in five point eight?”
“Only when the police aren’t looking. And it’s five point two.”
“But who counts?” Tommy said and laughed.
He had been coming to the camp for the last three summers, ever since his parents had him enhanced. They had been dissatisfied with his poor analytical skills, particularly with math and logic. At their wit’s end, they came all the way from Chicago to the Nova Children’s Center where they met Dr. Malenko. When all else failed, they put up an expensive summer home as collateral. Now Tommy was a sophomore math major at Cornell. He was also a computer wizard who taught compu lab here. It was he who had done the Boolean search that linked Vanessa Watts to Joshua Blake. Her own little Big Brother.
He stepped into the main office behind the reception desk and said hello to Karl who managed the camp. He handed Malenko some mail. “Oliver’s waiting for you.”
Malenko took his material and stepped back outside. On the baseball field across the way, two teams in red and black T-shirts were at play. At one end of the first-baseline bench, some second-stringers were at a laptop, probably working out the odds for a hit based on the batter’s record and pitcher’s ERA.
Some kids in the tennis court across the dirt road saw him and waved. “Hi, Dr. M.,” one of the boys in white shouted. “How about a game?” The girl across the court waved at him.
Malenko smiled and waved back. “Maybe some other time.”
The boy’s name was Fabiano. He was the son of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Eight years ago he had an IQ of 75 and was a boarder at a school in New York City for the learning disabled. Today at sixteen, he was entering his sophomore year at Columbia with interests in astrophysics. And the young girl was interested in international law. As with all the Tarabec children, they would be getting the intensive exposure and training that would propel them toward their goals. Next week, for instance, they would be guests of astronomers at the observatory at the U. of Maine where they had use of the large reflector telescope.
Malenko got back into the Porsche. Some of the kids hooted him on to peel out. That would not set a very good example, he thought, but he trounced the accelerator and lurched forward in a cloud of dirt. In the rearview mirror, the kids waved and cheered.
Malenko pulled down a small dirt road to the water and into an old boathouse that also served as his garage. He parked, took his bags, and headed down to the dock.
As Karl had said, Oliver was waiting in the boat, a long white twin-engine outboard. He took Malenko’s bags and started the engines. “You made good time.” Oliver removed the ropes.
“Traffic was light.” Malenko took the passenger seat behind the windshield. Oliver maneuvered the boat through the little channel and around the floats that forged the barricade to the open water. In a few seconds, the big Mercury engines were cutting a wake to the island.
Oliver Vines was a carryover from their NSA days—a onetime operative who had assisted Malenko in the enhancement project, which back then was known as “Project Headlight”—a dumb name, but that was governmental skulduggery for you. Once that was terminated, Oliver and Malenko went their separate ways until ten years ago when Malenko set up his private practice. What made Oliver particularly valuable were his connections—from former government ops to private investigators to small-time crooks. He also had a total lack of compunction about performing matters that made others squeamish. Like excessive exposure to radium, governments did that to people. But it also meant that he left no trails—such as that snatcher he had hired in Florida.
Oliver had two passions—money and flying, the former he shared with his wife Vera, a former nurse’s aide who watched over the children. Of late, he had done considerable flying—little midnight excursions.
As they rounded the eastern flank of the island, the blue and white DeHavilland Beaver came into view at its berth on the small dock just offshore from the compound. If the weather held, Oliver would make another run in the plane later that evening. And because he would mostly be over water, he needed a clear sky to fly.
Oliver pulled the boat up to the dock then took one of Malenko’s shoulder bags as they climbed the dirt lane to the main building, a large brown structure that had once been a fishing and hunting lodge.
Before he entered, Malenko waved to Vera who was in the backyard playground with some of the children. Oliver led him inside where they were met by Phillip who poured Malenko a cup of coffee he had just made. In spite of the fact they were brothers, Phillip looked nothing like Karl back at the camp. Phillip Moy, a former private investigator who had run afoul of the law, had been recruited by Oliver. Phillip was proficient at running background checks on people. He was also handy with machinery and computers, which
made him very useful keeping things in operating condition. On occasion he worked with the kids or accompanied Oliver in the dirty work.

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