Chronic fear f-2 Read online

  Chronic fear

  ( Fear - 2 )

  Scott Nicholson

  Scott Nicholson

  Chronic fear

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Surely you didn’t think we could let you live, after what happened.”

  Dr. Alexis Morgan’s lungs froze in shock at the words. She didn’t recognize the male voice on the phone, and the caller ID had been blocked. She’d answered out of habit, because she’d become a reliable source not just for academic types, but among the pop-culture journalists as well. Answering the phone was the price of becoming the Carl Sagan of the mind’s vast cosmos.

  Alexis made herself take a breath, glancing around her office in the University of North Carolina neurosciences department, seeking reassurance in the fat books lining the shelves, the research notes pinned to the bulletin board, and the cold eye of the computer screen.

  Yes, everything was normal, or at least typically abnormal.

  “Who is this?” she finally managed to whisper.

  The voice chuckled on the other end of the line. “You could call me a ‘watchdog,’ but that wouldn’t narrow it down much, would it?”

  “If you’re threatening me, I’ll report you to the university police.”

  “That would be wonderful, Dr. Morgan. Then they’d open up that whole barrel of monkeys and my work would be done.”

  “I’m a neurobiologist, not a kindergarten teacher. I’m afraid you have the wrong-”

  “You didn’t like playing second banana, did you? You want it all to yourself.”

  She should have thumbed the phone dead. But people tended to let things slip that revealed secrets they’d hidden even from themselves. No matter how carefully the psychological vault was built, it always had a crack. Maybe she could bait him out.

  “Is Burchfield behind this?”

  “We gave you a chance to forget,” the voice said. “But, no, you just had to keep digging.”

  Because the neurosciences department dealt with sensitive information as well as private health records, the technical security was high. But the best hacks were employed by the people with the most power, and right now, Senator Daniel Burchfield was in the running for the most powerful position on the planet.

  “Halcyon is dead,” Alexis said.

  “See, you didn’t forget,” the voice answered. “But you never wanted to forget, did you?”

  She couldn’t really place the age of the caller. She flipped through a mental file as she might go through a series of brain scans, trying to summon a face, but she was pretty sure she’d never heard the voice before.

  Of course, she could have heard it and had her mind wiped clean. One of the lasting effects of the Monkey House trials was that stretches of the past were garbled or blank, like a cassette tape with Coke spilled on it.

  “If you were just going to kill me, I’d be dead,” she said. “So I must have something you want.”

  “Maybe lots of somethings.”

  “And maybe you can save us both some time by telling me what it is.”

  “What fun would that be?”

  “You can tell your boss that Halcyon is buried, and so is the past.”

  And a lot of people along with it.

  After a pause, the caller continued. “We know you’ve been playing around in your lab. Here’s what you need to-”

  Alexis killed the signal. That was the only thing she needed to do: make him shut up.

  Her main research lab was three floors below. For some reason, even in its modern science buildings, UNC still confined much of its research to the basement. It was a tradition dating back to Memorial Hospital’s founding, when the dead were wheeled away in the middle of the night and kept out of view of the living patients. Mortality was bad for business.

  Unless you were in the business of murder.

  Alexis thought about calling Mark, but he always turned off his cell when he was at the shooting range, and he’d be wearing ear protection, anyway. Besides, she didn’t want to scare him until she knew what the caller wanted. Mark was scared enough already, considering what was happening inside his skull.

  She hurried from the office to the elevator. She hit the button twice but the light was stuck on floor seven. That was the outpatient floor, the one on which Anita Molkesky had undergone intensive therapy for her bipolar disorder and suicidal ideations.

  We were so close to getting away with it, Anita. But you know that there’s really only one escape.

  Alexis gave up on the elevator and made for the stairs, jogging down the three flights with her heels clacking on the concrete. She passed an intern she recognized, mumbling an impersonal greeting. Only three people had keys to her lab, except for the master key held by housekeeping. But the cleaning staff was under orders not to enter any labs without direction, since most of the research was proprietary, classified, or potentially hazardous to human health.

  She reached the basement, wondering whether the mysterious caller had been from a legitimate federal agency, a drug company, or that special class of mercenary operating slightly beyond the influence of either. Burchfield trolled in all three of those murky pools.

  Alexis had projects going in three labs, but two of the labs were shared. The private one was a perk, containing functional MRI, PET, and CT scanners for her neural research. The department head had granted it as an unspoken reward for her work on the president’s bioethics council. She’d resigned from the council three months before, citing personal reasons, although the council’s shift in focus from mind-changing drugs to synthetic biology had made her a bit of a dinosaur anyway.

  But this was one dinosaur that didn’t plan on going extinct. Not until she’d saved her husband, the world, and possibly herself, in that order.

  Her imaging lab was in the farthest corner of the basement floor, which was underground on three sides with a main entrance to the rear, a rectangular hallway connecting the labs. Although the hallway was brightly lit, she could feel the weight of the earth and the darkness that waited beyond the waterproof concrete walls. It was early evening and much of the research section was empty, but a few doors were open. She didn’t glance in, lest someone call out to her in greeting.

  She had a feeling she didn’t have much time.

  She rounded the corner and saw two men outside the imaging lab. They were dressed like hospital interns in green scrubs, with cotton masks fitted over their mouths. The lab door was open.

  “Hey!” she shouted.

  The two men glanced at her, then each other. The taller one bolted to the left, where the hallway led back to the main entrance. He carried a white canvas bag in one gloved hand, and its bulk and sagging weight made her think it held machinery or books.

  Alexis started after him but the second man stepped forward, blocking her path. She was so enraged by the invasion she didn’t consider that he might be armed.

  “You’re not allowed access,” she shouted at the fleeing man, but he was already around the corner.

  The remaining man spread his arms as if to tackle her if she tried to run past. Most of his body was covered, but his dark eyes and brown skin suggested someone of Indian or Middle Eastern descent. There was a large Indian and Pakistani population in the medical department, but she had a feeling this wasn’t an inside job.

  “I’ve called the police,” Alexis said, hoping she sounded more commanding than she felt.

  “We are the police,” the man said. She detected a Middle Eastern accent, but his voice was muffled enough that she couldn’t tell whether he was the same man who’d called. Had the caller wanted to tip her off, or send her into danger?

  The sounds of conversation and shoes squeaking on hard tiles came from around the bend, in the direction opposit
e the one in which the man with the canvas bag had fled. Alexis considered calling out to the approaching people, but she didn’t want anyone else involved. Involvement meant complications, which would lead to questions.

  And the man knew it. Because he stood his ground. She wondered if he was smiling behind the mask.

  Alexis lowered her voice. “You have what you wanted. Now get out of here.”

  “I don’t think so, Dr. Morgan. Not even half of it.”

  “Are you going to start making threats again? Because I can’t take you seriously while you’re dressed as House.”

  His black eyebrows lifted as if he’d never heard of the misanthropic TV doctor. The people around the corner were moving closer, and Alexis recognized one of the speakers as Franz Huber, a visiting neurobiologist from the Planck Institute in Heidelberg. Huber was typically Teutonic, blond and broad-shouldered, and would have been just as suited for fur and a stone ax as a lab coat. If trouble erupted, she’d bet on him over the slim man who was blocking her way.

  Assuming he wasn’t hiding a gun in his scrubs.

  “We’ll talk later, Dr. Morgan,” he said, pulling his mask up a little higher on his face. Huber and his companion, a female in a pants suit whom Alexis didn’t recognize, rounded the corner, and Huber hailed Alexis. The man in the scrubs walked away with a forced ease, as if he preferred to run but was holding back.

  “Dr. Morgan, you’re working late,” Huber said in his deep voice, barely glancing at the man in scrubs.

  Elitism. I’d have reacted the same way. If that guy hadn’t been raiding my lab, I wouldn’t have given him a second look. Just another nurse handling specimens.

  “Hi, Franz,” Alexis said, straining a grin and hiding her impatience. They went through the formalities of introductions while Alexis kept glancing behind her into her lab to see if anything had been disturbed. It wasn’t until Alexis said her husband was waiting that the pair continued on their way.

  Alexis went inside the lab and shut the door. At first, everything seemed as she had left it. The scanning machines were intact behind the lead-lined glass window, the computers were on, and the support vector machines were busy analyzing hundreds of brain images collected from student volunteers. Sabotage obviously wasn’t a motive, or the creeps could have caused millions of dollars in damages and wiped out months of work.

  No, they were after something that was inside the lab, a tangible, portable item. Intellectual property could be stolen in a dozen ways. Her experience with the Monkey House trials had proven that crimes of the mind left no fingerprints. She wouldn’t go to the extremes of her deranged former mentor, Dr. Sebastian Briggs, who kept critical notes only on paper, but she’d also learned to run double sets of data, in much the same way a crooked business owner ran two sets of accounting books.

  There was only one thing she could think of that anyone would want here. And she was smart enough to keep it off-site. Except for the secrets stored in her mind, the ones she couldn’t trust to even a computer or a piece of paper, because that might make them real.

  But the first goon in scrubs had definitely been carrying something in the canvas bag. The array of thick technical manuals and books on the shelves appeared untouched. The vector machines that housed most of her records were bolted to the floor and too heavy to move without machinery. Although some of the imaging equipment was expensive, the specialized technology was pretty worthless to somebody looking for her secret research.

  Whether or not one of the fake nurses was the man who’d called her, the incidents were clearly connected. It was too much of a coincidence. Her life had been relatively calm for the past year, and the Monkey House incident had been covered up just the way Mark had predicted, including the loss of his vice-presidency of CRO Pharmaceuticals.

  After all, you couldn’t keep paying a man who’d just cost you billions in profits and lost you a critical ally in Washington, DC.

  But the caller had threatened to kill her, and the two thieves in scrubs hadn’t so much as barked at her.

  Which meant they didn’t have what they wanted yet, so they needed her alive.

  For now.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Are you sure Burchfield’s behind it?” Mark asked.

  They were having dinner at their wooded ranch house just outside Chapel Hill, which provided convenient access to the university, Raleigh-Durham International, and CRO’s headquarters in the Research Triangle Park. But since Mark had been axed and Alexis had resigned from the ethics council, they had traveled little, although Alexis still made occasional speaking appearances to support her new book on personality-altering drugs.

  “Who else would it be?” Alexis responded.

  “The deal was that everyone forgets the Monkey House. All the Seethe and Halcyon was destroyed, and the facility was leveled. A minor chemical leak contaminated the property, the health department condemned it, and CRO leveled the facility and took the tax write-off. It all looked good on paper.”

  “Even the four deaths.”

  “Only three, remember?”

  Alexis frowned. She and Mark had discussed the events of that night many times, but they could never quite put all the pieces together. The Seethe exposure had induced bouts of fear and rage, and Halcyon had punched holes in their memories. Alexis would have happily believed the whole thing never happened except both of them still bore scar tissue from fighting to stay alive in the Monkey House.

  While Mark’s scars were on the outside, including the jagged purple line on his cheek, hers mostly remained hidden.

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Alexis said, pushing at the mashed potatoes and salmon on her plate. “We trusted Burchfield to keep it quiet. He has more to lose than any of us.”

  “He wasn’t running for president then. Now the stakes are higher. The first task of any campaign is to run a minesweeper and see if any explosives are waiting to detonate. Maybe he’s decided it won’t stay quiet on its own.”

  Daniel Burchfield chaired the Senate health committee, and Mark had been one of his Washington allies. As a CRO executive, Mark’s job was to encourage the senator to back legislation favorable to the pharmaceutical giant. Not that Burchfield needed much prompting. Generous campaign contributions would have been enough, but Burchfield also saw the potential to exploit personality-altering drugs for political gain.

  Alexis understood the stakes were higher now. Since Burchfield was running for the Republican presidential nomination, maybe he’d decided he couldn’t risk a potential bombshell from his past. As long as the bomb wasn’t ticking, everyone was happy. But if someone had started the countdown, wouldn’t Burchfield seek to defuse it completely? If he couldn’t wipe it away from their memories, the only response left was to wipe their existence from the face of the Earth.

  “Yeah, I understand he might want us out of the way,” Alexis said. “But what would he want with my research?”

  “Maybe he thinks you’re still pursuing Halcyon.” He said it with the cruel sarcasm he’d developed since the Monkey House. The sneer and the scar worked together to arouse in her a mixture of guilt, sorrow, and anger.

  I’m doing it for YOU, Mark.

  But, as always, she failed to completely convince herself. She pursued Halcyon for many reasons, and some of them scared her more than Mark’s frightening decay had.

  Because you want to be its mother. You want to own it and be responsible for it. You want to be first banana.

  Alexis glanced at the front door, wondering if Mark had locked it. She’d never felt this vulnerable, even in the immediate aftermath of the Monkey House trials, and their home’s relative isolation now was a worry instead of an asset.

  “You destroyed all the Seethe and Halcyon,” she said, trying to hide the big lie behind her bitterness.

  “You saw what that stuff turned us into.”

  She dared him with her eyes. Her memories of the Monkey House tangled in oscillating bands of terror and violence, but she was incapa
ble of such terrible acts. His accusations were even more proof that his condition was deteriorating.

  “I saw a drug that had a potential to help ease people’s suffering,” Alexis said. “But you had to play God and take it out of the hands of science. You had no right to make that decision.”

  “Making people’s lives better by helping them forget? It hasn’t helped ours very much, has it?”

  “Two months of law-enforcement training, and suddenly you’re the world’s morality cop.”

  “If it wasn’t for you and your Frankenstein complex, I would still have a career. But at least you have your career, right?”

  “Mark, you know why I stayed on in the neurosciences department. It was our best chance to find a treatment for-”

  Mark slammed his fist down on the table, causing his glass to jump. Mark and Alexis watched the white wine quiver a moment before settling down. Then he looked at her.

  “Sorry,” he said, lifting his palms in supplication. “I’m not angry. Not anymore.”

  At least this time he noticed his outburst. I don’t know if that’s an improvement or not.

  “We’d better stop fighting each other,” Alexis said. “Soon we might be fighting to save our lives.”

  They fell into silence at the thought. They both lifted their heads as if expecting to hear something in the woods outside. A truck rumbled down a distant street and a jet swept over on its way to RDI.

  “If it was Burchfield, what could he possibly want in your lab?” Mark asked, taking a half-hearted bite of salmon. “Halcyon’s dead. Seethe’s dead. Briggs is dead. There’s nothing left.”

  “That’s what has me stumped. We’re working on fear response, sure, but nothing like what Sebastian Briggs was doing. All those brain scans I’ve been looking at, all that mapping? That’s just tracking basic emotional and motor responses, grunt work.”

  “I don’t see what Burchfield would want with that, unless he plans on clubbing his Republican challengers over the head with a budget ax.”