Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

"No, nothing more tonight," she promised. "And yes, I am tired."

''How are you really doing, Jess? I mean, well, I know this maniac's got to you."

"I'm holding up," she assured him, thinking, but barely…

J. T. gritted his teeth and said, "And Karl Repasi's only making it more difficult for you."

"Leave Repasi to me, okay. I don't want to hear that you two've gotten into a fistfight behind the barn over my honor, J. T. Is that clear?"

"All clear, Doctor… All clear."

"I know it sounds crazy, J. T., but you know what I fear the most tonight?''

"Your telephone, I would imagine."

She nodded. "Exactly. Crazy, isn't it? I mean, he can't possibly know I'm staying here tonight, yet."

"If it bothers you, unplug the damned thing."

"Unplug the phone? If I do that, I cut myself off from Quantico, from Bishop, everyone. No, I can't do that."

"Why the hell not?"

"It's not done in our profession."

"It's time you started thinking of yourself, Jess, and to hell with our profession."

She smiled back at J. T., saying, "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'll do just that, and thanks, John."

"What for?"

"For being a friend."

Unable to sleep, her mind returning again to Karl Repasi's outrageous suggestions, Jessica wondered how many other less informed, less educated people in and out of her profession had begun to see things through the same distorted mirror as Repasi. Certainly, Karl had always been eccentric, an odd practitioner even for an M.E., but she could not fathom how he had arrived at such warped assumptions and conclusions. Then again, of late, anyone connected with the FBI, or the U.S. government in any way, shape, or form, had become targets for all the paranoia free-floating about American society, from UFO freaks, delusional fringe groups, and the man on the street, thanks in large measure to Hollywood's portrayal of government cover-ups, particularly in hiding UFOs and alien bodies, genetic experiments, and covert operatives working under the cloak of the U.S. flag; all this had become a battle cry for the fringe element and the fanatic alike. And why not exploit this uniquely American mass paranoia with such blockbuster, billion-dollar productions as now decorated the marquees of every movie theater in the land?

Jessica sadly realized that for many she'd become a scapegoat. Americans and people in general needed scapegoats and villains, people to point at and call less than holy, less than human, less than themselves, to point a finger at people capable of ignoring the rules all good Americans lived by.

Hollywood had lost many of its favorite villains, the threat of Russians overrunning America long gone, the German Nazis a thing of the past, now considered historical fiction by many young people, as if the Holocaust were a staged event for propaganda. Where better to place today's villain than squarely beneath the cloak of government, despite the fact that the U.S. government was made up of people just like all other citizens of the country, people who wanted white-picket fences around suburban homes in which to raise happy, healthy children? But nowadays Americans were drowning in their own paranoia, unable to see that the true villains, criminal-minded adults, were created out of Nazilike, Gestapolike upbringings, born to parents who abused children in cruel and torturous ways.

American mass paranoia had begun long before Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City. And to a certain extent, healthy paranoia, cynicism, and distrust of British authority had created the republic that was America. Cynicism formed the roots of democracy. Without it, there would be no America, a nation conceived in liberty, justice for all, and skepticism of authority.

Still, Jessica felt shocked to her core when an audience in a movie house applauded at the sight of the White House being blown away by alien invaders. She felt a wave of revulsion that films were now glamorizing such violent acts directed at the core of the nation and its symbols.

Jessica wondered at what juncture healthy criticism of the government became a bitter expression of futility, threatening to destroy all social fabric and the body politic. Popular fiction and movies of late had recently taken people into a chaotic landscape, displaying the American inability to sort out good from evil. Yet films and popular books only mirrored what was out there, what free-floated about in the ether of a place. The root causes of the paranoia didn't burst forth from film or the writings of horror and science fiction novelists, but from the collective soul.

Jessica knew that ill feelings toward government and government agencies were in the popular mind long before they were in the Hollywood pipeline, long before Hollywood embraced such scripts, before such incidents as Ruby Ridge-and that they'd grown to epidemic proportions, poisoning minds, especially those of the nation's youth, since Watergate.

Now Waco and Ruby Ridge had convinced thousands of thousands in the land that they lived under the rule of a government capable of blowing up a busy office building in the middle of a thriving middle-American city, a building housing men, women and children, for the sole purpose of getting an upper hand on the National Rifle Association. That the Oklahoma bombing was a ''black ops'' move in order that the president and "God Government" might point a finger at some unfortunate and beleaguered militia groups, members of which were being crucified in federal "monkey" courts where the evidence meant nothing; where defendants were railroaded to the gas chamber, as if everyone in America now lived under a pre-World War II Japanese military regime. And why would the U.S. government have planned and carried out the bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building? According to many a teen-on-the-street interview, the simple answer was as a show of force and power over those who dared question the president, his agenda or cabinet members, Congress or the House of Representatives, the CIA, FBI, FDA, ATF, FAA, NASA, the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Postal Service, the governors of every state, the mayors, the courts, the cops, and meter maids.

If you wore a badge of government at any level, you were suspect nowadays. And while writers and producers of paranoia-laden story lines only perpetuated the idea that everyone in government was for sale or had malicious intentions, Repasi remained right about one thing: Half-truths were good enough for the average reader who invested in a tabloid at the grocery counter.

Unable to sleep, Jessica tried to put Repasi and his specific paranoia out of her mind, and to help do so, she found herself drawn to Bishop's Western Union and the information packet that had arrived from Santiva in Quantico. She ripped open the message from Bishop, knowing what it must be, and she read:

Phantom has left another body at El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon Village, Yavapai East. Killer made phone contact with your stand-in. Call was placed 6:09 a.m. this morning and was caught on tape. Urgent you contact me ASAP.

Chief Warren Bishop

The message was damnably brief, saying nothing of where the phone call from the killer had originated. One good thing, Jessica gratefully thought, at least the bastard still thinks I'm at the Hilton in Vegas.

She put Warren's message aside and next took up Santiva's larger packet, spilling out its contents across the little table below the light. Santiva and the Behavioral Science Unit were as thorough as they could be with what little they had to go on, resulting in a less than detailed report on the suspect's profile. The unit had determined that the killer operated under a psychotic delusion involving a lust need for fire, that he was on some bizarre high and on an unknown quest, having a religious source, like some mythical archetype journeying deep into the belly of the beast to slay his personal demons. The report said that he was a thin, unremarkable, and unimpressive character with little to recommend him save the fact he appeared nonthreatening.