David Dun: Overfall

“So if I go ahead with my little plan, we don’t know exactly how good the result will be on Samir?”

“That’s right.”

“But he will be nervous.”

“Yes. It would be shocking if he weren’t at least somewhat paranoid. Especially for the first few months.”

“But not completely crazy. And we alone can provide him relief.”

“It should make him a lot more manageable. We will see. You know I can guarantee nothing. We are reasonably sure but we don’t have the controls, and the volume for a human-sized mammal remains a question.”

“I know. I know. But let’s do something.”

“Imagine what you could do to a head of state, or an entire parliament…”

Chellis didn’t mind Jacques’s probing; he wasn’t going to get anywhere with it.

“Is the gas chamber foolproof?”

“You must get him placed between the nozzles. If you don’t we’ll have to try again on the way back, maybe use force and rely on memory blockers.”

“Samir should be here any moment; I need to get to my office.”

“You could use mine,” Jacques said.

“No. No. I don’t need to impress this man.”

When Samir entered Chellis’s office, Chellis stood and greeted him in quiet tones. Samir was a big man, thick like a wrestler with glasses like Coke bottles, and an aura of confidence that was palpable. They had met for the first time fifteen years earlier, and since then had actually met face-to-face on perhaps a dozen occasions. They had become not so much friends or acquaintances as uneasy joint venturers, each keenly aware at any given moment of what the other might hold for him.

“Well,” Chellis said, interrupting the mutual pleasantries. “I know you’re a busy man and would no doubt like to get on with business.”

“I’m not like the Orientals who require an hour’s socializing before getting down to work,” Samir said, “but I do need to see what you’re developing so I can begin thinking about how we might employ it.”

“I’d like to ask that only you view the demonstration. It’s top secret.”

Samir hesitated but was unreadable. “My men can wait outside the door?”

“Of the molecular biology wing.”

Samir nodded, clearly not pleased but amenable. Weapons carried by Samir’s men were hidden only in a crude fashion. There were obvious lumps in their clothes.

They went down long halls, and finally emerged into the main molecular biology lab, but this time Chellis led him to a different door. It was metal and heavy.

“What is this?” Samir asked.

“We go through an air lock. An anticontamination measure.”

They walked to a second heavy metal door that said: AIR LOCK. CLEAN ROOM.

Chellis removed a plastic card and inserted it into a shiny stainless box. As if to ease Samir’s mind, he explained:

“We have to keep out foreign bacteria. Ordinarily we wouldn’t traipse through with street shoes on, but today it’s okay.”

With a sucking sound the heavy door opened to reveal a three-meter-by-five-meter chamberlike area with all-metal walls and to the left, hanging on the wall, heavy white suits looking rather like astronaut garb. They approached an even more massive door. Chellis determined that Samir was perfectly placed between the two gas nozzles.

Chellis took a deep breath and held it. A whirring could be heard as the sliding door began closing behind them. There was a loud pop and rushing gas. Samir, startled, took a breath, then began to look wildly about, gasping. Within ten seconds he began to stagger and to lose motor control. Chellis grabbed his own throat and swayed as if drunk, turning to look in Samir’s alarm-filled eyes as he fell to the floor. Chellis stepped back to the door through which they had come. A crack remained to allow his exit; then the door closed. By the time Samir’s eyes had rolled back in his head, Chellis was outside the chamber with the door closed.

Two hours later Chellis, as was his custom when under stress, went on a ten-minute screaming tirade. Jacques, appearing pale, began to stare down at his shoes, and Chellis realized that he was repeating himself badly. “You never said he would get uncontrollably angry.” Jacques blinked his irritation but said nothing. “Answer me! I had Samir Aziz in the lab. We gassed him. How could you screw this up?”

“There is no indication that we screwed anything up. He is angry. He probably always gets mad when he feels powerless. Mad is different from aggressive. Aggressive means killing people; it comes from phase two, and he received no phase-two-vector particles. No receptors for those areas of the brain. You watch, the fear will increase, but he won’t become more hostile or aggressive. When you have had a chance to introduce him to a masseuse, the massage oil will work perfectly. He will calm himself temporarily with each introduction of the hormone. More than that, he will crave it once he tries it.”

At that moment Benoit arrived with Jacques’s right-hand man, a bearded fellow with a round face and stomach. He stood back and nodded toward Chellis, who looked at Benoit as she put a hand on Chellis’s arm.

“I am sorry. I wondered if I might interrupt.”

“I want it working,” Chellis said, no longer yelling but ignoring Benoit. “I’m going to see him in a few hours and he’s mad as hell.”

Chellis escorted Benoit down the hall, knowing he should not have alluded to the Samir situation in her presence. He kept her out of such things.

It was a short walk to her comfortable six-bedroom home, a small mansion set carefully at the jungle’s edge with lush gardens and a ten-foot brick wall to ensure privacy. Benoit held his arm as they came up the walk and he nodded at the servants whose names he could never remember. Benoit seemed to know them all. It bothered him that she held his arm, as it gave the appearance of impropriety.

In the study he found a bottle of Glenlivet. After the first sip he turned his attention to Benoit. She was dark-haired and with the same stark-white unblemished skin as her sister Marie, his wife, but with large, doelike, brown eyes. She was slightly more squared in the shoulders than Marie, which he liked, and unlike Marie she was petite in the torso with a small bust.

Two years younger than Marie, Benoit looked more like five years her junior; at forty-one she looked to be in her early thirties. While Marie was a witty observer, an arranger of things, passively inviting sexually, and generally warm to everybody, Benoit was calculating and aggressively sexual, a small tigress with a killer instinct. In his most private thoughts it seemed to Chellis that they were two halves of a marvelous whole: sweet and succulent but tart and nourishing; luxurious and classy but practical and gritty. Where Marie was sexual creme brulee, Benoit held the hot tang of his favorite chutney. Together they had it all, and which of them he wanted in his bed depended on whether he wanted to rhapsodize or sweat.

He made sure the shades were drawn and the door locked. Although he was still not quite in the mood, he gave Benoit a long, slow kiss, very carefully, with enough of his tongue to warm the heart but not so much as to move over the line to disrespect. If he hadn’t made it right, she would be a bitch for a while. It was one of the few concessions he made to another person playing with his carefully spun reality. Never would he tolerate diffidence from a man, but the two women in his life were different.

Benoit gave him a good smile. She was pampering him. And he knew it was because she had a strong opinion about Jacques and his value and she felt the need to manipulate his mood any way she could.

“It will be fine. Give it time and it will work just like it did with Jason. You know I would never tell you your business, but it strikes me that Jacques is very capable. Perhaps we should not unfairly blame him.”