Scott Nicholson - Chronic fear

“He learned that your last consultant died from a sudden heart attack,” Forsyth said. “But that may not work again, because Scagnelli ain’t got a heart.”

“Whoever is behind it, before we take them out, I need to know one thing.” Burchfield’s face grew serious, and even the Botox regimen couldn’t diminish the hard wrinkles around his eyes.

“What’s that?”

“Whether or not Seethe and Halcyon still exist. I’m not even sure they were real.”

“They’re real. Those drugs have changed you.”

“How?”

“You’re more intense now. It goes over as passion. And I think you can ride that to the White House if you can keep a lid on it.”

“I am in control.” Burchfield brushed past him and opened the door, where the pretty production assistant was waiting to outfit him with a wireless, clip-on microphone. He grinned boyishly as she attached it to his breast pocket.

“Be careful, I’m ticklish,” he said.

“Bet you say that to all the voters.”

“Only the pretty ones.”

She blushed and finished the job, giving him an extra pat to make sure the wire was completed concealed. Burchfield’s smile stayed with him as he was escorted before the bright lights and cameras.

Forsyth watched from the wings in admiration as Burchfield masterfully fielded questions about his foreign policy, budget plan, and the all-important controversy over whether the Tea Party was going to fracture the Republicans and create an opening for a third-party candidate.

When Burchfield deftly dodged questions about a potential running mate, it was Forsyth’s turn to smile.

Seethe and Halcyon changed both of us, Daniel.

“Dr. Morgan?”

Alexis looked up from the computer, where X-rays of Mark’s brain were scattered across the screen. Even though the images were filed under a pseudonym, she was careful to intersperse images of other volunteer subjects so anyone cracking into the vector machines wouldn’t notice an obsession with any one case.

But she instinctively minimized the window anyway, leaving up images of four other brains.

“What is it, Haleema?” she asked her graduate assistant.

“Have you seen my laptop? I left it here yesterday when I had an appointment with my advisor.”

Alexis flashed to the memory of the two men who’d raided the lab. She’d conducted another search that morning and hadn’t noticed anything out of place or missing. She’d settled on the story that the men were after drugs, which made pharmacies and medical facilities popular targets for addicted, desperate crooks. Lying to herself had become easier with practice, and denial was one of the most basic survival mechanisms.

“I haven’t seen it,” Alexis said. “Are you sure it was here?”

Haleema pointed a slender brown hand toward a narrow cubicle where volunteers filled out their paperwork. “It was on the table. I meant to come back and pick it up last night, but I got tied up by my boyfriend.”

Alexis tried not to smile, and the young woman recognized the double entendre. She might have blushed, though her skin was too dark to reveal the rush of blood to her cheeks.

“I mean…he took me to a play on campus. So I couldn’t get back here, and I figured the lab would be locked anyway.”

“I left early, and no one else should have been in here,” Alexis said. Haleema, an honors student planning to become a brain surgeon, wasn’t authorized to enter the lab without Alexis present. Alexis had very briefly wondered if Haleema was involved in yesterday’s raid, but Haleema would have had to illegally copy one of the few existing keys to the door. Besides, it wouldn’t have been hard for Haleema to steal while Alexis was consumed with her research.

Maybe she stole things that didn’t need to be carried.

“I can’t afford another laptop,” Haleema said, eyes misting in frustration.

“I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” Alexis said. She left her chair and checked her desk drawers and cabinets, repeating the search she’d conducted earlier.

Haleema checked the cubicle again, adding, “It’s not just the computer that worries me. All my research was on it, too.”

Haleema had been correlating images for the brain-stimulation study, handling a lot of the grunt work of noting the before-and-after differences in the brain scans. Since most of the images revealed only minute changes, her job was to create the median from which the deviations could be measured.

“It’s backed up on the vector machines, isn’t it?” Alexis asked, browsing a shelf filled with binders and journals to make sure the laptop hadn’t been tucked among them.

“Most of it,” Haleema said. “I didn’t get a chance to upload yesterday’s data.”

“That’s okay,” Alexis said. “We can go to the last update and catch up from there. But that laptop probably cost a few thousand dollars. I know we don’t pay that much, and it would suck for you to take out another student loan.”

“Some of the data may be saved,” Haleema said. “I e-mailed thumbnails of the image batch to my university account so I could work on them from the library.”

“I told you to keep it off the networks, damn it! It’s hard enough to keep electronic information private on dedicated devices, but anything sent over a network is fair game for anybody to steal.”

Haleema drew back, cowering a little. Alexis realized she’d better not let her rage run wild, or Haleema might start wondering about the real nature of the work.

“Sorry,” Haleema said, lowering her gaze to the floor.

The subjects had been assigned numbers to protect their privacy, and when the results were published, no names would be revealed. But during the analysis, Alexis was running both names and assigned numbers to avoid mistaken identities. If someone had hacked the records, that would have led them to take a closer look.

Or raid the lab.

“Anything particular you were correlating?” Alexis asked, more calmly.

“I was working on the Ds,” Haleema said. “Four or five, if I remember correctly.”

Davis.

Alexis forced her voice to remain steady. “And you e-mailed them all?”

“Yes.” Haleema picked up a stack of manila folders to check behind it.

“With names and numbers assigned?”

“Yes, the way we did all of them.”

Alexis pretended to keep searching but she knew the laptop was gone. Whoever had been watching her must have hacked into Haleema’s e-mail. It wouldn’t even be that difficult, since the university had a large IT staff devoted solely to maintaining the networks, any of whom could have opened her e-mail.

Or granted password access to an interested bidder.

You’re getting as paranoid as Mark. Nobody cares about the brain chemistry of college students besides the Miller Brewing Company. I’ve been very careful.

Still, the Donnie Davis files couldn’t be a coincidence. She’d lumped Mark’s scans in with the others so they wouldn’t be identified as anomalies, and Haleema was too inexperienced to notice the tiny lesions that only a skilled eye could detect.

“I don’t think it’s here, Dr. Morgan,” Haleema said, worried and depressed.

“Maybe you left it in your dorm room, or your boyfriend’s apartment. Have you checked with Lost and Found?”

“No,” Haleema said. “Should we call the campus police?”

“Let’s not do that yet,” Alexis said. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

She said the words vacantly and automatically, knowing it had walked out of the room yesterday afternoon under the arm of one of the intruders.

But why didn’t they steal the vector machines or my desktop? Sure, those would be much harder to carry away without attracting notice, but then they would have had a better chance of tracking my digital footprints.