Scott Nicholson - Liquid fear

“You make it sound so wrong.”

“We learn from our mistakes. Flight or fight. If you snip those wires, all you have is a puppet.”

Briggs turned up one corner of his mouth in what might have been a grin. “Ah, the military application. One of them, anyway.”

“Above my pay grade,” Mark said. “But this is the kind of stuff I don’t want to monkey around with.”

“Good choice of metaphor. The amygdala is the foundation of our evolutionary brain, the mysterious center over which all that complex gray matter blossoms. But give it the slightest bit of stimulation and you might as well be a caveman, whimpering in the dark as the beasties roar.”

Briggs veered off the interstate onto NC 15-501 and began winding along the wooded, gently bending road toward the university. “You know, Mark,” Briggs continued, “there’s a chance for Alexis to make her name in this after all. There’s enough credit to go around for everyone, and it could really advance her career. Grants, peer reviews, all those honorary degrees.”

“Forget it,” Mark said.

“Ah, the protective male. Why don’t you let her decide for herself?”

“I told you the deal,” Mark said. “We’ve already given you the others. That should be plenty.”

“I’m a mad scientist, remember? I won’t be happy until I accidentally destroy the world.”

“I’m not so sure it would be an accident. But there’s bigger stuff at stake than just the future of the world.”

“CRO’s stock value, I know. I hear shares are slipping while all this is cooking, but they’re poised to make a miraculous run after Halcyon is announced and the government invests. And I’m sure they give stock options in your pay grade, right?”

“I have my own motives. Just like everyone.”

They had passed the golf course and the turnoff to the Dean Dome, the cavernous gymnasium named for the venerable basketball coach Dean Smith. More university structures began appearing on the wooded lots, identifiable by their brick facades and large windows. They would reach the main campus within minutes.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the next question, but he needed to know. It would reassure him that he still had some vestiges of a conscience and hadn’t become a complete sociopath. “How many more will you need for trials?”

“I’ve administered mild doses to half a dozen subjects,” Briggs said. “They think they’re in clinicals for a new anxiety treatment. That’s not on CRO’s dime, it’s through a CDC grant with a real professor heading it up. But that’s a cover. We need the original subjects because they’ve already been exposed to Halcyon. The pump is primed, so to speak.”

Mark didn’t want to think about the neurochemical time bomb ticking in his wife’s brain. Maybe sociopaths couldn’t truly love, but he was deeply passionate about her. He was slightly comforted by the notion that sociopaths wouldn’t have such a thought.

“So we stop at four? Leng, Underwood, Doyle, and Molkesky.”

“I love the old part of campus and all those brick sidewalks,” Briggs said. “Too bad they kicked me out. Once I restore my good name, maybe I’ll see about an adjunct position.”

“Four.”

Briggs pulled to the side of the narrow road, near an old stone amphitheater girded by oaks and maples. “Is four your limit, or is that a direct order from the senator?”

Mark slammed his fist against the dashboard hard enough to hurt. “That name stays out of this.”

“Ah, so you’re the satchel man, or whatever they call it in the movies.”

Mark opened the door. His wife’s office was half a mile away, and he would be a little late. But he had another stop to make first, one that was long overdue, and one he didn’t want Briggs to know about. “You’ll get your satchel soon enough.”

Mark collected his suitcase and hurried away without looking back. Briggs called from the open window. “Tell your wife I said hello.”

Mark turned, his fist unconsciously clenched again. If you weren’t so critical to CRO’s future, I’d give you a dose of medicine you wouldn’t forget for a long, long time.

“Just kidding,” Briggs said, then rolled up the window and eased away from the curb.

Traffic was picking up, and the wind sent leaves scuttling over the sidewalk. Mark crunched them underfoot as he jogged up a short rise of stairs. The brittle noise was like the breaking of many tiny bones.

If Burchfield had ordered Alexis into the Monkey House trials as well, he wondered if he would have nodded in acquiescence.

He wasn’t sure which master he served anymore. It seemed there were far too many.

“That was a little risky, don’t you think?” Briggs asked, glancing around his office as if expecting to see cops in the shadows. “An open attack on Dr. Morgan in broad daylight?”

“You said try to embarrass her,” Kleingarten said, tossing a handful of unshelled sunflower seeds into his mouth. “Besides,” he said amid crunches, “only sneaky people come under suspicion. The important thing is I got it done.”

Kleingarten looked around the bizarre office as he chewed. Briggs had rigged up a temporary lab on one side of the old factory, and he’d stuck most of his gear in what looked to be a zoo cage. It had a hinged grid of steel for a door, with a thick lock, as if Briggs anticipated the need to keep people out. On a low catwalk above, sophisticated equipment of some kind was at work, but Briggs had little more than a computer, some rows of test tubes, an autoclave, and moldering reams of research journals.

Somebody had sunk a fortune in state-of-the-art video monitors and what looked like a security and light system operated by remote control. The main gate was set on a rolling track, and it appeared Briggs could run the whole show from right here.

It seemed like a lot of trouble for a building filled with old tractor parts and farm equipment. He’d had a hard time even finding the place, and the closest buildings were about half a mile away. The huge factory was made of light-red brick, the concrete joints gray with age and spotted with moss.

It seemed like a weird place for a super-secret project, but everything about Briggs and this job was weird.

A large charcoal drawing of a nude woman was taped to the bars on one side of the cage. It wasn’t one of those boring pictures they usually did in art classes. This was like porn, with her tits stuck out and a smile on her lips as the fingers of one hand trailed between the dark patch between her legs. She looked Oriental, and Kleingarten wondered if it was a self-portrait of the Slant, because it was framed like a mirror.

But that wasn’t as strange as what hung above it. A Curious George clock, with George’s skinny arms pointing out the hour and minute, was tied to one of the cell bars with baling wire.

Maybe that’s why he calls this the Monkey House.

Briggs didn’t fit the criminal type, but he had the glittering, intense eyes down pat. The guy was wired, and Kleingarten had found over the years that obsessed people tended to make mistakes because all they saw was the finish line, not the track. With his soft hands and pale skin, he looked like he’d melt if stuck under a heat lamp for too long.

Kleingarten smiled and spat some salty shells onto the stained concrete floor. He’d have to try that sometime.

“I dosed her close to her office, and I trashed it just like you wanted,” Kleingarten said. “She had time to get there before she freaked out. Plus, I got to admit, I was curious to see what would happen. I’ve been juicing up all these people and I still don’t see the point.”

“Lucky for you, I’ve worked two time-release mechanisms into the compound,” Briggs said, heading into the cage of his office. “One is the diminishing effect of the chemicals, which occurs naturally as the substance is broken down by the body’s processes. The other is a narrow window of disintegration. The time between breakdown and complete eradication is so short that no trace remains even if the symptoms linger.”