Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

After that we continued in silence. When we got back to Grand Army Plaza, I told him again that I’d phone him soon.

‘A day or two, yeah?’ he said. ‘And please do , because this could really make a difference. I don’t want to push you, but-’

‘I know ,’ I said firmly, ‘I know.’

‘OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘Just… call me.’

He started looking around for a taxi.

‘One last question,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Why all this outdoor, park-bench stuff?’

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Do you have any idea what kind of power structure I’m up against in Eiben-Chemcorp? And what kind of money is at stake for them?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Well, it’s a lot, on both counts.’ He stuck his arm out and hailed a taxi. ‘I’m under constant surveillance from these people. They watch everything I do, my phones, e-mail, my travel itinerary. You think they’re not watching us now?’

The taxi pulled up at the kerb. As he was getting into it, Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Spinola, you may not have as much time as you think.’

I watched the cab drive away and disappear into the flow of traffic on Fifth Avenue. Then I took off in that direction myself, walking slowly, still feeling a bit nauseous – not least now because I realized that my plan was unworkable. Morgenthaler may have been slightly paranoid, but it was nevertheless clear that threatening to play hardball with a huge pharmaceutical company was not a good idea. Who would I be approaching in any case? The Defense Secretary’s brother ? Apart from how complicated that made things, I couldn’t see a company like Eiben-Chemcorp standing for blackmail in the first place, not with all of the resources they’d have at their disposal. This, in turn, made me think of how Vernon had died, and of how Todd Ellis had left United Labtech and then conveniently been run over. What had happened there? Had Vernon and Todd’s little scam siphoning off and dealing supplies of MDT been found out? Maybe Morgenthaler wasn’t being paranoid after all, but if that was how things really were I was going to have to come up with another plan – something a little less audacious, to say the least.

I arrived at Fifty-seventh Street, and as I was crossing it I looked around. I remembered that one of my earliest blackouts had occurred here, after that first night in Van Loon’s library. It’d been a couple of blocks over, on Park. I’d been overcome with dizziness, and had stumbled, and without any explanation found myself a block further down, on Fifty-sixth Street. Then I thought about the major blackout I’d had the following evening – punching that guy in the Congo down in Tribeca, then that girl in the cubicle, then Donatella Alvarez, then the fifteenth floor of the Clifden…

Something had gone seriously wrong that night, and just thinking about it now caused a stabbing sensation in the pit of my stomach.

But then it struck me… the whole sequence here – MDT, cognitive enhancement, blackouts, loss of impulse control, aggressive behaviour, Dexeron to counteract the blackouts, more MDT, more cognitive enhancement – it was all tinkering with brain chemistry. Maybe the reductionist view of human behaviour that Morgenthaler was going to pitch to his jury was right, maybe it was all down to molecular interaction, maybe we were just machines.

But if that was the case, if the mind was simply a chemical-software program running in the brain – and pharmaceutical products such as Triburbazine and MDT were simply rewrite programs – then what was to stop me from learning how all of that stuff worked? Using the supply of MDT-48 I had left, I could focus my powers of concentration for the next few weeks on the mechanics of the human brain. I could study neuroscience, and chemistry, and pharmacology, and even – goddammit – neuropsychopharmacology…

What would there then be to stop me from making my own MDT? There had been plenty of underground chemists in the old LSD days, people who had sidestepped the need to cultivate supply sources in the medical or pharmaceutical communities by setting up their own labs in bathrooms and basements all around the country. I was no chemist, for sure, but before I took MDT I hadn’t been a stock-market trader, either – far from it, in fact. Excited now at the prospect of getting started on this, I quickened my pace. There was a Barnes & Noble at Forty-eighth Street. I’d stop in there and pick up some textbooks and then get a cab straight back to the Celestial.

Passing a news-stand I saw a headline on a paper referring to the proposed MCL-Abraxas merger and remembered that I still had my cellphone powered off. As I walked along, I took it out and checked it for messages. There were two from Van Loon, the first puzzled, the second slightly irritated. I would have to talk to him soon and come up with some pre-emptive excuse for my absence over the coming weeks. I couldn’t just ignore him. After all, I owed the man nearly ten million dollars.

I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, browsing through college textbooks – enormous tomes in fine print, with charts and diagrams and a blizzard of italicized Latin and Greek terminology. Finally, I picked out eight books with titles like Biochemistry & Behaviour, Vol. 1., Principles of Neurology and The Cerebral Cortex , paid for them by credit card and left the store weighed down with two extremely heavy bags in each hand. I got a cab out on Fifth Avenue, just as it was starting to rain. By the time we pulled up at the Celestial, it had turned into a downpour, and in the ten or so seconds it took me to hobble across the plaza to the main entrance of the building, I got soaked. But I didn’t care – I was excited and dying to get up to the apartment so I could make a start on these textbooks.

When I was inside, walking across the lobby, the guy on the desk, Richie, waved over at me.

‘Mr Spinola. Hi. Yeah… I let those guys in.’

‘What?’

‘I let them in. They just left about twenty minutes ago.’

I walked over towards the desk.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Those guys you said were delivering something. They were here.’

I put the bags down, and looked at him.

‘I didn’t say anything to you about any guys delivering… anything. What are you talking about?’

He swallowed and looked nervous all of a sudden.

‘Mr Spinola, you… you called me about an hour ago, you said some guys were coming to deliver something and that I was to give them a key…’

‘ I called you?’

‘Yes.’

Water was dripping now from my hair down into the back of my shirt collar.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, as though to reassure himself. ‘The line was bad, you said so yourself, it was your cellphone…’

I picked up the bags and started walking very quickly towards the elevators.

‘Mr Spinola?’

I ignored him.

‘Mr Spinola? Are… are we OK about this?’

I got into an elevator, pressed the button and as the car climbed up to the sixty-eighth floor, I could feel my heart beating so hard that I had to take deep breaths and bang my fist on the side panels of the car a couple of times to steady myself. Then I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. Drops of water sprayed everywhere.

At sixty-eight, I picked up the two bags and slid out of the car before the elevator door was even fully open. I rushed along the corridor to my apartment, dropped the bags on the floor and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. When I got the key out, I had a hard time getting it into the keyhole. I eventually managed to get the door open, but the second I stepped inside the apartment I knew that everything was lost.