Second Sight (25 page)

“Don’t worry. I won’t leave you here,” he said. “The friends of your friends might decide to come looking for you one day,” he mocked. “Besides. I have friends too. Friends who can make it look like you shot yourself in your own bed.” He laughed, the sheer evil in him coming to the surface.

Suddenly the table was gone, she could put it no other way. The table was gone and the room was gone and Troy Weir was gone. Everything gone.

She felt herself looking down the end of a long, well-lit hall. She felt herself walking toward the room she was now in.

…The halls were lined with olive metal file cabinets, illuminated by bare lightbulbs in heavy wire casings. There was a man in uniform at the end of the hall, sitting by the front door. He was young and he was in uniform and he was drunkenly raising a bottle of whiskey to his lips. There was a smaller man in a white smock, a weasel of a man, maybe sixty years old. He wore thick spectacles and a stethoscope around his neck and he was standing at the door with the glass window.

A-P, she noted on the tabs of a file cabinet to her right, PZ on the next one. Another cabinet was labeled R-Iodine, R-Calcium-R-Iron, and in large capital letters, SUPPLEMENTS.

A dead mouse lay in a space between the next set of cabinets and these were labeled NUCLEONICS and LFP-ELF respectively. There was a cold black cigar stub balanced on the edge of the last one, and just beyond that, pushed against the wall, sat a metal hospital gurney on rubber wheels. It had restraining straps on it.

The small man in the white smock and glasses was beckon
ing her to the door with the glass window. She walked past him and through it.

Sherry had experienced dreams of residual memories before, the finer details of things seen or remembered by someone in those last eighteen seconds before death. Such a dream usually came unexpectedly, in the middle of some night, when the subconscious mind comes out to play. Having the recent experience of sight and television, she likened it to instant replay, those dramatic, slow-motion, time-stretched moments when things become evident that could not be seen in real time.

Only this time she wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t dreaming. This was here and now. This was in the light of day. She knew that something had changed when she took Thomas J. Monahan’s hand. That his distorted memories had thrown some cerebral switch in her head and opened a brand-new door.

She caught the peripheral images of light flickering on the wall to her left, a jeep approaching a spread-eagle woman in the medical corps uniform, the water buffalo, the mist of blood and brains as the grenade was pulled from her clamped teeth.

How many times had she, no he, been made to see it? How much violence had he been forced to watch to desensitize him to death? Was it over hours or days or even months?

The machine was there at the end of the table, the needle on its resting pin, and she knew it would remain that way until the weasel was safely outside the door. The pistol was there on the table where
he
’d sit. Everything in its place, everything ready to resume.

“Cant…on, Cant…on,” she whispered.

She thought about leaping for the gun, wondering if it was loaded. She looked at it, studied the contour of its frame, the smooth curve of the trigger guard, the barest glint of light on the steel blue barrel. She caught the slightest whiff of cinnamon, the smell of good gun oil. She admired the walnut diamond-stamped grips. She could even imagine the weight of it as she raised it to her…

She took two steps forward and reached for it. She picked
the gun up and raised it to her head. “Are you there?” she whispered, and Troy Weir laughed, and as he did she spun and slammed it down on his forehead. It wasn’t a gun, she saw, as she snapped back to reality, but a baseball-sized chunk of concrete. He stumbled as she hit him again and again and the last time she hit him she heard it break the cartilage of his nose.

His hand grabbed hers, wrestling for the weapon, but he was blinded by the blood running into his eyes and their hands were slippery with it as she pulled herself out of his grip and found the opening of the door, and squeezed through it. She ran down the hall, smelling the wet air in front of her as Troy Weir hit the door with his shoulder to follow her. There was a loud groaning sound and small chunks of ceiling began to pelt down on her head, but then she was beyond the door and the mortar began to give way and one of the interior walls of the bunker crumbled under the weight of the roof.

Sherry ran up the stairs and across the glistening ice, hoping she could put enough time and distance between herself and Weir to allow sleet to cover her tracks.

She found her way through the woods by a deer path, crossed a dirt road, and in minutes was at the fence where it had been torn from the ground by the roots of a massive tree. She got on her belly and crawled under the opening, pulling herself forward with her elbows until she was free. Then she stood and ran and it was as if she knew where she was going. As if every step had been predetermined. She saw the front gates of the State Psychiatric Hospital to her left as she crossed a wide field. She began to ascend a ridge when she reentered the trees, rising like the spine of a sleeping giant to the neck of the mountain. A thousand feet higher she was looking out over the Catskills toward the jagged Delaware Water Gap.

The overlook road was visible just above her and she clawed
her way up a grassy embankment to a guardrail and followed the road to the top of the mountain.

There were picnic tables around the overlook. A wire safety fence prevented children from wandering out onto Chimney Rock, the most prominent formation overlooking the horizon.

She vaulted the small safety fence and walked out onto the top of the rock.

It was mesmerizing to watch the sleet falling around and beneath her, a haze of white filaments as spare and delicate as spider’s silk. Why had she come here? she wondered. Why hadn’t she run to the asylum’s gates for help?

“Dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

She turned and saw Troy.

His face and shirt collar were crusted with blood. His hair was wet. Rivulets of pink water coursed beneath his collar.

“You’re still in his head, aren’t you?” Weir said.

Sherry just looked at him.

“You’re going to end it just like he did, except my guess is you won’t survive the fall.” Weir put a hand on the wire fence and threw a leg over the rail.

“They’ll call it that too,” he said, moving toward her on the rock. “A copycat suicide. They’ll say you snapped. Drawn to the grave by a dead man. Lots of magazines will sell that story, I would predict.”

Sherry saw Weir’s hands come out of his pockets. He was holding the cell phone with one and raising the pen with the other. She knew he would be looking at an image of her head on the screen of the phone.

He was going to finish it now.

Sherry raised a finger to her lips in time to catch a stream of blood running from her nose. Her vision began to blur until she could see only light and then broken fragments of Weir and the trees and the sleet, as if they were shards of a shattered mirror. It was happening again, she realized. Whatever he was doing to her
was opening that same door and reversing what Thomas Monahan had done to her mind. Troy had created a link between them.

He was thinking, she realized, and then she smiled.

He was instructing her to step off the end of the rocks.

She turned toward the edge of the cliff and leaned forward, seeing glimpses of the rolling hills and showering white lights. She was in that place between sight and blindness again.

“Troy?” She heard his shoes grinding on the dirt behind her and she knew where he was and she turned and thrust out her hand and grabbed his fist clamped around the small device.

“Did you ever imagine MIRA working both ways?” He tried to wrestle his hand from her grip.

“Imagine that a defectively wired mind might mirror your own contrivance. What might happen in a moment of rare eclipse as the device performs in your hand?”

By squeezing the skin cell receptors of his hand, her most unusually configured mind was feeding the link back to him. He scratched with his nails to remove her hand, but she clamped her other over it as well and held on.

“Troy?” she whispered.

“No,” she heard him say. “NO!” he screamed and she knew he was hearing her thoughts.

“Stop it!” he yelled, wriggling in her grasp. “Don’t do this!” he begged.

Sherry pivoted to maintain her grip as he stepped to her side and then past her toward the edge of the cliff.

“Jump,” she said softly.

“Don’t!” he cried.

“Go ahead, Troy, jump.” She was looking his way but could no longer see. She took a breath of fresh air. She had traded her eyes for her gift, for her life.

“Jump,” she whispered.

And she released his hand and he leapt from the rocks and it was many seconds before she heard him hit bottom.

Dr. Salix put his feet on his desk and rotated his chair toward the window as he spoke to Sherry by phone. “I spoke with the technician in Boston this morning. The roentgen equivalent of point oh-one is negligible, Sherry. In fact, it was little more than a therapeutic dose a cancer patient might receive. Your lungs and bone marrow are clean. You are fine, young lady.”

Sherry thanked him and put the cell phone back in her pocket.

“He says I’m negative.” She laughed and put her face against Brigham’s shoulder, tears streaming from her eyes.

She took Brigham’s arm and they walked across the rolling lawn of Arlington National Cemetery. She could hear a jet ascending from Ronald Reagan National Airport, a siren somewhere in the city across the Potomac River.

Her thoughts wandered, with the clop of hooves on pavement as black horses drew the casket to the grave. She could imagine the last of the cherry blossoms swirling around the wind with the words of the chaplain. She heard the sharp click
of heels as the seven-man honor guard presented arms. She winced as three volleys were fired across the grave. She cried as the bugler played Taps from the top of the hill. She shook as Brian Metcalf presented her with the triangular flag from Thomas J. Monahan’s casket.

Then Brian put his arm around her waist and walked her back to the car.

She remembered thinking how thankful she was to have seen his face.

Edward Case hung up the phone and wheeled his chair to the window. The office was cool, the air-conditioning lifting pages of documents on his desk.

Outside it was a beautiful sunny day. The kind that toasts the tips of knee-high wheat and spreads honeysuckle scents across porch swings and vine-covered rural road mailboxes.

He saw the limousine coming, far above the fields, it was black, and two Pennsylvania state police cars escorted it in a cloud of dust. There was one before and one behind, their solemn blue lights flashing in the grilles.

He lifted a picture from his desktop, a very young and a very sure-looking man with his meerschaum pipe in his teeth, smiling for the cameras, rakish tilt to his white homburg. Case nodded and set it back down.

The government had severed the contract for MIRA research and gathered all traces of equipment. They could afford to do that now. They had bought and paid for the technology. It was already theirs.

He watched the limo getting closer down the lane. Now
he was about to sign away his position as CEO of Case and Kimble.

It wasn’t really a choice. The FDA’s approval for Alixador was being held until the ink was dry on the document.

They were also going to take away his Lancaster estate. That and assets totaling $880 million, which would be held in escrow for settlements sure to arise from the government’s imminent disclosure of what took place in Area 17.

And he did it all to avoid prosecution and what would certainly be a literal life sentence in prison.

The Nobel Prize winner would be permitted to retain his brownstone in New York City.

And live out his life in obscurity.