Second Sight (5 page)

But why now? she kept thinking. Why had she let Brian Metcalf rekindle her heart?

In a week or so, Brian would leave for Little Creek, Virginia, where he would deploy to Kabul. Time apart would do them both good, she’d decided. Perhaps a relationship wasn’t the be-all-end-all she’d imagined it might be. Perhaps fate had something else in store, and who was she to doubt the cards?

She heard familiar footsteps in the corridor, which stopped at her door. A polite knock, a gentle whisper.

“Sherry?”

She turned to face her neighbor and confidant. “Come in, Mr. Brigham,” she said.

“I didn’t know if you were sleeping.” He put his coat on a hook behind the door.

“I was just thinking,” she said.

Brigham kissed her forehead and took a seat between the bed and window. “What did he say?”

“Something’s changed in the EEG, he thinks. He doesn’t know what it means. They never do.”

“You’re not in pain?”

She shook her head. “I’m thinking I should just try to live with it.”

“Which would be like me living with random bouts of blindness. Don’t be silly,” Brigham said. “You’ve come this far. Maybe it’s a good time to take your friend the neurologist up on his offer. Dr. Salix has been trying to get you back on his table for some time.”

“To screw around with my head a little longer.”

“What could it hurt? The weather’s still cold. You’re on medication for another month and not missing a ray of sunshine, I promise.”

“He’d need months to set it up.”

“You know as well as I do, he’ll drop whatever he’s doing for a shot at getting you on his table.”

Sherry smiled weakly. She could feel tears welling in one eye. “You’ll make the call?”

“That’s better,” Brigham said.

“I’m just making up to you for all the times I’ve been stubborn.”

“Like in Haiti,” he said sternly.

“I’m especially sorry for Haiti, Mr. Brigham,” Sherry said meekly.

“And well you should be.” Brigham took Sherry’s hand. “I’ll call the doctor and see if he can scare up some cadavers for you to play with.”

“Oh, don’t make it sound like a party.”

“Sherry,” Brigham said seriously, “maybe it’s only a side effect of the Prussian blue. Or have you ever considered that the changes you might be experiencing are sight and that your night terrors are real memories fighting to surface?”

Sherry pulled the bedcover to her chin. She dared not speak.

The doctors would continue to take blood and urine every week. Those tests would provide the earliest indications of how well the Prussian blue was sweeping the deadly radiation from her body. But blood and urine tests wouldn’t tell her how much radiation had been absorbed into her lungs and bones. That would take four more weeks.

In a month or so Sherry would undergo a whole-body scan at Boston Medical Center. The gamma ray test would be the final word on how badly her soft tissue and bone marrow had been dosed by radiation.

How likely she was to get cancer.

M
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Mary Brighton was scratching a lottery ticket when she heard the dull tone of a monitor sounding in Corridor A. It was almost 4 a.m. and she was alone on the second floor. The state hospital could hardly afford overtime, let alone auxiliary staff on the graveyard shift. She brushed gray flakes from her scratch ticket and trashed it with a sigh. Then she stood and punched a button on the console as she reached for the box beneath the counter and tugged on a pair of latex gloves.

“Security,” a man’s voice came over the speaker.

“Checking out our friend in 1400 again, Jerome.” She snapped on one of the gloves. “You got the phones.”

“You can’t convince him to wait another hour?” the man said with a dry New York accent. “I’m watching M*A*S*H.”

Brighton rolled her eyes and disconnected, maneuvering her considerable weight past the counter as she started down the hall toward the flashing light over Room 1400.

Thomas Joseph Monahan had been acting up all week, if you could call a seventy-six-year-old man who hadn’t spoken in half a decade acting up. Heartbeat low, blood pressure high. His breathing went from shallow to panting like a dog. For six straight days he had been tripping the monitors and running nurses to and from his room.

The nurse entered the dark room, thumbed up the light switch, and stopped dead in her tracks. Monahan lay in his bed with eyes and mouth wide open. His cheeks were hollow, his arm leaning on the bed rail, a finger raised and pointing in her direction.

She tried not to look at him as she picked up his wrist, simultaneously reaching to silence the monitor’s alarm.

For more than fifty years, she thought, the entire span of her life, this man had been living in this asylum. His file, thick as a New York phone directory, recorded not a word of where he had come from or his next of kin. In fact, besides the routine records and various procedures he had undergone over the years, there was only a yellowed Kennedy-era document authorizing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to accept all bills.

Monahan’s end would be little more remarkable than his life, she thought. He would go to cold storage in the basement and then off to some medical school where students got their first experience with a scalpel. That’s where all the bodies with pink slips stapled to their jackets went.

Case and Kimble had put most everything on the line when they focused early earnings and resources on a birth control pill in 1960. Then they moved on to C&K’s antianxiety silver bullet, distributed as Sentinal throughout the last quarter century. In the nineties they released their first erectile dysfunction pill that broke records on all world pharmaceutical markets. Billion-dollar profit makers like these served to stabilize the gargantuan pharmaceutical concern from damage incurred through economic depressions and class action lawsuits. But Case and Kimble had a heavily padded safeguard against risk, even in an unstable economy. They had the United States government’s largest black-budget grant to a private company in all history, and they had maintained it exclusively and secretly for the past fifty years.

The entity was DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The ultrasecret project was MIRA, which until 2008 was the linchpin of American weaponry. So advanced was MIRA’s artificial intelligence that MIRA could have application in nearly every aspect of war and war machines.

Except that suddenly the newly elected president wasn’t behind the defense department administration’s spending, talking about cuts so deep they might even excise ongoing MIRA development, and that was something Edward Case had never anticipated. More than thirty-eight billion dollars’ worth of research over the last twenty years was about to be shelved.

To an outsider it would appear that pharmaceutical companies could afford to take risks, since the profits in prescription medications alone were simply staggering. But no one stuck his neck out like Edward Case in speculation research, and no one had the nerve to question the company’s surviving founder until the board of directors learned about the White House position on defense spending. Now at risk of losing their seven-figure bonuses, they wanted to know on record why he had been pushing so much of the company’s holdings into research on MIRA. They wanted it noted that the company was already teetering on the FDA’s approval of Alixador, which had passed its own billion-dollar mark in genetic research last year. The board wanted it made clear to stockholders that they were only following the lead of their founder, and that perhaps they had been misled themselves concerning future approvals.

No one ever knew what some jury might decide about how death or impairment was related to one of their prescription medications. Subjective though it was, major awards and ripples of consumer anxiety were enough to rock a company, even one the size of Case and Kimble. And C&K’s legal bills were anything but incidental. Edward Case had always insisted that the organization send a message that Case and Kimble wasn’t an easy target for every law school graduate who managed to add Esquire to their name.

Now a dozen competitors had eclipsed the wonder drug Sentinal, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was calling for a review of its progeny, Xendoral, which had been implicated in dozens of suicides in the last two years.

C&K’s stocks were on the decline in a deplorable economy, and CEO Ed Case was getting vibes from his board of directors that they wanted a public audit. They were worried about their own asses, of course, worried and feigning disapproval of his own sixty-two-million-dollar annual bonus in a recession with an unemployment rate rising over eight percent.

They wouldn’t have said a word about it had the Democrats not taken over the White House. They wouldn’t have dared to raise a hand when everyone’s good fortune was riding on the wings of national security. The military’s interest had long been piqued by Case’s mind-control research, and indeed they had used it in the field with a high degree of effectiveness. But secret defense department funding would no longer escape scrutiny in a Democrat-controlled Senate, and Case’s new renderings of microwave delivery systems could be first on the list of cuts.

Thank God for Alixador, he thought. Case knew what impact Alixador would have on Case and Kimble’s bottom line next year. Alixador was going to be the biggest thing to hit the market since aspirin, and all it required was the FDA’s approval.

A phenomenon of cellular research, Alixador was designed to trick the brain into believing the stomach was full. Alixador, touting well-established trials of men and women under sixty, boasted a seventy percent success rate in non-narcotic weight loss trials. It was the weight-loss miracle of the twenty-first century and it was going to fly off the shelves.

Case knew how badly he needed that FDA approval. It had been years since they’d had a mega drug on any market, and if the government pulled their defense contract, they were at the mercy of any new legal disaster that might come their way. Alixador was going to hit the market just in time to save him.

Case had personally handled settlements in more than thirty percent of Case and Kimble’s legal cases over the past five years, doing everything in his power to keep Case and Kimble’s name clean until their new diet phenomenon hit the market.

Just one more year, he thought, one more home run, and he would cash in options and bonuses and quietly slip away.

The engine of a John Deere tractor was popping on a distant hill. The sweet smell of cut hay lay heavy on the morning air. Ed Case watched steam rise on the dew-covered lawn behind his Lancaster, Pennsylvania, estate. The sun was large and pink and not an hour above the horizon.

He toggled his wheelchair in a half circle, making his way through a maze of ornate statues and urns. A servant was setting china on the patio for morning coffee. A young blond woman was doing laps in the pool.

Case’s eyes searched fields of clover; he looked deep in thought, as if he were thinking about another time, another place.

“What’s with this kid and the Regeral research?” Case coughed into a handkerchief balled in his left hand.

“First-year law student at Boston College,” the young blond man walking next to him said. “He wants to get out in front of the game. Skip the hard work and get rich quick.”

“Is he anybody?”

“Does he have connections, do you mean?”

“The kind of connections that matter,” the old man said emphatically. “Family, friends, mentors, anyone? Anyone that could make a stink?”

“His father is an attorney in Boston. Corporate law. Divorced for the last ten years.”

“How does he get his clients?”

“Teen websites, and hundreds of them. He leaves posts on blogs to suggest kids could get money if they took Regeral as children for attention deficit disorder and suffered side effects.”

“Side effects,” Case said flatly.

“Self-harm, loss of memory, failure to achieve, difficulty with authority, you know. The kind of stuff every kid suffers from. You can imagine the responses he’s getting.”

“How did we get onto him?”

“He sent a letter to our attorneys on his father’s stationery. Quite an old partnership, State Street in Boston, you know the type. It was enough to concern one of them, but it took me all of an hour to figure out who sent it.”

“Kids.” The doctor snorted. “So it was blackmail?” He looked up at the younger man.

“His version, but rather pathetic.”

“Who else knows about the letter?”

“Charles in legal. No one else.”

Case stopped the wheelchair short of the patio, watching the woman climb from the pool. A servant met her with a bath towel that she slowly wrapped around her bikini.

“You’ll have no problem getting next to him.”

“Like taking candy from a baby.”

“I want the records first,” Case said abruptly.

“Understood.”

Case looked up at the man next to him. Troy Weir was thirty-two, handsome, charismatic, brilliant, sociopathic. Case’s only stepson from his marriage to Marlo Weir, a soap opera star who managed to traverse almost five decades before dying of alcoholism at age forty-six, Troy had been a troubled youth, in and out of jails and treatment centers since he was fourteen years old.

It had started out as fistfights at school, but then there was a sexual assault charge and then another, and soon Troy faced rape charges in the California juvenile system. Frankly, Case’s stepson had all the common traits of a sociopath; chameleon-like, manipulative, charming, inwardly hostile with a sense of entitlement. Case could see the boy’s earliest manifestation of the social disorder, as he stood before the judge, remorseful, meek, breaking down only when he mentioned his mother’s alcoholism. The judge released him to the custody of his stepfather and recommended counseling.

A year later the girl who had accused him disappeared. Try as they might, no one could ever connect Troy to a crime. She
simply vanished. And then the other girl’s parents moved to another country.

In college there had been an accusation of date rape, but victims rarely remember the hours after they ingest Rohypnol. Rarely can they say how they had been given the drug. Prosecutors refused to present it.

Case was sure the stories were true, but by then Marlo’s drinking was spiraling out of control and Case had been meeting with old friends about a new defense contract coming on line. Case was far too busy researching his way toward becoming a pharmaceutical magnate. He had no time for either of them.

After graduation, Troy escaped to New York City, and Case hadn’t seen him until he showed up in Amagansett for his mother’s funeral in 2001. What the boy did or didn’t do during his time alone in the city, buffered by a substantial allowance, he didn’t want to know. But it was there, at the funeral, that Case saw a change in the boy. He was only twenty-six, undoubtedly unchanged, but he had lost all the rough edges. He had learned to present himself properly in front of others. Whatever rage he bore was suppressed, and he spoke with a degree of class and refinement. Perhaps, the old man thought, he had acquired his mother’s acting ability along with all that motherly hate.

Troy stepped onto the patio and nodded to the blonde. Wendy had been a model in her teens, yet became more beautiful with each year that passed. Case had surprised her on her twenty-seventh birthday—last month—with a trip to Cannes and a movie contract. Troy knew what that woman and her contract had cost his stepfather. Case had been courting her since his wife’s death, and while the papers made much ado over the young woman’s intentions with a decrepit old scientist, he was indeed widowed and entitled to see whomever he wished.

Troy knew she was loyal. Loyal like Troy’s mother was loyal,
because with Ed Case, there was no other choice. Loyalty was rewarded in the Case mansion and treachery was grounds for unspeakable retribution.

As a teenager he had only considered his mother’s self-hatred and her low self-esteem, how she projected her extreme dislike of herself onto him and caused him to act out. She had had the opportunity to protect him, but chose instead to retreat into bottles and the beds of strange men.

Nothing had really changed over the years, only the way he reacted to her now. He still saw her in every dark bar and behind every sloppy smile and lipstick-smeared glass. He still reviled the weakness that made her vulnerable to all who’d chosen to use her. But now he understood why his father had refused to let her go. She was his first lady, and first ladies were never permitted to divorce midterm.

Edward Case had managed to become one of the world’s most successful CEOs because he kept his house in strict order. There were no scandals for the tabloids. He was legendary for establishing a foundation that patronized the needs of America’s war veterans. He was loyal to his wife and her son no matter what their personal excesses, and who in these times could hold the father to blame for the sins of the son or even his mother? When you were as clean as Ed Case you could hold hands in every White House, be it Democratic or Republican. And you could continue a sixty-year legacy of providing American’s most secret weapons.

Wendy brushed past Troy and leaned to kiss Case on the cheek. Her towel came open, water beads falling from her breasts, blotting the arm of his Dolce & Gabbana shirt. “Are you joining us?” she asked, looking into Troy’s eyes.

He shook his head. “Just leaving.”

She pulled the towel from her shoulders and tossed it on the grass and sat at the table as the servant poured coffee.

Troy bowed courteously and left.