"What about the shipping cases the bottles came in?"
"If the bottles came in shipping cases, I never saw them. For the past week and a half I've been talking to drug company people, trying to find out the name of the manufacturer. We have to get more of the medication."
"I'm aware of that."
"When you questioned that man and woman, you asked if Lorminix made the drug, and they said yes."
"Knowing that isn't necessarily going to help us get a fresh supply of the drug in the time we have. Lorminix is going to stonewall and deny any knowledge of the drug-for years, if they have to. Clandestinely supplying dangerous drugs to the CIA for illegal human experimentation is the kind of secret corporations pay lawyers and PR agents millions to safeguard. Lorminix has manufacturing plants and distribution centers all over the world. Making that stuff for the CIA was a relatively tiny operation, and probably done at one site, say in Brazil. By now they've probably shut down that operation, shredded records, and maybe even destroyed whatever supply of the drug they might have had on hand."
Tears glistened in the psychiatrist's eyes. "Are you saying it's hopeless? All of the patients are going to die?"
"I'm saying Lorminix is going to be less than cooperative."
"We only have two and a half weeks left."
"Less than that. My friend Margaret upstairs only has thirteen capsules left, counting the dose she has to take tonight."
Sharon Stephens frowned. "Margaret is schizophrenic?"
I nodded.
"How did she get the capsules?"
"Philip Mayepoles slipped them to her just before he was killed by Punch and Judy. He may have dropped a few while he was handing them to her, or maybe he didn't have that many to begin with. Also, I had to take a few to use for my own purposes. The point is that Margaret isn't going to make it to Christmas Eve. It would really have helped if you'd seen a label on a shipping carton, so we'd at least know where to look to find out if there is any more of the drug left."
"I'm sorry."
"So am I, but it can't be helped."
"What are we going to do?"
"I'm working on the problem. Tell me more about the operation at Rivercliff. Besides handing out meds once a day, what were your duties? Did you test the patients?"
"No. All the testing was done by senior staff doctors, people who'd worked for the Company for years. Junior staff members were only to observe patient behavior, looking for side effects, and write daily reports on a certain number of patients we were assigned to track. The side effects could be broken down into three broad categories. Some patients experienced a marked amplification of some natural sense- like smell, taste, hearing, or eyesight."
"That would be my friend Margaret. She's got the nose of a bloodhound and the palate of a gourmet chef."
The woman nodded. "Emily also falls into that first category. We all know that some people are naturally hypersensitive to other people's feelings, empathic. The medication pushed Emily's hypersensitivity way beyond the range of anything that could be considered natural empathy. She's like a sponge, soaking up what other people are feeling from the way they speak, the tension in their voices or bodies, body language, facial expressions; she picks up on the slightest cues. That's what makes her potentially so valuable to the CIA- she can tell when people are lying, apparently even sociopaths and psychopaths, people who can sometimes beat polygraph tests."
"The CIA trains its own agents how to beat the polygraph. So do other intelligence agencies. Sometimes all it takes is a little Miltown or Valium."
"I don't think they could fool Emily. She would be invaluable in certain types of situations, like negotiations, or interrogations of enemy prisoners. It's why I took her with me when I went to question the drug company executives. It's what Rivercliff was all about-trying to develop people with very specialized skills that could be exploited by the Company. There weren't many of these; Emily was one of the few."
"I thought you said nobody ever told you anything."
"Emily and some of my other patients told me about the tests they were put through, I saw what went on around there, and I guessed what they wanted. You have to give me credit for a bit of intelligence, Dr. Frederickson. If all I was supposed to do was observe the side effects of a single medication, then that must have been all they were interested in. My guess that they found very few patients of use to them is simply based on observation. Just because somebody suddenly can learn to play the piano and begins composing music doesn't mean he or she is going to be of any use as a spy, does it? Also, I have to assume they would have taken out anybody they thought could prove useful to them, and none of the patients I worked with were ever released."
"What about other patients? Were any of them ever released- harvested?"
"I have to assume so, if the particular side effects they were exhibiting were deemed useful. My point is that there couldn't have been many."
"Michael was there for years, and he told me nobody was ever released."
"He wouldn't necessarily know if a patient had been harvested, as you put it. There were different groups of patients in separate sections of the complex, and each group was kept totally segregated from the others. Also, even if a patient in his group had been harvested, Michael might have been told that the person had died. Like I said, I'm just guessing. I doubt the agency would have kept spending all that money over the years if they didn't occasionally get somebody they could use. Like Emily."
"You're probably right. If BUHR had deemed Emily useful to the Company, why wasn't she harvested?"
"Probably because she can't cope with other people's negative feelings; in case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of negativity in the world."
"I've noticed."
"The medication treated Emily's symptoms of schizophrenia, but she was-is-always on the edge of a different kind of breakdown. Imagine constantly experiencing not only your own fears and pain and anger but those of everybody else in your immediate vicinity as well. All those things enter Emily's mind and tear at her. She can't tolerate, at least for long, being around other people who are stressed, or angry, or sad, and since there was always the risk that she would run into those feelings if she mingled with the others, she preferred to spend all her time in her room. They-we-couldn't put her on tranquilizers, because that would dull her hypersensitivity, the one thing that might make her useful to the Company in the first place. She became my sole responsibility. I was supposed to develop some kind of nonchemical therapeutic program that would stabilize her emotionally. If I'd been able to do that, I believe she would have been taken out."
I nodded. "The second category of side effects is the amplification of natural talents?"
"Yes," she replied with a faint smile. "Observing that was the most satisfying part of the job. To see people who had been hopelessly mentally ill and delusional most of their lives suddenly not only be able to function but also discover they had some extraordinary talent was wonderful. People who'd only talked to trees were suddenly able to do remarkable things, assuming the natural talent had always been there, buried under the schizophrenia, in the first place. We had mathematicians, musicians, painters, poets."
"And at least one budding chess master."
"It was kind of magical, watching these people. It could also be very funny. We had ourselves quite an assortment of jugglers, comedians, ham actors, you name it. We could have mounted our own Broadway show."
Considering the fact that Dr. Sharon Stephens's show folk had been prisoners, kept sane and alive, like all the others, only so that they might one day serve as indentured servants for the CIA, I wasn't amused. I asked, "What was the third category?"