“Dr. Morgan is quite talented, Daniel,” Forsyth said. “And she’s also smart enough to know we’re watching. That’s why she’s kept her guinea pig close to home.”
“Mark?”
“That would explain a lot. He used to have a lot of sense. We had high hopes for that boy, despite him having an uppity liberal for a wife. But if she’s been feeding him that monkey juice, it’s no wonder he cracked.”
“You don’t think she’d do that to the man she loves, do you?”
“No. Only the one she married.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Seethe. If ever the devil was put into a pill, that’s what he would look like. There ain’t no morals with that stuff, and that’s why the world better not get a hold of it.”
“Wallace, I respect the hell out of you, but sometimes you’re just a little too holier than thou. You don’t have to frame everything as a moral issue.”
“Well, somebody better. The only place the government’s able to use the word God anymore is on money.”
Forsyth was loyal enough to deliver Burchfield a powerful weapon for his Oval Office arsenal, but he wanted to ensure his own place in the administration first. And he wanted collateral in case Burchfield backed off his plan to start a war in Pakistan, igniting the tinderbox of Afghanistan and Iran, opening the door to massive U.S. military involvement and God’s final battle. That’s why he’d triggered the CIA investigation into the Morgans while making it appear Burchfield had started the inquiry.
“If Dr. Morgan has Seethe, how do we get it without killing everybody in sight?” Burchfield asked. “And what do we do with her afterwards?”
“There won’t be any ‘afterwards’ this time,” Forsyth said. “Scagnelli will make sure of that.”
Alexis Morgan had been his philosophical adversary on the president’s bioethics council, defending the benefits of what she considered “humane neurochemistry” to treat mental conditions. Forsyth saw the brain as God’s domain, the seat of reason and choice, and its sole purpose was in making the decision to believe in that which had created it.
Intelligence existed to manifest temptation. Logic existed to lead humans to faith.
And God had shaped Wallace, guided him toward this destiny, and the president’s council seemed like a distant dream on a long-forgotten night. Wallace had a role to serve, and he’d been placed in the perfect position to fulfill the prophecies.
After all, revelations weren’t an option if God put them right into your head.
Which is where Dr. Morgan had it all wrong. Believing in God was not only natural, it was the highest purpose of brain function, whether that brain had evolved from monkeys or whether it had sprung full-blown into the world.
But she’d answer for that, for she’d never repent of her sorceries.
“You’ve got a campaign to worry about,” Forsyth said to Burchfield. “Leave Seethe and Halcyon to me.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Alexis figured she’d better just play along.
The pistol was in the seat between them, but she ignored it. Mark was in the gray T-shirt and baggy athletic pants he called his “Dirty Harry warm-ups,” and he wiped at his forehead as if cobwebs had collected there. He focused his gaze on the road ahead with an intensity that alarmed her.
“Class end early?” she asked.
“I was on call.”
“Is that part of the training?”
“Everything’s part of the training, honey.”
Even his voice was slightly off, a clipped monotone that he might have used if talking to himself. She glanced at the mock police radio that had been installed below the dash. Wires had been ripped from it and the handset was lying in the floorboard in three pieces.
“Nice of them to let you take the car home,” she said.
“We’re not going home.”
She glanced at him, but he didn’t blink. “I have to be back in the lab this afternoon.”
“They’ve been watching the house.”
“We don’t know that, Mark. We have a lot of research that corporate spies would love to get their greedy little paws on. I think the lab raid was about something else, not Seethe.”
“It’s always about Seethe.”
They had crossed Franklin and Rosemary streets and were heading into the suburban outskirts of Chapel Hill, where Colonial-style homes were tucked behind fences beneath old oaks and towering pines. They passed a county patrol car coming from the other direction, but it didn’t slow, much less follow them.
“Where are you going?” Alexis asked.
Mark’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles were white, and he looked at her for the first time since he’d insisted she get in the car. “You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Where it all started.”
A second surge of panic rolled through her. A hundred stories and images fought for attention, but they were like broken strips of film reassembled at random: the original Monkey House trials, where she’d been nothing but a diligent graduate assistant; the trials themselves; and one bloody and battered face-had she been part of that?
No. Remember it the way it happened. You were Briggs’s assistant and that woman fell down the stairs and struck her head. A tragic accident and nothing more.
But the fresher waves of memories were harder to fend off. The events of a year ago had been carefully reconstructed, both externally and internally, and they stirred beneath a gently roiling surface. If Mark took her back to the Monkey House-or what was left of it-then they might rise in a psychotic tsunami and sweep away the levees and bulkheads of her defenses.
And nobody wanted the truth, least of all her.
“Mark, we can’t do that. They might think we know something.”
“Do we?”
“They’ve split us all up. Anita’s hanging by a thread. David’s locked away. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wendy and Roland are out of the way, too. Maybe their move to the mountains wasn’t voluntary.”
She glanced at the gun. She couldn’t risk provoking him in this state. The effects of Seethe could spin him in several unpredictable directions, and she realized how foolish she’d been in thinking she could treat the unknown.
I’m just as arrogant and deranged as Sebastian Briggs.
The realization stunned her because she’d been acting through a coherent scientific method. But if she couldn’t trust her own motives and thought processes, how could she be confident she was doing the right thing? Maybe Briggs had been his own guinea pig, the first subject of the Monkey House trials, and his contamination by Seethe had led to his later madness.
God, what if I’m running past the fun-house mirrors myself? What if Seethe and Halcyon changed me in ways I can’t even recognize?
“Lex?” Mark said, his tone normal but concerned. He took his right hand from the wheel and, for a moment, she had the image of him grabbing the gun and putting the barrel to her temple. Instead, he gave her a reassuring stroke on the forearm. “What do you remember about that night?”
“Just like we told each other. Briggs tricked us into coming back to the Monkey House and then he tried to kill us. But the federal agents got there first. There was an explosion and four people died.”
“And we took the last of Briggs’s Halcyon. They thought it was all destroyed, but we had it, didn’t we?”
Her pulse accelerated, and she wondered if the lie would somehow show on her face. “You flushed it. You didn’t trust anybody with it, even me.”
He looked at her, dangerously ignoring the lunchtime traffic on the highway. “I can’t remember. I might have given it to you. I love you, remember?”
He squeezed her arm with passion, but then the grip tightened until it hurt. She moaned and tried to pull free, but he dug his fingers into her soft flesh. He yanked her closer and the car swerved, causing car horns to blare around them.