“It’s the key to the Monkey House,” she said, voice vacant.
“I thought you didn’t remember the Monkey House.” He checked the woods again for movement. If not for the strong scent of the acrylic paint and Wendy’s body, he might have still been dreaming. Her flesh smelled raw and pungent, like a wild animal’s. She hadn’t smelled like that since…
Since the last time we made love.
“How long have you been out here?” he asked.
“How much of what you told Gundersson was true?” For the first time, she spoke with distinct clarity, as if finally aware of his presence.
“Most of it,” he said.
“And about me and Sebastian Briggs?”
“Who the hell knows? Briggs scrambled our memories. But I’ve been piecing it back together as best I can.”
She turned, her robe falling open. She was moist from more than the mist. Wendy occasionally painted in the nude, claiming that if models could strip for class, so could she. She swayed as if slow-dancing with her palette and brush.
“Briggs told me something,” she said. “It’s all I can remember from that night.”
She hadn’t been with Briggs long in the Monkey House, maybe fifteen minutes in the dark. He might have seduced her-no, Roland thought, assaulted her, not seduced her-in such a short time, but it’s possible their relationship had been deeper eleven years ago, during the first Halcyon trials. She hadn’t talked about it back then, and he was foolish enough and deeply enough in love not to press her on it.
“Briggs was going to kill us,” Roland said. “We did what we had to in order to survive.”
She shook her head. Her eyes were onyx, her pupils glinting amid her oval Asian face. “No, it was something to do with Seethe. He showed me.”
“Showed you?” Roland found himself staring at the inner curves of her exposed breasts, where a discolored spot suggested a bruise. Someone had been playing rough.
Wendy pointed to the canvas. “Letters. Shapes. He arranged them in a diagram.”
Roland strained against the dimness and now saw more of a pattern to her markings. A series of curls and short slashes were clotted against the canvas, covering the original form of the huddled figure, as if she were belatedly tattooing it.
It was difficult to discern the new markings, aside from their damp thickness, because the weak light blended the colors into browns and tans. But he made out what looked like a C and several crooked H marks.
“You’re trying to spell something?” he said, recalling the “CRO” initials of the drug conglomerate that had been Briggs’s financial backer. Those initials had been in the motel room where he’d awoken to find a corpse in the bathroom. He still didn’t know who she was or who had really killed her. And he still wasn’t fully convinced of his innocence.
“No.” Again she shook her head, and the dangling cotton belt of her robe brushed gently against the porch. Besides the insects and the distant tinkle of the creek, the night was still. The mist around them seemed to thicken.
“You suddenly remember something from a year ago, but you don’t remember what it is,” he said, feeling his anger and mistrust rising.
“Something you told Gundersson jarred my memory,” she said. “When you said Sebastian took me to his office.”
He lowered his voice, unconsciously squeezing the barrel of the pistol. “Nothing happened in the office.”
“Sebastian showed me a piece of paper. It had markings on it, letters. He took my hand and guided my fingers over them, again and again.”
Roland didn’t know what angered him more, her referring to him as “Sebastian” as if he were an old friend, or the image of the scientist’s filthy hands on her flesh as he leaned over her. He took a couple of steps closer to the canvas. Now he could see another set of symbols.
“I thought he was…playing nasty…but he was teaching me,” she said.
They were skewed and uneven, but the patterns appeared to be a set of linked hexagons. An F tilted to one side, and an S wound like a sick snake across the center of the painting.
“Did Briggs tell you what these were?” Roland asked.
Wendy stood back and studied the marks as if she had just painted over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “It looks like graffiti,” she said.
“But you were painting from memory.” Roland understood how absurd that statement was. “Memory” no longer had any reliable meaning for the Monkey House survivors.
“The key,” Wendy said. “That’s what he kept saying.”
The key.
A fine steam rose from her flesh, heat leaving her body and rising to merge with the mist. He went to her and closed her robe. The gun bumped against her hip.
“Maybe it’s a code of some kind,” Roland said. “All this secret-agent shit, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“But why would he tell me?”
Because you were his little pet, his plaything, his lover.
But he couldn’t think that way, because then he’d start raging, and the Seethe would rise from its slumber and own him. “He couldn’t trust Alexis or Mark. David and Anita were already head cases. And he knew I hated his guts.”
She turned her back to him and studied the painting. He pressed himself behind her, one arm wrapped around her stomach. The back of her neck smelled like the forest, wild and green and filthy with rot.
“The key,” Roland said. “Whatever it is, we can’t let Gundersson find out.”
“I still don’t know what it means.”
That’s when the pattern coalesced into something both familiar and frightening, as Roland recalled his rudimentary high school chemistry. The markings represented a diagram of a molecular structure, and the letters were the elements from the periodic chart.
Briggs had wanted to store the diagram in a safe place, in case he needed to recall it later. Maybe Wendy wasn’t exactly safe, but she was a data storage unit that no one would suspect. Because she was the artist of the bunch, the least interested in nuts and bolts and how things fit together but the one most visually adept. And the only one Briggs could trust.
And now Wendy had unearthed a compound that half a dozen people had died to control. Wendy had drawn a secret chemical formula.
Wendy had drawn Seethe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Scagnelli wasn’t a hacker by profession, but he’d picked up enough skills to penetrate a firewall or two.
Not that he needed many skills. His level of respect for the CIA plummeted another few notches as he dug through the files on the stolen laptop. He’d previously hijacked their e-mails but he expected the case files to be secured. But Dr. Morgan’s stolen collection of brain scans and her surveillance records were all stored on the desktop in plain sight.
Scagnelli initially suspected they were red herrings, because nothing important was ever hidden in plain sight. But he gradually accepted it was yet more incompetence by Goatbreeder and Baby bin Laden, agents with so little professionalism that they didn’t even bother encrypting the files or using passwords.
When will the government learn that American pride can’t be exported?
But something about the whole job still smelled funny.
The CIA had always been the wild card of the intelligence community, an independent agency that made presidents uneasy and kept generals in line. But the reorganization in 2004 punished the agency for the failure of the country’s intelligence networks. The perception since then was that the CIA was more of a fringe watchdog group, useful in spying on everyone but not particularly reliable.
As such, it was the agency most likely to be exploited in a political bait-and-switch.
And from the information in the leather satchel he’d taken from the two dead agents, Senator Burchfield had triggered the investigation into Dr. Alexis Morgan, considering her research a matter of national security. That wasn’t so unusual, since practically everything was a matter of national security these days, from the ingredients of ballpark hot dogs to the newest panelist on American Idol. Burchfield’s primary influence was as chairman of the Senate health committee, but he also served on the defense subcommittee.