Have fun trying to stop me.
“This is completely pointless,” Bell said. “What can we possibly do to stop him? Every single thing we’ve tried has been a complete and utter failure.”
Neither Walter nor Nina had an answer. It just felt so hopeless, like trying to stop a river from flowing with their bare hands.
Walter paced, folding and unfolding the killer’s letter over and over.
There had to be a way. There just had to be.
Then, just like that, it came to him.
“What if...” Walter paused, pushing his fingers through his hair. “Just bear with me for a moment, but what if we were to, for lack of a better metaphor, bring the mountain to Mohamed? After all, we know exactly where the killer will be, and at what time, right?”
“So what,” Bell said. “You’re suggesting that we try to open the gate there?”
“Exactly,” Walter said. He grabbed another sheet of paper from Nina’s desk. “See, what we would need would be three teams, each one consisting of two trippers and one ground control.” He started to sketch a rough triangle. “We’d place the alpha wave generator here at the center—” He pointed with the pencil. “—and we could use three smaller slave units to boost the signal.”
“Right,” Bell said, but he didn’t sound as skeptical. Walter could see the excitement building in his face. “Right, of course. Then we sync the teams, triangulate the signal and...”
“Open the gate.” Walter tapped the center of the triangle. “Right here.”
“Well, I hate to rain on your little eureka moment,” Nina said, “but where the hell are we going to get these teams you’re talking about? I don’t know if Roscoe and the rest of the band have been arrested or not, but I’m pretty damn sure they aren’t going to want to participate in any more of your ‘exciting experiments.’”
“Fair enough,” Walter said. “So who else do you know who might be willing to help?”
“Ideally,” Bell said, “it would need to be people who are intelligent, open-minded, and familiar with the use of biofeedback techniques.”
Walter immediately thought of the lovely May Zhang, with her charming, gap-toothed smile and bright, brainy banter.
“How about volunteers from Doctor Rayley’s Institute for Bio-Spiritual Awareness?” Walter suggested. “Students, maybe, or other test subjects who have worked with Rayley in the past.”
“Great idea,” Bell exclaimed. “Nina, what do you think?”
“I suppose we could ask,” she replied with a grudging shrug. “But let’s say we are able to recruit enough people for these teams you have in mind. Then what?”
“Then it plays out just the way we planned,” Walter said. “We chloroform him...”
“You’ll need to get a new bottle,” Nina reminded him.
“Yes, yes, but let’s say we have—then we just chloroform him, cuff him, and sedate him like we originally planned. Once he’s under, we radio the teams to start the mental synchronization, and when the gate opens...”
Nina and Bell both nodded, silent and thoughtful.
“What about the psychic bleed through?” Bell asked. “We can’t risk allowing the same kind of deadly telekinetic phenomenon to endanger those innocent people in the park!”
“When you were in the trip,” Walter said, struggling to remember, “didn’t you notice, about a minute after the gate opens, that it starts to grow these... well, tendrils?”
“Yes,” Bell said. “I saw that, too.”
“Well,” Walter said. “I’m almost positive that’s the moment at which the psychic side effects begin to manifest. If we could set up some kind of failsafe that would stop the trip and close the gate the moment those tendrils begin to appear...”
“A valium injection, perhaps,” Bell suggested.
“Yes, that would be perfect,” Walter said.
“Of course,” Nina said, “that leaves us with a pretty short window of time to get the killer through the gate.”
“It’s the only way!” Walter insisted. “We can’t let this monster continue to threaten—or, God forbid—succeed in killing more victims.”
“He’s right,” Bell said.
Nina didn’t respond, but Walter could tell by her grim expression that she agreed.
“We should prepare individual doses of the special blend,” Walter said. “A sugar water suspension, maybe. Simple to hand out and easy to ingest.”
“And we’ll need to borrow additional equipment from Rayley,” Bell said. “Do you think he’ll be amenable?”
“I think we need to get some rest,” Nina said, weary hand over her eyes. “We can head over to the Institute the first thing in the morning.”
36
The drive out to the Institute in Nina’s Beetle was tense and quiet, a weighty sense of anxious expectation like a fourth passenger inside the little car.
There were so many ways their scheme could go apocalyptically wrong, and only one way for it to go exactly right. Walter had been unable to sleep a wink, even though he was so tired he felt as if his eyeballs were made of sand. All he could do was think and rethink the plan, turning it over and over in his mind, searching out flaws and weakness.
Although if he stopped to really think about it, he knew, the whole thing was absolutely crazy. Impossible.
Yet it was their only hope.
When they arrived at the Institute, there was no one at the front desk. Walter couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that May wasn’t there. They found the good doctor in his lab, brewing herbal tea in a large Erlenmeyer flask. He was wearing nothing but fuzzy pink slippers and boxer shorts under his lab coat.
“Well, isn’t this a nice surprise?” he said with a childlike grin. “Would you like some tea?”
He gripped the neck of the flask with tongs and poured the tea through a strainer, into several small beakers. He handed a beaker to each of them and then took one for himself.
“Now, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asked.
After much debate, the three of them had agreed to let Nina do the talking this time, since they already had an existing friendship, and Nina was by far the most socially adept out of the three.
“We’ve been getting the most extraordinary results in our early trials of the psychic biofeedback alpha-wave theory,” she said.
“Is that right?” Doctor Rayley said, leaning one hip back against a tall stool and taking a sip of his tea. “Do tell.”
“Fascinating stuff,” Nina said. “We’ve been able to achieve near perfect synchronization within a dual-subject model. Including several verifiable incidents of parallel ideation.”
“Why, that’s wonderful,” Doctor Rayley said.
“Isn’t it?” Nina smiled over the rim of her beaker of tea, turning up the charm.
“So what’s your next step?” Doctor Rayley asked. “Something on a larger, more ambitious scale perhaps?”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “We have a plan worked out for a large scale, wide-ranging experiment that, if successful, could very well shatter all preconceived notions of human brain function. But...” She batted her lashes, going in for the kill. “But where could we possibly find such a large number of appropriate and willing subjects?”
Walter took a swallow of the strange, medicinal tasting tea to cover his excitement. Nina was playing this brilliantly. Setting Rayley up to think helping them was his idea.
“Why, my morning class on nurturing bio-spiritual wholeness has more than a dozen students,” Rayley replied. “Bright, young, and open-minded, every one of them. I’m sure you could find plenty of willing volunteers from within that group.” He winked and patted Nina’s arm. “I’ll tell them it’s an extra credit assignment. You three are welcome to sit in on the class. It starts in about thirty minutes.”
“Jeremey, you’re the best,” Nina said, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “Thanks!”