Chronic fear

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Butner was a small town about fifteen miles north of Durham. It had been known as Camp Butner during World War II, an army training facility that later became a home for injured veterans. The town of nearly six thousand people had maintained that institutional identity ever since, housing several prisons, a federal correctional facility, some state agency headquarters, and the largest mental hospital in North Carolina.

Forsyth had driven himself to Butner after leaving Burchfield in Winston-Salem. He could have used Abernethy and the limo, since Burchfield planned to spend the night at home, but Forsyth didn’t want anyone to know of his movements, especially the Secret Service.

He was just exiting I-85 when the cell phone rang and he had to fumble through several jacket pockets to find it. “Forsyth here.”

“Scagnelli.”

“Do you got anything?” Forsyth didn’t bother with correct grammar when he was away from the press.

“No. They headed out to the Research Triangle Park, and I figured they were working with somebody out there. Thought I’d get lucky and they’d lead me right to the secret lab.”

“You might as well expect a wild hog to grub up a truffle and drop it on your dinner plate,” Forsyth said. “You ought to know by now that ‘secret’ means everybody don’t know about it.”

“Well, the Secret Service has a Twitter account. That’s hardly a good way to keep secrets.”

Forsyth knew Twitter was some kind of Internet thing, and he was happy to stay away from it. As far as he could tell, all it did was get people in trouble when they said things they shouldn’t.

“You don’t have to worry about what the Secret Service does. You’d better be worrying about what Dominic Scagnelli does. Don’t forget who you work for.”

“You say that a lot.”

“Because you work for me. Where are the Morgans now?”

“They’re walking around an abandoned lot. I checked out the property on my laptop. It’s owned by CRO Pharmaceuticals but apparently it was shut down after a fatal industrial accident last year.”

“You don’t say.”

“Morgan worked for CRO. Real high up the ladder, a guy just doing his job. And he gave it all up to become a cop?”

“No, he gave it up for his wife. He just didn’t know it at the time.”

“Women. They sure know how to fuck up a good thing. The most selfish creatures on God’s green earth.”

Forsyth winced a little. He’d been married once. He’d lain his lovely Louisa to rest fifteen years back, and he’d never found her equal. He was content to finish up his time here and be reunited in heaven with his monogamy still intact.

Scagnelli sputtered on, the amphetamines fueling his tirade. “After the nuclear holocaust when all the dust settles, first will come the cockroaches, and then some cats will pussyfoot out of their holes. And then a few women will crawl out of the rubble. If ever you want to learn about self-preservation-”

“Did the Morgans see you?”

“Of course not.” Scagnelli sounded offended, which was exactly what Forsyth intended. “He looks a little jittery but otherwise they’re just hacking through the weeds like they’re looking for a way inside the fence.”

“Monitor them but don’t take no action.”

“What if they find something?”

“There ain’t nothing left to find.”

“Okay, I’ll just send you a text.”

“Why don’t you Twitter it?”

“Tweet.”

“Whatever. Or ram it up a carrier pigeon’s butt and have it sing ‘Dixie’ on the way over.”

Scagnelli laughed, taking Forsyth’s gruffness for folksy humor. Forsyth could tell Scagnelli was underestimating him. Just the way he liked it.

He clicked the cell phone dead and turned into the parking lot of Central Regional Hospital. It had once been named Umstead Hospital after one of the state’s endless series of mental-health reformers dating all the way back to Dorothea Dix, whose own namesake hospital was nearly dead.

Two and a half centuries of meddling in people’s heads and they still ain’t got things right.

The hospital was two stories at ground level, although it was set on a gentle slope that allowed for a lower floor at the back end of the building. The flat roof and glass facade suggested a 1990s-era design, back when architects didn’t realize how quickly their futuristic designs would look bulldozer-ready. The lot was relatively empty, since the hospital didn’t get a lot of visitors. Many of the patients were of the sort that no one wanted to acknowledge, much less spend time with.

The assistant director was waiting by the front desk, wearing a crisp pants suit. She was of late middle-age, her hair white and fluffy, although her face was relatively unlined. She greeted him with a smile and shining blue eyes that suggested unflagging optimism in the face of her grim duties as a shepherd of the lost and hopeless.

“Mr. Forsyth,” she said, shaking his hand like a man. “I’m a fan of your work. Except for that proposal to cut federal support for mental health services. I’m Paula Redfern.”

“A real pleasure, Dr. Redfern. And about that-”

“I know you’re a busy man, so let’s not waste your time. Besides, I don’t vote in your district.”

As she led him down the hall and into the labyrinth, Forsyth found himself admiring her spunk as she described the various missions of the hospital. He liked the graceful way she moved, too, but he was wise enough to keep it on an aesthetic level, like a man watching someone else’s thoroughbred gallop through a meadow.

“We focus on interdisciplinary approaches individualized to each patient’s desired therapeutic outcomes,” she said.

“I ain’t sure what that means,” he said, “but your funding just went up a million dollars.”

She laughed and kept on with the tour. Forsyth was pleased the hospital had honored his request to keep the tour private. Because every entity receiving public funding was now in intense competition with all the other entities, people grabbed any advantage they could. Everybody in the country was in favor of smaller government until it came time to take a pay cut themselves.

“We’re not just a treatment center, we have research and forensic wings as well,” Dr. Redfern said. “UNC and Duke conduct research work here.”

“I know a few researchers down this way,” Forsyth said. “As you know, I’m a close friend of Senator Burchfield’s and-”

“I vote against him every chance I get, but I am sure he’s an honorable man in private.”

They were entering the Acute Adult Unit, where psychiatric patients with little hope of release were confined. Dr. Redfern continued on with her chipper presentation in wholesale denial of the fact that the ward wasn’t much of an upgrade from the mental asylums of old. The main differences were better lighting and a diverse array of designer drugs, plus the fact that the public couldn’t pay admission to derive some cheap entertainment.

Forsyth signed in with an armed guard while Redfern blathered airily about the “pathophysiology and psychosocial precipitants of mental illness,” getting an extra lift when she started in on “comprehensive community-based intervention modules.”

The first patient they passed, a shuffling young man in paper slippers with a strand of drool dangling down to his chest, looked like he could care less what the community thought.

Forsyth nodded at him out of rote politeness but the man simply took another sliding step away from reality and toward whatever mercy God granted the deranged.

The patients in open confinement were largely clean and passive. A bald black man sat playing checkers with himself, although there was no board on the coffee table. A woman in street clothes stood looking out the barred window as if waiting for a bus that would never come. Another woman with palsy muttered to herself over and over, and it took Forsyth a moment to realize she was faithfully reciting the Gospel According to Luke.

Then they entered the ward with the private rooms. These resembled regular hospital rooms, although through the doors of the unoccupied ones, Forsyth saw padding on the walls and restraint devices made of steel and leather. An occasional wail reverberated from a distant hellhole, a sound as lonely of that of a barn owl in the October night.

“What’s your interest in Mr. Underwood?” Dr. Redfern asked.

“One of those researchers I spoke of asked me to look in on him,” Forsyth said. “A cousin. Just between you and me, I suspect he’s afraid that sort of thing runs in the family.”

A few howls stitched themselves together into a caterwauling melody. It wasn’t until the sounds repeated that Forsyth made it out. The old western folk song “Home on the Range.”

“Mr. Underwood is one of our more…interesting…cases,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s clinging to a persistent delusion that he’s the subject of a secret government experiment. He was connected with a clinical trial during his college years, and one of the subjects died. Apparently the guilt and trauma lingered, triggering a latent schizophrenia.”

Forsyth probed her a little in case David Underwood’s psychotic ramblings had aroused any suspicion. “I thought schizophrenia was genetic.”

“There are certainly links,” she said. “But current research is focusing on neurobiology. Drug use could worsen such a condition.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Anything mind-altering or mood-altering.”

Then they were outside the room from which the wailing came. Forsyth wondered if Underwood would remember him. But the great thing about a nutcase, nobody believed anything they said.

They peered through a glass observational window. Underwood sat on a cot, hunched forward and staring at the floor. His hair was clipped close and his ill-fitting gown was draped over his gaunt frame.

Forsyth noted that Underwood’s present circumstances were not that different from when he’d been held captive in Sebastian Briggs’s lab and used as a test monkey. The only thing that had changed since then was the name of the zookeeper.

“Is he responding to medication?” Forsyth asked, making conversation.

“He’s on several new antipsychotic drugs,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s also presenting anxiety and depression, and because he’s such a risk, I’m afraid he doesn’t have much hope for release. He’s got the major first-rank symptom of schizophrenia.”

“What’s that?”

“The belief that his thoughts are controlled by an external force. In his case, he believes he’s been brainwashed by the government.”

“I could make a grand joke of that, but it doesn’t look like a laughing matter,” Forsyth said.

“Still, he deserves the same compassionate care that Central Regional aspires to administer to all its patients,” Dr. Redfern said, once again lapsing into a robo-cheerleader for her facility.

“Of that, I’ve no doubt,” Forsyth said. He took one more glance at David Underwood and was surprised he didn’t feel a twinge of sympathy for the man.

Too goddamned long in politics. Your heart is the first thing to go, and then you lose your soul. God help me. God help us all.

“Did you want to see him personally?” Dr. Redfern asked, eager to please.

“No,” he said, making a show of glancing at his wristwatch. “Is Darrell Silver available?”

Redfern’s mood darkened a little. “Of course. Federal inmates under treatment place a particularly heavy burden on a facility like ours, as you can imagine.”

Add another million to that funding request, Doctor. Maybe we should put you on Daniel’s staff. You would make a mighty fine health secretary and I’d bet you’d say whatever it took to make the administration look good.

And being pretty don’t hurt a bit.

“I understand Silver’s been charged with drug manufacturing and conspiracy,” he said.

“This way.” Redfern led him down the hall and around a bend, passing rooms in which involuntary patients spent their time until the next dose, meal, or change of underwear.

Alone with nothing but their thoughts. Satan has truly been loosed for a season and his millennium is coming up.

Forsyth’s Pentecostal upbringing had softened a little in the face of political realities, melding into a more palatable fundamentalism as he became entrenched in Congress. Extremes of every kind tended to get blunted by the forge and hammer of the corporations, lobbyists, and party leaders.

Still, he felt Armageddon was near-not in the literal sense of a climactic battle in the Middle East, but in a general erosion of the human spirit. Where others saw Satan’s armies attacking from the field, Forsyth believed Satan delivered destruction from the inside out.

Just like those drugs, Seethe and Halcyon, did.

Forsyth wondered if that was more than a coincidence.

Redfern was blithely enumerating all the funding challenges in the face of rising costs and the threat that national health care posed. Forsyth mumbled assurances that one of Burchfield’s top priorities was to revise the landmark legislation, although they all knew that entitlements were nearly impossible to take away once people got used to them.

Soon they came to a thicker door with a security camera and keypad. After Redfern logged in and was identified, they were buzzed into an antechamber where an armed and uniformed guard staffed a desk, surrounded by security monitors and alarm systems. Both of them had to sign another log, and then they entered a second door.

The rooms on this floor were a cross between prison cells and hospital rooms. Another armed guard patrolled the hallway, a tall, sunburnt man who greeted Redfern by name and gave Forsyth a sideways grin.

“Tell Senator Burchfield I’m voting for him,” the guard said. “I’ve voted for him in every election since he ran for the State House, and I’m not about to stop now.”

“I’ll do that,” Forsyth said. “And thank you for your vital service here. Is Mr. Silver ready?”

“In interrogation like you requested.”

Redfern beamed in satisfaction at the show of efficiency. The guard led the way to the room as Redfern explained, “Usually lawyers meet their clients here, and if the inmates are deemed competent, they are sometimes asked questions by investigators.”

Forsyth didn’t want to ask who did the “deeming,” but he was sure the taxpayers were footing the bill for some egghead to write big words that added up to either “Nuts” or “Probably guilty.”

Darrell Silver was seated at a table, shackled to a steel bar that was welded to the table’s edge. He appeared calm and was relatively clean, although Forsyth was surprised the man was allowed to keep his beard and unhealthy-looking dreadlocks. He could have passed for a street musician if not for the orange scrubs and his spasmodically twitching right eyelid.

“Where’s my lawyer?” Silver asked.

“It’s okay, Mr. Silver,” Redfern said. “We’re not interrogating you. Mr. Forsyth is touring our facilities. He’s a member of the president’s bioethics council.”

“Are you being treated well, Mr. Silver?” Forsyth asked, sitting at the table across from him. Redfern joined him while the guard waited at the end of the room.

“Not too bad. They have some awesome drugs in here,” Silver said.

“I understand you worked with Dr. Alexis Morgan,” Forsyth said, watching the way Silver’s eyes narrowed like those of a cornered animal’s. “She served with us on the council for a while.”

“Yeah, I did some research for her.”

“What were y’all working on?”

“I thought you weren’t going to ask any questions.”

Forsyth held up a palm and smiled. “Just making conversation, Mr. Silver. No need to go getting riled up.”

“Well, if you ask me, she ought to be the one in here, not me.”

“Is that so?”

Dr. Redfern gave Forsyth a sympathetic look, as if Silver had just revealed his own paranoid delusions. “Mr. Silver also believes he’s involved in a secret government conspiracy,” Dr. Redfern said.

“Sounds like a contagious idea,” Forsyth said, staring fully into Silver’s eyes. “What did Dr. Morgan do that was so terrible?”

“She did it. She gave me the formula, asked me to cook it up for her.”

“A formula? Some secret government drug?” Forsyth gave Redfern a surreptitious wink.

“Yeah. She called it Halcyon. It’s supposed to make you forget stuff. I played with it, put my own spin on it. That’s my style.”

Dr. Redfern cut in, speaking as if the inmate wasn’t present. “Mr. Silver has a record of illegal drug manufacturing. LSD, meth-amphetamine, OxyContin. His diagnosis states chronic drug use has damaged his perceptions of reality.”

“You call it ‘damaged,’ I call it ‘superduperfied,’” Silver said, swinging his dreadlocks in his exuberance. “What’s in a name, right? I mean, if they called MDMA ‘Funny Puppy’ instead of ‘Mad Dog,’ everybody would be taking it. It’s all about marketing, man.”

Forsyth ruminated while Silver finished his rant, and then said, “Do you think you could recreate this Halcyon?”

“No prob, dude.”

“You have a vast range of experience, Mr. Silver,” Forsyth said. “I think we can work something out.”

He gave a lopsided grin. “You think I don’t know what’s going on here?”

“What?” Forsyth asked.

“You guys are in on it. This Halcyon stuff. She said I had to be careful because important people were watching. People all the way up to the top.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Forsyth said. “If people in the government have secret drugs, then they can take away anybody’s rights at any time by making you think a certain way. By changing your mind. Why, they can even make you crazy, right?”

Silver’s eyes narrowed again, as if he was figuring Forsyth’s angle. “I tried some of that stuff. I can’t remember what it was like.”

Dr. Redfern’s face furrowed in deep concern and solemn sorrow. Forsyth was sure she’d refined that look in a mirror.

“Did Dr. Morgan ever mention a drug called Seethe?” Forsyth said.

“No, but it sounds cool,” Silver said. “Upper?”

“It doesn’t exist,” he replied. “But we got reason to think Dr. Morgan may be under a bit of…strain. As you can likely appreciate, her previous post as a presidential advisor means her actions reflect on all of us. If she needs help, she deserves the finest treatment and…” Forsyth turned to Dr. Redfern. “What did you call that?”

“Continuum of care,” she said, pleased to contribute.

“She didn’t talk about Seethe, but she did seem a little freaked out,” Silver said. “I offered her some weed to help her chill, but she said she didn’t do drugs.” He gave a sudden bark of laughter. “Doesn’t do drugs. Now that’s what I call crazy, man.”

“Thank you for the information. Mr. Silver,” Forsyth said, rising from his chair. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you with the federal prosecutors.”

“But this wasn’t an interrogation, right? If it was, I’d have had a lawyer and stuff, right?” As they retreated, he raised his voice to yell at their backs. “Unless my lawyer’s in on it, too.”

After the guard let them out, Dr. Redfern said, “We have more secret government drug conspiracies per square foot than any facility in the country, it seems.”

Forsyth gave an understanding smile, one full of paternal concern and a veiled promise of support. “Just between you and me, I think it’s the aliens and their little mind-scrambling ray guns.”

Dr. Redfern granted him a coy and unprofessional titter.