Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

Chapter 11

At first Michael was speechless when he saw Emily and their psychiatrist, but then he let out a whoop of joy and rushed over to them. There were lots of hugs and kisses, and a few tears, and then it was time to get down to the business of organization.

The brownstone was getting crowded. After introducing the new tenants to the old, the guards, and Francisco, I left it to Margaret and Michael, who enjoyed seniority, to work out sleeping arrangements. I explained the house rules about staying away from open windows, not answering telephones or the door, and then I took Sharon Stephens with me down to my office, closing the door after me. I sat down behind my desk, and she sat stiffly, her knees close together and her hands in her lap, in a chair by the wall to my left. Her green eyes at once mirrored both relief and anxiety.

"Thank you for rescuing us, Dr. Frederickson," she said with a quick, nervous smile that showed the fine white teeth Peter South-worth had mentioned.

"You're welcome, I'm sure," I replied evenly.

"I. . have so many questions."

"I know the feeling."

She clasped and unclasped her hands, looked down at them. "You don't think much of me, do you?"

"I don't know what to think of you. You saved those people's lives, and you've been going to a lot of trouble and risking your own life to try to keep them alive. On the other hand, if it hadn't been for you, and people like you, they wouldn't have been prisoners in danger in the first place. What was a nice girl like you doing in a purgatory like Rivercliff?"

"I didn't know what kind of work I was going to be doing when I was assigned there, Dr. Frederickson-and I'd only worked there a short time. I answered an ad in one of the medical journals; it said the CIA was looking for physicians, especially psychiatrists. I wrote them a letter, filled out an application, and went for an interview. I'm sure thousands of government employees have done the same thing. Psychiatry is a very difficult branch of medicine to make a living in these days. I assumed I would be treating CIA personnel and their families. I was never told anything about this BUHR, this 'chill shop.' To me, the CIA was just the CIA, with everybody focused on the same mission, which was to protect the nation's security. I was excited, thinking I was actually going to be doing important and worthwhile work for the government."

"The CIA is a whole other country unto itself, lady. They have some very strange customs and notions there."

"I was naive. By the time I realized what was going on, and what I was expected to do, it was too late. I was already in place at Rivercliff. I'd signed what seemed like dozens of security pledges, and I assumed they had me. I felt like a prisoner myself. I was afraid. A number of times I thought of quitting, and even mentioned it to my supervisor once, but he made implied threats that the CIA would make a great deal of trouble for me if I quit, and that I would have difficulty going back into private practice. Somebody else I talked to about quitting said there could be legal consequences because of the papers I'd signed."

"That was absurd. They were the ones committing illegal acts. You were recruited by a particular department at the CIA, and if I have my way they're definitely going to be put out of business when this is all over. Michael told me you warned him and the other patients that people might be sent to kill you. I have to ask how, if you hadn't realized by then just how rotten and ruthless your employers really were, you guessed that they might go so far as to kill all of you in order to cover up the Rivercliff operation."

She shrugged her shoulders. "I guess I did realize it by then- especially after what they did with a man named Raymond Rogers."

"I know about Raymond. What did they do with him?"

Her emerald-colored eyes clouded, and she averted her gaze. "When I first started working there, I did feel that I was doing something very worthwhile, working on the cutting edge of research that could radically change the lives of so many sick people for the better. But I was just a junior staff member. I didn't know for some time that nobody was ever released, and it wasn't until a month and a half ago that I realized the real purpose of Rivercliff."

"Studying the side effects of the medication supplied to you that was given to them."

She looked back into my face, slowly nodded. "That's correct. How did you learn so much in such a short time?"

"You have to be a chess player who's kind to street people."

"I don't understand."

"Never mind; it's not important how I know what I know. I need to know more. Is there a name for the drug you gave the patients?"

"If there is, I never heard it. We all just called it 'meds,' like the patients. If the senior staff members who ran Rivercliff had a name for it, they never told me."

"You were willing to medicate patients with a drug you didn't even know the name of?"

Sharon Stephens flushed slightly. "It wasn't exactly like working at General Hospital, Dr. Frederickson."

"I can believe that. You never asked what this drug was?"

"Of course I asked. I was simply told I had no need to know. There were no labels on the bottles that came up to the infirmary."

"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?"

Her smile vanished. "Monsters," she replied in a voice that cracked.

"Like Raymond Rogers?"

She hesitated, frowned slightly. "Yes and no."

"Let's do the yes part first. Rogers was turned into a killer, a homicidal maniac totally out of control. Did that happen a lot?"

"Not a lot. There were only a few cases like Raymond's that I observed while I was there. It would happen suddenly; a patient would appear to be a category one or two-sometimes for weeks, or even months-and then one day go berserk. It was totally unpredictable. There was always at least one male nurse on duty at all times who was armed with a tranquilizer gun in case that happened."

"That danger exists for the patients who are out there on the streets now? And the people upstairs?"

Again she hesitated, then slowly, reluctantly, nodded. "Yes. Percentagewise, the risk is minimal, but it exists. Raymond exists. They have to be monitored constantly. I'll have to talk to the guards you introduced me to, tell them what signs to look for. They must watch out for your friend and the patients as well as intruders."

Terrific. Felix MacWhorter had been dead-on, much more so than either of us could have realized about the risks I was undertaking when he had warned me against trying to obtain more of the drug for the patients. It was risky even shielding these people. My neck was stretched a long way out on the chopping block, along with the necks of more than seven million other people in the city. My particular good deed could conceivably set an all-time record for tragic consequences. My mouth had suddenly gone dry, and I swallowed in an attempt to work up some moisture. I felt a crush of responsibility, and for a fleeting moment I wished I had less time to deal with the problems of Margaret and the patients, not more. "What happened to the people who went homicidal?" I asked.

"They were tranquilized and taken to a secure lockup facility in a separate wing."

"And?"

"Raymond was the only one of them I ever saw again. I don't know what happened to the others."

"And that's why you say Raymond is different?"

"Yes," she replied in a voice that was becoming increasingly stressed and halting. "As part of my training, I was allowed to observe a couple of his training sessions. I think he was. . the only one they could. . control. Or whom they thought they could control."

"Tell me about Raymond's training sessions."

She stared at the floor, clasping and unclasping her hands. "Dr. Frederickson, I. . I. ."

"Come on, Doctor," I said impatiently. "Time's a-wasting. This isn't Nuremberg, and it isn't the time for soul-searching. You did the right thing when the chips were down. We've got a very big mess to try to clean up, so just tell me what they did with Rogers. How did they control him?"

"I think. . One of the senior doctors explained that all of the patients who had gone berserk had bloodlust, but it was generalized. They were all males. I got the impression some of them finally managed to kill themselves. With Raymond, there was a specific link between killing and his sex drive."

"An off-the-shelf serial killer."

"Exactly," the woman said in a voice barely above a whisper. "After he'd killed, there was a period of reversion. He would become calmer. I was told you could even talk and reason with him for a while, until the bloodlust began to mount again, but I never witnessed that, and I never spoke to him. I was. . very frightened."

"I'm sure Raymond and his keepers had some interesting conversations. So when they wanted to calm him down, they gave him things to kill?"

She nodded. "It was what he needed, along with his medication, to remain functional."

"Other patients?"

"No," she replied, still staring intently at the floor. "Animals- mostly dogs and cats."

"Well, he's certainly graduated from dogs and cats, and he isn't exactly treating his bloodlust with moderation. He's insatiable. The death count as of noon today was thirty-three. What was he doing up in the infirmary on the day he got loose?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure."

"Which is it? Was it standard procedure to treat these homicidals in the infirmary?"

"No. When they needed medical attention, they were usually treated in their own wing, after they'd been tranquilized. At least that's what I was told. Maybe …"

"Maybe what, Doctor?"

Now she looked back up at me and met my gaze. She had gone very pale, but her voice was steady. "I've given this a lot of thought, Dr. Frederickson. There was no reason to bring Raymond up to the main infirmary, not unless they wanted to use some of the specialized testing equipment we kept there. He certainly wasn't tranquilized, and he wasn't even wearing physical restraints. There were only two guards with him, and he killed those. They must have thought they had him under control. I think it's possible they planned to run some final, sophisticated tests on him before …"

"Before harvesting him for possible use as a terror weapon?"

"Yes. It's one explanation. It's possible they were going to send him out on a trial run, perhaps put him in a situation like the one he's in now. They must have thought they had him under control, could just send him out and reel him back in when they wanted. They were wrong."

"Indeed. Maybe BUHR didn't even care about reeling him back in, just in seeing what would happen. He's probably not coherent, and he'd die anyway if he were taken alive and his pills taken away from him. They might figure there were other Raymonds to be shaped."

"I'm just speculating."

I didn't care what she was doing, didn't care whether she was right or wrong. I'd heard quite enough about Raymond Rogers, and whether or not his handlers had intended to set him loose in some foreign country, for whatever insane reason, was beside the point; he was loose in New York City. The more I heard, the angrier I got; it was also enough to make me increasingly nervous, and I was in no position, had already gone too far, to have my resolve weakened.

I said, "You escaped with twelve patients. One is dead, and two are upstairs. That leaves nine. Four of them are males. You have any idea at all where I can find them? Not only are they in danger, but they could become killers themselves. One Raymond Rogers is enough."

She slowly shook her head. "I explained their options to them, and they all decided to go into hiding. I assume they're scattered around the city. They're supposed to meet me by the tree at Rockefeller Center on Christmas Eve. I was hoping I could find the company that manufactured the drug, somehow find a way to force them to give me more of it. I talked to dozens of people, and I wasn't getting anywhere. I was feeling so hopeless. Then those two people found me. And then you came along, out of nowhere. I don't know how to thank you."

"Thanks are premature, Doctor. I'm not exactly riding a tidal wave of optimism, and I'm very ambivalent about what both of us are trying to do right now."

"None of this is the patients' fault, Dr. Frederickson. They didn't ask to be mentally ill, nor to be sent to Rivercliff, nor to be experimented on with a drug that just happens to let them think in a way most of us take for granted but to them is a miracle."

"Thank you, Dr. Schweitzer. I'll try to keep bearing those things in mind."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to sound. . What can I do to help?"

"Does Michael know that he could go the way of Raymond Rogers?"

"No. Those kinds of emotional meltdowns were rare, and to my knowledge neither he nor Emily ever witnessed one."

"Okay, what you can do to help is go back upstairs and brief the guards, and then check out the living arrangements to make sure we can all kind of keep an eye on each other. If Michael and Emily don't know about this latest twist, I don't see any reason why they should be told. It wouldn't serve any purpose, and they've got enough to worry about."

"Who are those people?"

"Friends of a friend. We'll be safe as long as they're here." At least from outsiders, I thought, but didn't say so.

Tears sprang to the psychiatrist's eyes. "I. . still don't know how to thank you for all you've done-what you're doing."

"I'll share all my neuroses with you when this matter is resolved. That should be enough for a research paper or two."

She smiled. "Promise?"

"Promise."

I waited until she'd left the office, closing the door behind her, then picked up the phone and called Felix MacWhorter to see if he'd picked up the package I'd left him. He had, and the DA's office was already busy building a case against Punch and Judy. Interpol had been notified, and the information on the tape recording had been passed along to a variety of government offices in Washington. I was betting the Chill Shop had been shut down five minutes after the CIA had found out Punch and Judy had been caught, and they would already be busy preparing denials that BUHR had ever existed. It was even possible any more Company or Lorminix hunting patrols left in the city would be called back, but I wasn't going to count on it. The police captain wanted me to come in for another chat, but I said I had other, more pressing things to do at the moment. He didn't argue with me.

Step Seven.

It was time to get my brother into the act. It was almost midnight in Switzerland, and Garth and Mary had probably been asleep for hours after a day on the slopes, but I figured Garth wouldn't mind being awakened when he heard what I had to tell him and what I wanted him to try to do. I dialed the number of his hotel, thought about what I was doing while the phone rang, then abruptly hung up when somebody answered.

Cancel Step Seven.

I no longer had any qualms about disrupting my brother and sister-in-law's holiday, for the circumstances now certainly warranted it, and they would be the first to agree. Indeed, Garth was going to be more than a little upset with me when he found out I hadn't brought him into the situation immediately, and heard about what I'd been up to while he was gone. It wasn't disrupted vacation plans, but Garth himself I was worried about. My brother was absolutely fearless, and a bullet between the eyes was the only thing that would stop him once he had committed himself to a certain course of action. He was a quiet warrior whose actions spoke very loudly, and who took no prisoners if he thought his cause was just; and I had no doubt that he would think getting more medication for the patients from Rivercliff was the right thing to do. If I involved Garth, I was going to have a lot of explaining to do; once he found out about the drug a certain company with headquarters in Switzerland had been manufacturing for the CIA, and once I told him that somebody in said headquarters might be able to provide information that could save the lives of a dozen people who were otherwise going to die in a few days, he was going to be out the door and on his way to Berne. The one thing predictable about Garth was that he could be unpredictable, and very dangerous to anybody he considered a bad guy. He was in a foreign country, one that went to great pains to protect the privacy and interests of the corporations that were headquartered there. If I told him about Lorminix and asked for his help, he would be working alone and blind, without any franchise or weapons, in what could quickly turn into a very hostile environment. His wife wasn't going to be too pleased with me if Garth ended up in a Swiss prison, or dead, and I wouldn't be too happy myself.

Besides, I might not need Garth. Thanks to my very informative chat with Punch and Judy, I could probably take care of the business I wanted done with Lorminix myself, or at least accomplish as much as my brother could in person.

My alarm woke me at four in the morning. I got up and put on my thick terry-cloth robe. Stepping over the figure of Michael Stout, who was in a sleeping bag in the middle of the floor in the living room, I went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. Then, wanting to make sure that Michael didn't overhear any of my conversation, I padded downstairs to my office, taking along with me the notebook in which I had jotted down the salient details of Punch and Judy's story. I consulted my notes, then dialed the office number of one Heinrich Muller at Lorminix headquarters in Berne. "Ja?"

"You speak English, Herr Muller?"

"Who is this?" the man on the other end of the line asked in English that had a thick German accent. "How did you get this number?"

"My name's Robert Frederickson, and since this is my nickel, I'll do most of the talking."

"I'm not interested in anything you have to say. Goodbye, Herr Frederickson."

"I got your name and this number from Punch and Judy, Muller. They also let slip the fact that Lorminix occasionally acts as a CIA asset, and that you're the liaison. You're also the cutout. Those two assassins are paid through a Swiss account that belongs to Lorminix. Right now your two hired hands are sitting in a New York City jail cell spilling their guts out. Now do I have your attention?"

The silence on the other end was broken only by the sound of heavy breathing; Heinrich Muller even breathed with a German accent.

I let some more time pass, then continued, "This is your lucky day, Herr Muller. I suspect you've already received a report on me, maybe even have it in front of you right now, so I won't bore you with all my credentials. I'm a private investigator, somewhat to the left of center politically, but I have a special place in my heart for big companies like yours, and I tend to be very sensitive to their needs. Very shortly, the needs of Lorminix will be great. I can not only directly link your company to the CIA, which isn't going to please a lot of your other customers around the world, but I can also prove that you developed and manufactured a very dangerous drug to CIA specifications, and then shipped it to them for illegal experiments on humans. Shades of Nazi Germany, Herr Muller. I can prove that your company bears at least some responsibility for producing a serial killer who's loose on the streets of New York City and probably killing somebody even as we speak. I know all about Rivercliff, Punch and Judy, BUHR-all of it. Your company's ass and your personal ass are fried anyway; if the courts in this country don't kill you with criminal charges and civil suits, the bad publicity will. Luckily for you, I'm here to offer you a measure of corporate and personal redemption. You can help save the lives of some of the people whose heads and bodies you've been helping the CIA mess with. Cooperating in that way could prove advantageous to you, providing a bit of an umbrella in the shit storm that's about to come down on your head. If you help me, I'll do what I can to help you contain the damage, including offering testimony in any court about the way in which you cooperated. If you don't help me, Herr Muller, I'm going to start banging the publicity drums the minute I hang up this telephone, and I'll make sure that you get personal credit for the deaths that are going to occur if you don't help. Now, here's the deal. It's very simple. I want a case-a big case, all you've got-of that mystery drug in the black-and-yellow capsules delivered to my doorstep within the next forty-eight hours. I don't care how you do it, just get it done. If it arrives, you get a friend in court; if it doesn't, I use this same phone to call a friend of mine at The New York Times. Now, I want to hear you tell me that you understand."

The response was more guttural breathing.

"Muller? Let me hear it. If I don't, I hang up and call my reporter friend. She'd kill for a story like this."

"Ja. I understand."

"Good," I said, and hung up.

I sat for a few minutes, sipping at my coffee, which had gone cold, thinking. I finally decided to give my performance a favorable review, reasoning that my move on Muller had been as good as anything that Garth could have done-and a lot better than a few things he might have done. The next two days would tell whether I had been able to shake loose a supply of the drug, but I wasn't going to count on it. For one thing, there was always the possibility that Lorminix had destroyed any existing supply of the drug after the patients escaped from

Rivercliff. Also, Herr Muller might not panic as easily as I hoped he would; he could confer with his colleagues, who might conclude that, in fact, I probably couldn't prove anything. Then they would take the defensive posture of complete stonewalling, denying everything, letting matters drag on in court, if it ever came to that, for years.

There was nothing left to do at 4:30 in the morning, so I went back to bed.

I awoke again at 6:45. I made more coffee for Michael and myself, then went down to my office. I was very anxious to talk to Bailey Kramer to get at least a preliminary indication of whether or not he could do the job I wanted him to do, and so I called his apartment on the Lower East Side at 7:50. There was no answer, which surprised me; he didn't go in to work until nine, and at that hour of the morning he should have been up and eating breakfast, maybe reading the newspaper. Thinking that he might be in the shower, I waited twenty minutes, called again. There was still no answer.

Now I was getting nervous. I didn't want to call him at work, because I didn't want Frank Lemengello to know anything about the private little arrangement between Bailey and myself. At the same time I wanted to know where we stood, and I didn't want to have to sit around all day biting my fingernails while waiting for Bailey to call me. I presumed it would take some time to find suitable lab space and equipment and anything else Bailey might need if it was possible for him to replicate the drug, and I wanted to get started as soon as possible. I tried Bailey's apartment once more, with the same result, then, at 9:15, I called the lab, thinking that if Frank answered I would simply hang up.

I needn't have worried. What I got was a recorded message informing me that Frank was on vacation and the lab would be closed until after New Year's. Frank hadn't told me he was going away on vacation, but then there was no reason why he should have; we had concluded our business. But with the lab closed, that left the very loud question of just where Bailey Kramer might be.

I worked in the office through the morning, trying to concentrate on contracts and reports while I waited for the phone to ring. At noon a deliveryman arrived with pizza, apparently my guests' choice for their midday meal. Francisco had given Chico Velasquez, one of the day's guards, money to pay, but I waved him off, paid the deliveryman, then took the two pies upstairs myself. I gathered Margaret, Michael, Emily, and Sharon Stephens in my kitchen, and I shared their meal with them. When we had finished, I said, "We have to talk."

Margaret, who was sitting next to me at the table, touched my arm. "Mongo, what's wrong?"

"What's wrong is that you don't have enough capsules to make it to Christmas Eve," I said, turning toward her, glancing at Michael and Emily. "I assume everybody's supply is going to be running out by then. There'll be no safety margin."

Michael ran a hand back through his hair, and his blue eyes glowed with intensity. "Margaret can have some of my capsules. I have twenty-one."

"I'll share mine too," Emily said quietly.

"No," Margaret declared in a firm voice. "I can't accept your offers. But thank you."

"Look," I said, once more glancing in turn at the others around the table, "in a way, it doesn't make any difference. You'll only be postponing the problem of what will happen to all of you when you run out. There may not be any of the drug left in existence; all supplies of it, in this country or anywhere else, could have been destroyed after Raymond Rogers ran amok and you people escaped from Rivercliff. Even the formula itself may have been destroyed. There's a very good chance that's exactly what happened. There are a whole lot of individuals, and one very large corporation, that stand to lose a great deal if any of you survive to tell your stories, and a whole lot to gain if you all end up dead or insane once again."

"Mongo," Sharon Stephens said quietly, "is there any hope at all?"

"Yes, there's hope-but absolutely no guarantees. I've taken steps to try to force Lorminix to supply us with more of the drug, and I've got a very good chemist trying to make more of it. The problem is that I'm not sure Lorminix will come through, even if they do have more of the drug to send, and the chemist seems to have disappeared. There's nothing we can do now about the others, because we have no way to contact them. We just have to hope that I can come up with more of the stuff by the time we rendezvous with them on Christmas Eve. But you're not in that position. You know what will happen to you if you run out of the medication. Right now is the time, while you still have a few days' supply left, for you to check yourselves into a hospital and tell your story. Dr. Stephens and I will be with you to back you up. If the three of you lapse back into insanity, and maybe die, then all of this will have been a wasted exercise. So that's my recommendation; the three of you go to a hospital now, while there's still time for the doctors to study your conditions and treat you."

There was a prolonged silence, which was finally broken by the psychiatrist. "I think Mongo's right," Sharon Stephens said softly. "If you run out, you'll first lose your rationality, and then you'll die. Maybe it is possible for the doctors to come up with at least an interim treatment to prevent the cellular collapse that occurs when you stop taking the drug. Turning yourselves in now for treatment may be the wisest thing to do."

Margaret, Michael, and Emily all looked at one another, and finally Michael turned to Sharon Stephens. "Does what you just said mean you think they'll let us keep taking our meds as long as we have them while they work on us?"

"I don't know," the psychiatrist said in a small voice, looking away.

I said, "Michael asked what you thought. Give us your best guess."

"I. . think not," the woman replied. There was anguish in her voice and expressive green eyes as her gaze swept around the table. "You have to understand the thinking of the medical establishment, which is conservative by nature to begin with. You have to look at things from their perspective. They'd see five people walking into an emergency room. Three of these people announce that they're schizophrenics, but they display absolutely no signs of mental illness, nor do they exhibit any of the side effects normally associated with any of the drugs used to treat mental illness. They talk about being patients at a mental hospital called Rivercliff, which these doctors have never heard of. Their records, of course, no longer exist anywhere. Then these people start talking about illegal experiments that were conducted at this place the doctors can't find listed anywhere. They also claim that the ice-pick killer on the streets also came from Rivercliff. So now the doctors start thinking that maybe these three people really are crazy, but they're going to be extremely cautious in diagnosing and treating them. It won't matter what Dr. Stephens or the highly respected Dr. Frederickson have to say on the matter. Doctors and hospitals are being sued all the time. Finally, these three people who claim to be schizophrenic pull out bags of capsules, supposed medication that doesn't have a name, and ask that they be allowed to continue taking one a day while the doctors check them out. I ask you, Mongo, if you were a hospital administrator, would you allow the people I've just described to self-medicate after you'd admitted them into your hospital?"

"But you're an MD yourself, a psychiatrist. You'd be there along with me to back up their story."

"My best guess that you asked for is that they're not going to take my word for anything-or yours. How long will it take them to check my credentials? And how do you know what kinds of trash stories my former employer may have already put out about me? Considering the legal consequences of what could happen to them if they make a bad decision, do you think the physicians at any hospital we go to will be able to check our stories and test that medication within twenty-four hours? I said I agreed with your recommendation because we're running out of time and it looks like that may be our best hope, our only choice. You know what's at stake as well as I do. I'm just not optimistic about our chances."

I nodded. "You make some good points, Doctor."

Michael said, "What you're saying is that if we go to a hospital now in order to save time while we still have almost a couple of weeks left, we risk ending up with only one more day to be well and alive."

Sharon Stephens and I glanced at each other, nodded in agreement. I said, "That's about right, Michael."

"Then I'm going to stay out and take my chances that you'll get us more meds, Mongo."

"Me too," Emily said in a voice just above a whisper.

I turned in my chair to face Margaret. She stared back at me, her expression filled with anxiety. "Michael and Emily are Dr. Stephens's patients, Margaret, so I'm not going to say anything more to try to influence them. But you're not anybody's patient; you're just my friend. I feel responsible for you. Time is running out-even more so for you than the others. I want you to listen to me and take my advice. I'll arrange for my own doctor to admit you to the hospital, and I guarantee you he'll, at least, listen to me and be on your side. I'll keep your meds with me, and if it looks like you'll be denied permission to keep taking them while they figure out how to treat you, I'll take you right back out of there. Okay?"

"Things may not be that simple, Mongo," Sharon Stephens said in a firm voice. "It's possible the Company has spread disinformation about all of us to hospital personnel throughout the country, just in case we did try to turn ourselves in for treatment; I don't know if that's the case, but it would have been the logical thing to do after we escaped from Rivercliff. Hospital administrators could have been asked to alert their staffs to be on the lookout for people who come in and tell a certain kind of story. If that's how it is, then the police could show up to take Margaret into protective custody. I still concur with your recommendation, for the reasons you mentioned, but I think everybody sitting at this table should be aware of the risks involved. If you do take Margaret into a hospital, you may not have the option of taking her out again."

"It doesn't make any difference, Dr. Stephens," the middle-aged woman with the worn, leathery features said, still looking at me. "I'm not going to the hospital."

I shook my head in frustration. "Margaret, I'll test the waters first. I'll-"

"I know you're thinking of my best interests, Mongo," the woman interrupted. "But even if it was guaranteed that they would let me keep taking my medication, I would still have to answer all sorts of questions that could jeopardize Michael and Emily and the others out there who didn't come in with me. I can't do that. And if they took away my medication, and you couldn't take me out, then I'd end up. . crazy again, like I used to be."

"Margaret," I said in a slow, measured tone, "that's a risk you may just have to take. If you'll let me, I'll try to negotiate with the medical authorities, or the police, before I take you in with me. If Dr. Stephens and Emily agree, I'll take Emily with me when I talk to them to make sure they don't lie. I know a lot of people. I can try to get a guarantee that you'll be allowed to continue to take the medication you have now while they examine you and search for another way to treat you. But we have to use what little time we have left to the best advantage. If you run out of your meds before another way to treat you can be found, you'll die. That's what the blood on your bed the morning you woke up and found me sitting next to you was all about. With no meds or other treatment, your cells will rupture; your circulatory system will collapse, and you'll bleed to death. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mongo. But it's not death I'm afraid of. I've been kind of dead most of my life. I'd rather be really dead than the way I was before. Maybe you can't understand that because you've never been insane; you've never heard a lot of voices in your head, never had to live in the cold on the street, never really been hungry and not been able to remember how to ask for help, never been hurt in a shelter. Your mind has never turned on you the way mine has. You know how to take care of yourself. You only understand what it's like to work with your mind, not to have it working against you like an enemy. You can think clearly, recognize your friends, have your mind tell you when it's time to go to the bathroom, and then help you get there. Your mind knows how to shut down so that it can sleep properly when you need rest. These are all things I wasn't able to do when I lived on the street. Mama Spit was what you and other people called me. You're saying that maybe the doctors can help me if I go to them now, with you. But maybe they can't. Maybe the police will take me and separate us. Maybe all I have left is ten days. Well, so be it. I'll take those ten days, and I'll die when I become Mama Spit again. But the only way I can be assured of spending those ten days as me is to stay here, with my friends-if you'll let me. That's what I'm going to do, Mongo, if it's all right with you. Ten days is a whole lifetime to me."

For some reason I wanted to cry, but I didn't. Instead I rose, smiled, and nodded to Margaret and the others. "Of course you can stay here with your friends, Margaret. And I do understand, folks. I'm not sure I wouldn't make the same decision myself if I were in your position. I just wanted to make sure you all knew you had another option.".

"Finding more meds," Michael said in a low voice that trembled slightly. "You'll keep trying, Mongo?"

I sighed. "Of course I'll keep trying. Thanks for letting me share your pizza."

The first thing I kept trying, for the rest of the day, was Bailey Kramer's home phone number. There was still no answer. I kept trying until well past midnight, then finally went to bed.

As I lay awake staring at the ceiling it occurred to me that I had been too impatient and careless in openly approaching Bailey on the street; anyone who might be following and watching me would have seen us talking, possibly guessed what the conversation was about, and what I was asking him to do. Because of me, Bailey Kramer might be dead.

I did not sleep well.