Fear

SEVEN

‘Does it work?’ Groote asked. He nearly held his breath and thought: This is it, Amanda, here’s the miracle that saves you and makes you all right again. He had flown out from Orange County to Albuquerque, then sped the hour north to Santa Fe. His exhaustion from the long night of waiting to kill the accountant evaporated. ‘Does it really work?’

And in the hospital conference room, Doctor Leland Hurley smiled at him and his hopes and his question. Hurley started talking again about lessening the vivid emotional toll of the most horrifying of memories, rattling off a glossary of brain chemicals: epinephrine, propanolol, super beta-blockers, adrenergic receptors. Hurley spoke of giving patients back their normal lives and all Groote could think was, Does it work, does it work, does it work?

Doctor Hurley gestured at the elevator. ‘Let’s go to the top floor.’

The top floor meant Frost. The medicine.

Most of the patients were in their rooms after an early dinner, small but comfortable cubbyholes. At the end of the floor’s main hallway stood an expansive group room where they could talk and gather.

‘Here’s a treat you won’t see every day,’ Hurley said, leading Groote through a door that read VIRTUAL REALITY TREATMENT. QUIET, PLEASE.

The room was dark, separated in half by a glass screen, a jumble of computers loading the walls. A young man, on the other side of the glass, dangled by four elastic cables from the ceiling. A strange helmet covered his eyes and ears; he wore a tight white bodysuit, webbed with wire and tiny gadgets that Groote guessed were recording heartbeat, breathing, and other functions. The patient hung, almost motionless, jerking now and then as he reacted to the scenes playing out of the goggles. On a screen, what appeared to be a computer-animated movie showed a darkened alleyway, wet with rain, three men walking close. One held a chain, the other a blade.

‘What are those scenes?’ Groote asked.

‘We re-create their traumas for them,’ Hurley said with a thin knife of a grin. ‘We do extensive research and interviews to get the details of their individual traumas, then we construct a computer-generated scenario that matches those details. We watch it onscreen – he sees it on the goggles, as though he’s immersed in the scene. You see it’s like a rough cut of a video game, except it’s tailor made to help them face their worst fears. It helps those who aren’t yet willing to talk consistently about their experiences process the memories, so they can discuss them and the medicine, Frost, can weaken the bad memories. This subject was attacked and nearly murdered in a vicious gang mugging in Washington. So he’s experiencing a re-creation of the mugging.’

‘Virtual reality,’ Groote said. ‘But it’s not required for the medicine to work, right?’

‘For us, it serves as camouflage for Frost. Every patient here believes they’re testing the effectiveness of the virtual-reality treatment – they don’t know they’re being dosed with Frost.’

Groote frowned. ‘They don’t know they’re test subjects.’

‘No. We couldn’t let them know. It’s important we not publicize the research, since we’ll be selling it to a pharmaceutical that’ll claim the research for their own.’

The young man jerked against the suspension cables, started to gasp and plead for help as, on the screen, the computer-generated thugs attacked him with chains and knives. A technician sitting on the same side of the glass as Groote and Hurley spoke quietly to the patient through a microphone, reassuring him.

‘I understand your stepdaughter suffered an interesting trauma.’

Interesting? Nice word; this guy was a lab-rat freak. ‘Daughter. I adopted her. She and her mother were driving on a canyon road when another car fired shots at them and drove them off the road. They were pinned in the wreckage. My wife died a few hours later, my daughter lay trapped in the car with her mother’s body for another thirty-six hours before they were found.’ Tightness filled his chest. He was surprised at himself, sharing his family’s horror with a near-stranger – but he knew this was it, clear and present hope for Amanda, the promise of a future for her beyond tiled hallways and sedatives and twenty-four-hour care. ‘The doctors haven’t been able to help her. She tries to hurt herself.’

‘Her brain is dealing with this constant recalling of the traumatic memory. The memory strengthens – and so does the trauma associated with it – the nightmares, the fear, the paranoia,’ Hurley said. ‘In your daughter’s case, everything becomes a reaction to the power of the memory; I suspect she’s afraid to ride in a car, or thinking of her mother sends her into a dissociative state where she flashes back to the trauma itself, or she hurts herself because she believes she should have died with your wife.’

‘Yes,’ Groote said.

Hurley pointed at the man in the virtual-reality chamber. ‘Most of the research about dulling the traumatic memory – we can’t wipe a memory out, after all – has revolved around introducing beta blockers to the patient, which help keep the memory from forming. When we have a frightening experience, our brains activate stress hormones, neurotransmitters, and peripheral beta-receptors – I call the whole mix “fear juice.”’ Hurley smiled. ‘Those chemicals enhance the memory of the traumatic event. Conceivably we can interfere, right away, with the formation of a traumatic memory if we introduce beta-adrenergic antagonists such as a beta blocker called propanolol – so the memory of the trauma never gets the power of the fear juice, to put it simply.’

Groote nodded. ‘I did take chemistry in college, I can handle a technical explanation.’

Hurley smiled as if he didn’t believe him. ‘Of course. A traumatic memory consolidates in regions across our brain – it doesn’t just exist in one set of brain cells that we can zap away. But the moments when the patient recalls the memory, as our boy is doing right now, are also the moments when the memory is at its most chemically fragile. It’s the best opportunity to weaken the memory, make its impact less debilitating. You pull the memory up out of the bed of your brain; it’s like loosening a rose from its bed of soil. If you don’t treat the memory, it takes root again, harder and deeper. But if you chemically weaken the memory after it’s pulled up, you can strip the thorns, so to speak. The problem was, with earlier experiments, you had to introduce the beta blockers very soon after the trauma; there was nothing to help those suffering from long-term trauma. Until Frost. It’s a cocktail – well, “a combination” sounds better – of drugs that combines several approaches: a synthetic, super beta-blocker to undermine the fear juice and powerful new brain enzyme blockers to keep the fearful memories from getting their thorns back.’

On the screens one of the animated attackers delivered a vicious kick to the man’s chest, held a knife to his throat. The patient stayed still in the cables, tilted his head as though a scene only mildly interesting were playing out of the screen.

‘You’re saying Frost could let this guy eventually forget this attack?’

‘Not entirely. But Frost strips the trauma of the attack, keeps the fearful memory from strengthening. Frost can make his memory of being beaten almost to death toothless – so that the recall of it produces no effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.’ Hurley tapped a pen against his bottom lip, grinned with pride. ‘This man suffered his trauma two years ago. Four months ago seeing the computer-generated re-creation practically drove him into a dissociative state. But now, after treatment with Frost, his heartbeat’s slightly elevated, he’s nervous, but not frightened.’

‘It’s a cure.’

Hurley grinned. ‘It works. As long as it’s used in combination with therapy that brings back the traumatic memory – such as our virtual-reality room or regular psychiatric therapy – while medicated with Frost. Come with me.’

Groote followed him out of the VR room and down the hall to Hurley’s cluttered office. Hurley sat down at his desk and tapped on the computer keyboard. ‘All forty-six patients dosed with Frost were suffering from severe PTSD, with extreme flashbacks, pronounced anxieties, and often maladaptive behavior. All of them have shown steady improvement in the lessening of their trauma through usage of the memory drug when compared with the control group of forty-six patients who got a sugar pill. A small sample, but enough to interest the pharmas in our sale.’

‘And this Allison Vance knows about the program.’

‘She doesn’t know about Frost – only the VR side of the project here. But I believe she’s gotten suspicious about whether we’re dosing the patients. I caught her trying to take a blood sample from the lab; she said she thought the patient might be HIV positive and that we should get it tested.’

‘That’s not completely implausible.’

‘It suggested to me she thought there was a story hiding in the blood samples,’ Hurley said. ‘If she got hold of Frost, or she knew about the auction of our research to the drug manufacturers, she could make trouble.’

‘The drug companies wouldn’t develop this themselves?’

‘Think how many ads for drugs you see. Their marketing budgets are much more than their research-and-development budgets. We’ll make a mint, so will they.’ Hurley turned back to the computer.

Groote crossed his arms. ‘Where’d Quantrill get Frost?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He steal it? He’s a thief, even if you put a fancy consultant title on him.’

Hurley didn’t answer.

Groote leaned forward. ‘Here’s my theory. He doesn’t want the drug companies to know where he got Frost from, does he?’

‘I couldn’t say, Mr. Groote.’

‘Why have Allison Vance involved?’

‘She’s fairly new to town, not plugged in to the local psychiatric community. She keeps to herself. I needed a doctor to handle assessments. She was affordable and efficient. Patients liked her.’

‘She could sneak out a Frost sample and get it tested.’

‘I administer all the doses. None are missing.’

‘How do you check them?’

‘Counts.’

‘Are these solid capsules? Could she replace any with fakes?’

Hurley’s face grew red. ‘You’re giving her far too much credit. She wouldn’t resort to thievery. She’d simply call the authorities if she had a concern.’

‘So we buy her off if she raises a stink.’

‘Allison’s not the type much motivated by money. She’s altruistic. Always blathering on about how the patients come first.’

‘Why not just bring her in, sit her down, and question her?’

Hurley gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m not a strong-arm type of guy. That’s why you’re here.’

‘But she hasn’t run to the authorities about your setup.’

‘Allison would never make a sudden or ill-placed accusation. Spend five minutes with her and you can see she’s simply a careful person, as most psychiatrists are. You can see how she is, we have videos of her interviewing the patients…’ He unlocked a desk drawer, opened it, froze.

‘What’s the matter?’ Groote asked.

‘I have backup DVDs of all our research – I keep them in here. They’re gone.’

Frost. Gone. The tightness came back to Groote’s chest. ‘But they’re only backups. You have the originals on the hard drive-’

‘That’s not the point. If Allison wanted to expose us, she’s got the proof on those DVDs.’

‘Maybe you simply misplaced them.’

‘No. I do a daily backup here, lock them up tight. I have the only key.’ Hurley’s voice rose in panic.

‘Is Allison here now?’

Hurley moused and clicked on his computer screen. A video window opened to show the three entrance and exit points from the hospital; it also displayed a log that recorded the usage of the staff’s electronic passkeys. ‘No, she’s not.’

‘Where might I find her?’

‘Probably at her office. On Palace Avenue, close to the Plaza.’

‘How long ago did she leave?’

Hurley clicked on the keyboard; two of the video windows stayed open, one showing Allison Vance walking out of the building; according to the timer, at ten that morning. The other video showed a young man, in patient scrubs, glancing over his shoulder, heading out a door. The timer read ten minutes ago.

‘Who’s that guy?’ Groote asked.

‘A patient. Nathan Ruiz. What the hell’s he doing with a pass-key? It’s showing him because the key he’s using is the same code as Allison’s… The guards must not have seen him leave.’

Groote drew his sidearm from under his jacket.

‘I don’t know how he got past the doors up here,’ Hurley said.

‘He’s the thief.’

‘Not this guy, he’s a total fuckup, and the patients don’t know about Frost,’ Hurley said. ‘I’ll handle him. You find Allison and see if she has those files.’

‘It’s not the end of the world, right? You still have the original research.’

Hurley’s tone was tight and frantic as he started to head down the hall, Groote following him. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Whoever took the research, they could give Frost to the FDA and blow us out of the water. No medicine for us to sell.’ He shook his head. ‘No medicine for your kid.’

Groote bolted past him.