Dead Wrong (8 page)

Maybe he should’ve done something—although he wasn’t sure what—when Russell started to complain about the memories. But no, he’d blown Russell off, figuring the problem would simply go away. It didn’t. Then, two months ago, a request for a copy of Russell’s medical records landed on his desk to be sent to McCarthy’s office. He blew that off too. Two weeks later another request arrived. Again he ignored it, figuring fuck McCarthy.

A request for Baker’s files followed.

Meaning McCarthy was working up both patients. Christ, both of them!

Any other doctor evaluating those two patients would’ve thrown up his hands and figured they were loony. But to stumble across two patients with the same bizarre symptoms would surely pique McCarthy’s interest. If you see one patient with strange symptoms, it’s an undiagnosed oddity. But then another patient comes along with similar symptoms, it’s a fucking syndrome. He knew McCarthy well enough to expect the self-righteous prick to dig until he put it together. Once he did that, he’d blow the whistle. So Wyse wasn’t going to let that happen.

Again, he started to dial but hesitated.
Calm down. Don’t let Cunningham hear you like this.

At the wet bar, he flicked on the black Krups coffeemaker that his secretary readied each morning with his special Starbucks blend, then entered his private bathroom of ebony granite and brushed nickel fixtures.

After showering, he donned a clean set of scrubs. Considering there was no other surgery scheduled until Monday morning, wearing scrubs was unnecessary. But he believed they portrayed the right image to the residents, making him appear more like “one of them” instead of a white-shirts-andtie professor.

Armed with coffee and a PowerBar he settled into his desk and eyed the phone and the message beside it, rubbed his forehead, drummed his fingers. Had Cunningham sold the concept? Why wouldn’t they leap at the opportunity? Well, because … Jesus, he didn’t want to even think about it. He swiveled around to the magnificent view of Queen Anne Hill.

How in the hell had it come to this? A distinguished career now at the mercy of a handpicked group of CIA nerds and a two-bit army colonel. He hated Cunningham about as much as he hated the DARPA money. Initially, it seemed like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a mother lode to be mined without fear of tapping out. To realize how naive he’d been initially now doubly pissed him off. Even the village idiot knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So how had he been so stupid to not see the downside to the deal? Cunningham now controlled him the way heroin controls the junky. Shaking his head in disgust at himself, he dialed.

A moment later: “Cunningham.”

“It’s me. What happened?”

“Let me call you back on a secure line.”

Fuck! A secure line? That couldn’t be good news.
He kept the phone in hand and connected before the first ring finished. “What happened?”

Cunningham said, “We ran into some snags.”

Wyse swallowed. “Snags? What kind of snags?” An ice cube crystallized in his gut.

“They love the idea, but they see a few problems.”

The ice cube grew. “What problems?”

“They’re not stupid, Bert. The same reason you want out is the same reason they don’t want in.”

The gut cube grew so cold it was now burning. “They’re the agency, for Christ’s sake. They can do the work anywhere they damn well please, Afghanistan or fucking Antarctica, doesn’t matter, anywhere where they can make the rules. I can’t.” He realized the last words had come out as whiney and blamed Cunningham for making him sound like that.

“There’s the ethics issue.”

They’d discussed this particular point multiple times during rehearsals. “Ethics? Are you fucking kidding me? What about the ethics of flying a plane of innocent people into the World Trade Center to kill three thousand more innocent people? Don’t talk to me about ethics. Can’t they see the good this will do?”

“Bert, get off your soapbox. It’s me you’re talking to. It all boils down to the potential for blowback. Nothing more.”

Cunningham’s tone verged on condescending, Wyse thought. But instead of the snide comment on the tip of his tongue, he said, “Blowback? Tell me you’re joking.”

“Don’t give me that ‘I’m amazed’ routine. We discussed this, what, a couple hundred times already? These guys are affected by the political winds just as much as any other government bureaucrat. No one within fifty miles of the Lincoln Memorial wants to risk getting their ass fried. You know damn well there’s a huge leap between PTSD and the war on terror. Ever since the whole water boarding brouhaha, there’s been increased sensitivity in, shall we say, interrogation techniques.”

What was he talking about? As long as his implants yielded a bulletproof way of obtaining pristine intelligence why should anyone give a rat’s ass? So what if the present subjects didn’t know they’d been implanted? Other than a few harmless memories, they came though the procedure totally intact. Besides, how could Wyse and Cunningham be expected to do classified research if the subject knew the all details? Fucking ridiculous to say there were issues.

Hell, if the CIA, FBI, or whatever, had used torture to learn about the 9/11 attacks before they happened so they could prevent them, would people in their right mind argue that torture wasn’t worth it? Hell no! So what’s the big ethical dilemma here?

“That’s it? They’re worried about political blowback?” Wyse asked.

“No. They also worry that your numbers are too small to convincingly prove it works. They want longer follow-up on your implanted subjects too. In other words, before they stick their necks out, they want assurance that it works without any problems. And I’ve got to tell you that although the Russell interview is convincing, it sure as hell didn’t help
us
any.”

“Then they missed the whole point. Need I remind you that you agreed to use the Russell interview? It’s a convincing demonstration precisely because ninety-nine percent of married men aren’t going to describe strangling a goddamn hooker to death while boning her. I assume you emphasized that point to your little group of choir boys?”

“Of course. I’m just telling you how it played.”

Wyse was seething now.

“And that,” Cunningham continued, “brings us back to the McCarthy problem.”

“Wait, we haven’t finished this topic yet. Answer me this, do you think they’re going to buy it or not?”

“Truthfully, I don’t know. Eventually. Maybe. But I didn’t push it because I didn’t want to appear too eager. At this point my best strategy is to lobby each member of the committee until I can get solid support. Right now, we’re not even close.”

“What kind of timeline we talking about?”
Fuck! This was all McCarthy’s fault
.

“How should I know? Look, just do your job, and let me do mine. Do you understand this concept?”

“But you
will
work on it. And work it hard?”

Cunningham said, “Hey look, I have just as much at stake in this as you. Maybe even more.”

The fuck you do!
“Maybe even
more
?” Wyse barked a sarcastic laugh. “What the hell do you have on the line? Another star on your cap? This blows up, you still have a nice fat pension. Me? I’ll have nothing.” He caught himself before letting slip about the overdue mountainous debt.

Silence.

Wyse managed to reign in his emotions. “Sorry. I interrupted. What were you going to say about McCarthy?”

“Apparently he was called into surgery early this morning, so he wasn’t in the office when it opened. But I’ve been assured matters are being taken care of now.”

W
YSE HAD DEVELOPED a fascination in the Nobel Prize in grade school. Not the peace prize and the other pantywaist social ones, but the hardcore medals for physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine. The appeal wasn’t their academic or intellectual significance; it was the fame bestowed to the recipient. Not rock star, Brett Favre, or Alex Rodriguez type fame. Rather, a tuxedo-clad, distinguished fame. Or perhaps respectful adoration more aptly described it.

By senior year in high school he was an encyclopedia of facts about obscure winners, like Gabriel Jonas Lippmann, winner of the 1908 prize in physics for a method of color photography based on the phenomenon of interference that became known as the Lippmann plate.

By college he realized the odds of winning a prize were miniscule. No one ever set out in life to win the prize like some do for becoming president of the United States or winning on
American Idol
. The usual winner spent a career pushing the horizons of a phenomenon they had stumbled onto early. Only years later, sometimes even posthumously, did the Stockholm committee call with the good news. Winning depended on happenstance and a lot of luck. Like Bill Gates and Microsoft.

On the other hand, there were tangible things one could do to increase the odds of being recorded in the annals of history. Like the lottery advertisements preach, you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. For starters, one should be in a likely field. High school English teachers don’t win a Nobel Prize in medicine. So Wyse narrowed the choices. Not being able to handle complex math made chemistry and physics out of the question. Medicine became the only realistic option. Not that that was a chip shot either.

The subject that interested him most was memory, but that particular topic had been mined too many times to still hold Nobel-winning potential. So, if the prize was out, the next best road to fame was to have a disease named after him, like Alzheimer did. Another option was to devise a kick-ass treatment like the Whipple procedure. But, he didn’t have an inventive gene in his body.

He figured no one became famous by being a family doctor working thirty hours a day in Butt Fuck, North Dakota. You needed to specialize. And do so in a big city. Although he started med school without a specialty interest, he knew it’d be some sort of surgeon. The simplicity, glamour, and adrenaline rush of trauma appealed to his naive sense of drama, as did neurosurgery’s cachet as an elite specialty.

And there was the answer: Combine the two. Become a trauma neurosurgeon.

Sure, medicine held a fascination, but not as much as business. Market opportunities, especially. He had a knack for that. Making it a natural to combine neurosurgery with business.

Perfect. But where was the opportunity, the untapped disease?

Spinal cord tumors? Tragic, but not a big enough market to consider.

Lumbar disc disease? A huge market but already trampled to death by med-tech companies.

Head trauma? Profit margins too thin.

Posttraumatic stress disorder? Whoa, that was huge. And the really appealing thing was, there weren’t any effective treatments. So there it was: his calling.

Numerous times when asked why a neurosurgeon would devote a career to a nonsurgical problem he spouted some drivel about the personal agony PTSD inflicted on its victims, but the unstated answer was, he would
make
it a surgical disease. The concept was amazingly simple: The memory of the traumatic event triggered acute symptoms. Localize that specific memory within the brain and remove it, thereby removing the symptoms. Exactly the approach neurosurgeons use to treat some forms of epilepsy. Wyse believed in the elegantly simple logic. And guess what? Most great ideas appear so simple that the moment one hears them, one says, “Why didn’t I think if that?”

And now McCarthy was sticking his nose into the medical history of two of his patients. Given enough information, McCarthy would figure it out. Once that happened, that bastard would try to destroy his one big chance at fame. Wyse would make sure he never got the chance to interfere.

M
CCARTHY HEARD THREE rapid thumps quickly followed by a deep guttural groan behind him. He stopped crawling to listen harder, expecting to hear movement from Washington. Instead, he heard a Sikes yell, “Washington. Listen up. I got the sombitch.”

Washington didn’t answer.

Hmmm, a ploy to trick him into moving and giving away his position? But that groan, so real, so full of agony—and those thumps so familiar. Then it clicked: He’d heard those thumps when Washington shot Maria.

Jesus, had Sikes accidentally … No, it couldn’t be.

He cocked his head to listen harder but only heard water trickling through a nearby pipe and the humming of the same fluorescent light fixture. The passage he just crawled through remained only dark shadows and no movement. The back of his head prickled, urging him to get going in spite of being afraid of a trap.

“Hey, Elroy. Sound off.” Sikes again.

No answer.

Sikes sounded what? Angry? Concerned? Whatever it was, it struck him as genuine. Something
had
happened. Okay, so now what? Keep moving in the same direction or double back? Instinct said to move as far away as possible. Logic told him that Washington’s gun was probably not more than fifteen feet away. If the man was injured or dead, could he retrieve it before Sikes did?

He crawled back to the right-angle turn and cautiously poked his head around the corner enough to see Washington lying face down and motionless, right arm draped over the same pipe that had ripped Tom’s pants. He stretched out and tapped Washington’s hand. The man didn’t move. Tom quickly grasped the wrist. Flaccid. He felt for a pulse but felt none. More confident now, he slid forward enough to do the same with Washington’s neck. No carotid pulse either. The man was seriously dead.