The Omega Point

His stomach was sharp with acid, his mind racing. He needed a gun, he needed a bodyguard, but how to tell who was reliable?

Then he realized that somebody was in the room. He turned. A lovely young woman had entered and was standing in the doorway, silently watching him.

“Hello.”

“I’m Katie Starnes.”

That was to be their only introduction.

“Miss Starnes, I want a list of all the other members of the board. And I want us to start trying to get in touch with them immediately.”

She stared at him.

“Please!”

“Dr. Ford, there are no other members of the board. Mrs. Denman—she’s the board.”

“That’s impossible!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then get hold of her secretary, her accountant, whoever you can locate. I need to talk to anyone I can!”

“We only have the one number.”

“That can’t be true!”

“We only have the one number!”

“What about her bank? Call her bank, call her lawyer!”

She shook her head, her eyes full of fear. “We only have the one number, I’m sorry. Security here—”

“Is very damn tight but very damn poor!”

And what were his alternatives now?

That, at least, was one question with a perfectly clear answer: he had no alternatives. He was trapped.

DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: ONE

I have never been so scared in my life, so confused in my life, so apprehensive in my life. I’d take mood regulators but they’re out of supply, and anyway, I can’t afford to lose whatever pitiful edge I may have.

The clinic is full of guns, and I have been issued a weapon. It’s a compact thing, a Beretta. Can I use it? I don’t know, I’ve never shot a gun in my life.

I tell myself that I don’t know enough to matter, that I’d never need to use the gun or the cyanide, but then I look into the well of my own mind, and I know that there is amnesia there, and suspect that a skilled interrogator could break it. Psychosomatic amnesia is nothing more than a refusal to access certain memories, which remain intact beneath the surface.

How, without Mrs. Denman, do I repair my broken classmates, not to mention find them in the first place? There isn’t any literature on the induction of psychosis—at least, in the public domain. Probably reams of it in the classified world.

I am keeping up as best I can with outside events, but communications are sporadic. For example, the Internet has been intermittent for days and so far cell phone coverage has not returned since this morning. Given that they’re so entangled with the Internet, landlines are unreliable. In the past, they survived all but the most extreme catastrophes. No more.

In a world going out of control, an organization like this is highly vulnerable. We are suffering every kind of shortage, including drugs. For example, we have no atypical antipsychotics left. No clozapine, no risperidone, no nothing. Because of the youth of most of our patients, the lack of Risperdal is particularly distressing. We have Xanax, but that’s hardly adequate.

Many of the patients I have met display very structured, relentlessly typical symptoms. They’re like actors who have been captured by their roles. I suppose that this is induced psychosis.

It’s not that they all exhibit the same symptoms or should receive the same diagnosis—but there is a strange by-the-book quality about them, as if they’d stepped right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

As conditions deteriorate, what do I do with patients who I know to be imprisoned by artificially induced mental illness? What if the death of Mrs. Denman means that we will never get the information we need to draw people out of their psychoses?

It’s late, and auroras are appearing, even this far south. The sun must be literally blazing for this to happen. They are a bizarre emerald green and flickering like a broken lightbulb. Across the room, the shadows are deep, and I dread going through them to get to my bedroom.

And why should I? I don’t sleep, how can I?

My head is on the block. I await the stroke of the axe.

3. MACK THE CAT

Michael Graham—who had called himself Mack the Cat ever since he came to be nicknamed “el Gato” by his colleagues at the Mexico City station—drew on the notepad that the doctors had agreed not to look at—but, of course, did… as he expected them to. If he was supposed to be crazy, he needed to exhibit symptoms, and doctors loved drawings.

He was encouraged by the ease and success of the Denman operation, which had trapped these bastards like a maze full of rats. She’d been a fool to be so controlling that their whole operation depended on her.

Buried in this place as he was, it was easy to forget that he had been assigned to the Acton Clinic, not committed to it. He was a specialist in stealth, and this was not only a place of interest for his superior, General Wylie, it was packed with exotic security. So he’d been given a false past that would allow him entry, and sent here to find what the general needed.

He tried to be professional and dispassionate, doing his work with clarity and efficiency. But he could not help hating these arrogant people. Filthy half-breeds all, chosen by that obscene fool Herbert Acton to represent the common man.

The common man was the goddamn problem. Blood is what counts, and this was the time to save the best human blood. Let the common man die; he’d shown himself to be a weak, ignorant fool.

The Acton Clinic had looked easy to deal with, but this was among the most difficult situations he had ever confronted, and despite the success of the Denman operation, he was still having trouble making progress understanding exactly what they were doing here—and therein, of course, lay the key. They had a means of survival, or believed that they did. But what was it?

Every night he got an increasingly urgent demand for that information from General Wylie.

He sat beneath the apple tree that grew near the enormous oak at the edge of the grounds, his back against the sweating bricks of the wall, in the shade of the oak and the scent of apple blossom.

The sky was a shimmering electric yellow, and last night the auroras had been intense. So the sense of urgency around here was right. Time was running out.

He was supposed to be not only crazy but dangerous, so he had a minder, Sam Taylor. He sat under the tree drawing a glyph of a tzitzimitl, a skeleton demon of the stars that governed the sun at times like this. Death star. Everyone in the world by now was well aware of the fact that this present disaster had begun to unfold during the night of December 21, 2012, and people were obsessed with the Mayan and Aztec religions, and with their calendars and their prophecies. So he was just another stupid patient, chewing the fad.

A lot of people had suspected that Herbert Acton had possessed some sort of secret beyond his uncanny skills as a speculator. He had been approached by occultist J. P. Morgan and by John D. Rockefeller, by