Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

'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