The R.E.M. Project_A Thriller Read online

  “I hope so. Because you know what happens at three o’clock.”

  “Yeah, dude. The bastards are going down.”

  Chapter 33:

  Headlines

  Back at the Little Bear Motel, Donny and Fenton were preparing for the second stage of the operation. Out of the entire plan, this was the dicey part. It was on Claire to get into the facility; Paul to hijack the transmitter tower (with Fenton’s help); and Dawa to get them both in and out safely. Then, at precisely five minutes before three o’clock, Donny would take a dose of Ocula, lie on a bed surrounded by a shrine of everything they had on Skyline (a collection of employee photographs, background checks, facility blueprints . . . even a recording of a conference call between Kovic, Cline, and Ramírez), and enter into a lucid dream. Hopefully.

  Content overload, combined with monk-like focus, a unique genetic makeup, and the power of Ocula. It was the same way Donny had located Fenton Reed, so they both knew it could work. But, this time was different. This was the big game. No do-overs. No excuses. And if something went wrong, Donny knew he would essentially be leaving Paul and Claire hanging out to dry.

  The pressure was on, and the last thing Donny needed was an inquisitive kid testing his patience. “So can we go over what you need me to do just one more time?” Fenton asked.

  “Are you kidding me right now? We’re doing this thing in two minutes!”

  “Just sum it all up real quick.”

  Donny rolled his eyes. “Again, all I need you to do is to make sure there are no distractions. To make sure you’re quiet and the phones are quiet and everything around us is quiet, quiet, quiet.”

  “Even the recording?”

  “Obviously, NOT the recording!”

  “So, you want me to be quiet?” Fenton asked, a certifiable teenage smartass.

  Donny ignored him. “Just make sure nothing distracts me, okay?” He leaned up in bed and pulled a couple of tissues from the Kleenex box on the nightstand. He tore off little pieces, rolled them into little balls and stuffed them in his ears. Then he asked Fenton to hand him his headphones, motioning toward the pair lying on the desk. Fenton tossed them over. The headphones went on, and Donny lay back in the bed.

  “Now remember, when I’m done with the mantra I’ll raise my index finger off my chest. That’s the signal to walk over and place the pill in my mouth, then give me some water to wash it down. We need to keep movements to a minimum. Every thought in my head needs to be on the task at hand—not on this room or this motel or anything else that could lead to distractions. That means following through from start to finish with absolute silence. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, then.” He took a deep breath, checked the clock, then said, “Give Freeman the signal.”

  Fenton complied, radioing Paul and giving the go-ahead to flip the switch before signing off Channel 30 for the foreseeable future. Then he pulled up a chair and sat next to Donny. He pressed play on the recording and watched as Donny closed his eyes, crossed his arms back over his chest, and began the ritual:

  I know I am going to dream. I know I will see Kovic.

  I know I am going to dream. I know I will see Cline.

  Fenton’s lip curled, brows snapping together as watched the ritual. That’s it? That’s lucid dreaming? Just repeating the same shit over and over? He thought there would be more to it than that. But, when it came to mantras, the simpler the better. Anything extra, anything that could jump-start a racing mind, was a potential distraction.

  One simple mantra. One goal.

  Donny must’ve repeated the phrases thirty times, the monotony of the exercise losing Fenton’s attention fast. He blinked hard and tried to stay focused. Just when the lure of closing his eyes was becoming a hard temptation to resist, Donny raised his index finger.

  ***

  Claire sat in the holding cell across the table from Kovic as she watched him flip through a pocket-sized notepad in search of a blank page to scribble on. A little old school, she thought—especially for someone who likely had access to the latest 007 tech straight from the finest brains Langley had to offer. Then again, this was a field agent sporting a Casio watch and an Aerosmith T-shirt. Maybe there was a reason behind the low-tech approach; maybe he was afraid that being surrounded by outliers 24/7 would lead to short-circuiting cellphones and stopped watches. Or maybe he was just a little old school.

  Kovic waved to the two-way mirror—Cline and Ramírez watched and recorded from the other side—and the interrogation commenced.

  “Please tell us your name for the record,” Kovic said.

  Claire rolled her eyes and reluctantly played along. “Claire. Claire Connor.”

  “Ms. Connor, can you tell us who turned over the illegally-acquired Skyline files?”

  “Sorry, Kovic. Reporter’s privilege. I’m not revealing my sources. You should know that.”

  “Sources. So you’re saying there’s more than one?”

  “I’m not saying anything, Kovic. I have the information. That’s all that matters. Well, that and the fact that if I don’t get a call out by 7 p.m. tonight then this operation will be the lead-in story for all the Sunday news shows. Sunday papers, too”—Claire poked at Kovic’s dated wardrobe and interrogation methods—“You prefer the paper to the Internet, Kovic?”

  “Sometimes,” he answered without looking up, scribbling something on his pad. “So, tell me what you know about Paul Freeman.”

  “Freeman? What’s he got to do with any of this?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Claire. We know you two were together at the old facility, together on the flight out of San José, together in Atlanta . . . we also know he was pulled over earlier this week just outside of Hiouchi in northern California. Know anything about that?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because he was driving a car registered to a man named Antonio Gonzalez. Name ring a bell?”

  One of Alejandro’s smugglers, thought Claire. Quickly, “No, not at all.”

  Kovic knew she was lying. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You know what I think, Claire? I think you’ve been in contact with Paul Freeman all along. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were out there in the woods, popping Ocula pills and hoping he can get inside our heads, just like back in Costa Rica.” He looked into her face, full of doubt, as his eyes sharpened. “Is that it, Claire? Is that your big plan? Let Paul do the dreaming for you?”

  “Yeah, Kovic. Paul’s out there in the woods holding an Ocula-induced séance.” Mockingly, “That’s the big plan, all right!”

  “Where is he, Claire?”

  “Even if I knew, why would I ever tell you? And how can you even have the audacity to ask me a question like that? You already know Tanner went completely off the reservation bringing him into all this.”

  Kovic cocked his head. “I’m sorry?”

  “Paul worked for Tanner in the marketing department at Asteria. Tanner sent him to a Donny Ford seminar with the device you guys use to detect nearby outliers, and when Paul brought it back, Tanner knew he was one of them. That’s the reason he got kidnapped in the first place—wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The chair squeaked as Kovic leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. “You think Tanner hired Paul based on his résumé? Have you read his résumé?” Amused, he shook his head, even laughing a little on the inside. “Claire, Tanner didn’t hire Paul only to find out later that he was an outlier. He hired Paul because he already suspected he was an outlier.”

  It was clear Claire wasn’t following, so Kovic explained.

  “Paul’s brother, Alex. He was a participant in the original clinical trials held by the FDA spring of 2020. Once Tanner had a lock on the twelve outliers, he started digging into their families, too. He had this theory of heredity that presumed the genes responsible for the R.E.M. effect were likely to occur in family members as well, just like skin tone and hair color and every other gene we pass on f
rom one generation to the next. And in Freeman’s case, he was right.”

  Claire was stunned, and for a moment, speechless. She’d always assumed the Freeman brothers’ ties to Asteria were mutually exclusive: Alex on the consumer side, seeking a drug to help him sleep, with Paul on the corporate side, working to give consumers like his brother exactly what they wanted, one pill at a time. Claire kicked herself for failing to connect the dots. Perhaps she had gotten lost in the way Paul had told his side of the story. He’d always painted a picture of a bad coincidence—it had never occurred to Claire that Paul was only hired by Asteria to confirm some hypothesis Tanner had come up with.

  A hundred thoughts raced through her mind, but one in particular stood out more than any other:

  Michelle didn’t drug Paul. Tanner did.

  In retrospect, Claire knew it must have been all too easy. Slip him a pill here, or maybe even a liquid or an aerosol there. From nine to five, Monday through Friday, Paul and Tanner had occupied the same building, the same floor, giving the boss free rein over the new hire to experiment with him however he saw fit—while leaving Paul the Guinea Pig none the wiser.

  Finally, Claire asked, “Did Tanner find any other family members who were outliers?”

  “I know it’s only your journalistic nature, but you don’t get to ask the questions here,” Kovic said. “Besides, what Tanner did or didn’t do has no bearing on the situation at hand. We need to know . . . No, we have to know who all is involved here, who knows about Skyline.”

  Kovic read the cynicism in Claire’s eyes and got ahead of it. “This isn’t about a cover up, Claire. This is a matter of national security. If Ocula remains on the open market, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to harm Americans, but when. In all likelihood, there are already cases out there of murder and domestic violence and God knows what else that can be traced back to Ocula—we just haven’t made the connections yet. All of our data say that one-half of one percent of the general population carries the same R.E.M. gene as you, Freeman, Ford . . . Meanwhile, the CDC estimates that 60 million people suffer from sleep disorders. You don’t think a substantial portion of these people aren’t going to try the latest greatest drug to hit the market?”

  A briefcase propped against Kovic’s chair. He picked it up and flipped the latches open, tossing Claire a manila folder. “Go ahead, take a look. Those are yours to keep.”

  She dumped out the contents, and a flurry of newspaper clippings came to rest on the table in front of her. “I knew you were a newspaper man,” she said.

  “Just read them.”

  She turned a rectangular piece over (she highly doubted Kovic wanted her to see the weekend sale on all pork products running at the Piggly Wiggly) and read the headline:

  9 Dead, 12 Injured After Fire Roars Through Country Club

  Dayton, Ohio—Members of the Seneca Hills Country Club are still in shock after one of its own members allegedly started a fire that claimed the lives of nine members as of this press run. According to several eyewitness reports, 39-year-old Barbara Webb was seen lighting the curtains draped over the ballroom windows during a private event late Saturday night. So far, no motive has been found …

  “Strange,” she said.

  “It gets stranger,” said Kovic. “Keep reading.”

  Claire read another clipping:

  Harrowing Honeymoon Turns Deadly

  Tampa—What was supposed to be a honeymoon to remember turned deadly over the weekend, when 23-year-old Wade Bryant turned a knife on 22-year-old Erika Maddison-Bryant less than 24 hours after their wedding day. According to investigators, Bryant then turned the knife on himself, cutting his own wrists before passing away next to his bride in the honeymoon suite of the Tampa Ritz …

  Claire said, “This kind of shit happens all the time, Kovic. World’s a fucked-up place.” She sifted through the pile of clippings. Must have been two-dozen stories, maybe more. “How did you link this to Ocula?”

  “The government formulary. We’ve kept tabs on everyone who has been prescribed Ocula in the United States since the day it hit the open market. Some of those prescriptions were only filled once, putting those users on the list of former Ocula patients. When we started looking into why these patients were no longer filling their prescriptions, we took a closer look, only to find that the majority of them were deceased or incapacitated in some other way.”

  “Some other way?”

  “You read the first headline yourself, Claire. Not every Ocula victim dies. Some just end up in the burn unit at Dayton Medical.”

  A few major developments courtesy of the agent who was supposed to have her back in Costa Rica, and already Claire’s resolve was beginning to crack. Before entering the facility, Claire had known exactly what she had to do, and that involved doing everything in her power to take down Asteria and the CIA in one fell swoop. Now, she was confused. These were still the people who’d betrayed her south of the border; still the people responsible for the death of Aguilar; still an organization of professionals who lied for a living.

  Kovic also had a good point. Several, in fact. If everything they had on Asteria’s connection to the CIA were leaked tomorrow, it would be a national-security nightmare. Bringing down Asteria was one thing, but indicting the Central Intelligence Agency on such an epic scale would cause America and its allies to lose what little confidence they already had in the federal government overnight. It would be a nightmare scenario: One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world in bed with the CIA, performing illegal genetic experiments . . .

  The leaks would also do little (if anything) to get Ocula off the market. Claire hated to think she could ever cooperate with the same people responsible for Aguilar’s death—she didn’t do betrayal. Wasn’t in her blood. But, in the near-term, putting the CIA aside for the time being, at least until Ocula 1.0 was off the market, might be the best play.

  Maybe.

  Claire was just about to concede that Kovic might have had some valid concerns when she noticed it in the cup of water sitting on the table. A shimmer across the top, breaking the placid liquid like a spring wind across the surface of a lake. It was gentle at first, then the ripples grew, reminding her of a scene in her favorite sci-fi movie about dinosaurs stomping through a park and shaking everything from water cups to the poor souls caught in the grips of their gnashing teeth—only these ripples didn’t coincide with seven-ton steps. Instead, they were consistent. And they were getting bigger.

  Claire checked her watch: 3:07 p.m. Right on time. Soon, the noise followed. A loud hum, distant at first, like the roar of a jet taking off from an airport thirty miles away. It got closer, louder. Kovic noticed it, too, and looked up to see fine particles of dust from the ceiling tiles drifting down like slow-falling snow from above. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it until it was too late.

  And that’s when the screams started.

  A chorus of them, traumatic and agonizing, all coming from down the hall outside the interrogation room. Kovic went from conversational to high alert, like an anxious dog that had just heard a knock at the door. He kicked his chair out behind him, put hand to pistol, and stepped to the door. A small horizontal window reinforced with diamond-pattern wire was at eye level near the top of the entryway.

  Kovic peered out, but couldn’t see a thing. He turned to the two-way mirror, hands out in a kind of disbelief, and asked, “What the fuck’s going on out there, Cline?” An intercom hung from the wall above the window, but there was no answer.

  “Cline? Ramírez? Come on, guys. Tell me what’s going on here.” He looked back at Claire. She was way too comfortable with the events unfolding.

  “What in the hell is going on, Claire? You’d better tell me right now.”

  Claire shrugged. “Feels like an earthquake to me.”

  “Bullshit. Something’s going on. Something you’re not telling me.”

  She deadpanned. She wasn’t talking, and there was nothing Kovic could do abo
ut it. He turned back to the door and grabbed the knob, slowly turning it until the latch clicked. Then he looked back at Claire. “Don’t you even think about moving.”

  Some might have listened, but not Claire. She never was one to take orders. She watched him intently, ready to act, her eyes fixed on his fist gripping the doorknob. She braced herself for what was to come. It won’t last. Only be a second or two.

  The door opened, and Kovic screamed. An ungodly force of charged particles roared down the hallways and into the room, the high-pitched noise piercing his eardrums while some unseen energy pressed hot on his skin. His first reaction was to fall back into the safety of the room, to slam the door shut, to stay inside until this unknown catastrophe subsided.

  And he might have been able to do just that, had Claire not taken the initiative, waiting for Kovic to feel the full force of the electromagnetic radiation pouring into the hallway before jumping up to give him a push. One hard shove and Kovic slid across the linoleum floor and into the hall, far enough out of the way for Claire to get the door shut. She quickly grabbed the nearest chair and wedged the back under the doorknob, effectively locking Kovic out of the room.

  For a moment, she couldn’t see him through the horizontal window—something that came with the territory of being a short girl in a tall man’s world. She was used to it. What she wasn’t prepared for, however, was the look of horror on Kovic’s face the moment it shot up from the hallway floor and pressed against the horizontal mirror. The noise outside thundered down the hall; there was no way Claire was going to hear what he was saying.

  But she could read his lips. “I’M GOING TO DIE,” they said. “PLEASE . . . YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME OUT HERE!”

  “Drama queen.” Claire backed away from the door—the chair doing its part to keep Kovic and all the other bad things out—and watched the contorted face in the window. He wasn’t going to die: that was something Claire was sure of. Maybe a little deaf in the end, even a few burns, but nothing worse than a day at the beach without the sunscreen.