Dead Wrong (44 page)

“No, but you’re going to tell me when I get there. Then you’re going to stay the hell away and let me handle this. You’re in a parking lot?”

Bingo
. He’d get his chance to watch. “Yes.”

“Where?”

Wyse explained how to find it.

“Doctors Hospital is what, maybe three blocks away? I’ll be there in whatever time it takes to walk. Probably be faster than trying to find parking at this hour.”

Wyse dumped the cell in his pocket and glanced back down the tunnel, considered checking on Hamilton, blew a hard breath, and dried his palms with his scrub shirt.
Fuck! Sikes said to stay. What am I, a fucking poodle
? He wiped his hands again.

W
YSE’S FILE CABINET turned out to be a hell of a lot easier to bust open than the damned fire doors. Had only one locked drawer, which narrowed down the choices of where to start searching for the sensitive files. McCarthy set the Sony camera for close-ups, grabbed a random page from a folder, and focused. Even when squinting he couldn’t read the print on the small screen so snapped the shot anyway then used the zoom feature on the viewer to look at the detail of the picture. Yeah, all the typing was there. And if you enlarged it even more—piece of cake with Photoshop.

He scanned the dividers, pulling out files he thought were relevant. After dumping them into a pile, he sat on the floor cross-legged and started sorting and taking shots.

S
ARAH GREW INCREASINGLY restless, making it impossible to wait any longer. She stood, but now didn’t know where to go or what to do. Tom’s instructions were to wait fifteen minutes. But fifteen minutes from when? From the time of the call? Then what? Go upstairs? She’d been so damn nervous about getting caught that she hadn’t really concentrated on the instructions. Crap! Go help Tom, or continue to lookout? Look out for what? Wyse was long gone. Oh crap city! Waiting here was unbearable. Besides, what if Tom needed help? She dumped the cup of tasteless coffee in the trash bin and started for the elevators.

A big hand grabbed her arm. “Ma’am.”

She spun around, coming face-to-face with a security guard. A big black guy with a receding hairline and yellow fat in his eyes. Wyse stood to the guard’s right, eyeing her with a smirk. She jerked her arm free. “What!”
Call Tom. Wyse knows
.

“May I ask what you’re doing here?”

Sarah reached in her purse for the cell phone.

The guard raised his voice. “Ma’am, hand out of your purse, please.”

She raised the hand, opting now for righteous indignation. “You afraid I’m going to pull a gun? Jesus, how ridiculous.”

The guard asked, “May I see your ID?”

“It’s in my purse. That what I was reaching for.”
Asshole
.

“Go ahead, but do it slow.”

She flashed her Doctors Hospital ID. “I’m a resident. I work here.”

“Yes, ma’am. What service?”

Another smirk from Wyse.

“Psychiatry.”

The guard said, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

M
CCARTHY MARVELED AT Wyse’s work. If he were not so furious with the man, he’d have to admit the work bordered on brilliant. Not only did he understand what Wyse was doing, but also
why
he was doing it. Simple enough: money and fame. Two age-honored motivations.

McCarthy now had evidence that Baker, Russell, and eight other patients had unknowingly become human guinea pigs in a classified research study to demonstrate the feasibility of transplanting small cores of brain from one person to another. In addition, it was hoped that if the transplants were viable, they would actually transfer memories from the donor to the recipient.

Head trauma patients requiring emergency surgery were the donors. PTSD patients seeking relief from intolerable symptoms served as recipients. None of the patients were informed of the experiment, so of course none had consented to become subjects.

DARPA funded the work. The assumption was that if this initial experiment proved feasible, a larger, more in-depth study would be conducted. This next phase would use suspected terrorists as donors. The recipients—inmates of military prisons—would be offered reduced sentences for agreeing to be recipients of the transplants.

Although the exact mechanism for laying down and storing long-term memories is not entirely understood, evidence suggests that the process involves changing short-term memories from electrical signals between neurons into stable proteins stored in neurons. It would be similar to storing a Word file in a computer’s memory to the hard disk.

To remain alive, brain requires oxygen and glucose supplied by blood. However, small pieces can be kept alive by diffusion if placed in an oxygen-and glucose-rich solution. Wyse had been taking small pieces of temporal lobe—a brain region noted for storing memories—from trauma patients undergoing emergency surgery. He kept these pieces alive until they could be implanted into PTSD patients.

Transplanting these plugs from one patient to another wasn’t such a big deal—tissue exchanges have been done for years. The challenge is to force the transplanted neurons to make new, functional connections with the recipient brain. Wyse had apparently solved this problem by using a special combination of growth factors in the implant bed.

The only way to prove that the transplanted tissue actually functioned was if the recipients began experiencing memories that could only have come from the donor. The one major problem that Wyse hadn’t anticipated was that some of these memories might be upsetting to the recipients. Baker and Russell, for example.

McCarthy snapped another photo and shook his head in disgust.

B
AM
.

McCarthy jumped, looked up.
What was that?

Shit, a door slammed
.
Oh man
,
here we go!

He jumped up on his feet and headed for the office door, Washington’s gun in hand. He reached the jamb and edged his line of sight around it. Warren Sikes stood beside the reception desk, staring at him with a hateful expression. It only took a second before Sikes’s face blossomed into a wide grin.

“Well, son of a mother bitch. Look who we got here.”

Tom aimed the gun. “You come down that hall, I swear to God I’ll shoot.”

Sikes raised a gun and aimed at Tom. “The fuck you will.”

One second later splinters of wood flew from the jamb above his head. Tom ducked, slammed the door, snapped home the dead bolt, and glanced around frantically for something to barricade the door with. Chairs, a couch, a couple tables that would be of little use. He saw nothing of substance other than Wyse’s desk, but that was too heavy to move. But it could at least be a barrier to slow down a bullet. He ran to it and lifted one side until the entire desk fell over, crashing onto its front. He crouched behind it and aimed the gun at the door where Sikes would enter.

He remembered the camera on the floor by the folders, between the desk and the door. It now contained proof that he
was
stealing classified information. He sprinted around the desk, grabbed it, and returned to the desk just as something crashed against the door, almost ripping it from the hinges.

McCarthy popped out the camera’s memory card and slipped it into his wallet, and threw the camera back at the folders.

Another deafening impact and the doorjamb splintered. Sikes yelled, “Goddamn, McCarthy, you’re one fucking dead man. You know that, don’t you!”

Intense tingling burrowed into the base of Tom’s tailbone. He checked to make sure the safety on the pistol was off. There was no safety.

Another impact and the door burst open. “McCarthy, I’m talking to you.”

Tom sighted over the desk but the doorway remained empty as the room became eerily silent. The overhead lights flickered out. He glanced at the wet bar, saw the red LED on the coffeemaker out too, and figured Sikes must’ve cut the power.

“McCarthy, you are
not
gettin’ outta here alive. You understand that, don’t you, boy?” Sikes’s redneck twang was becoming thicker now.

What about Sarah? Was she still downstairs? Had they caught her?

Call 9-1-1? He picked the phone off the floor, thinking it’d be better than his cell because landlines have automatic caller ID, letting them know the call’s origin. He pressed on but the line was dead.

Sikes yelled, “Fair warning asshole. I’m coming for you.”

Tom yelled, “Listen, Sikes, you’re making a huge mistake. The classified material thing is all bullshit. Wyse made it up. It never happened. You try to kill me and you’re in a heap of trouble.”

Silence.

“My lawyer knows it’s bullshit. So does Tony Cassera. Know who he is? He’s an investigative reporter. So, the word’s out. They’ll prove this is all bullshit. You kill me and you’re totally fucked. Understand what I’m telling you?”

“Got me a very sensitive pigshit meter, McCarthy. And you just pegged it. Ooo weee, you fuckers are all the same. Deny, deny, deny.” He mimicked a woman’s voice: “Oh, I’m innocent. I didn’t do nothing wrong.” Then, back to normal: “But I know different. You’re a traitor. You killed my partner. You deserve to die so guess what, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. I will personally make sure of it.”

McCarthy licked his lips, glanced around for Sikes. Shit, where was he? His voice seemed to be coming from all directions. “Killed your partner? How’d you figure that?”

“You tricked him with the beeper. That makes you responsible.” A flashlight angled in low from the doorway, swept the room, clicked off.

Tom realized Sikes’s strategy: locate him by sound. Even though he knew to stay silent, he
had
to at least try to reason with him. “Is that why you dragged him down out of the ceiling? So you could take responsibility for pulling the trigger?”

“The ball started way before that. If you hadn’t been dickin’ around in government property, we never would’ve been there in the first place.”

“Listen to me, Sikes. Who said I took them? Cunningham?”

“How would you know about Colonel Cunningham if you’re innocent?” Sikes’s voice came from a different direction now and McCarthy realized Sikes had made it into the office and was edging closer.

“Sounds like one of those Sunday school arguments, Sikes. Goes like this: Since you can’t be sure God doesn’t exist, you’d better cover your ass and believe, because otherwise, you’re condemned to hell. You weren’t trained by the Jesuits, were you?” He listened hard for Sikes’s voice to see where it came from, but he didn’t answer.

McCarthy wiped sweat from his eyes and fought to slow his breathing. Where the hell was he, outflanking him? He glanced to either side but only saw shadows in the weak city light.

“Who’d you give the documents to? Who’s your controller?” Sikes’s voice came from the right this time. Closer.

McCarthy aimed and fired. Glass shattered. Had he hit a window?

“You’re really testing my patience, boy. Keep fucking with me I’ll just kill you and be done with it.”

McCarthy squeezed off another round.

Sikes yelled, “Going to start counting. When I hit five you’re one fucking dead man. And when that happens it won’t make a shitload of difference to you what I think. Run that one up your Jesuit pigshit theology flagpole.”