Hidden in Dreams (27 page)

But Larry Kroom knew they were intelligent and good-hearted. It was all there in his journals, Rachel told her.
Kroom’s agonizing, the love he felt for his boys, the helpless frustration. The lab results and animal testing had shown remarkable potential. To wait another two or three years until the clinical trials were completed would mean the drug would come online too late to have any impact on his children’s crucial teenage years.

So he did what many other parents would have done. He stole samples from the lab.

Larry Kroom started with the boy who was older by eight minutes, because he was the worst off and was showing alarming signs of growing violent. Most ADHD patients leveled off at the approach to puberty, but in his son’s case the symptoms were becoming increasingly severe, as though the only emotion he could freely express was rage. So he became SuenaMind’s first human test subject.

The change was overnight.

Within seventy-two hours, the boy was laughing again. And not in the manic rage-filled manner that had marked his former outbursts. The boy’s laugh was almost musical. In a week, he discovered the joy of reading. The scientist’s personal journals recounted the astonishment and joy both parents felt, emotions that had been absent from their home for what seemed like years.

Three months later, Larry Kroom administered the drug to his younger son. Again the change was drastic and immediate.

Then, two weeks later, Kroom noticed a different change. One that was far less welcome. And extremely worrying.

The younger boy lost his ability to filter suggestion from reality. The older son read the younger boy a story at bedtime, and the next morning the child treated the story as part of his reality, part of his overall worldview.

Larry Kroom was a trained psychologist as well as biomedical scientist. He knew the patterns of hypnotic abuse, when ideas
were force-instilled into the patients. The risk of manipulating a patient’s subconscious was one reason so many clinicians refused to practice hypnosis at all. In normal cases, any patient over the age of four or five had a subconscious strong enough to filter out what was genuinely false, or in opposition to the patient’s concept of self. Yet with some weaker patients, particularly those suffering from psychoses or showing evidence of schizoid tendencies, the risk was that any hypnotic suggestion would be adopted as truth.

Larry Kroom’s journals described in exact detail how his younger boy lost the ability to tell the difference between inserted truth—including stories told to him or seen in movies and television shows—from reality. Once he had the opportunity to sleep, and to dream, the boy woke up assuming the fiction was fact.

At first Kroom had suspected it was a side effect of the new drug. And so he took two weeks off of work, to remain with his son through the period that the initial dose remained active, so as to buffer the child from any such further psychic insertions. But his older boy continued to show astonishing progress. And his younger son’s behavior also improved. It was as though the drug was working,
despite
the side effect. And as was the case with most identical twins, the boys’ bloodwork was almost identical. Which led Kroom to wonder if perhaps the problem lay not with SuenaMind, but with the
combination
of his new drug with something else.

There were basically two different patterns to ADHD treatment in young patients. The two boys had alternated between them. A number of children showed best results by moving from one to the other, and side effects were minimized. At the point when Kroom had administered the new drug, the older boy was going off one medicine, while the other had already started on the second.

Kroom took his younger boy off the other drug.

The result was a total and immediate cessation of all side effects.

The two boys never looked back.

At this point, Rachel began weeping so hard she could no longer breathe, much less speak. When she finally regained control, she said, “Kroom took his findings to the company’s managing director. I checked. That man is now president of one of the banks involved in the One World scam.”

Elena found herself glad that one of them was capable of shedding tears. “Rachel, I hope you’re listening, because what I want to say to you is very important. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry. I apologize with all my heart.” Elena felt the band of sorrowful tension unwind from around her heart. “I distrusted you. I was wrong.”

The words helped restore Rachel to a semblance of calm. “My career is a sham. Trevor Tenning has duped me from the first day I entered the building.”

“SuenaMind is still a major breakthrough. The lab results and the help it gives children are all real. The side effect can be controlled. Your work is vital. None of this has been changed.”

“But they
used
me.”

“They used us both. Right now, I need you to
focus.
Can you do that?”

Rachel took a long breath. “Yes.”

“Good. Now I want you to call Reed Thompson and tell him everything you told me. He’s a friend and our ally in all this.” Elena read off Reed’s number. “Will you do that?”

Each moment drew Rachel further from the brink. “Yes. All right.”

“Good. Then I want you to gather up all those journals and go somewhere safe. Call when you arrive. Don’t phone me. My
cell isn’t safe. Ask Reed for a number you can use. Does anyone at SuenaMed know where you are?”

“Only my assistant, Reginald. I phoned him before I called you. I can’t go in today, I—”

Alarms of electric clarity went off in her head. “Rachel, gather the journals and get out of there
now
!”

29

E
lena tried to reach Reed, first on his cell and then at home. When the voice mail answered on both, she called his office and let it ring a dozen times and more. She then tried the university operator, who was clearly coming to the end of a very long shift. “Ma’am, nobody is ever in those offices this early on a Saturday.”

“I’ve tried his home, he’s not there.”

The operator stifled a yawn. “He must be on his way in.”

“Listen, you’ve got to help. This is an emergency.”

“Hold on, then. I’ll put you through to security.”

“No, that’s not—” But the operator was already gone. Elena paced to the closet and put back the clothes she had laid out for the day. When the security’s voice mail came on, she cut the connection. Elena checked the bedside clock, which read ten minutes to eight. Jacob should be arriving at any minute. She tried his phone, and was switched immediately to voice mail. She ended the call and threw the phone at her pillow.

Elena opened her bedroom door far enough to tell Dorothy, “I’ve got to forget the workout and head straight to the university.”

“Thought so. Personally, I never answer the phone in the morning, not until I’m ready to let the day in.”

Elena dressed in a blouse of light gray silk and a slate-gray gabardine skirt. And pearls. She had decided on the ensemble while still on the phone with Rachel. This day would require all the solemn authority Elena could muster.

Or so she thought.

She was buttoning up her cuffs when there was a knock on her door. Dorothy set down her mug, walked over, and checked through the front door’s spyhole. She turned to smile at Elena. “Looks like the beau who’s not your beau got here early.” She unlocked the door and said, “Always did like a man who knows how to be on time.”

Dorothy was caught by the door crashing back. She was slammed against the wall with such force it overturned the vase on Elena’s side table.

They had obviously planned their entry to the max. This much was clear in Elena’s first milliseconds of shock and fear and dismay. They powered in together, their movements precise and deadly.

The taller of the two bodyguards held Jacob as a human shield. Jacob’s eyes were the only part that moved of their own volition. He watched Elena with a look of visceral terror, fathomless and bleak.

The man directly behind the puppet master was a fireplug. Elena recognized him as the bodyguard who had cleared away the reporters as she had entered SuenaMed’s headquarters. He aimed around Jacob and his mate, and shot Dorothy with a Taser.

A hallway connected the kitchen and the bedroom and the living-dining room to the front door. The foyer held a narrow side table and a chair. From the doorway it was possible to look down the hall, past the kitchen entry and through the living-dining
room to the porch and the sparkling waters beyond. Elena watched the policewoman’s seizure from the bedroom doorway, frozen with dread, until Reginald Pierce aimed a second Taser at Elena.

She slammed the bedroom door shut and raced to the window by her desk. A metal plate kept the window from sliding more than ten inches. Elena hefted the desk chair and threw it at the glass just as the door splintered. The fireplug of a guard did not so much break open the door as turn it into kindling. The entire frame broke apart in his fury.

Reginald stepped into the room, took aim, and said, “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

Nothing could have prepared her for the experience of being Tasered. The electric current did not hurt at first. The shock was too great to permit pain. Her entire body arched at an impossible angle. Only after Elena toppled onto her desk and then fell to the floor, after her lungs unlocked, when she drew her first screeching breath, did the agony come.

30

T
hey lashed the three prisoners to chairs from the dining table. They took no chances. They used four plastic ties per person. Reginald paced in front of Elena while the two guards bound and positioned her according to his exact instruction. They strapped her wrists to the base of the chair back, which cocked her elbows at odd angles and left her feeling even more vulnerable. Which may have been Reginald’s intention.

Dorothy was settled into the chair closest to the door. The policewoman had been Tasered a second time. Reginald had done this clearly as a warning. Dorothy looked at Elena but could not keep her eyes from tracking upward as her body spasmed again. Reginald called Dorothy
the cop.
“Make sure the cop can’t budge.”

Reginald watched Elena. He knew when the Taser’s aftershock dimmed enough for her thinking to clear. He leaned in tight and said, “One move and I shoot you again. You want another spark, Dr. Burroughs?”

“No.” Definitely not.

“Then stay still and wait your turn.” He remained like that,
tight in her face, while they fastened Jacob to a third chair. Reginald made no attempt to hide his pleasure at having her under his control.

“The bonds on my wrists are too tight,” Elena complained.

“Tough.”

“My hands hurt.”

“Not for long.” He glanced over. “You about done?”

There was the sound of another plastic tie ratcheting shut. “That’s it.”

“Bring in the gear.” He turned back to Elena. “You couldn’t just take the payoff and enjoy yourself like any sane person. No. You had to make waves. You had to keep asking questions.”

The fireplug opened the front door and brought in two black canvas grips. Reginald pointed at the floor to his right, where Elena could see what was happening, and went on, “Curiosity will soon kill the psychologist. Both of them. Pity.”

“We know everything,” Elena said.

“I’m sure you think you do.” He waved at the docile bodies positioned to either side of her. “We’ve given your friend Jacob a sedative spray. It’s another of the new products in the pipeline, all tied to what we’re going to do with SuenaMind. This baby is a game changer. But you already know that, don’t you?”

Reginald accepted a pair of surgical gloves from the bodyguard. He fitted them on and slipped an atomizer spray from his pocket. “Where was I going with this?”

The fireplug shrugged. “SuenaMind?”

“The sedative. Right. Give the cop a dose.” As the guard pulled an atomizer from his pocket and sprayed Dorothy’s face, Reginald went on, “One whiff of this new stuff and the patient is pliable as plastic. Got quite a kick, so I’m told. Makes the toughest go all happy-sappy. But once the dose is over, they don’t remember a thing. Based on those new anesthetics doctors use for in-office procedures.” He held up a second atomizer. “Then we
give them the SuenaMind and the other ADHD drug together in a second spray. After that, and we’re good to go.”