The Nirvana Plague (30 page)

Karen sat there on the filthy floor, holding on to the bars, her head spinning.

Time passed. It must have passed, because things would suddenly be different. Cellmates disappeared. New ones took their places. The cell grew more crowded. She found herself sitting on the bench instead of the floor.

Now and then, something would bring her attention back to the television. Newsline was giving IDD wall-to-wall coverage. If anything else was going on in the world, you had to go elsewhere to find it. The clip of Roger’s interview was repeated at least once an hour. Whenever it came on she’d find herself standing at the bars again, watching her husband dancing and dodging around the foolish doctor. The devil doctor. The traitor doctor. And when it came to the place where her husband roared his laughter at the demon’s silly antics, it always made her cry.

In a small windowless room, clinically white and clean, in Patient Unit A of the Abrams facility, Roger Sturgeon, dressed in orange patient scrubs, sat alone astride a plastic chair beside his bed. He wasn’t doing anything in particular. There wasn’t anything to do. No books, no television, no sound. Now and then his head wobbled slightly and drooped, then he’d blink and recover, but his blink was slow, lethargic.

Marley, in lime green scrubs, entered the airlock outside Roger’s room. As the outer glass door slid shut behind him, he studied his patient through the inner glass door. A security camera watched them both from a glass dome in the ceiling of the airlock.

Roger heard the hiss of the doors and looked up slowly, vaguely.

Marley nodded.

Something Marley could credit as a smile appeared in Roger’s face.

The outer door shut and sealed. The release pad on the inner door changed from red to green. Marley tapped it and the door slid open with a sigh. Marley stepped into the room. The door closed again behind him.

“Good morning, Roger,” he said.

Roger’s eyes focused on him a little less distantly. The effort it cost him to do this was evident.

Marley came round the bed and sat down in the other chair in the room. A small white plastic table stood between them.

“How’s the arm?”

Roger did not respond. They’d removed his cast a couple of weeks ago. The muscle tone was slowly returning.

“I have some good news,” Marley said, “and some not so good news. Which would you like to have first?”

For a moment, Roger still did not react. Then, suddenly, he seemed to be taken with the realization that he’d been spoken to, and he formed an answer: “No news,” he said. “Mmm. No news is good news.”

“I’ve decided to take you off medication, Roger.”

Roger nodded listlessly, and grunted an acknowledgement. “Mm.”

There was a drop of drying white spit on the corner of his mouth.

“That was the good news,” Marley continued. “The not so good news is that you’re going to be here a while longer yet. We’re both going to be here a while longer.”

“Mm,” Roger grunted, just as weakly as before.

“I’m sorry about that, Roger. We don’t have any choice.”

“Mm.”

“I know you don’t want to have the meds. I want to see how you do now without them.”

Roger studied him vaguely.

“Do you understand?”

Roger seemed to freeze while he processed the question.

Marley waited for him to answer.

Finally, Roger, making an effort of concentration, nodded his head awkwardly. “Yes,” he said.

“Good,” Marley said. “We’re also going to be meeting more than we have been, for the next week or so. I hope it will help you shake off the effects of the drugs.”

Marley waited, but Roger made no response.

“All right, Roger. Try to get some rest. Also, drink plenty of water. It’ll help.”

Marley stood to leave.

“Home,” Roger said to Marley’s knees, then, slowly, looked up. Everything he did was a few seconds late.

“Not yet,” Marley said. “Not yet. Sorry.”

Marley stepped into the corridor from Roger’s room, the airlock door slid shut behind him and sealed. Marley headed to the next patient’s room.

Dr. Fred Peters lay curled up under a white sheet on his white bed. His clawed hand lay cradled in his good hand. Now and then he twitched very slightly. Marley studied him through the glass doors, hesitant to key in. He hated to wake him. He thought he’d go on to Reynolds next, and come back to Peters. Perhaps he’d be awake.

But then Benford’s voice chirped out of his comm badge: “Dr. Marley, can you come to the video room, please?” She sounded odd.

“All right,” he said.

He made his way back down the shiny white corridors to “the Core,” then upstairs to the video room. There he found Benford and Delacourt and a handful of other team members sitting in the half-light before a wall full of screens, some moving, some locked. One screen had the feed from the surveillance camera in Roger’s airlock. He was still sitting astride his chair, doing nothing.

Benford got up when Marley came in, and led him into an adjacent room, a small glass-walled conference room. Delacourt followed them. She gave Marley a supportive little pat on the shoulder as they went in.

Benford closed the door behind them.

“Are you taking me to the woodshed, colonel?” he said.

“Something you should see,” she said without smiling.

The ceiling came on, filling the room with a cool bluewhite light. They sat down at a corner of the hard plastic table. (Nearly every exposed surface in Abrams was plastic.) Benford picked up a remote and pointed it at the opposite wall. The tinted glass turned opaque and a freeze-frame of a Newsline broadcast appeared.

“Dr. Delacourt and I have been in the video room this morning watching patient interactions, including yours with Roger a few minutes ago. We also had a feed from the news going in one of the screens.”

“OK,” Marley said.

“I saved it for you.”

She thumbed a button on a remote and the Newsline frame unfroze, catching the newsreader in mid-sentence:

Marley noticed that Benford and Delacourt were watching him watch the screen, monitoring his reactions.

Someone named Kaufman, billed as a former director of the NIMH, introduced a video clip. Marley thought he recognized Kaufman, but he wasn’t sure.

Then Kaufman shrank to a small box and the featured clip filled the screen: in an over-lit room an unidentified doctor interviewing an unidentified patient in a white room behind a two-way mirror…

Marley suddenly felt very stiff.

“What the hell is this?”

“Yeah,” Benford said. “That’s what I said.”

“Who the hell gave them permission to use that?” Marley said.

Benford made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know that anyone did. I’ve already put a call in to General Harden about it. He’s in a meeting. I’m going to give Dr. Moran a call in Atlanta—”

Marley’s skin felt hot. “Well, goddamn it!”

“I know. But no one — I mean, neither of you are identified—”

“That’s not the fucking point, colonel!”

Benford stopped the playback.

The images of Roger and Marley sat facing each other on the wall, Marley’s mouth caught open in mid-speech.

“I can understand that you’re upset, Carl,” Benford said.

“Hell yes, I’m upset.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Christ, colonel! My face is all over the news. To say nothing of my patient’s face. Even if I’m not identified, it was aired without my knowledge or permission. Roger’s wife is going to see this tape.
My
wife is going to see it. They don’t even know that Roger is here!”

Benford was caught off guard for a moment. She glanced away. Through the glass, the video room sat bathed in the light of its many screens.

“Dr. Marley,” Benford began, looking back at him, “I don’t mean to make light of your feelings, but I think you need to get a little perspective. Your personal embarrassment doesn’t really count for much compared to the scale of the threat we’re here to deal with. You have been acting under orders. You’re not responsible for Roger Sturgeon or anyone else being here. We don’t have the luxury of playing strictly by the rules anymore. There are larger issues we have to consider than your discomfort.”

“I’m well aware that my little feelings don’t count for much in the grand scheme of our mighty endeavor, colonel. Nevertheless, I don’t like having myself and my patients paraded across the news without my consent.”

“I still don’t think you take my point, Carl. Deer Park is a secret project. No one needs to know where we are or what we’re doing.”

She was right, Marley still didn’t see where she was going.

“People who know you and know Sturgeon are going to see this clip. People who know you’re in Alaska. People who don’t know their husbands and wives and sons and daughters are here.”

“That’s precisely the point I was trying to make. That’s what I’m—”

Benford waved him off impatiently. “How well do you know Sturgeon’s wife?”

Marley blinked. “What?”

“Do you know her well?”

“Well enough,” he said. “She’s a long-time patient’s caretaker wife. In the last few weeks she’s also become friends with my wife. Why?”

“She’s in jail. She was arrested this morning in Chicago for causing a disturbance at the Board of Health offices. She was looking for Sturgeon.”

Marley was speechless for a long count. What the hell is going on? At last, warily he said: “You sure found that out fast.”

“I checked into her status right away, of course,” Benford said.

Marley was three steps behind Benford and struggling not to fall further behind.

“Of course,” he said. “Because you wanted to tell her yourself that her husband is safe and sound in a secret government research facility in Alaska.”

“Because I know that she knows you are on a secret project in Alaska, she knows her husband isn’t where he’s supposed to be, and, assuming she’s seen this clip on Newsline, she now has good reason to suppose he is where you are.”

Maliciously: “Are you worried she’s gonna blow our cover?”

“Yes! We don’t want to see her on the news later accusing the government of abducting her husband. We don’t want other IDD families to see her on the news. It’s not going to help us beat this thing if we have a public relations meltdown going on too.”

Marley looked at Benford like she’d just said the president of the United States was an alien from space. “Colonel,” he said, “I think maybe you’re the one who needs to get a little perspective. IDD is breaking out all over the world, and you’re worried about catching a little bad press?” He pointed at his image still frozen on the glass wall. “You might want to find out who released that clip of me and my patient to Newsline.”