It wasn’t only the chair that had been new three decades ago, he thought. He himself had been new back then. Young and eager and ambitious. He had also been madly in love with Beth Mapstone, the woman on the other end of the phone connection.
A lot of things had changed in the past three decades. The chair was getting old and so was he. His youthful zeal had taken on a cynical edge, although he still believed passionately in the importance of his work. He was no longer ambitious, either. He had built his empire. His goal now was to hang onto it until retirement and then see to it that the program passed into good hands.
Technology had changed a lot over the years, too. He was proud of the way he had adapted. The fancy, high-tech phone he was using today with its specially designed scrambling and encryption software was a far cry from the telephone that had come with the desk thirty years ago.
But one thing had not changed. He was still in love with Beth. Nothing could ever alter that. She had been his partner right from the start. He could still recall their first meeting at Frey-Salter’s pistol range as though it were yesterday. Her hair was cinched back in a cute ponytail and she wore a pair of jeans that fit her so tightly he wondered if she’d used a shrink-wrap machine to put them on that morning. She outshot him by a country mile. He knew he was in love before they reeled in the paper targets.
“His fixation with the notion that Vincent Scargill is still alive has turned into some sort of obsession,” he said. “It started with the incident at the survivalists’ compound. Some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome maybe. Hell, he damn near died that day.”
“I know,” Beth said quietly.
“Whatever it is, I don’t like what’s happening to Ellis.” Lawson picked up a tiny hammer and struck the first of several small, gleaming, stainless steel balls suspended in a row on his desk toy. The first ball struck the next one in line, which clanged into a third. The effect rippled down the line of balls and then reversed. He always found the ping-ping-ping sound soothing. “I ordered him to talk to one of the shrinks here at Frey-Salter.”
“Did he do it?”
“No. You know he doesn’t take orders well. Never did. Always been a lone wolf.”
“He needs a distraction,” Beth said, sounding thoughtful. “Something to take his mind off Vincent Scargill.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Jack watched the silver balls bounce gently off one another. “Got an idea. A situation has developed out in California. Belvedere collapsed and died a few days ago. Heart attack.”
Beth sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that. Belvedere was a strange duck and not exactly Mr. Personality, but his lucid dream research work was far ahead of the curve. Too bad it went unrecognized in his lifetime.”
“Tell me about it. Anyhow, as it stands now, Belvedere’s son, Randolph, has taken over the Center for Sleep Research.”
“Don’t worry, even if he discovers that there is an anonymous Client Number One, he won’t be able to trace you or Frey-Salter. I made sure of that when I set up the e-mail contact system between you and Belvedere.”
“I’m not worried about Randolph locating me,” he said impatiently. “The problem is that one of his first official acts was to fire Isabel Wright.”
“Damn. Not good. You’d better not lose her, Jack. You need her.”
“Hell, I know that. Seems to me the best way to handle this now that Belvedere is gone is to bring her back here to Frey-Salter and tuck her away in a nice, quiet little office.”
“Makes sense. You’ll have better control over her that way.”
“So here’s the plan.” Jack drank some coffee. “I’m going to send Ellis to bring her in. You said he needs a distraction, right? Let him play recruiting agent.”
“Good idea. Just might work, too. I’ve had a feeling for a while now that he’s rather intrigued by her. In fact, if this thing with Scargill hadn’t blown up, literally, a few months ago, I’ve got a hunch Ellis would have looked up Isabel Wright on his own by now.”
Jack smiled, pleased with himself for having impressed her. “Maybe I’ve got some heretofore undiscovered matchmaking talent.”
The instant the words were out of his mouth, he cringed, mentally kicking himself. That had been a stupid thing to say under the circumstances.
“You’re good, Jack,” Beth said coolly. “But when it comes to figuring out relationships, you’re as dumb as a brick.”
He rocked back and forth in the squeaky chair a couple of times, gathering his nerve. “Are you ever gonna forgive me, Beth?”
“I still can’t believe you slept with that woman,” she muttered.
“I still can’t believe you actually went to a lawyer to see about a divorce. Give me a break, Beth, you’ve never pushed it that far before. I thought you had left me for real that time. I was a basket case. I was cracking up inside. I was vulnerable.”
There was a short pause.
“Vulnerable?” Beth repeated, sounding as if she had never heard the word before. “You?”
“I read one of those advice books for people who are involved in failed relationships. It said that people are vulnerable when a mate walks out. They’re inclined to do dumb things.”
“You actually bought a book about relationships?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate.” He banged the first ball on the desk toy so hard the steel spheres crashed into one another. “Look, Beth, I didn’t know there was a rule against sleeping with someone else once your wife has gone to a lawyer. That sounded like the end to me. Thought we had split up for good. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You thought it was okay to have an affair with Maureen Sage just because I’d consulted a lawyer?”
“Like I said, I thought it was really the end for us that time. I was trying to drown my sorrows with Maureen, so to speak. It was a mistake, okay?”
Beth fell silent. He dared to hope.
“Go call Ellis,” she said finally. “I’ve got a full schedule this morning. I’ll talk to you later.”
She ended the connection.
He sat there for a while, glumly gazing through the window that separated his office from the main lab and work areas. On the other side of the glass two agents were meeting with a couple of white-coated members of the research staff. Elsewhere people were busy at their computers. There was an air of purposeful activity about the place. Important work was being done. Crimes were being solved. Lives were being saved. Cutting-edge science was happening.
His empire, Jack thought. And he had built it with Beth’s help. If he didn’t get her back, the rest of it would cease to be important.
He hit the phone memory code that would connect him with Ellis.
4
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
we’ve got a very big problem,” Jack Lawson announced from the other end of the phone. “Martin Belvedere dropped dead of a heart attack several days ago. His son has taken over the Center for Sleep Research. One of his first official acts was to fire Isabel Wright. She’s gone.”
The news hit Ellis with the shock of a small earthquake. Okay, he thought, get a grip here. This isn’t the end of life on earth as we know it. But it was a hell of a jolt.
Tango Dancer was gone. He cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and set the frying pan down on the stove with such force that the two frozen soy sausages he had been about to cook bounced a couple of times from the impact.
“Everything okay there?” Lawson asked with casual concern. “Sounded like something fell on that end.”
“Just put a pan on the stove.” He was careful not to allow any indication of his reaction to the news show in his voice. Lawson was already worried enough about his mental state as it was. “It’s lunchtime out here in California, remember?”
“Yeah, sure,” Lawson said vaguely. “Forgot.”
Lawson was fifty-seven, wiry and compact, with a completely bald head, a gravelly voice and the haggard, drawn features associated with li
felong smokers and marathon runners, although he did not smoke and never moved any faster than absolutely necessary. Ellis thought about him sitting in his cluttered office deep in the bowels of Frey-Salter, several time zones away in North Carolina.
“That’s because you have no life outside Frey-Salter,” Ellis said. Ignoring the soy sausages, he leaned against the counter and looked at the photo he had attached to the door of the refrigerator. “Time is meaningless to you.”
Lawson snorted. “Time is everything to me. That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to find Isabel Wright and bring her into Frey-Salter. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but there was no reason to rush into such a move. Things were working just fine the way they were. But with old man Belvedere gone—”
“Hang on, let’s start at the beginning. Belvedere’s dead?”
“Yeah. Several days ago.”
“And you just found out?”
“Haven’t had any reason to contact him for a couple of weeks.” There was a shrug in Lawson’s voice.
“Neither have I. Been busy with a new start-up project.” And with his ongoing research into an old problem, but he sure wasn’t going to mention that bit. He didn’t need any more of Lawson’s well-meant but really annoying lectures on the dangers of obsessing over the Vincent Scargill issue.
“As I was saying, the old man’s son, Randolph Belvedere, took over as director of the center the day after he buried his father,” Lawson continued.
“Didn’t know Belvedere had a son.”
“Beth looked into it. Turns out Belvedere and Randolph were what folks like to call ‘estranged’ for years. But the son was the old man’s only heir. He got everything, including the center.”
Beth Mapstone would know, Ellis thought. She owned Mapstone Investigations, a quasi-private security firm with affiliates in several states.
Beth was not only Lawson’s wife, she was his partner in every sense of the word. The pair had enjoyed, or endured, depending on your point of view, an on-again, off-again relationship for over thirty years. At the moment, they were off-again. But when it came to their professional relationship, they were always a team.
The formal relationship between Mapstone Investigations and Frey-Salter was officially that of corporate security firm and corporate client. In reality, however, Mapstone served as both an investigative arm for Lawson’s secret agency and a convenient cover for his agents.
“What does Randolph Belvedere think of his father’s theories of Level Five dreaming?” Ellis asked.
“Thinks they’re pure crap, of course. He’s into sleep research, though. Got big plans for the center. Needless to say, none of those plans involve Isabel Wright.”
“But you have plans for her.”
“I do, indeed,” Lawson said fervently. “I want her right here where I can keep an eye on her.”
“What did you mean when you said she was gone?”
“Gave notice to the manager of the apartment complex where she was living out there in LA, packed up her belongings and took off.”
“I assume this phone call is not because you can’t locate Isabel Wright.”
“Hell, no. Beth found her right away. That’s not the problem. The problem is convincing her to come back here to Raleigh to work at Frey-Salter. I don’t want to take a chance on losing her to some other outfit.”
“That’s where I come in, I take it?”
“I’m counting on you to sell her on the idea of working directly for me.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“That hurts, Ellis. That cuts real deep. Our association may have started out on a business footing, but I like to think that we did the macho male bonding thing after you came to work for me.”
“Was that what you call it? Felt more like me working my ass off in your lab every night while you conducted your Frankenstein experiments.”
“What are you complaining about? All you had to do was go to sleep.”
There had been a little more to it than that, Ellis reflected. He had not exactly slept his way through Jack Lawson’s experiments, he had dreamed his way through them. And those dreams had not been sweet. He usually awoke from them in a state of physical and mental exhaustion. It sometimes took days to recover. The really bad ones still took that long.
He had been in the middle of his sophomore year in college when Jack found him. On the point of dropping out of school because the budding business analyst part of him was reluctant to take on any more student loans, he volunteered for a sleep research experiment.
He had not been keen on the idea of being hooked up to a lot of electrodes while he slept but he told himself that the money was good and he needed the cash. Deep down, however, he knew that was not the real reason he had decided to offer himself up as a research subject. The truth was that the extreme dreams had become increasingly disturbing. It had gotten to the point where he avoided going to bed, dosing himself with caffeine and other stuff to stay awake. But sooner or later he always crashed, and when he finally went under, the dreams were waiting for him.
The chronic sleep deprivation, combined with the unsettling effects of the surreal, ultra-vivid dreams, had left him too edgy to study. If he hadn’t dropped out, he would surely have flunked out.
What he had not known was that Lawson’s tiny, secretive government agency paid for the experiments using Frey-Salter as its guise. The sleep research conducted on the campus where Ellis was attending college was one of many such projects that Lawson had commissioned. Lawson was looking for people like Ellis.
Forty-eight hours after the results of the sleep research project were on Lawson’s desk, Lawson himself was at Ellis’s door, a dazzling contract in his hand. But it was not the promise of a lucrative job offer, tantalizing as it was, that swept Ellis off his feet; it was Lawson’s reassuring conviction that, whatever it was that happened when Ellis dreamed, he was not going crazy.
Lawson had tossed out a second lure as well. He gave Ellis the chance to join a small, clandestine organization that was doing exciting work. For a nineteen-year-old who had been orphaned at twelve and who had spent his teenage years bouncing from one foster-care home to another, the offer was irresistible. For the first time in a very long while, he felt that he belonged somewhere.
Looking back, Ellis thought, it was probably no big surprise that Lawson had become a sort of father figure to him.
“You know, I’m going to miss the old man,” Lawson said, sounding unusually wistful. “Martin Belvedere could be a pain in the ass but he was brilliant and he knew how to keep secrets.” There was a short, meaningful pause. “At least, I think he knew how to keep ’em.”
“You’re worried that he might have said too much about you and your agency to Isabel Wright, aren’t you?”
A rhythmic series of small squeaks and squeals sounded on the other end of the line. Ellis could almost see Lawson leaning back in his government-issue chair, swiveling slowly from side to side while he talked into the phone.
“It’s a possibility I can’t afford to ignore,” Lawson admitted. “Let’s face it, she worked closely with Belvedere for the better part of a year and she’s obviously damn smart. Got to assume she picked up a few clues.”
“I don’t think you need to panic here. You’re very good at keeping Frey-Salter in the shadows. Ms. Wright could not have learned much and even if she did make a few insightful guesses, what harm could she do?”
“Problem is, with Martin Belvedere gone, the situation has gotten real murky. I need to get Isabel Wright back under control and I need to do it as fast as possible. I can’t afford to lose her. Also, I need to know if she’s told anyone about the kind of work she did while she worked for Belvedere. Might be necessary to do some damage control.”
Ellis gave a short, harsh laugh. “What are you afraid of, Lawson? Think Isabel Wright might take her suspicions to the media?”
“It could complicate things for me.”
“Not a chance.
The only news outlets that would pay attention to such an off-the-wall story are the supermarket tabloids. I can see the headlines at the checkout counter now: ‘Secret Government Agency Tracks Killers in Dreams.’ ”
“I’ve got my funding to protect,” Lawson growled. “I don’t need that kind of publicity. You know how much heat the CIA and the FBI take whenever some enterprising reporter discovers yet again that they occasionally use psychics. Hell, they had to shut down the remote viewing project at Stanford back in the nineties because of the embarrassing press. Duke University closed its parapsychology research lab for similar reasons.”
“The government has a long and extremely lurid history of financing psychic research,” Ellis reminded him. “It’s no secret.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t always fashionable. In the current funding climate, I can guarantee you that if certain people in Congress find out what’s really going on here at Frey-Salter, they’ll start screaming about how I’m wasting taxpayer dollars and I’ll end up with serious budget problems.”
“I’ve got great faith in your ability to secure funding. You’ve been doing it for over two decades. You’re a survivor, Lawson.”
“So are you,” Lawson shot back a little too smoothly. “And the bottom line here is that we both need Isabel Wright.”
“Yeah, I know. You don’t have to remind me.”
“I’ll make this job worth your while, like I always do. Easy money, pal. All you have to do is track her down, feel out the situation to see if she’s talked to anyone and then convince her to come work here at Frey-Salter. How hard can it be?”
“What makes you think she’ll want to work for you?”
“Not a lot of openings for fired Level Five dream analysts,” Lawson said. “Hell, most people don’t even know there is such a thing. She’s thirty-three, never been married and, according to Beth, hasn’t dated seriously in months. All indications are that she’s a meek, lonely, nervous little spinster who lives for her work. Martin Belvedere once told me that she often spent her nights sleeping on a cot in her office. She’s probably anxious as hell now that she no longer has a nice little office to call her own.”