Lock In (28 page)

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Dad said, and waved me off. He set down his drink and looked at me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Tell me what I should do,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that son of a bitch tried to kill you,” Dad said, loudly, forcefully. “My only child. My flesh and blood. Tell me what to do, Chris. If you told me to shoot him, I would go do it right now.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Stab him,” Dad said. “Drown him. Run him over with my truck.”

“They are all tempting,” I said. “But none of those is a good idea.”

“Then tell me,” Dad said. “Tell me what I can do.”

“Before I do,” I said. “Let me ask. Senate?”

“Oh. Well.
That,
” Dad said, and reached for his scotch. I picked it up and moved it out of his reach. He looked at me quizzically, but accepted it and sat back. “William came over this morning, first thing,” he said, referring to the state party chairman. “He was all concern and sympathy and told me how much he admired me standing up for my home and family, and somehow all that puffery ended up with me being told that there’s no way the party could support me this election cycle. And perhaps it was just me, but I think there was the implication I wouldn’t be supported in
any
election cycle that might come up.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Dad shrugged. “It is what it is, kid,” he said. “It saves me the trouble of pretending to be nice to a bunch of assholes I never really liked.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “So. Dad. I need to you do something for me.”

“Yeah?” Dad said. “And what is that, Chris?”

“I need you to do a business deal,” I said.

Dad furrowed his brow at me. “How did we get to a business deal?” he asked. “I thought we were talking revenge and politics.”

“We still are,” I said. “And the way it will get done is through a business deal.”

“With whom?” Dad asked.

“With the Navajo, Dad,” I said.

Dad sat up, uncomfortable. “I know you’ve been busy,” he said. “But I just
shot
one of their people last night. I don’t think they’ll want to do business with me
today
.”

“No one blames you for it.”

“
I
blame me for it,” Dad said.

“You didn’t shoot him because he was Navajo,” I said. “You shot him because he was about to shoot me. He wasn’t there because he was a bad man. He was there because bad men were using him.”

“Which means I shot an innocent man,” Dad said.

“You did,” I said. “And I’m sorry about that, Dad. But you didn’t kill him. Lucas Hubbard did. He just used you to do it. And if you hadn’t, it would be me who was dead.”

Dad put his head in his hands. I let him take a moment.

“Bruce Skow was innocent,” I said. “Johnny Sani was innocent. Neither of them are coming back. But I have a way you can punish the person responsible for both of their deaths. You’ll also get to help out a lot of people in the Navajo Nation in the bargain. Something really good can come out of this thing. You just have to do what you already do better than anyone else. Do some business.”

“What kind of business are we talking about here?”

“Real estate,” I said. “Sort of.”

*   *   *

Three thirty, and I was with Jim Buchold, in his home office. “We’re tearing down both buildings,” he said, of Loudoun Pharma campus. “Well. We’re tearing down the office building, which the Loudoun County inspectors tell me is mostly cracked off its foundation. The labs are already gone. We’re just clearing the rubble for that.”

“What’s going to happen to Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“In the short run, tomorrow I’m going to a memorial for our janitors,” Buchold said. “All six of them at the same time. They were all each other’s friends. It makes sense to do it that way. Then on Monday I’m laying off everyone in the company and then taking bids for buyers.”

I cocked my head at that. “Someone wants to buy Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“We have a number of valuable patents and we were able to retrieve a good amount of our current research, some of which can probably be reconstructed,” Buchold said. “And if whoever buys the company hires our researchers, there’s a chance they’ll reconstruct it faster. And we still have our government contracts, although I’m having our lawyers go through those contracts now to make sure they can’t be withdrawn because of terrorism.”

“Then why sell at all?” I asked.

“Because
I’m
done,” Buchold said. “I put twenty years into this company and then it all went up in a single night. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t,” Buchold said. “You can’t know. I didn’t know until someone took two decades of my life and turned it into a pile of rubble. I think about trying to build it back up from nothing and all it does is make me feel tired. So, no. Time for me and Rick to retire to the Outer Banks, get a beach house, and run corgis up and down the sand until they collapse.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

“It’ll be great,” Buchold said. “For the first week. After that I’ll have to figure out what to do with myself.”

“The night of my dad’s party, you were talking about the therapies you were developing to unlock people from Haden’s,” I said.

“I remember I dragged you into the argument,” Buchold said. “Rick gave me crap for that yesterday when he remembered it. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I remember that night you also mentioned the drug you were developing.”

“Neuroulease.”

“That’s right,” I said. “How far along were you with it?”

“You mean, how long until Neuroulease was on the market?”

“Yes.”

“We were feeling optimistic that we’d have enough progress on the drug within the year to apply for clinical trials,” Buchold said. “And if those showed promise we were pretty much already guaranteed a fast track at the FDA for approval. You have four and a half million people suffering from lock in. Especially now that Abrams-Kettering’s on the books, the sooner we can unlock them, the better.”

“What about now?” I asked.

“Well, one of the principal investigators blew up the company, and with it a whole lot of our data and documentation,” Buchold said. “Then he killed himself, and however I feel about
that
at the moment, he was the one who could have most easily reconstructed that data from what we have left. From what we have now, it’ll take five to seven years before we’re at the clinical trial stage again. And that’s optimistic.”

“Anyone else as close to it as you were?” I asked.

“I know Roche has a combination drug and brain stimulus therapy they’ve been working on,” Buchold said. “But they’re nowhere close to clinical trials with that. No one else is even in the same ballpark.” He looked at me sourly. “You want to hear something funny?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That bastard Hubbard,” he said. “At your dad’s party he was tearing into me about Haden culture and how they didn’t want to be free of their disease and doing everything short of implying I was encouraging a genocide.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Yesterday that son of a bitch calls up and makes an offer on Loudoun Pharma!” Buchold said.

“For how much?”

“For fucking not enough!” Buchold said. “And I let him know. He said the offer was flexible but that he wanted to move quickly. And I said to him that a couple of days before he was telling me what a horrible idea our work was, and now he wanted to buy it? Do you know what he said?”

“I don’t know,” I said, although I had some idea.

“He said, ‘Business is business’!” Buchold exclaimed. “Jesus lord. I just about hung up on him then.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Buchold said. “Because he’s right. Business is business. I have six hundred employees who are going to be out of work in three days, and even though Rick doesn’t think I should
socialize
with them”—Buchold rolled his eyes, and looked around to see if his husband was about—“I do feel responsible for them. It would be fine with me if some of them kept their jobs, and the rest had better severance pay than they would have otherwise.”

“So you would sell to him?” I asked.

“If no one else steps up with a better offer, I just might,” Buchold said. “Why? Do you think I should pass on the offer?”

“I would never tell you how to run your own business, Mr. Buchold.”

“What’s left of it anyway,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Agent Shane. You find me a good reason to keep my options open, and maybe I’ll do just that.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will see what I can do.”

*   *   *

Five o’clock, and I was in the liminal space of Cassandra Bell.

It was bare. And by bare, I mean that there was literally nothing in it.

This was not the vast expanse of endless space. It was the absolute opposite, a close, tight darkness. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of black ink. For the first time I understood claustrophobia.

“Most people find my liminal space uncomfortable, Agent Shane,” Bell said. A voice that I could not see and which came from everywhere, although quietly. It was like being inside the head of a very private person. Which, I suppose, was exactly what this was.

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Does it bother you?”

“I’m trying not to let it.”

“I find it comforting,” Bell said. “It reminds me of the womb. They say we don’t remember what it is like to be there, but I don’t believe that. I think deep inside we always know. It’s why children burrow under blankets and cats push their heads into your elbow when they sit beside you. I’ve not had those experiences myself, but I know why they happen. I’ve been told my liminal space is like the dark of the grave. But I think of it as the dark from the other end of life entirely. The dark of everything ahead, not everything behind.”

“I like the way you put that,” I said. “I’m going to try to think of it that way.”

“That’s the way. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, Agent Shane,” Bell said.

And then she was in front of me, close, a lit candle illuminating her face, the light throwing back the darkness to a breathable distance.

“Thank you,” I said, and felt a shudder of relief.

“You are welcome,” she said, and smiled, looking younger than twenty years old, although of course here she could appear to be any age she wished.

“And thank you for seeing me on short notice,” I said. “I know you are busy.”

“I am always busy,” she said. Not a brag, or a show of pride, just a fact. She smiled at me again. “But of course I know of you, Agent Shane. Chris Shane. The Haden Child. So strange, isn’t it, that we have not met before this.”

“I had that same thought the other day,” I said.

“And why do you suppose that is, that we have only now met.”

“We ran in different circles,” I said.

“Ran in different circles,” she said. “And now the image I have is of you and me moving in separate orbits, centered on different stars.”

“Same metaphor,” I said. “Different description.”

“Yes!” Bell said, and gave a small laugh. “And who was your star? Whom did you orbit?”

“My father, I suppose,” I said.

“He is a good man,” Bell said. Not a question.

“Yes,” I said, and thought of him this morning, in his bathrobe, scotch in his hand, grieving for Bruce Skow.

“I know what happened,” Bell said. “To and by your father. I am sorry for it.”

“Thank you,” I said, strangely touched by her manner of speaking. Formal and yet also intimate. “Who was your star, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t know,” Bell said. “I still don’t know. I am beginning to suspect it’s not a person but is an idea. And that’s why I’m strange, and also gives me my power.”

“Maybe,” I said, as diplomatically as possible.

She caught it, smiled, and laughed at me. “I don’t mean to be obtuse or intentionally bizarre, Agent Shane, honestly I don’t,” she said. “It’s just that I am terribly bad at small talk. The longer it goes on the more I sound like a refugee from a commune.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I live in an intentional community myself.”

“Kind of you to empathize with me,” Cassandra Bell said. “You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment. This time it is.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You did not come to make small talk with me,” she said. “As well as you make it.”

“No,” I said. “I came to talk to you about your brother.”

“Have you,” she said. “I would like to tell you a story of my brother, if you will hear it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“He was a little boy when I was born and he knew that I was held within myself,” she said. “And so he would come to me, and kiss me on my forehead, and sing to me for hours. Can you imagine. What other seven-year-old boy would do such a thing. You have no sisters or brothers.”

“No,” I said.

“Do you miss them?”

“I can’t miss what I never had,” I said.

“Which is not true at all,” Bell said. “But I have put it poorly. I mean do you feel that you have missed out by not having siblings.”

“I think it would have been interesting to have siblings,” I said.

“Your parents had no more after you.”

“I think they were worried that if they did, they would neglect one or the other of us to focus on the other,” I said. “And that the one who was neglected would have eventually become resentful. It’s hard to have one child be a Haden and one not. I would imagine.” I paused.

“You have a question about me and my brother,” Bell said.

“I wondered if you ever integrated with him,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Bell said. “Altogether too intimate, I should think. I love my brother and he me. But I have no desire to be inside of his head, and I don’t believe he wants me in his. Both of us in the same head at the same time! We would become our parents.”

“That’s an image,” I said.

“I have never integrated. I am enough in my own head. I don’t wish to be in someone else’s as well.”