We’d all been warned by our lawyers not to talk about the murder. They didn’t want us to pollute our testimonies in case we were called to the stand, as if three people with verifiable mental disorders could possibly be trusted to relay facts of the case. I was in the worst shape: clinically depressed and minimally medicated, and the only one of us still in a facility. Edo and Rovil, at least, had managed to impersonate the sane and the unsainted long enough to escape the psych wards.
“You could leave if you wanted to,” Dr. Gloria said. “I’ll be with you.”
Again I ignored her. “Let’s talk about the NME,” I said.
Edo and Rovil glanced at each other. They didn’t know where this was going.
“We bury it,” I said. “It can never see the light of day.”
Edo frowned. “I don’t think…”
“The intellectual property stays locked up. We get the lawyers to write something for us. We make sure that Little Sprout never gets re-formed to make the drug, and we don’t sell the IP to anyone, for any reason. Promise me.”
“Of course,” Rovil said. “I would never—”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said.
Edo thought for a long moment. “I know you’re hurt,” he said. “I can feel it. But Numinous is not the problem.”
“Jesus Christ, Mikala’s dead because of it.”
“I can’t tell you why Gil—why he did what he did,” Edo said. “But that was an overdose; we were all … disoriented. Most of us were knocked unconscious. That doesn’t mean Numinous can’t—”
“Stop calling it that.” Numinous was Mikala’s name for it. The trial had turned up her computerized log books. She’d been taking the drug, ramping up dosages week by week. Sometime during the experiments she stopped calling it by its number and gave it a name.
“One-Ten can still help people,” Edo said. “Not in the amounts that we took, of course. Perhaps tiny dosages. Something that would open the door just a little bit.”
“What fucking door?”
“To God,” Edo said. He was perfectly sincere.
That’s when I realized he’d been taken in by the drug. He wasn’t even struggling to keep himself sane. He’d given in.
I turned on Rovil. “What about you? Is Numinous a doorway to Jesus?”
Rovil glanced at Edo, then looked at his hands. “I cannot say that, but it has certainly helped me.”
“You fuckers.”
Edo stared at me. His eyes gleamed.
I pushed back from the table and started to get up. My belly was huge, a thing with its own gravity. Dr. Gloria put out a hand to help me up, but I shoved her away. “After all this,” I said to Edo, “you would still put the drug out there. You think people can take just one small dose, then stop? What do you think Mikala was doing before she lost herself? She became a fanatic. She made a neurochemical bomb, then she dropped it—on her own child. Why? So we could all see God together.”
“Please, sit down…,” Edo said.
“Promise me.”
“I can’t—”
“Swear on your fucking god!”
“I can’t do that,” he said.
The nurse was hurrying toward me.
“If you ever let it out in the world, I will hunt you down like a fucking dog,” I said to him. “And no god will save you.”
* * *
When I returned to the hotel room, Ollie had turned it into a command center. She’d moved the bed and desk to the center of the room, then laid the two chairs on the bed. Dozens of floppy screens had been taped up on three walls. To the left was a rectangular arrangement of screens ten feet wide and five feet tall. Another row of screens were taped end to end, forming a band that ran across the glass balcony door. The right-hand wall was a random selection of single screens.
Ollie stood before one of the singles, flicking through text. She’d showered and changed into a new T-shirt. Without looking away from the screen she said, “You missed breakfast.”
She was annoyed with me.
“Missed more than that, looks like,” I said. On the screen nearest me was displayed a column of long numbers separated with dots, like foreign telephone numbers. “So what are you up to, Ol? And where did you get all these screens?”
“Have you been in contact with Edo Anderssen Vik?” she asked. Still not looking at me.
“Contact? Not yet.”
“Anything—calls, messages…”
“Well, I tried to get messages through.”
She turned to face me. “Have you been crying?”
“I’m fine.”
“Lyda, you can tell me if—”
“I’m fine. Edo never called me back. Rovil hasn’t gotten an answer, either.”
“I wish you had told me that,” she said. Her gaze shifted from me to some mental screen.
“Why?” I asked.
She walked along the balcony glass, one hand raised, and the text and graphics rippled as she passed, seemingly following her across the room. “You’ve tipped him off. If you’re hunting someone, you don’t give them advance notice.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing—hunting him?”
“Last night you said you didn’t want anyone to get the drug, and you mentioned Edo especially.”
“I did?” I did. At the diner, I remembered it now. “Okay, yeah. I’m hunting him.”
“Then we’re on the same page.”
“Uh, you look like you’re on fifty pages at once.”
“It’s been tricky,” she said. “Your friend Edo keeps a low profile.” She swiped away a graphic, and it was replaced with a picture of a smiling Edo at some business affair, wearing a jacket with no tie. “This is his last public appearance, five years ago.” He looked even bigger than in the old days. His eyes gleamed, perhaps from the camera flash. Something about that smile seemed false.
She called up another photo. The man looked like a younger, thinner, and humorless version of Edo. His hair was blond to almost white, and pulled back high on his forehead. The last time I’d seen him had been at the trial, ten years ago. He’d looked less like his father then and more like a shaggy blond hippie.
“Little Edo,” I said.
“Don’t call him that to his face,” Ollie said. “He hates it. Eduard Junior is handling all the business now—he’s the public face of the company. He has a beautiful wife, an adopted daughter, and is active in several charities.” She flicked through several pictures. Most of them of Eduard Jr., but in several he appeared with his wife Suzette, an ice-blonde Nordic princess in size zero dresses.
Their daughter appeared in only one photo, which seemed to have been taken at an airport. She was eight or nine years old in the picture, with curly hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was looking at something in her hands. Eduard had his arm around her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Ollie asked. “You’re flushed.”
“I’m—she’s just very pretty.”
Ollie’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, she is.”
I cleared my throat. “So is Edo still calling the shots for the company?”
“Opinion’s split,” she said. “Nobody can get close enough to ask him.”
“So we can’t reach him?” I said, frustrated. “Rovil said the same thing. He wasn’t even sure what country Edo was in.”
“This week he’s in his place outside London.”
“What?”
She turned back to the screens. “London right now. Before that, he spent fifteen days in the US, most of it on his estate in New Mexico, but he was in New York City for two days. He also has a home in Norway, but he hasn’t visited there in years, most likely because of his tax situation.”
I was stunned. “You got all that from—” I gestured at the walls. “What? Illegal wiretaps? Your spook friends in the government?”
Ollie shook her head. “They’re not allowed to talk to me anymore. If I even reach out, it could cause problems for them. So I don’t. This is all from public or semipublic sources. No TSA data, no wiretaps. I’ve got bots crawling the social web, and a cloud-based analysis engine that’s just a generation behind what I used to work with professionally.”