“Just talk. I’ll be the judge.”
“You’re in no condition to judge!”
“You were angry that they’d cheated you,” she said. “So you decided that no one would get the buyout money. An overdose would queer the whole deal. Kind of shortsighted of you, though. Two percent is better than nothing.”
“This is what you do,” he said. “You take fragments and guesses and unrelated details, and you make up stories. This is your mania for pattern recognition talking.”
“Sometimes when the crazy talks, you got to listen.”
“That sounds like something Lyda would say.”
“It does, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing. When there’s a real conspiracy, I am indeed hell on wheels.”
He groaned.
“You’re a bright person, Rovil. I’d rate you a three on Intelligence, maybe even a three point five.”
He blinked. “You’re trying to insult me.”
She showed him the pen. “You rated yourself a five. Really? That in itself is a sign of diminished intelligence.”
“If you let me go now,” Rovil said. “I promise not to tell anyone about this. You’re not thinking clearly, and you need help. Look around—we’re in a basement in the suburbs of Santa Fe. You’re not a secret agent anymore. You’re not NSA, or Special Forces. You’re a patient who is off her meds.”
Ollie breathed out. “So you’re not confessing then?”
“I can’t confess to something that isn’t—”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
She made her decision. Or rather, if Lyda was right, her brain decided for her. She also hoped that Lyda was right that there was no God to punish her.
From the backpack she took out a box of latex gloves and withdrew a pair.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice wavered—and not just for show. He was truly nervous now.
She wriggled into one glove, then the other. “Let me ask you a different question.” She picked up the bottle again. “As a professional in the pharmaceutical industry, and the product owner of Stepladder…” She shook a dozen pills into her hand. “What’s the dosage equivalent of what Lyda took in Chicago? Ten pills? Twenty? A hundred?”
His eyes widened.
“How many steps on the Stepladder?” she asked.
“You can’t do this.”
She placed an empty water bottle between her knees, then unscrewed one of the blue capsules and let the white grains drop into the bottle. “Forget the question—you’ll only lie. I need to talk to someone who has a conscience.”
He watched her as she emptied six, then ten, then fifteen capsules into the bottle. She found herself humming “Stairway to Heaven.”
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“The name of the cowboy. All contact info, too.”
“I don’t know this cowboy. I swear.”
“See? Lying.” She unscrewed another capsule. “I figure a hundred ought to do it.”
“You’ll kill me!”
“Nah,” she said. “You may go insane, but Landon-Rousse’s own studies put the fatal dose at well over a hundred pills. Or so I read this afternoon.”
Rovil lunged forward. The water bottle was between her legs, and both her hands were occupied with the current capsule. His own hands, bound at the wrist, reached for her. She brought up her knees, but he threw himself over them and seized her throat. The chair tipped backward, and she slammed into the floor with Rovil on top of her.
She’d been expecting this move for some time; the only surprise was in how long he’d taken to try it. She made sure he’d committed to the throat; then she seized both thumbs, and twisted.
He screamed, tried to get off her. She opened her knees and circled her legs around his waist, holding him to her. He was tilted at an angle, head down, feet in the air, his thighs pressed to the lip of the chair. The ties around his ankles made it impossible for him to get leverage, and his tethered wrists made it impossible to attack her.
She twisted her hips and rolled him off the chair and onto his back. She squatted above him, still holding the good thumb. The Sig Sauer was now pressed to his forehead.
“I told you I would have to hurt you,” she said.
“Please,” Rovil said. “Don’t turn me into one of them.”
“The cowboy,” she said.
He gulped air. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Okay then,” she said. “It’s time to meet your god.”
THE PARABLE OF
the Man Who Sacrificed Himself
Once, in a city by a lake, at the top of a high tower, a rich man held a party. Unbeknownst to him, one of the guests had invited God. The deity was smuggled into the party inside a champagne bottle.
Gilbert, IT expert and the fattest guest at the party, was the first to drink. He hoisted the bottle and took two great swigs before passing it to the rich man, whose name was Edo. Edo drank a long pull, then passed it to the neuroscientist, Lyda. She sipped it once before offering it to Rovil, the former rat wrangler. Rovil only pretended to drink, pressing the mouth of the bottle to his closed lips. He quickly wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled broadly. He thought he felt the tingle of the psychotropic on his skin, but told himself not to worry. Such brief skin contact, he knew from helping Mikala with her experiments, should affect him only mildly. “You too,” he said to Mikala, and gave the bottle to her. She drank deeply and handed it back to him.
A moment later Gil stumbled backward, into the coffee table. His eyes had rolled back, and he began to speak in an unknown language. Mikala called out his name in alarm. He crashed to the floor, his arms and legs shaking as if electrified.
Edo gripped his head as if he’d been struck by a migraine. He dropped to his knees and looked up at the ceiling, moaning. Lyda was on her back, convulsing, her face making ugly grimaces.
Only Mikala and Rovil were still upright. She looked dazed. Slowly she realized that Rovil was watching her. “What did you do?” she asked him.
Oh, but she already knew. Even freshly dosed with the NME, she was the brightest of them.
She had trusted Rovil. He’d become her confidant, and when he accidently discovered her self-administering NME 110, he became the observer for her experiments, the keeper of the records. She’d asked him not to tell Lyda or the others, and he had obeyed her wishes. He was too interested in the outcome not to. She never permitted him to try the drug; the risk was to be hers alone. She began with a dose of 25 micrograms, far less than a grain of sand. Over the course of six weeks she ramped up to 50 micrograms, then 100, about the same as an average LSD blot.
He’d asked her to describe the effects for their records. “It feels like … the numinous,” she said. And that became its name in the notebooks.
It eventually became obvious to him that her interest had moved beyond the scientific. She was becoming an addict. Her personality was changing, the effects of the drug persisting well beyond what either of them predicted.
Still she wanted more, and more frequently. In those final weeks, they would spread out a yoga mat, and she would drink a vial of 100 milliliters of distilled water mixed with 300 micrograms of NME 110. He held her down while she bucked and kicked in epileptic ecstasy. The hallucinations became permanent. God, she said, was watching over her.
Sometime in those weeks Edo announced that he’d struck a deal to sell Little Sprout, and that Gil and Lyda had voted with him against Mikala. Rovil, with his paltry two-percent share of the company, was not even asked his opinion. He was nothing to them. Even Mikala, with her new god, was too enraptured with her own anger and sorrow to see that he was the one who’d been wronged. They were about to become millionaires, and he’d be left with perhaps enough to buy a new car. He pretended to be happy for them.
The night of the party, he had called Mikala from the restaurant and begged her to come to the afterparty in Edo’s suite. It’s over, he told her. You should forgive them. He came down and met her in the lobby of the Lake Point Tower and shepherded her into the elevator. Before the doors opened he handed her the bottle of very expensive champagne he had purchased. “We should celebrate together,” he said.