Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [79]
I stare Chuck in his eyes. They betray the deliberately vague emotion of a hostile witness trying not to appear too unfriendly.
“E-mailed to a couple of friends, and asked them not to open unless something happens to me.”
“The old don’t-open-the-envelope-unless-I-disappear trick, but updated for the Internet era. Nicely done.”
I nod.
Chuck is quiet for several seconds.
“Up until you said ‘cortisol,’ I thought you were bluffing,” he finally says.
“My grandmother learned something about the project, right? She’s carrying critical information. So you’ve taken her. Where is she?”
“Let’s get out of this alley.”
“Tell me where she is, or the world gets a big dose of my fancy journalism.”
“Slow down, Woodward. I need to find your grandmother as much as you do.”
“Why?”
He pauses.
“Why, Chuck? Who has her?”
“Lane is ground zero.”
Chapter 43
He takes two steps away from me.
“Of what?” I nearly shout. I take two quick steps, catch him and reach for his arm and pull him around. “Does this have to do with her past?”
He shakes me off and starts walking away.
“Wildfire?” I say. “Is ground zero the same as wildfire?”
There’s a hitch in his step but he doesn’t turn around. Without looking back, he says, “There’s something I need to show you. Someone you need to meet.”
We walk three blocks in silence and he ascends the stairs of a boxy three-story home with an over-sized front window. He looks both ways and speaks quietly.
“Get in here if you want to see what happens when science goes wrong.”
I’m met by a hippopotamus.
In Chuck’s foyer hangs a giant stuffed hippo head with a toothy overbite, mounted on a leather backing. Chuck walks directly through the entrance and into a doorway on the left. I follow. From upstairs, I hear a voice: “Mr. Chuck?”
He presses an intercom on the wall, and says: “I’ll be up shortly. Please keep Victor entertained.”
We stand in a living room decorated in Hunter Chic. Mounted on the wall are a stuffed cheetah, a black bear, and something from the antelope/elk family. The rest of the room is modern—stylized metal coffee table, sharp-cornered couch, and, of course, a flat-panel TV big enough to watch from space.
“Is my grandmother safe?”
“I assume so.”
“Why?”
“I need more information,” he says. “What happened to her? Where? When?”
“You really don’t know.”
He purses his lips, looks me in the eye, and then glances away. He doesn’t know.
When I first met G.I. Chuck, he’d had a sty beneath his eye. Now it’s inflamed with a hordeolum, a white pimple that means his infection is intensifying but, I have to wonder, if that’s a by-product of stress taxing his immune system.
“Chuck, you’re getting no information out of me. None. Not until you explain what’s going on. You can shoot me and stuff me but no matter what you do, information is now going in a single direction in this conversation.”
“Sit,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
“Who took my grandmother?”
“Let me get some things to show you.”
Damn it. What choice do I have?
Chuck walks out.
I see a stainless steel refrigerator built into a cabinet beneath the cheetah. “Can I grab a water?”
“Help yourself,” I hear from the other room.
I open the fridge and take a bottle of water. But I’m looking for something else—I’m not exactly sure what until I see it sitting beneath the fridge: the steel glint of a wine opener. The proverbial sharp object. I slip it into my pocket.
Chuck returns, holding a sleek, maroon-colored Dell laptop in his left hand and a small projector in his right. He opens the computer and plugs the projector into it. Onto the wall, he projects an image of a title page of a presentation. The title reads: “Human Memory Crusade.”
“Listen first, then I’ll show you the slide deck.”
I can’t believe it. In this region and era, even the dark conspiracies have a PowerPoint presentation.
“You’re theories are half right,” he begins. “You’ve missed the main point: We started trying to enhance memory.”
He explains that Biogen and Dr. Laramer teamed up to determine whether there might be a way to enhance memory capacity