Falling Awake(13)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“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.”