False Memory

While Dusty and Martie were digging into the doctor’s past in New Mexico, Skeet was playing detective, too. This was undoubtedly his own half-baked idea, because his brother was too smart to have put him up to it.

The blushing man with the Mount Palomar spectacles was probably one of Skeet’s dope-smoking, dope-swilling, dope-shooting buddies. Sherlock Holmes and Watson played by Cheech and Chong.

Regardless of what happened to Dusty and Martie in New Mexico, Skeet was the biggest loose end. Getting rid of the cheese-headed doper had been a priority for two days, since the doctor had sent him toddling away to jump off a roof.

Now, relieved of the need to locate Skeet, Dr. Ahriman must only drive considerately, keeping the boy in tow, until he had time to assess the situation and to settle upon the best strategy to take advantage of this fortuitous development. The game was on.

Martie followed Chase Glyson’s Navigator into the parking lot of a roadhouse a few miles past the city line, where a giant dancing cowboy was depicted in mid sashay with a giant cowgirl, outlined in neon but unlit now, with a few hours remaining till the music and the drinking started. They parked facing away from the building, looking toward the highway.

Chase left his SUV and settled into the back of the rental Ford. “That, over there, is the Bellon-Tockland Institute.”

The institute occupied approximately twenty acres in the middle of a much larger tract of undeveloped sage. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-high, stacked-stone wall.

The building looming beyond the wall had been inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, in particular by his most famous house, Fallingwater. Except that this was Fallingwater without the water, and it was over scaled in violation — perhaps even in contempt — of Wright’s belief that every structure must be in harmony with the land on which it rested. This massive stone-and-stucco pile, two hundred thousand square feet if it was an inch, didn’t hug the stark desert contours; it seemed to explode from them, more an act of violence than a work of architecture. This was what one of Wright’s works might look like if reinterpreted by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect.

“A bit Goth,” Dusty said.

“What do they do in there?” Martie asked. “Plan the end of the world?”

Chase wasn’t reassuring. “Probably, yeah. I’ve never been able to make sense of what they say they do, but maybe you’re not as dense as me. Research, they say, research that leads to… “Now he quoted from something he must have read: “‘Applying the latest discoveries in psychology and psychopharmacology to design more equitable and stable structural models for government, business, culture, and for society as a whole, which will contribute to a clean environment, a more reliable system of justice, the fulfillment of human potential, and world peace —’”

“And, at long last, the end of that nasty old rock-n-roll,” Dusty added scornfully.

“Brainwashing,” Martie declared.

“Well,” said Chase, “I guess I wouldn’t argue with you on that — or on much of anything you chose to say. Might even have a crashed alien spaceship in there, for all I know.”

“I’d rather it was aliens, even nasty ones with a taste for human livers,” Dusty said. “That wouldn’t scare me half as much as Big Brother.”

“Oh, this isn’t a government shop,” Chase Glyson assured him. “At least there’s not a visible connection.”

“Then who are they?”

“The institute was originally capitalized by twenty-two major universities and six big-bucks private foundations from all over the country, and they’re the ones who keep it running year after year, along with some large grants from major corporations.”

“Universities?” Martie frowned. “That disappoints the raving paranoid in me. Big Professor isn’t as spooky as Big Brother.”

“You wouldn’t feel that way if you’d spent more time with Lizard Lampton,” Dusty said.

“Lizard Lampton?” Chase asked.

“Dr. Derek Lampton. My stepfather.”

“Considering that they’re working for world peace,” Chase said, “it’s a damn tightly guarded place.”

Less than fifty yards to the north, cars entering the institute had to stop at a formidable-looking gate next to a guardhouse. Three uniformed men attended to each visitor as he came to the head of the line, and one of them even circled each vehicle with an angled mirror on a pole, to inspect the undercarriage.

“Looking for what?” Dusty wondered. “Stowaways, bombs?”

“Maybe both. Heavy electronic security, too, probably better than out at Los Alamos.”

“Maybe that’s not saying much,” Dusty noted, “since the Chinese waltzed out of Los Alamos with all our nuclear secrets.”

Martie said, “Judging by all this security, we don’t need to worry about the Chinese making off with our peace secrets.”

“Ahriman was deep into this place,” Chase said. “He had his own practice in town, but this was his real work. And when strings had to be pulled to save his ass, after the Pastore killings, these were the people pulling them.”