Page 17

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

KARLIN

“ W here is it?” Karlin muttered to herself as she rooted around in the cavernous white cabinet. It was at floor level, forcing her to sit in the most ungraceful position humanly possible, and not for the first time, she found herself feeling extremely grateful to be alone in the lab.

At last, she felt her fingers clasping around a small plastic container of the correct shape.

She pulled out the green food dye and got to her feet, shoving it into the pocket of her lab coat quickly, though it wasn’t like anyone was watching.

Unless they were extremely well hidden, she saw nothing that would indicate the lab had security cameras.

She continued her work as normal, making the final preparations for tomorrow night’s inaugural psychedelic trip, but found herself continually suppressing yawns. It was late, but she had no choice but to finish her work now, unless she wanted to get up at four in the morning.

Bajwa had been driving her insane all day.

After their group lunch on the bluff, he’d handed Karlin a set of Jeep keys and sent her down to the main office to do some suddenly urgent inventory paperwork.

She’d been paranoid for most of the afternoon that he somehow suspected her and Axel, but ultimately, she figured the real reason was a lot more mundane.

Bajwa always preferred the more exciting parts of the job and loved to pawn off the most boring work on his inferiors.

Karlin resented it. He may have been her boss, but that didn’t entitle him to make her his on-demand administrative assistant.

By the time she’d finally returned to the retreat site and stuffed down some leftover dinner, it was almost client curfew.

Before she could attempt to meet Axel at the old cabin like they’d planned, Bajwa had intercepted her and insisted she join him in watching a lecture from the latest Psychedelic Medicine Research Conference that had just taken place a few days prior.

The lecture had been interesting enough, and fortunately, Bajwa wasn’t the sort of boss who used alone time with his female employees as an excuse to be creepy, but it had still stressed her out. She couldn’t shake the constant sense of paranoia.

Finally, Bajwa had let her escape, but it was late, and she was certain that Axel would have given up waiting for her and gone to bed. Which was a problem, because she had never gotten a chance to explain to him how his fake DX8 dose worked.

Now, as she filled several vials with compounded DX8 for the rest of her patients, she pondered how tomorrow night was going to go.

Her original plan had been to dose Axel with a safe, non-mind-altering drug that would mimic most of the basic physical symptoms of DX8. This would allow his body to respond normally to any tests that she and Bajwa ran without putting him in a position he wasn’t comfortable with.

But of course, she needed his consent for that, or at least to warn him that it was going to be more than just a run of the mill placebo.

For now, she had no choice but to set his special doses aside, prepare a simple vial of food coloring and water, and hope that Bajwa wouldn’t decide to run any unplanned tests.

Fortunately, it was unlikely. For the first trip or two, they tended to stick to only verbal and visual monitoring, allowing the patients to relax and get used to DX8 before they started taking their blood pressure and prodding them with needles during the experience. But that did little to calm her nerves.

So many things could go wrong, but she had no choice now but to keep moving forward.

She would do everything she could to protect him, even if it was just from taking a medication he didn’t want.

But a nagging question lingered in the back of her mind as she printed out the label for the new placebo vial.

Could Axel protect them both if their scheme was uncovered?

ASHER

Asher stretched out in his chair, sticking his sneaker-clad feet up on the dining table. The old cabin’s futon might have been slightly more comfortable, but he’d already almost fallen asleep more than once, so he decided it was best not to risk it.

He’d been waiting for Karlin to arrive for the last two and a half hours, and he was slowly going crazy with boredom. He’d found a Tom Clancy novel sitting on top of a case of plastic water bottles, but to his dismay, the first third of it had been rendered unreadable by mold damage.

That left singing to himself, staring at the wall, and wondering if he’d be one of those people who started talking to a volleyball if he got lost on a desert island.

He didn’t even have his cell phone with him, not that there was any phone service at the retreat site. If there had been, he would have long since called Karlin and demanded to know what on earth she was doing.

Actually, that was a lie. He probably would have been so relieved to hear that she was safe and sound that all of his annoyance would have melted away in an instant.

She’d opened up to him a little bit when they were doing the trust fall exercise, but man, he’d had to fight for it.

And he still wasn’t exactly sure why he kept bothering.

Sure, she was a client, and he really did want to help her, but he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit there was more than that. He liked her.

Even if he knew that it was never going to go anywhere.

Even if he knew he never wanted to let it go anywhere, even if Karlin suddenly decided that he was worthy of her interest. He had enough to deal with in his life. Flirting was about the limit of his romantic ambition.

He shook his head as he tried to push those thoughts out of his mind, along with his growing sleepiness.

It was getting colder now, and his own guest cabin with its cozy bed sounded like the best thing in the world. But he couldn’t leave. Not if there was any chance Karlin would come looking for him here.

Instead, he eyed the old futon and its threadbare blanket. He really was getting chilly.

He jumped up from the chair and strode across the room, giving the old quilt a quick shake to make sure that no bugs or rodents had taken up residence, and made himself comfortable.

Asher woke up suddenly some time later.

There was a strange sound caught in his ears, a long, deepening wail that seemed to pour directly into his head, chilling him straight down to his toes.

He leapt up from the futon, grappling for his M16. “Ambush! Guys, get up, there’s an ambush!”

Where was his gun?

He reached under the futon, covering his fingers in dust. He looked to either side of the wooden frame, finding nothing but cobwebs.

“Call it in, Rome! Kent? Guys, let’s go! Now!”

No one answered. Suddenly, his own voice sounded very loud.

Where was everybody?

He rushed to the window, peering over the edge of the sill, only to realize he could see nothing but darkness. The noise sounded again, but it was quieter now and harder to make sense of.

His heart was thundering in his chest as realization dawned.

He slid down along the log wall until his butt collided with the hard floor, sending a jolt of pain up his spine that knocked further sense into him.

There was no ambush. He didn’t have an M16, only a handgun that was currently locked up under the bed back at his guest cabin. He wasn’t in Afghanistan anymore.

He was in a different desert, thousands of miles away, and he was by himself.

None of his friends were getting hurt this time.

No one was dying this time.

He heard the sound once more, but this time, he wasn’t scared. It was almost certainly nothing more than the cry of a wolf.

At least that wasn’t a dream. Or worse, an auditory hallucination.

It was a real sound, and he wasn’t going crazy, even if he had forgotten for a few seconds where he was or what was going on.

He was totally fine.

So why did he still feel so guilty about what had happened halfway across the world?

It was a long time ago now. He wasn’t interested in crying to some Veteran’s Freedom Society counselor about his feelings. He just wanted to keep moving forward and trusting that if he acted fine, he would be fine. Just fine, fine, fine.

What other choice did he have?

He rubbed a hand over his face and sat back down on the futon, pulling the quilt around himself once more. It was even colder now than it had been when he fell asleep, and as freaked out as he felt being here, he wasn’t going out there in the freezing night with the clearly very active coyotes.

Karlin was definitely in bed by now. She had probably just gotten held up somehow. He’d see her in the morning.

He closed his eyes, praying that God would take care of her and that they would be able to succeed in taking Senera down.

At last the strange sounds went completely silent, and after a lot of tossing and turning, he finally managed to fall asleep once more.