I walked down the female wing in Ward Six, a rolled report in my right hand.
Karla Raven leaned against her doorjamb, attention centered on the gray metal security door at the end of the corridor. A good three paces away, I called, “Coming up behind you, Chief.” A smart man doesn’t surprise a SEAL with acute PTSD.
Karla snapped to attention.
“At ease, Chief. I’m retired, remember?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied with full military propriety.
“I suppose there’s no way we can get past that commanding officer thing?”
“No, sir.” Her level gray eyes looked down into mine. Then a faint smile bent her perfect lips. “Well, perhaps just a little, sir.”
I gestured at the gray door that blocked the hallway just beyond hers. “Something interesting there?”
“Just Gray, sir.”
“Prisoner Alpha?”
“She’s Gray to us, sir. Like her door. Curious that she doesn’t have a name, isn’t it, sir?”
“This may come as a surprise, Chief, but despite my research, I don’t know much about her.”
“Odd that someone would try to KILL a woman who doesn’t exist.” She paused. “Rumor is they never ID’d that guy who died trying to kill her. That the female shooter just vanished. No trace.”
“That’s classified.”
“Yes, sir.” Karla gestured toward the door. “There a reason she doesn’t get to rub elbows with the rest of us?”
“Orders. And even if there weren’t, I don’t know what to make of her. She spoke no English to begin with, but she’s been learning. Her math skills are outstanding. I suspect she was a physicist in her former life.”
“How’d she get here?” Karla wondered, forgetting herself for the moment.
“Security caught her inside a black project Los Alamos lab. No idea how she got in or where she came from. They charged her with criminal trespass. In the subsequent investigation they couldn’t turn up anything on her. No name, no address, no history, nothing. Her interrogators couldn’t recognize her language and would like to chalk it up to a disorder in the speech centers of the brain. She might have been Italian since she can comprehend simple phrases. Problem is, neither fMRI nor CT scans show any damage to either Broca’s area or Heschl’s gyrus. Those are the language centers of the brain.”
“She faking?”
“More like she’s ignorant. She prints in an unusual alphabet with additional patterned symbols we can’t decipher. She couldn’t read or write cursive, though she’s learning. Common references, like World War II, the Cold War, Afghanistan don’t register. She responds with a blank look.”
“So, what do you think, sir?”
I sucked a deep breath and shrugged. “I originally thought it was some sort of autism that’s manifesting in a form I’ve never seen: an NOS, or Not Otherwise Specified. In some ways she demonstrates the kinds of behaviors we see in ‘closet children.’ You know, the ones locked in a closet or basement for years? But she’s neither physically nor emotionally stunted. There’s no sign of brain injury or developmental abnormality, factors which would seem to discount autism. The different centers of her brain activate the way they would in any other intelligent human. Put that all together, and what do you have?”
“Enigma?”
“I couldn’t have said it better, Chief.” I tapped my report against my left hand like it was a baton.
She gave me a gray-eyed sidelong glance.
I started back down the hall, took two steps, and patted my pocket. “Uh, Chief?”
Raven gave me an impish grin and tossed me my pen. I snatched it out of the air, reclipped it to my pocket, and shook my head.
How does she do that?
On the way back down the hall, I checked to ensure that keys, cell phone, wallet, pocket schedule, and reading glasses were where they should be. And, damn it, I knew Karla was grinning at my back as I went.
Stopping at Dr. Talavera’s door, I was curious to find it open. Glancing in, I knocked on the doorframe. At sight of the red-headed woman seated on the corner of Cat’s bed I prepared for trouble. Major Winchester Swink shot a quick glance my way. “Hello, Skipper!”
“Hello, Winny.” Swink suffers from antisocial personality disorder. Because she’s so damn good at flying things, the Air Force overlooked her APD until Winny pissed off a general.
Worried that she was cooking up trouble, I shot a glance at Cat. Sitting at her desk, she seemed composed. “Sorry to bother the two of you. I can come back later.”
“It’s okay, Skipper. I was about to leave.” Swink rose to her full five-foot-four and shook back her flaming hair. She kept herself in superb shape in the expectation that she would be cleared for flight duty again. She also practiced a variety of different martial arts should she ever need to, as she said, “clean someone’s clock.”
For whatever reason, the chip that balanced so precariously on her shoulder seemed absent today. Or she wanted something from Cat and was governing her trip-wire temper with an iron hand.
She turned her attention to Talavera, and said, “Talk to you later, Cat.”
I watched her half-swagger out of the room, as if she were mocking me.
Cat Talavera smiled shyly. “She wanted to know about Los Angeles. Her husband is taking their two little boys to LA. for a visit.”
“She does care about her kids.”
I stepped fully into the room, wondering about the wisdom of what I was about to do. “How have you been feeling?”
Cat’s history was as unique as she was. She was a “Dreamer,” brought to this country when she was six. In school, she’d excelled, entered the university on a full-ride scholarship. Earned two PhDs by the time she was twenty-five. Despite offers in the private sector, she was working on a DOD-funded grant through the university. Conducting cutting-edge research on methylated genes that I didn’t understand. When she learned her research had been used to murder an entire village with Taliban sympathies, she imploded. Unleashed all that guilt, betrayal, and rage in a much-too-public display.
She tilted her head, giving me an “Are you crazy?” arch of one delicate eyebrow. Then she raised her forearms, the whitened scars visible on her wrists. “Look, Dr. Ryan. No new ones. But then, you’ve cunningly managed to avoid giving me anything sharp.”
“Comes with the territory. Nothing in life is free. Not even brilliance.”
“So, you think brilliance made me crazy?”
I slapped my hand with the rolled report. “In all fairness to the Department of Defense—and their reasons for placing you here—people with normally functioning brains don’t usually attempt suicide on the Capitol steps.”
“Looking back, had I been in control of my faculties, I’d have done it someplace farther from medical aid. I was thinking of the statement it would make, not the proximity of trained EMTs. But then, suicide was a bit out of my expertise.” She chuckled, shaking her head. “Two-hundred-and-twenty people are dead because my research enabled the cholo bastard who ordered their murder!”
“He’s been relieved of command.”
“There’s always another one waiting to replace him.” She flipped her thick black hair back. “The things I did, Dr. Ryan? Emailing my research to the New York Times, trying to kill myself on the Capitol steps? That was rage and shock.”
“So how would you do it differently?”
“I wouldn’t. Killing myself wasn’t the answer.” She looked around helplessly. “Looking back . . . Seeing it clearly, maybe I belong in here. It’s just tough to admit.”
“And the sadness and depression? Have they been getting worse?”
“When I first got here? There was this feeling of happy idiocy. I could just sit like a vegetable and be okay with it. For the last month I’ve been at my wit’s end. Let me scrub floors, pick up the trash, anything but just sit here!”
I carefully asked, “You know why you’re here? Really?”
“They said ‘for observation.’ In reality, I’m a security risk. They barely managed to kill that email before the Times got it. I’m too valuable to let go.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Hell, no! I want out of here! I’m a biochemist and geneticist with two PhDs! And given the way you people sanitize everything, I can’t even grow mold in my toilet, let alone tinker with its DNA.”
Then she looked up, eyes widening with understanding. “You’ve been changing my meds, haven’t you?”
“I don’t think you were mentally ill, Dr. Talavera. Here’s my take: You were twenty-seven years old, dazzled by your own brilliance, incredibly idealistic, and out to save the world. When you smacked headlong into the wall of reality and betrayal, you didn’t have the emotional foundation to handle it. You’d spent your life sequestered in study, education, the university, and scholarship.” I paused. “What’s the phrase? Book bright, world dumb?”
A frown lined her brow. “What did you do to my meds?”
“You’ve been on a placebo for the last couple of months.”
A thousand thoughts churned behind her delicate face. “But I’m still a security risk.”
“That, unfortunately, I can’t change with a wave of my magic psychiatric wand. What I can do is start laying a foundation to eventually get you out of here.”
“That’s supposed to motivate me? Dr. Ryan, if I’m suddenly declared sane, they’ll charge me with all those security violations. Maybe even treason. Charges that have heavy-duty jail time attached. And when they’re done with that, there’s my illegal status.” She paused. “As if they’d ever really deport me to Mexico.”
I gave her a conspiratorial grin. “Landing in Grantham Barracks may turn out to be the preferred alternative to a felony cell in Leavenworth.” I waggled the roll of papers in my hand. “Meanwhile, the Chinese are doing something with pigs by inserting human genes that govern the development of our brain tissue. Why put human ‘brain DNA’ into pigs? I caught a whiff of the story and contacted the guys at DARPA. Maybe, if I had your take on it . . . ?”
She took the roll of papers before seating herself at the desk and rubbing them flat with her palm. “I’d need the latest journals. I’ve been out of the loop for the last year. Research on this stuff moves like lightning.”
“I might be able to swing that.”
But she was already lost in the report, the cutest little parallel lines in her brow above her nose.
When I left the room a couple of minutes later, I couldn’t quite control the smile that kept tugging up the corners of my lips.