A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O’Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing “flashbacks” to his unresolved and turbulent past.
It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier.
The much-publicized trial and the full-scale police investigation into a series of recent murders are among events which draw Kellen O’Reilly and the dynamic and Sexy Sarah Paradis – trial counsel for Satorius's victims – into an ever-widening web of intrigue and corruption involving the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the police force itself.
As events in Kellen O'Reilly’s own past become linked with uncovering secret government-funded psychochemical experiments, tables are turned and Kellen is running for his life.
A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O’Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing “flashbacks” to his unresolved and turbulent past.
It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier.
The much-publicized trial and the full-scale police investigation into a series of recent murders are among events which draw Kellen O’Reilly and the dynamic and Sexy Sarah Paradis – trial counsel for Satorius's victims – into an ever-widening web of intrigue and corruption involving the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the police force itself.
As events in Kellen O'Reilly’s own past become linked with uncovering secret government-funded psychochemical experiments, tables are turned and Kellen is running for his life.
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Overview
A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O’Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing “flashbacks” to his unresolved and turbulent past.
It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier.
The much-publicized trial and the full-scale police investigation into a series of recent murders are among events which draw Kellen O’Reilly and the dynamic and Sexy Sarah Paradis – trial counsel for Satorius's victims – into an ever-widening web of intrigue and corruption involving the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the police force itself.
As events in Kellen O'Reilly’s own past become linked with uncovering secret government-funded psychochemical experiments, tables are turned and Kellen is running for his life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770905511 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 965 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mindfield
By William Deverell
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2006 William DeverellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55022-696-6
CHAPTER 1
Friday, eleven a.m.
Kellen O'Reilly armed himself with caffeine and nicotine at his kitchen table as he waited for Margot. On the phone she'd been breathless, had hinted at menacing secrets. "I'll tell you when I get there."
He stared at, without reading, the Montreal Gazette's front page. CHAOS IN STREETS PREDICTED, said the headline. Alarmist propaganda from the comité executif.
Kellen's headache was complicated by a prickly, inexplicable anxiety, a sense of impending folie which arrived last night, an unwelcome guest whom he'd tried to drown in vodka and soda, but who stayed overnight and woke up with him in his bed, in his head.
Along with this thirteen-ounce hangover. Drinking. Thinking. Reading. Alone, until midnight, in his own easy chair.
"That's pretty sad, isn't it, Mao?" he said to his old tomcat, who was lying near the radiator, asleep, uncaring.
Yesterday had been bad. Bork the Stork had conspired with the Monster, Kellen's new desk computer, to break his spirit, and he'd returned home enervated, mentally washed out, then began to notice a disquiet growing tumor-like within him. Its source, he thought at first, was loneliness: the monk-in-a-cell pattern he'd got into in recent months, and he'd actually considered dropping into one of the pickup bars on Bishop, in the Anglais-Yuppie barrio, but in the end he couldn't face the awful game.
He stayed home and read Camus and drank half a twenty-six of Stolichnaya.
And felt inner tremors all night, fluttery feelings, little bats trapped inside him.
Goddamnit, he'd been well for so long. Well. Unsick. Mended. For almost twenty years. After five years of crawling from hell.
Could the seams of his mind be unraveling again?
Unthinkable thought. Avoided now, interrupted by Margot's footfall on the stairs outside.
She didn't knock, used the key over the sill, and emerged from the vestibule talking about the cold snap. Kellen tried to rise to greet her, but felt glued to his chair.
"My God, it's even colder in here," she said, shucking off a fur coat. "How can you stand living in an igloo?" She went to the rad and turned up the heat, then bent and patted Mao, who stood and stretched and prowled about her ankles.
She looked at the mess in the kitchen, then studied Kellen with a cold appraiser's eye. About a week's worth of blond-gray grizzle veiled the angular planes of his cheeks and jaw. Ragged hair curled over tautly muscled shoulders. The whole unkempt package was hunched into a cardigan sweater, an item of clothing ugly and old, tobacco-smelling, showing his shirt at threadbare elbows.
"You look like hell," she said.
"Yeah, well, we're on job action. Work to rule."
"Job action, eh?" She was looking at the half of Stolichnaya on the kitchen counter, the empty soda cans. "Why don't you and your downtrodden comrades just do it, take to the streets, get the goddamn thing over?"
"Yeah, we're going out. Totally illegal strike. But the executive retained this brilliant lawyer, who happens to be a Communist, and she's painted us into a corner with rhetoric that would embarrass Joseph Stalin. Now we have to walk out to save face."
He jerked upright at her touch.
"Relax." Her fingers traced across a shoulder to the spine, and she massaged him gently there. "Your stupid strike, is that all that's eating at you?"
"You've nothing to lose but your brains, I told them." He shrugged. "I'm almost a lone voice."
She patted his cheek, then picked up his ashtray. "Are these just today's butts?" He turned, watched her shake it into the wastebasket. "A single drop of pure nicotine on the tongue will kill a hundred-and-seventy-pound man in three minutes, did you know that? Carcinogenocide, pal."
"She's become a fresh-air fascist. This comes from your new boyfriend, right? Mr. Live-Right."
"Let's not," she said. Her face seemed hidden from him, made up, fuchsia lips, mascara in the morning, red hair for the month of February. The Technicolor woman.
Yeah, let's not, he told himself. "So how'd the audition go?"
She became chatty. "I think I've got a shot. They want me back Monday for a longer look. It's only a movie-of-the-week, but I'd kill for that part. Jon Voight's in it."
"What do you play?"
"His scheming ex-wife. Don't say I'll be perfect for it."
A helpless, crooked smile broke through the wall of Kellen's malaise. Margot seemed chirpily nervous, putting off the moment. She was high on something, a legal substance, maybe love. Yuppie-love with Mr. Live-Right, clean and keen and carcinogen-free.
"There's a fresh pot on the stove. You still, ah, do coffee? Or does a single drop of pure caffeine also have incredible stopping power?"
He got up. She blocked his way and brushed his cheek with a kiss. "I'll get it," she said.
"I'll get it," he said.
"I'll get it!"
Don't be controlling. He subsided to his chair and watched her move briskly to the stove. She was about as skinny as the fire pole by his office door. She'd become an aerobot: dance those ounces off, ladies. She'd been rounder and softer at twenty-five, when he married her. That was ten years ago. It lasted six.
Too many dark rooms, she'd announced. Too many closets with skeletons unshared, unspoken of. Too many veiled, blank years, his shattered past an opaque glass seen through only darkly. The controlling hadn't been meant for her. The controlling was to keep him whole and sane.
As she poured her coffee, she glanced at him, seemed about to say something, then looked away. Say it, he thought. Give with the bad news.
"You don't like Brad, do you?"
"I've never met him. If you like him, I like him."
"You don't like him because you think he's just a rich jock."
"I don't like him because he sells non-union doughnuts."
"He's not what you think. He's gentle, he has a nice, soft personality, he's shy, really, and he, ah, he ..."
"Yeah?"
"He proposed," she blurted.
Kellen felt an overwhelming sense of resignation, or failure. "Congratulations," he said.
She couldn't hold his eyes, and looked away. "I, ah, can't seem to find my divorce papers. I looked everywhere."
He lit another cigarette, drew on it deeply.
"And, ah, you know, I need them. The papers. To get married. The lawyer said he mailed them. I don't know, maybe when I moved ... Anyway, you know how totally scattered I am. Unlike you."
"Totally in control."
"So I thought maybe you could lend me yours. The divorce decree, or whatever they call it."
Kellen nodded, feeling a slow, creeping numbness. He walked into the living room, to his desk. Margot followed.
A map of Montreal was pinned to the wall behind the desk. Papers were scattered on it. Word Processing Made Easy, volumes one and two, were open in front of, incongruously, an old Remington typewriter. Telephone and answering machine.
Margot sat on the arm of the easy chair. Beside an open book. Camus. The Plague.
"You marrying him for his money or his nice, soft personality?" He began going through the drawers of the desk.
"Please, Kellen."
"I'm sorry. I'm being shitty." He shuffled through some files with personal papers. No divorce decree. "I think I may have put it in a box upstairs."
He found himself staring at a snapshot, he and Margot in happier times, hand in hand, smiling, weekend in Quebec City, Le Vieux-Port. More pictures. His mother, posed against a tree, trying to smile, but stern behind it, ascetic. Dead three years, a stroke, she had kept his frangible mind together through many troubled years.
Underneath that, another picture: Kellen at ten, wrestling with his father's leg, his father laughing, in an undershirt on the lawn, 1954. He quickly closed the drawer, feeling more pain, a different kind.
"You'll get a chance to meet him. Brad."
"Where?"
"The wedding."
"Thanks, but I'll take a rain check." He stood up and butted his cigarette into an ashtray. "I'd feel like Banquo's ghost. When is it?"
"In two weeks."
He turned to her. "You're pregnant."
She blushed. "It's true," she said, a little faintly.
A vulnerability about her got to Kellen. And he denied the sadness he felt, and put his arms around her. He felt her shiver.
"It's what you always wanted," he said. "I'm happy."
Kellen tried his best to live that lie until she left. He promised he would find the divorce papers, and arrange to get them to her. She stayed for an hour, talking to fill his silence, sharing her hopes for and fears of remarriage and motherhood, but after she left his emptiness took over him. At the end of a stressful marriage, somewhere beyond love, they'd found friendship, and he was going to miss that, miss her visits, her mothering, her caring.
From his kitchen window he watched her slide lithely into the driver's seat of a shiny red Porsche, pre-nuptial gift from the doughnut king, he guessed. The car pulled away from the curb across the street in front of a park where bundled toddlers romped in the snow, watched by mothers. His street, Avenue Ducharme, Outremont: two-storey duplexes square and squat, winding wrought-iron staircases trellised like butterfly wings, the naked skeletons of elm trees in the park, church steeples beyond, the looming gray mountain, and the brilliant cold-blue sky.
He lit another cigarette from the embers of his last one and felt his anxious self plunging into even a more terrible gloom. He felt the old fear, the fear of falling over the edge.
Why? Why now after twenty years? Maybe it was just a fusion of crises — the forthcoming walkout, Borko on his back all day-shift long, the Monster eating his files ... and now add to that mix the thought of another man's dividing cells in the womb of the woman he'd loved, still loved.
And maybe, somewhere beneath consciousness, he was still being haunted by his father. He'd never worked through the anger; he'd been told that. Until Kellen did so, the ghosts would keep making their regular visits. But whenever he thought of his father, murderous headaches racked him.
He sat at the table and unfolded the newspaper, tried to escape into it. And he saw, near the bottom of the front page, a photograph of Dr. Gregor Satorius, bow-tied, elderly, and stern, staring directly into the camera. CIA MUST DISCLOSE NAMES, LAWYER SAYS. As he looked into Satorius's eyes his mind went back to Coldhaven Manor, and there was nausea ...
He was jolted by a vision that jumped like a spark across his brain.
Teeth biting rubber, electrodes in your brain, Dr. Satorius says you are sick and this will make you better, and his finger is on the button ...
Immediately upon that, another flashback.
The smiling man shatters, his odious face disjoins into shards of broken glass, and all that remains are the padded wall and the spotlights and your fear and your despair ...
Kellen broke out into a hot hard sweat.
CHAPTER 2Friday, eleven-thirty a.m.
"Mlle Paradis, you seek the usual order under Section 398 of the Code de Procédure requiring Dr. Satorius to produce documents."
"My clients' files, yes, my Lord." Sarah Paradis had a feeling of foreboding about this chambers application. She'd drawn a bad judge, a reactionary dinosaur.
"Very well, he must produce them at your discovery on Monday. You have the order. So far, so good. But you also want access to the files of his other patients."
"Yes, I do."
"Well, had you not better obtain their consents? You can't just fish through people's private medical files without their leave."
"It would help if we knew who they were."
"Inquire of your clients."
"As your Lordship might recall from the affidavits, the patients were kept isolated. They were never allowed to meet. They were numbered by code and only Dr. Satorius has the key to that code. The court will be aware that my clients have very little recall of their own time at Coldhaven, let alone a memory for others they might accidentally have seen there. I'm sure hundreds of persons would come forward if we could reach them."
Urgent words for dead ears. Judge Martin had been a Mulroney bagman downtown, Sherbrooke to Dorchester, shaking down the big law offices. Monsieur le Patronage. He'd peddled too much influence to be electable, even in our corrupt democracy, so he was appointed to la cour supérieure.
"I don't see it as the court's function to create more business for your already busy practice, Miss Paradis. I can't see that your clients are entitled to any files but their own. You've made this argument very strongly once already."
"Thank you." A waterhead. Une tête d'eau.
"On the other motion, Miss Paradis, what is your answer to counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice?"
"What was his question?"
J'ai mon voyage, Sarah Paradis thought. This cucumber has already made his mind up. He'd listened with tender sympathy to the tearful pleas of the lawyers for the American and Canadian governments, co-conspirators here on behalf of the U.S. secret police. State privilege was their plaintive cry, the security of the Western World was at stake. What the CIA had been up to — three and four decades ago — was still a state secret in 1989.
She felt badly for her clients, several of whom were sitting in the gallery watching their brave lawyer try to keep her leaky boat afloat in heavy seas. She couldn't look at them, didn't have the strength.
"If I order officers of the CIA to attend your interrogatoires do I not require them to betray their sworn oath of secrecy? Do they not thus commit a federal felony?"
"An oath of secrecy," she said, "cannot be used by a law-breaker as a shield. Regina versus MacHenry."
"And how do you answer this: Operation Artichoke, or MK-ULTRA, or whatever you call it, these events ended twenty-five, twenty-six years ago; defendants say there are no witnesses —"
She cut in. "Witnesses? Sure there are witnesses, my Lord. The CIA's own agents. But they won't give us the names ..."
"You concede they have no documents."
"My Lord, everything went through their shredder in 1973." This was just too exasperating. "They admit it."
"I'm bound by the laws of state privilege. I can't force former CIA personnel to appear on commission evidence, and I can't force them to answer your questions."
She let loose her anger now. "These people scream state privilege every time we make an application to discover their case. They've indulged in a most blatant form of stonewalling. We've been at this three years and we can't even set a trial date!"
"Miss Paradis, this is hardly proper reply. You've made your case."
"Well, quite obviously I haven't made it very well." She took a deep breath, and let it go in a rush of words. "My Lord, I have a client who suffers acute depressions almost every day, terrible black holes she can't escape from, attacks of anxiety that come out of nowhere, nightmares so horrid she fears falling asleep. She's limped through the last twenty-five years of her life like a cripple maimed in a terrible accident."
Her angry emanations filled the courtroom. She'd at least make the transcript good reading for the appellate court. She directed an open hand toward the gallery, toward her clients.
"I have another client who has regressed to the behavior of a teenager. I have a client who has suffered clinical brain damage and can't recognize his children. I have a client who says he spends every day feeling like a squirrel climbing a cage and thinks the police are tapping his phone. The CIA funded Coldhaven — they paid that man to play with people's brains."
She stung a fierce index finger at Dr. Gregor Satorius, seated behind his lawyers. His eyes flashed back at her.
"Now I protest," said his lawyer, rising, flushed.
She turned to him, furious. "Oh, protest away." She ignored him, left him standing, turned back to the judge. "Isn't it obvious? They're manipulating the courts because they're afraid of a trial. Gregor Satorius and the CIA. They're afraid. Ever since we started this action, they've been trying to hide behind the cloak of secrecy. A cloak ... call it what it is ... a judicial gown."
"Miss Paradis!" the judge warned.
"I'm sorry, I put it badly, my Lord."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mindfield by William Deverell. Copyright © 2006 William Deverell. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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