Chapter Thirty-Six

Thorn

Paris, France

Monday, Zero Dark Thirty

"S he's asleep?" Lynx asked

"She's not responding to me. It doesn't look like sleep. It looks like a cage fight." Thorn's computer was open and resting on the counter. He spun the monitor, so Lynx could see.

Blankets had been duck taped to the safety bars of Juliette's bed, and the blankets and top sheet removed as she fought against whatever demons were chasing her.

It was hard to watch.

He spun the computer back to talk to his support team.

"We're in a better place than we were just a few hours ago." Lynx's voice was pitched to soothe. "We have a better handle on what's going on."

Thorn wasn't really in the mood to be mollified. He wanted to know what was happening to Juliette's body. With all this thrashing, they'd even taken the IV away.

When Thorn had asked about something to help her rest, the doctor said that if she was in detox, adding something to her system might just be the worst thing he could do. He said let her ride it out.

"Ride it out" sounded like balancing a surf board on a beautiful wave.

What he saw, she was riding a bucking bronco, ready to be thrown.

One of his buddies from back in his SEAL days got on pain meds after an explosion took part of his foot. For the sake of his brand-new baby girl, his buddy decided he had to get away from the pills. He'd become addicted. His fellow operators went deep out into the middle of nowhere, hid the keys to the truck, and watched him go through hell. Tremors, sweating, nausea, delirium, and depression. A deep, dark void of depression. They kept him there for three weeks.

It was one thing to watch a SEAL fight his demons. It was a whole other ballgame to watch Juliette face this down alone.

Thorn rubbed a hand over his face. "Good. Let's do this fast. This case seems to be dynamic. I have no idea how long I'll have a lull." If he could call this a lull. He remembered back to the dream where he'd been doing the fancy footwork to stay upright on the quickly rotating Earth. And he couldn't say that had been far off. "Start with the X-rays and blood work."

Nutsbe did a split screen. Now, Lynx took up the right-hand side, and Nutsbe's image was talking from the left, though both of his teammates were sitting in the Panther Force war room back at Iniquus Headquarters. "Gage and Thorn met with Polla and Habiba. They both said they had a sister with whom they'd had no contact in years," Nutsbe said.

Thorn's gut tightened. "Name?"

"Arya Khouri." Lynx typed it onto the screen, so he could see the spelling. "Dr. Arya Khouri."

"Her specialty was audiology?" Thorn asked.

"In a way," Lynx said. "Arya was studying subsonic vibrations to understand large mammal communications."

"So elephants and whales?" Thorn leaned his hips into the wall.

"Exactly. So the why of the X-ray ? the pictures that Polla and Habiba had of their sister don't match Juliette's photographs. The computer analysis gives us only a moderate chance that these are the same women. Juliette has the same coloring as Arya. We speculated that perhaps she'd changed her appearance with plastic surgery."

"Perhaps with the accident, she needed facial reconstruction," Thorn speculated.

"That had been exactly my thought," Lynx said. "This woman's nose is different than Arya's ? straighter and more slender, her cheekbones are more prominent, her teeth shaped differently. We gave the X-rays to a plastic surgeon to evaluate for us. He said that the work was not indicative of a trauma event or reconstructive in nature, but that these were voluntary procedures."

Thorn walked over and looked down at Juliette's face. "Do you think Juliette wanted to change her looks for aesthetics' sake, or do you think she was trying to disguise her identity?"

Lynx's voice was behind him. "Again, I don't know enough right now to answer that. I can also tell you that the scar on her head is just that – a scar on her head. The plastic surgeon said that it looks like it was created on purpose as if cut with a scalpel then sewn up again. There is no skeletal damage to her skull. She didn't have brain surgery."

"So who's lying here?" Thorn turned and walked back to his place against the wall. "She could well be Arya," Thorn said, "but we're not sure?"

"Not a hundred percent," Nutsbe confirmed. "Now, Honey telephoned his wife. Since she works with animal migration in the Ngorongoro region, he thought that she might know something about another female scientist interested in elephants."

"Yeah." Thorn crossed his arms over his chest and leaned his hips back against the wall. "I'd imagine that was a close-knit group of scientists. Did Meg know Arya?"

"Yes," Nutsbe said. "They'd been quite friendly. But Meg hasn't heard from Arya in years."

"Because?"

"Meg is frequently out in the bush, so she's not always in contact," Lynx said. "Meg speculated that probably Arya had lost funding, so she had to stop her field research and was teaching at a university somewhere. More interestingly, Meg said that the last she heard about Arya Khouri was when she was supposed to go to court to testify against the U.S. Navy. She remembered enough of the details that I was able to find it on the docket. Arya Khouri's documents were admitted into court. She was slated as an expert witness, but she was never called to the stand. It's on my list for tomorrow to get in touch with the lawyers and find out why."

Thorn nodded. "White military uniforms, she had said. Okay. What was that case about?"

"Whales." Lynx smiled. "I'll give you the highlights, but I'll stick this in your cloud file in case you want to read deeper. I honestly don't see that you'll have time. We have a lot to cover."

"Roger," Thorn said.

Juliette lay panting in her stupor, and Thorn was anxious to get to the information about her blood draw.

"Okay this was out in California and it had to do with low-frequency active (LFA) sonar that naval ships were using for training. The Navy was hauled in to court because it was violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act. From what I culled from Dr. Khouri's documentation, the LAF was having a negative impact on the animals like walruses, whales, and dolphins that are dependent on sound for navigation. It's messing up migration and reproduction. It separated mothers from their calves and stressed the animals out. Well, the sounds basically torture the animals. These sounds can travel hundreds of miles and can be found in seventy percent of the oceans."

"This trial was a while ago?"

"Years ago. Yes. The courts are trying to balance needs. The Navy is developing a plan to use the LAF more carefully. It's in study."

"And Dr. Khouri's written testimony was there, but she wasn't on the witness list. Did you take a look at that list?"

"I did," Lynx said, "and guess whose name was there, in defense of the Navy?"

Thorn didn't need to guess, he knew in his gut. "George Matthews."

"Bingo." Nutsbe looked at his watch. "I need to run to a meeting. Lynx is going to finish your briefing."

"Roger that." Thorn plunged on. "All right, George Matthews and Arya Khouri are on opposite sides of a major military trial. He goes, she does not."

"I need you to put that to the side." Lynx tapped at her keyboard, and Thorn watched as her focus scanned over the information she'd brought up. "The possibility that Juliette is Arya Khouri is one part of the puzzle. We know she's genetically tight with the other two Dr. Khouris, We know that her physical appearance has been changed. We know that she seems to have disappeared from research before the naval trial. I'm working on timelines of Arya Khouri, George Matthews, and David DuBois, and finding locations and intersections. Here's an important piece of information. Arya Khouri was born in Syria. Her father was a professor of medicine, and he spent time with his family in both France and America. Arya Khouri spoke Arabic, French, and English fluently, as does Juliette. Arya Khouri returned to the United States for her university studies, eventually getting her PhD in zoology. Her dissertation was on subsonic communications in large mammals. She became a United States citizen. She's an American now."

Thorn stalled. "And Brigitte knows that. Brigitte must know Juliette's true identity."

"How do you come to that conclusion?" she asked.

"When Brigitte and I were in the hotel room when I first met her, I asked, ‘Do you know where they took Juliette? Would you help us get her back? She's an American citizen, we won't let that go.' And Brigitte's response struck me as really odd. She said, ‘You either know that is the truth or you're trying to play me.'"

"Interesting. Yeah, I'd interpret that the way you did. Brigitte knows Juliette's true identity and that includes her American citizenship." Lynx looked down, tapping at her keyboard. "Another tick in the box saying Juliette is Arya." She brought her gaze back up. "Now, I need to shift gears and talk about her blood samples."

Thorn sucked in a lung full of air and braced himself. Fear ? just raw primal fear raced beneath his skin.

Lynx stopped to look at him. "We're doing our best to get her home. I promise you, Thorn. Everything that I can think of is happening. Okay?"

"Lynx, I…" The sensations running through him were so intense that they threw him completely off balance. Just like in his dream.

"Right. I get that." She nodded. Her smile was sad. Her eyes worried. "I've seen this a time or two before. Honey when he met Meg. Gage when he met Zoe. I think it's a thing with people who have their lives constantly in danger. They don't have time for personal drama or games. I haven't quite worked out a theory in my mind of why this is how things play out, but go down the list Brian and Sophia, Deep and Lacey, Jack knew with Suz, Gator and Christen. Across your team, across my team, the operatives are humming along and then its?"

"A kick in the balls."

"It can feel that way. Love isn't the same thing as joy."

"Love? No. This happened before I met her. It's a mind game. Not anything real. It started when I saw?"

"Her photo," Lynx said. "Haven't you heard that same story from Honey? Randy showed Honey a picture of Meg, and it was a done deal. His heart didn't belong to him alone anymore."

Thorn nodded. "It seemed more believable when it happened to Honey. He was more?"

"Deserving of happiness? Is that what you were going to say?"

Thorn rubbed his hands over his face and shifted on the wall. "It's just not my style," he said. "I don't do relationships, and I certainly don't do falling in love. What I do is I complete missions and enjoy what the moment brings. And that's not even diving into the whole it takes two to tango thing. Back to the mission. You were about to give me a medical update on the precious cargo." Thorn glanced over to Juliette to make sure she hadn't heard any of that.

She lay in a ball at the bottom of the bed, mouth slack, eyes in REM.

"Well, since we aren't sure of her name, ‘precious cargo' will work. And I won't even pause to tell you that you can run but you can't hide. Giving her an operator's term to keep things from becoming personal is too little, too late. Now, as to her blood ? we got the test results back. Everything seems to be normal as to her health – her white counts were elevated, but we'd expect that with her temperature so high. Two substances of interest were flagged. First, there are traces of a sedative which might have been used in this instance for chemically restraining Juliette. This drug is a very effective rapid tranquillizer used in emergency departments for psychiatrically agitated patients. By its half-life we believe she was tranquilized in the last twenty-four hours. Not knowing the original dosage, it's impossible for us to tell."

Thorn shook his head. "What she's going through right now doesn't seem like anything to do with her being sedated when she was kidnapped."

"Right. So the second substance that was found is a bit of a puzzle. We called in a professor of pharmacology to take a look at our results and give us her best guess as to what we were dealing with. This class of drug, as it pertains to our case, hang on…" Lynx typed at her computer. "Yes, here. Remember when you asked me why DuBois was facing ethical charges? It was because of a drug that was similar to Propranolol. A bit of background, Propranolol is legally prescribed. This does not have to do with its FDA approved usage. A Propranolol look-alike was being studied in its use for wiping out memories associated with post traumatic distress. There were lots of medical ethics issues that came up around wiping out memories."

"DuBois was using a look alike medicine?"

"Yes, on various human subjects, including the studies where he was working with the US sailors. His study not only included wiping memories, but applying his sea snail experiments in trying to replace the memories with alternatives. I'm referring you back to that article I sent you to read on your way down to Toulouse."

"Wait. DuBois wiped out old memories and put new ones from someone else in the old memories place? That's a sci-fi horror plot."

"Exactly." Lynx nodded emphatically. "The subjects said that they recalled the memories as static pictures that made no sense to them until Dr. DuBois gave them context. For example, a picture of a dog was implanted, and he'd tell them, "That was your childhood dog." They remembered that picture as a memory of their dog. He did places this way as well. He'd put a picture of a building and tell the subject, "This is where you lived as a child." And that picture would supplant other memories. This held only in the instance that medications were also used, and they wore off with time."

"That's nuts," was all Thorn could think to say.

"Can you imagine a world where not only was that possible, but it was in active use?" Lynx asked. "You'd have no grasp on reality, what really was, and what was just a manipulation of memory. Bottom line here, the drug in Juliette's system is similar to Propranolol but is something new. The pharmaceutical professor doesn't know what it is or what effects it has on the mind or body."

"Crap." Thorn watched as Juliette tried to scratch up the sheet underneath her. "It's in her system."

"If the drug is not recognized by the computer software, it means it hasn't passed through the FDA and isn't even in medical trial. It's rogue as far as the United States goes. I'll make a note for Nutsbe." Lynx turned her head and scratched a pen across a pad of paper. "It's a stretch, but I'll have him check and see if the search engine checked world-wide data bases. Perhaps it's used and approved in another country. Hard to imagine, but let's cross the Ts and dot the Is just to be sure.

Thorn swallowed. He'd spend some time later trying to calculate the ramifications of being a human guinea pig for an unethical pig like DuBois.

Lynx turned back to him. "Let's talk about memories. We don't actually know what they are. There's a lot of debate in the scientific community. Zoe, for example, got involved in her research in blood biomarkers and the BIOMIST system to try to help the Innocence Project. They've found that many of the people who are imprisoned, by eye-witness accounts alone, are often innocent. The witness swears it's the person who perpetrated the crime because they completely believe ? have certitude in their conviction ? that their memory and recognition can be depended on. I'll give you an example. In 1984, there was a college student, smart woman, twenty-two years old, 4.0 GPA, asleep in her bed. A man broke into her house, and with a knife to her throat, he raped her. She spent the time of her rape memorizing everything about him so she could identify him later. Hairline, tattoos, scars, she was searching him specifically to find identifiers."

"Brave and very smart. But there's a yeah here isn't there?"

"She found out that when identified by DNA not only was this guy not the guy who raped her, but the guy who actually raped her and admitted it to the police was brought to her. ‘Do you recognize this man?' ‘I've never seen him before, no.' The innocent man spent eleven years in prison."

Thorn let out a low whistle and scrubbed his hand over his head.

"Memory does not faithfully record events and store them away in the brain. Research shows that memory is neither persistent nor is it unchanging. As a matter of fact, every time someone recalls an event, it's altered in the memory. The thing we think we know about memory is that it creates a change in the brain. New synaptic connections form between brain neurons. So…" She turned her head to read from another monitor. "Scientists have been working to understand memory and its effects on anxiety. They've been trying to find a drug that leaves the memories intact but takes out the emotional charge."

"Someone who saw his buddy blown up in front of him remembers the instance but has no emotion? That sounds like a psychopath," Thorn said.

"They weren't working on that, they were working with people who are afraid of snakes," Lynx countered. "The scientists exposed people who had a snake phobia to the snakes and then they gave them a shot of their drug. After that, the subjects showed no sign of fear as they handled the pile of snakes."

"I'm still saying that sounds dangerous as hell. Is this being used now? You said it was used on people, so it's in human trial?"

"I don't have that. I could look it up for you, but this is a different drug that they found in Juliette's blood. I was just giving you that information as background to help you understand what might be happening in Juliette's mind. The drug given to Juliette is mostly a mystery. We won't know how long it can stay active in her system or what the long-term effects could be. If this is the reason why she doesn't remember before the accident, then it might be caused by the drug. Another possibility is that she's purposefully using the drug to deal with the ongoing anxiety of not knowing anything about herself."

"But the plastic surgeon says there was no accident."

"No," Lynx corrected. "He said that facial reconstruction was not done to correct for trauma. And that the incision on her head was clean, as if cut on purpose by a scalpel with no underlying cranial damage. There could still have been some kind of accident."

"Got it," Thorn said. "I have a question about the Propranolol look-alike when it was used for PTSD. Was the memory loss permanent?"

"The results were varied," Lynx said.

Thorn took a few breaths and let the information sift through various outcomes, so he could get strategies together. "I need to get a couple things accomplished here. Mainly, I need to get her under some competent care. If her memory is being held hostage ? probably not the right word."

"I was thinking about it similarly," Lynx said. "In the car they used a chemical restraint to stop her physically. They could also be using a chemical restraint on her mentally. They may just be holding her in a state of disorientation until they need her to remember again. If she is who we think she is, and she's tied to George Matthews, then they might have been forcing her to help him succeed with his project ? the apocalyptic neuroweapon."

"And this may just be putting her on hold for some reason." Thorn had never heard or contemplated the possibility of this kind of pharmacological warfare. "As the drug leaves her system, that could have its own ramifications. If her memories start to return, it might be one thing if they come in at a trickle. It might be a whole other thing if they come in like a flashflood. We have no idea what she's seen or heard or been through." He shook his head, his eyes fixed on Juliette. "I'm not equipped for that. I don't know what that might look like. But if she's not willingly playing on the bad-guy team, I think we owe it to her to have the softest landing possible."