Chapter Forty

Thorn

Paris, France

Monday, Zero Three Twenty Hours

"O ther than those sketchy details, I don't remember the escape right now, maybe it will come back to me later," Arya said.

"I'd like to know who was there at the hospital," Lynx said. "I'm trying to get an understanding of the relationships."

"George was helping me at the hospital. He spoke to the doctors on my behalf. They were speaking a language I didn't know."

Lynx seemed to brighten. "Portuguese maybe?"

"It sounded like a romance language. When they gave me paperwork to sign, I could guess at some of the words. It was too complicated for me to figure out, so I just signed it. I needed surgery." Her fingers came up and traced along the scar on her head. "And when I woke up, David Dubois and George were in the room with me. I needed time to recover. I was there for weeks, I think."

"Close your eyes. Go back to your recovery time," Lynx said in a smooth low voice. "Let a picture come up for you. Tell me what you see."

"My head and face were bandaged. George told me they'd had to shave off my hair."

"George was still with you." Lynx's voice was hypnotic. "Anyone else?"

Thorn had to trust Lynx knew what she was doing. He watched Arya's face slacken.

"He introduced me to David DuBois. He was famous for his neuro-biological studies in PTSD and brain trauma. He said he couldn't fix my ears, but he might be able to help me with interventions that could make my injuries less disabling."

Arya's eyes slid back and forth behind her closed lids.

"You're remembering a scene." Lynx's voice soothed. "Tell me what you see."

"I woke up and pushed my call button, but the nurse didn't come. I got myself out of bed, I needed to use the toilet. When I opened the bathroom door, I found David and George having sex in my bathroom. I was horribly embarrassed."

"Isn't Matthews married to a woman?" Thorn mouthed into his covert mic.

"That doesn't mean anything," Lynx said back in his ear.

True…

Arya opened her eyes. "I'm so sorry. I think I need to lie down and close my eyes. The vertigo is making me nauseated. My head is pounding."

"You gave me everything I needed. Thank you, Arya. You rest, and we'll keep moving forward with our plan."

Thorn shifted to get off her bed, but Arya wasn't letting go of his hand. He closed the laptop lid and stretched out to place it on the hospital table. Reaching across his chest, he pushed the button to lower the head of the bed back to flat, then turned on his side so she could burrow up next to him, their fingers still entwined.

He stroked her hair and soon, her breathing changed.

But he didn't want to move.

He wanted to stay right there in that place, tangled up with Arya. He'd kick his own ass later. He was breaking all kinds of rules, personal and professional.

"Can you hear me, Thorn?" Lynx said in his ear.

"Roger," Thorn mouthed back.

"She doing okay?"

"I think she's sleeping. I hope so."

"What times she identified and the timeline I've been developing line up neatly. It looks like DuBois and Matthews met while they were trying to identify a cause for the twenty-one military personnel who had just gone into theater with no previous head injuries, suddenly showing up with symptoms of traumatic brain injury. You have that article in your cloud file."

"Copy."

"Both George Matthews and Arya were speaking at the zoological conference I was asking her about. I tracked down the organizers and asked about Arya's program. She never showed up for her talk. Later that day, Arya sent word that there was a family emergency. No one that I could find saw her from that point on. Her financial obligations were closed out, and she disappeared."

"But not Matthews," Thorn said.

"No, he had already given his talk. And it doesn't seem that there were any breaks in his appearances or his employment. Arya didn't show up to testify at the Navy hearing, but George did. Interestingly, colleagues at Montrim told us that George often travelled out of Washington DC. He flew to a private laboratory in North Dakota. That's where he conducted some of his sound experiments. His colleagues said that George Matthews went there fairly frequently, if not once a week then every ten days. That was true, on my timeline, until several months before the first sounds were noticed by the American diplomatic corps in Cuba."

"Arya believed that Matthews was held prisoner all that time. But obviously they were duping her into working with him." Thorn swallowed down the bile the sat on the back of his tongue. "Why did you ask about Portuguese when you were asking her questions?"

"There was another intersection when Matthews went over to lecture at the American University in Beirut. From his visa papers, he listed DuBois's home address. I believe that Matthews was there recruiting DuBois to his project.

"Because?"

"A week later, DuBois had a new influx of money in his American bank account, and he flew to Brazil on the same flight as Matthews. When DuBois travelled back to his home in Beirut, he had a daughter with him, travelling on a French passport."

"Arya was injured in a sound experiment gone awry, thinks she's escaped and is getting medical help, falls prey to this scheme to what end?"

"I think I have that answer. Remember, I was brought in to a Montrim case. Montrim thought they had a mole feeding information to a foreign power about an ongoing Pentagon research project. Since I was read into that program, I have access to the files. I did a search and discovered that our surveillance of Matthews shows that he was speaking frequently with DuBois during the whole time period when I believe that Arya was held captive."

"Arya said Matthews and DuBois were having sex in her hospital bathroom. They were lovers, were their communications romantic in nature?"

"Nothing in there about the content of their communications. I think we had a warrant to monitor incoming and outgoing numbers, not content. But, our contractor was able to get me the DARPA files on DuBois, so I could figure out when and why he was hired by DARPA. It seems that Matthews was trying to convince DARPA to bring DuBois to the US to work as the counter for his work with sound weaponry – what he broke, DuBois could fix, should the enemy be working on similar neuroweaponry."

Thorn extrapolated that thought. "And Matthews very well might have broken Arya for the purpose of giving DuBois a guinea pig to experiment on."

"My thoughts," Lynx agreed. "And the whole charade of wiping her memory would make sense for a several reasons. One, Dubois was experimenting with his new drug. Two, if he wiped her memory, he could do human experiments on memory transference. You heard how Arya had weird pictures in her head that were labelled for her, and she believed them to be true. Three, he could monitor the long-term effect of the weapon that I believe, in some form or other, was directed at our embassies. I think that the CHAMP is a thing. Maybe not the thing it was first envisioned for."

"By Russia."

"Russian scientists, in cahoots with Matthews, might very well have been selling to the highest bidder. It looks like Russia won the bid when it came to the riot shields."

"Makes sense. And that works out with the details you've run down?" he asked. It was both complicated and simplistic. If Mathews and the two other scientists wanted to make money on the international weapons' stage, they needed the goods. Arya's unique expertise in studying how sounds injured marine mammals could be incorporated into the research Matthews had been conducting for the Pentagon while at Montrim. If Matthews already owned the property, for experiments, why couldn't they just snatch Arya up and fabricate this ruse? Those were three shitheads that needed to be caught and brought to justice.

"It needs further investigation and our client is taking that on."

"Then our contractor can't be the CIA." Another theory blown.

"Nope, not if they're doing domestic crime investigation. I'm guessing it's a Pentagon contract, maybe FBI," Lynx responded. "They could certainly dial up their spook friends and give us a leg up. That is, until you started playing spidey, crawling up the side of the building."

"Don't," he growled.

"Touchy. All right. To my eyes, this all lays out as a neatly executed plan. The players wait for DuBois to stabilize Arya in her new persona. When DuBois has a firm hand on her, he then puts out a series of academic papers on TBI and PTSD. A PR campaign is waged to increase his limelight, media paints DuBois as the world authority. I remember him being in the paper about this because of Striker's buddy Reaper Hamilton's medical issues. I was hoping to see some important strides being made."

"In retrospect, it's good that Reaper dodged the DuBois bullet," Thorn said.

"Amen. So, in this possible scenario, while DuBois's "I'm the best of the best" PR campaign is going on, the sounds and symptoms start showing up in our diplomats. DARPA already has his name. Montrim now has it from George Matthews, as well.

"They didn't think that a nod from Matthews was disqualifying? He was being watched for sharing weapons secrets with the enemy."

"Matthews's surveillance wasn't known to DARPA, Montrim hired Iniquus to protect their Pentagon contract. DARPA might never have made that connection. Probably never made that connection. They just wanted the best of the best when it came to this issue. They needed to understand what happened if they were to develop systems to protect our people."

"Roger."

"In this scenario, then, DuBois is aligned with and possibly being paid by Matthews and his buddies," Lynx said. "I can speculate that they needed him for a variety of reasons ? possibly to enter false data, possibly to give poor remediation, possibly to report back on the health findings."

"When Arya flew to France, they realize that she's endangering the entire scheme. If she starts looking into her citizenship, she will find that her papers are falsified. When she tried to talk to her grandmother, all the false memories that DuBois planted would be exposed. They needed to capture her. DuBois realized this too. Once he knew that the two Russians had grabbed Arya, he didn't stop to talk to his mom. He headed straight out of town. DuBois couldn't let the French pick him up for questioning since he's listed as her father on her green card."

"Agreed," Lynx said. "He had to get out of the EU stat."

"If we're working the hypothesis that DuBois called in the Russian scientists, how do the Rex Deus and Omega goons get involved?"

Brigitte rounded into the room. "Okay, lover boy, stop whispering sweet nothings into Juliette's ear. We've got incoming."