Tunnel Vision Read online

  “I think it’s some kind of paranormal thing like ESP. But I’m not convinced.”

  “So you’re not buying that his spirit merged with his dead father’s.”

  “No.”

  “Even though the others claim he’s got this hot God lobe.”

  Stern nodded.

  After reviewing more videos, Roman packed Stern’s laptop and slung it over his shoulder.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Your cellar.”

  “My cellar? What for?”

  “To keep you from jumping on 911 soon as I walk out of here.” He jabbed the pistol into Stern’s back. “Downstairs.”

  Stern led them to a door that led into the basement, a small dim place with one wall of granite boulders that formed one flank of the foundations. The other walls had been finished off. The ceiling was maybe seven feet high, consisting of beams and wallboard. Some beams looked original, with hooks for drying meat in the olden times.

  From his briefcase Roman pulled out a length of rope. “Turn around.” He wrapped the rope loosely around his hands. Then he removed a sleep mask. “And where exactly is the lab?”

  Stern rattled off directions as Roman jotted them down. “Who else works there?”

  He named names, beginning with Sarah Wyman.

  “Do she and Kashian have a thing going on?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And Elizabeth Luria’s in charge.”

  “Yes.”

  “Back to Zachary Kashian. Is he special?”

  “How do you mean special?”

  “Is he divine?”

  “Divine?” Stern gave him a perplexed look. “No. He’s a neurological anomaly, at best maybe psychic. But he’s as mortal as you and I.”

  “Then how do you explain his channeling Jesus?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was a paranormal experience. Maybe he memorized it as a child.”

  “Any reason to believe he was lying about his experiences?”

  “No.”

  The man had settled into the charade as his body relaxed. And that was good. “Would you say that he’s evil?”

  “Evil? No, he’s not evil.”

  Roman slipped the mask across Stern’s eyes. “Two more questions, and then we’re done. Do you believe in God?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation as his body appeared to stiffen. “No. I don’t.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. God exists.”

  Stern said nothing.

  “What about the devil? Do you believe in Satan?”

  “No.”

  And in a flash Roman slipped a length of clothesline over a beam hook and a noosed end around Stern’s neck. With all his body weight, Roman pulled the rope, causing Stern’s body nearly to lift off the ground. The man kicked and twisted as the rope dug into his neck, cutting off blood to his brain. In less than a minute, he stopped twitching as his body went limp. With a few quick twists of the loose end around the hook, Stern’s body weight did the rest.

  “Well, you’re wrong there, too,” Roman said, and left.

  72

  “You don’t even know if he’s alive,” Sarah said.

  “I think he is,” Zack said as he drove. “And I think he’s dying.”

  “Based on what?”

  “The last NDE—Gretch shot him in the side. And I felt it. I still do.” He pulled up his shirt to show clear, unbroken skin. “But it hurts, and I think he needs help.” He headed down Huntington Avenue and took a left onto Forsyth and from there to Storrow Drive, heading east, feeling a dim hum in his mind just above the threshold of awareness.

  “This is crazy. You said yourself the toxin creates delusions.”

  “That was him in the video.”

  “But it was grainy. You couldn’t see his face. Besides, that was three years ago.”

  Zack felt a blister of petulance rise. “Sarah, I recognize the shape of his head. I also saw him dig himself out,” he said. “And I saw him kill those people.” At the end of Storrow Drive, near Mass General Hospital, he turned into the lane for Route 93 North. “I felt the bullet go into him, like it was me.”

  “You heard Morris. They could be just scraps in your unconscious—things you put together. Flash dream stuff.”

  “He also said my mind merged with another.”

  “But that wasn’t confirmed.”

  Her insistence that he was yielding to some mystical instinct was making him anxious. “Then tell me how I knew about those deaths?”

  “Your suspensions happened after they died. So maybe you read about them and forgot, and maybe you thought you experienced them in suspension.”

  The traffic had slowed to a crawl just before the turnoff to 93 North. To their right was Massachusetts General Hospital. Except for the coma, the only other time Zack had been in a hospital was at his birth twenty-five years ago. His mother said he had been born with a caul. She also said that according to legend, people born with cauls were supposed to be mystical, have special powers. “Maybe.”

  Not so long ago, Sarah had sat across from him at the Grafton Street Pub & Grill and talked about the wondrous possibilities of transcending the physical world, of there being no death. And now she was telling him it was probably delusions. And that whatever instinct he was following was just his imagination. “Then how do you explain Luria’s claim? She said they’d identified his neuroprofile and that I merged with him last night.”

  “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see them.”

  “So she’s delusional, too?”

  “No, but it’s possible that she’s lining things up to fit a predetermined conclusion.” Then she added, “Look, Elizabeth Luria came into this project hoping to prove there’s an afterlife, and she got huge support from a televangelist. So scientific objectivity may not have been her bottom line, okay? Yes, they had your father’s neuropatterns. But what they found could also be an anomaly.”

  “So if a tree falls in the forest and Sarah’s not there, it didn’t fall.”

  “I didn’t say that, and frankly I don’t like your tone.”

  “And frankly I don’t like your automatic dismissal of other possibilities. I’m getting painful flares in my side, so how do you explain that?”

  She looked out the window for a moment to cool the air. Then she said, “Since there’s no evidence you got injured, I’d say you’re experiencing some kind of psychosomatic effect. You imagined or dreamed your father was shot, and this is just a case of autosuggestion or sympathetic delusion.”

  Autosuggestion. Sympathetic delusion. Such silky words, such silky reasoning, he thought. After all that talk about telepathy and the Overmind. Now it’s all New Age crap. “You’ve got a rational explanation for everything, haven’t you?”

  “And so did you once.”

  “Well, maybe this card-carrying reductionist is seeing other possibilities.” He felt another flare in his side, and he shot through the tunnel onto the northbound ramp of 93 and straight up the Zakim Bridge.

  “Will you please tell me where we’re going?”

  “I think I’ll know when we get there.” Ahead was the sign for a down-ramp that would take them back to Cambridge. “Still want to come?”

  “Only if you tell me where.”

  “Call it ESP, call it telepathy, call it cosmic fucking sentience—but I want to get to him before he dies for real. If I’m wrong, I’m an asshole. If not, I get to see him one more time.” He slowed down and pulled into the right lane for the turnoff. Sarah saw it approach.

  “What’s up 93?”

  “Maine.”

  “Maine? Zack, will you please tell me something definite?”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to flush away the festering irritation that she might be right: that he was talking himself into believing his father was beckoning him. “When my father was young, his father purchased a tract of land in the woods of southwestern Maine
. He built a little hunting and fishing cabin on the property, where my father was taken as a kid. When he got older, he’d hole up there for weeks on end.”

  “By himself?”

  The exit was upon them. “Should I turn?”

  “No.”

  He swerved back into the ongoing lane heading north on 93. “There’s another exit two minutes up.” Then he continued. “Yeah, by himself. He was a loner, and he loved the wilderness and learned survivalist skills. After college, he lived there for a year without seeing another person. It was his hideaway.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Once, but I was four or five. All I remember is woods and a small cabin. My mother didn’t like it because it was too isolated and primitive—no electricity and well water.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Off of 95, somewhere in the vicinity of the New Hampshire border.”

  “Gee, that narrows it down nicely.”

  He let her sarcasm pass. “I think I’ll know where to go when we get there.” They drove for a few more miles without saying anything. Then he turned his head toward her. “There’s one more exit before we get to 95. I can still take you home.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Yeah, I do. And if I’m not delusional, he’ll need medical attention.”

  “I was a nurse for only ten months, and that was five years ago.”

  “Beats my experience.”

  “Does this place have a name?”

  “Magog Woods.”

  “Magog Woods? Sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “That was the name back then. It may not even be called that or on any map.”

  “So, it’s been twenty years. Chances are old landmarks might be gone.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Then how will you know how to find it?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m hoping I’ll just know.”

  “I feel like a character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” She looked into the cargo space, where Zack had packed sleeping bags for them and a duffel bag of clothes. “All I have is what I’m wearing.”

  “You can get what you need up there. There are outlets everywhere.” They were closing in on Exit 36, Montvale Ave./Stoneham. “I can still take you back.”

  Just short of the turnoff, Sarah said, “Keep going.”

  Zack felt his internal organs unfist themselves. “Thanks,” he said, thinking, Oh, one more thing. Yesterday, on a hunch, he had found an online obit for Raymond Perkins, the hotshot lawyer who had gotten Volker and Gretch acquitted. Billy Volker’s uncle, in fact. He was found four weeks ago with an ax embedded in the back of his head.

  Zack kept that to himself and shot into the passing lane.

  73

  The Kashian kid was missing.

  After dispatching Morris Stern, Roman drove to Kashian’s apartment on Hemenway Street in Boston—a four-story redbrick building for college students. When nobody answered, he hit other buttons on lower floors until someone blindly let him in. Before that party came out to investigate, Roman was already above and jimmying the lock to Kashian’s door.

  The apartment was dark and looking as if the kid had left in a hurry. Bureau drawers were open, and underwear and tops were strewn about. His laptop was on his desk. No toothbrush or toothpaste in the bathroom. The kid was planning overnights.

  He left and drove to Harvard Street in Cambridge. Sarah Wyman was also nowhere to be found, and the downstairs neighbor said she had seen her leave the building before eight that morning.

  An hour later, he was at the address given him by Stern. GodLight Tabernacle Church sat at the front of a wooded compound in the suburbs of Medfield, about an hour southwest of Boston. A large empty parking lot separated the church from the road.

  Roman pulled in and drove to the rear of the structure. Sitting behind a shiny new chain-link fence was a large white house with an extension on the back. Its blandness masked the kind of research that apparently went on below—Warren Gladstone’s personal Manhattan Project. That explained the guard shack and barbed wire atop the fence.

  The shack was empty, and the gate was closed and padlocked. Because of the weekend, the place was abandoned, except for a single blue Volvo against the building.

  Roman had rented a Ford Explorer with a grille guard, which could have pushed his way through the fence. But that might set off an alarm. He had packed sundry paraphernalia in the back, including flashlights, rope, duct tape, and a variety of tools, including a long-handled cable cutter capable of snipping through half-inch steel wire. It took him only seconds to cut through the padlock.

  He drove through the gate and parked beside the Volvo, which was unlocked. On the upper corner of the windshield were parking stickers for Harvard Medical School faculty. He cut around to the main entrance, which to his surprise was unlocked, although he could have cut his way inside. The door opened to a security desk and gate with no one in attendance. Behind it was a door leading through a corridor to another entrance leading to the basement.

  With his pistol drawn, he descended the stairs.

  Halfway down, he detected a faint high-pitched electronic sound. At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor lit by a bank of fluorescent lights. Coming off either side of the corridor were rooms, some with windows. But the only one that was lit was toward the end—and the source of the electronic squeal.

  It got louder as he approached the room, his pistol gripped in both hands.

  The sound was some kind of alarm, and the piercing shrill was making him anxious.

  He reached the knob of the door, turned it, and, gripping the pistol, kicked it open.

  The alarm was emanating from a rack of electronic equipment that sat beside a gurney on which lay the body of a woman. She was hooked up to an IV and the various monitors on which alarm lights pulsed with the squealing. Clutched in her hands was a photograph of a young boy.

  From the various video images, he recognized Elizabeth Luria.

  And like the Kashian kid in the videos, she was hooked up for suspension from an IV. But unlike in the Kashian videos, the monitors were blinking red and squealing because all the vital function lines on screen were totally flat.

  The woman had suspended herself to death.

  74

  An hour later, Zack and Sarah were passing through Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The earlier heat of irritation had cooled, leaving him grateful that she was with him.

  As they moved to the right-hand lane, Zack pointed out the submarine base in the distance where his father had brought him when he was maybe seven.

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “Not a lot. He wasn’t around much,” Zack said. “He was a project engineer and worked long hours. I saw him mostly on weekends. Then my parents separated after Jake’s death. Sometime after that, he dropped out of sight.”

  “That must have been rough.”

  “It was.”

  “But you have some good memories of him.”

  “Until I was about ten. After he left, I saw him on a few occasions, which were mostly me telling him about what I was up to, but little about himself. Funny thing, as I got older, I thought of myself as not having a father, just a mother.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “To compensate, I made up stories about him. He was something of a photographer, so I’d tell kids he was on assignment for National Geographic and was off covering animal migrations in Kenya. Or helping build a refugee camp in Biafra. I once claimed he took me to Hawaii, where he saved me from a shark attack. Pretty pathetic.”

  “I guess that’s how you dealt with his absence.”

  “And all along he was a Benedictine monk praying and making jellies for tourists.”

  They crossed the Piscataqua Bridge. Although he had passed this way fifteen or more years ago, he felt nothing overt—just a vague sense that he was pursuing some kind of directive. Or maybe it was just dumb autosuggestion after all
. And the very possibility made his heart slump.

  “If he’s really still alive, what would you say to him?”

  “I’d ask him why he left me and my mother.” And if God is in him and talking to me.

  They soon passed a sign reading, “Welcome to Maine. The way life should be.”

  “Now what?”

  “We keep going.”

  “Until?”

  “Until I come to the right exit.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  “Not yet.”

  Please give a sign, he whispered in his head. I believe. Please give a sign.

  75

  For several minutes, Roman didn’t know what to do. Elizabeth Luria was dead. So were Stern and others who had put together that lab. He didn’t care about those he didn’t know about. The project was dead.

  And the Kashian kid was missing.

  Roman had spent the previous night and that morning poring over data in Morris Stern’s laptop. The mathematical stuff meant nothing to him. But the videos and explanations of the neuroimages of Kashian kept playing in Roman’s brain. And as he drove back to Boston, an idea began to grow. A very good idea. No, a brilliant idea. In fact, an epiphany.

  Epiphany.

  The term had shot up from the recesses of his memory. From his fretful days at St. Luke’s. Epiphany. As in Day of Epiphany. A revelation. A vision. A sudden miraculous insight.

  When he was a kid suffering through sermons, he remembered one Sunday in January when Father Infantino held forth on the meaning of the Day of Epiphany, when Christ’s divinity was revealed to the Magi. He went on about how each of us must find meaning in our lives and must listen to the yearnings of our souls, just like a lot of famous people who had made a difference in the world—Mother Teresa, President Kennedy, Martin Luther King. He hammered on about how each had experienced a revelation of how they should dedicate their lives—of how they were driven by higher missions from the rest of us. But the only difference between them and ordinary people was that they had discovered a clear purpose that they had embraced with fierce determination.