“You don’t come to Shelbyville for fine wine and gourmet food.”
“In that case, why did your aunt have a house here?”
“She liked the tranquillity of the mountains. Tell me more about Lawrence Quinn and his work.”
“You probably already know that a lot of the standard antidepressants, tranquilizers and painkillers have unpredictable side effects on people who possess high-level parasenses.”
She sighed. “We found that out when the doctors tried to treat Aunt Vella. Most of the drugs they used made things worse.”
“Not an uncommon situation. Psychotropic meds, in general, have unpredictable effects on sensitives. The Society does a lot of work in that area, trying to determine which meds are effective and which are dangerous. And any sensitive who decides to experiment with illicit crap is really asking for nightmares.”
“I see.”
“Getting back to Quinn, it took a surprisingly long time before anyone noticed that he had vanished.”
“Why?” she asked.
“There was some confusion initially because he had requested a large block of extended vacation time. It was only about a week ago that the lab director finally realized that Quinn wasn’t coming back to work. No one else missed Quinn, either. He was a loner. No close friends or family. Eventually the director decided that something was wrong and notified J&J. By then a couple more days had passed. An investigation was launched immediately, but Dr. Quinn seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.”
“I assume that made your boss extremely suspicious,” she said.
He smiled slightly. “Fallon is a suspicious man by nature.”
“Probably why he’s running J&J.”
“Probably. In any event, it didn’t take him long to leap to the conclusion that Quinn may have been connected to an organization called Nightshade. The group has created a new version of the founder’s formula.”
She froze. “My father was expelled from the Society on the rumor that he was conducting research on that damn formula.”
“What do you know about it?”
“The formula?” She set her glass down in the exact center of the cocktail napkin. “Very little. Just hints that I picked up from Aunt Vella over the years. I got the impression that the formula had the potential to greatly enhance a person’s natural psychic talents.”
“Theoretically it can boost a mid-range talent up to a level ten. It can kick a level ten like you or me right off the charts.” He paused. “It would, in effect, make us very, very powerful sensitives.”
She shivered. “I don’t think I’d like that very much. The voices are hard enough to deal with as it is. I don’t want them to get any louder.”
“Smart woman. I’m with you. But ours is an unusual and inherently difficult talent to handle. Trust me, there are a lot of intuitives, hunters and others who would kill for a drug that could jack up their talents. And Nightshade is happy to do just that.”
“Kill?”
“It has already done so on several occasions that we know of during the past year.”
She stared at him, nonplussed. “All because of that stupid formula?”
“It has caused trouble ever since it was recovered from Sylvester Jones’s tomb.”
“Why is the formula off-limits as far as the Society is concerned?”
His brows rose. “Aside from the fact that no rational person wants to see a whole bunch of superpowerful psychically enhanced criminals created, you mean?”
She winced. “Aside from that.”
“The formula is inherently unstable and has always had one hell of a downside,” he said.
“What’s the downside?”
“Sooner or later, everyone who has ever taken any version of the drug has wound up dead or insane, invariably after turning into a ruthless killer first.”
She cleared her throat. “I see. Okay, that definitely qualifies as an annoying side effect.”
“We don’t know a lot about the long-term effects of the latest version of the formula that Nightshade has cooked up but one thing has recently become clear. It’s seriously addictive.”
“How?”
“Insanity followed by suicide ensues within two or three days if the individual is deprived of the formula. From what J&J has been able to figure out, Nightshade uses that nifty little feature to control its operatives.”
She shuddered. “I can see where the tactic would be an effective way to keep discipline in the ranks.”
“There haven’t been any defectors or informants from the organization, that’s for sure.”
“What does Nightshade want?”
He shrugged. “What most bad actors want. Power and money.”
She smiled. “Total world domination, huh?”
He didn’t respond to her teasing. “Let’s take one small example. Just think what you could do if you had the ability to slip a few very powerful parahypnotists, sensitives with the ability to install hypnotic suggestions in almost anyone, into various corporations and agencies of the federal government. We’re talking the potential to control CEOs, governors, senators and the president.”
She jumped a little, spilling a few drops of wine. Grabbing a napkin, she hastily blotted up the liquid. “Okay, I can see where that might be a very bad thing. You said the Society has had this problem before?”
“There haven’t been many organized attempts to re-create the drug and use it for illicit purposes, but over the years there have been any number of individuals who were unable to resist the lure of experimenting with the formula.”
“People like my father?” she said coolly.
Zack folded his arms on the table and fixed her with an unrelenting expression.
“Judson Tallentyre was the most notorious renegade scientist of his generation,” he said evenly. “When he disappeared with the formula, the Master and the Council made finding him and destroying his lab and his research notes J&J’s top priority. There was a collective sigh of relief in the higher echelons of the Society when Wilder Jones reported that he had completed his mission.”
Well, he hadn’t tried to sugarcoat that.
“I should probably give you points for honesty,” she said, “but I don’t feel like it.”
“I understand.”
She took a fortifying swallow of wine and slowly lowered the glass. “I didn’t realize the Tallentyre name was so…so infamous within the Society.”