The Hope Vendetta by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

33.

MONTANA

THE PREVIOUS DAY

Dr. Joshua Greenberg pulled the rental Honda off the highway and into the parking lot of the roadside diner. Grabbing his briefcase from the passenger seat, he climbed out and groaned. He’d been on the road a long while. He stretched and rubbed his eyes.

A Freightliner truck roared past with a blast of wind and a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. The doctor turned towards the diner and slowly, stiffly, climbed the two steps up to the entrance. The place was quiet—a few sullen truckers and a couple of families taking a late lunch. He took a booth in the corner, settled on the red vinyl seat, and ordered coffee. He didn’t feel like eating. The brown liquid that the waitress shoved under his nose wasn’t really coffee, but he sat and drank it anyway.

He sat there for thirty minutes, staring at his hands on the table. He should be moving on. They’d be expecting him back at the facility, to deliver the package to Jones. It was still two hours’ drive away.

He gave a short, bitter laugh. Facility. That was a fine word for a semi-derelict hotel in the middle of nowhere that was being used as an illegal detention center for a kidnapped innocent young woman.

He glanced down at the briefcase next to him on the seat. Reached across, unsnapped the catch, dipped inside, and came out holding the little bottle. He set it down on the table in front of him. It was amber glass and held just under 100 milliliters of clear, slightly viscous fluid. There was no label. It looked innocuous enough. It could have been anything, some kind of innocent herbal remedy even. But he knew that if he were to empty the contents into the bubbling coffeepot behind the counter, every cup served out of it would make its drinker a candidate for the nuthouse within a day.

First they would become unusually chatty and uninhibited, happily revealing even the most intimate secrets about themselves. Then the drug would go to town on the unconscious mind, liberating every shred of darkness from inside—every repressed fear, every angry or bitter emotion, every disturbing or violent thought. It would all come flooding out, overwhelming the conscious mind in a wave of rage and paranoia and grief and terror, the whole spectrum of the most extreme emotions a human being could experience, all at once, relentlessly, for hours.

There was no stopping the feedback loop. Madness was the inevitable result, and there was no antidote.

He shuddered. And he was on his way to hand this over to Jones to give to an innocent young woman. To ruin her forever.

He sank his head into his hands.

How the hell did I get involved with this terrible business?

He knew perfectly well how. One small mistake, building on the errors of his past that he thought he’d left behind. One small mistake had ruined everything.

Joshua Greenberg had come from a poor background and spent his life trying to make up for it.

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