Page 76 of Thorn

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 ayeahhere isn’t there?”

“She found out that when identified by DNA not only was this guynotthe 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.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Thorn

Paris, France

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