Falling Awake

at the photo he had attached to the door of the refrigerator. “Time is meaningless to you.”
    Lawson snorted. “Time is everything to me. That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to find Isabel Wright and bring her into Frey-Salter. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but there was no reason to rush into such a move. Things were working just fine the way they were. But with old man Belvedere gone—”
    “Hang on, let’s start at the beginning. Belvedere’s dead?”
    “Yeah. Several days ago.”
    “And you just found out?”
    “Haven’t had any reason to contact him for a couple of weeks.” There was a shrug in Lawson’s voice.

    “Neither have I. Been busy with a new start-up project.” And with his ongoing research into an old problem, but he sure wasn’t going to mention that bit. He didn’t need any more of Lawson’s well-meant but really annoying lectures on the dangers of obsessing over the Vincent Scargill issue.
    “As I was saying, the old man’s son, Randolph Belvedere, took over as director of the center the day after he buried his father,” Lawson continued.
    “Didn’t know Belvedere had a son.”
    “Beth looked into it. Turns out Belvedere and Randolph were what folks like to call ‘estranged’ for years. But the son was the old man’s only heir. He got everything, including the center.”
    Beth Mapstone would know, Ellis thought. She owned Mapstone Investigations, a quasi-private security firm with affiliates in several states.
    Beth was not only Lawson’s wife, she was his partner in every sense of the word. The pair had enjoyed, or endured, depending on your point of view, an on-again, off-again relationship for over thirty years. At the moment, they were off-again. But when it came to their professional relationship, they were always a team.
    The formal relationship between Mapstone Investigations and Frey-Salter was officially that of corporate security firm and corporate client. In reality, however, Mapstone served as both an investigative arm for Lawson’s secret agency and a convenient cover for his agents.

    “What does Randolph Belvedere think of his father’s theories of Level Five dreaming?” Ellis asked.
    “Thinks they’re pure crap, of course. He’s into sleep research, though. Got big plans for the center. Needless to say, none of those plans involve Isabel Wright.”
    “But you have plans for her.”
    “I do, indeed,” Lawson said fervently. “I want her right here where I can keep an eye on her.”
    “What did you mean when you said she was gone?”
    “Gave notice to the manager of the apartment complex where she was living out there in LA, packed up her belongings and took off.”
    “I assume this phone call is not because you can’t locate Isabel Wright.”
    “Hell, no. Beth found her right away. That’s not the problem. The problem is convincing her to come back here to Raleigh to work at Frey-Salter. I don’t want to take a chance on losing her to some other outfit.”
    “That’s where I come in, I take it?”
    “I’m counting on you to sell her on the idea of working directly for me.”
    “Why would I want to do that?”
    “That hurts, Ellis. That cuts real deep. Our association may have started out on a business footing, but I like to think that we did the macho male bonding thing after you came to work for me.”
    “Was that what you call it? Felt more like me working my assoff in your lab every night while you conducted your Frankenstein experiments.”
    “What are you complaining about? All you had to do was go to sleep.”
    There had been a little more to it than that, Ellis reflected. He had not exactly slept his way through Jack Lawson’s experiments, he had dreamed his way through them. And those dreams had not been sweet. He usually awoke from them in a state of physical and mental exhaustion. It sometimes took days to recover. The really bad ones still took that long.
    He had been in the middle of his sophomore year in college when Jack found him. On the point of dropping out of school because the budding business analyst part of him was reluctant to take on any more student loans, he volunteered for a sleep research experiment.
    He had not been keen on the idea of being hooked up to a lot of electrodes while he slept but he told himself that the money was good and he needed the cash. Deep down, however, he knew that was not the real reason he had decided to offer himself up as a research subject. The truth