Shock!

By Donald Ladew

A group of powerful industrialists control key members of government agencies who disburse funds .

They handle any dissent through a network of psychiatric clinics around the country. Their solutions end in death.

Mrs. Hariett Piers, an older woman and a financial investigator catches on. She is incarcerated and killed in one of the clinics.

Her son, Gilbert Piers investigates and finding no legal solution provides his own. Two of the people involved in her murder are killed in electrically spectacular ways.

Lt. Edward Swinburne, Homicide investigator, discovers that it is Piers but before he can proceed has to join Gilbert for the safety of his own family. Together they pursue those involved in the conspiracy with every weapon they can muster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456603298

Book preview

Chapter 1

Primum non nocere

Above all do no harm.

—The Hippocratic Oath (The physician’s oath)

At 2:00 AM the Cabrillo Springs Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic, unlike its state or metropolitan counterparts, was quiet. Inside, from a small treatment room near the center of the complex, an occasional murmur of sound could be heard above the hum of machinery and air conditioning.

On a good day, or night, as many as one "treatment" might be given every ten minutes. In the language of the Harvard Business School, the treatment room was a profit center.

It wasn't surprising that the patients in the back wards of the clinic were quiet. Under the watchful eye of ward nurses and attendants, the prisoner-patients had been given their evening ration of mind-numbing drugs, some powerful enough to buckle the knees of an elephant. This is how psychiatric health care professionals "subdue and control difficult, uncooperative and unruly patients." Not surprisingly, all patients are deemed in need of subduing. The issuance of drugs is another profit center.

There were four people in the treatment room: a burly male attendant to subdue and control uncooperative and unruly patients; a psychiatric intern, a psychiatric nurse skilled in the administration of anesthetics and the operation of treatment room equipment; the psychiatrist, who diagnosed the patient's medical-mental illness, and thus prescribed the treatment; and finally, the victim of this medieval ritual, this twentieth-century Auto da Fe.

The woman on the gurney near the entrance lay still except for an occasional twitch of fingers and toes. The age given on her chart was fifty-five. She looked older. Her eyes were open.

To look there was to sink into a well of terror, a terror the drug-paralyzed muscles of her throat could not articulate. And if she could have spoken, what might she have said?

"Why do you torture me? What have I done? Why am I being punished? Won't someone please listen?

She hadn't been allowed any food for eight hours in order to effect full bowel and bladder elimination. As happens frequently in torture, psychiatric therapy and death, the muscles of the bladder and bowels relax, and uncontrolled elimination occurs adding to the degradation. The victim's misery is thought less important than the offended sensibilities of the practitioners.

The attendant picked her up like a child and transferred her to the treatment table with practiced ease. It resembled an operating table, though less complex; the more obvious differences being the straps placed over the woman's legs, waist and shoulders. The Neanderthal quickly strapped her to the table.

Two large tears hung motionless in the corners of her desperate eyes.

The psychiatrist stood to one side, a modern day Torquemada waiting for his acolytes to prepare the way.

Their movements were precise, choreographed, filled with prediction and consequence. The tortured always remember the agony of waiting.

The nurse pulled the old woman's wispy hair away from her temples, soaked a ball of cotton in acetone and proceeded to scrub her temples methodically. The powerful odor washed over the sensitive nasal tissues of everyone in the room.

Only the old woman, aware of its acrid bite, was beyond comment or question, a prisoner in a dark chemical cell. Yet even there the smell registered on the delicate receptors of the central nervous system, which then transmitted their message to her brain. There, this new data, unevaluated, undifferentiated, added to her increasing sense of doom.

Acetone, besides being a fingernail polish remover, is used in electronic circuits to clean electrical contacts. It is considered helpful as it improves the flow of electric current through such circuits. There, on the altar stone of psychiatric sacrifice, it served the same purpose.

The nurse efficiently removed the woman's wedding ring from her bony finger and tossed it casually into a metal tray. She checked for other articles of jewelry. As the nurse's hand touched the patient's face, it unknowingly triggered a memory from the old woman's youth.

After the birth of her first and only child, she had lain in the hospital room, weary and dazed. She remembered feeling depressed and resentful. It had been a long and difficult delivery.

Then like an essence of peace and validation, two large brown hands, smelling faintly of cigars and cologne, had clasped her face with such tenderness she wept.

Her husband's voice was as clear in her memory as it had been then.

My princess, we have a son. I am so very, very proud of you. And she felt his lips warm on hers.

Does memory lie? Where is his face? She opened her eyes then and smiled, and he was there, but now...

The nurse turned away and pulled a low cart covered with a nest of black, plastic-coated cables ending in silver-tipped electrodes toward the operating table: An electro-encephalograph machine. Across the top a roll of chart paper waited for needle-like pens to inscribe incomprehensible lines: For what purpose? For what science? Were they there to validate that electro shock destroys the electrical circuits of a healthy body and the spirit that is really a man or woman?

The nurse connected the electrodes to various points of the woman's body to monitor both brain and heart activity.

Up to this point no one spoke. No order had been given, no questions asked. The chief inquisitor had brought the heretic to the stake; her satanic possession would be purged. He stood to one side, empty of emotion, empty of humanity, as empty as the machines of his abysmal trade.

You see? How simple. She has to be mad. Her psychiatric inquisitor can never admit that she might be sane…not ever.

The attendant stepped back from the table. The nurse set up an intravenous solution. Finally, something in the environment offered sufficient resistance to provoke a human response on her features. She frowned and muttered something unintelligible, and then quite clearly, The old bag hasn't any veins. At this point she turned to the high priest.

Does she get pentothal? she asked.

He seemed to be considering something, some significant technical point. He didn't look at the patient's chart; he just stared at her with narrow, vulpine eyes.

No, I don't think so, he said. We'll do an unmodified bilateral treatment.

Modified ECT is effected by first rendering the patient unconscious and then administering a paralytic drug, such as succinycholine in conjunction with Pentothal sodium. It is also necessary to provide mechanical means for breathing, as with the onset of these drugs, the patient is unable to breath unassisted. Unmodified treatment is done without any of these so-called precautions.

The nurse's head came up a fraction. She hesitated for less than a heart beat.

This should be interesting, she murmured.

She pushed the mechanical breathing aid away from the table, and then inserted a mouth gag of rubber covered with gauze between the woman's teeth to prevent her from biting through her tongue or shattering her teeth.

On another stand near the head of the table sat another machine. Unlike the EEG, it only had two cables, each tipped with a silver electrode. The old-fashioned case was black with a crackle finish. On the top were four or five knobs and dials. It wasn't very complex. Two wires came from the device, each tipped with a small button electrode.

The nurse opened a small jar of conductive gel especially impregnated with tiny bits of graphite to make it a better conductor of electricity. She applied it first to the woman's temples, then to the electrodes.

Finally the conductor of this rite macabre stepped forward to a point just behind the black machine and made a few adjustments.

We'll try one hundred and fifty volts, at a half second.

The Psychiatrist paused; a minute change passed over his face. Was it excitement? Was it anticipation? Was it a re-enactment of some medieval memory? Did he long for the robes of his former office?

He looked at the tableau for a moment, and pressed the button marked 'activate'.

How much imagination would it take to see an arm in clerical black thrust the torch into a pile of wood beneath a heretic's feet?

The older machine didn't have controls to set the duration automatically so the high priest had to 'estimate' a half second. It was in fact much closer to two seconds.

Despite the straps, despite the strength of the attendant, the woman's body arched upward with incredible violence to form an inverse bow. For a few seconds her body remained in this position, with only her shoulders, feet and clenched hands touching the table. She was in the classic position of tonic stiffening, common during the beginning of a grand mal epileptic seizure.

A muffled snap came from the area of her back.

Shit, the attendant muttered. He knew. He'd heard it before: Compression fracture of the spine in the middorsal region, somewhere between the forth and eight dorsal vertebrae.

Her body shook and jerked in a violent series of clonic spasms, a terrible parody of St. Vitus Dance. Mercifully, the woman sank into unconsciousness after the application of the current.

But, in that moment before unconsciousness, a white-hot spear of pain plunged through her temples: Terrible, bright explosion, darkness, and then silence.

She exhibited the outward manifestations of a typical, generalized grand mal epileptic seizure. But she didn’t have epilepsy! It directly followed the tonic/clonic convulsions associated with epilepsy and other forms of brain damage.

Immediately after the application of current to her temples, blanching became noticeable, followed by frothing at the mouth. During and after the 'treatment' the body snorted and made other revolting sounds associated with a respiratory system out of control. These outward manifestations of sadistic torture echoed the destruction in the brain and were no less brutal and loathsome.

The doctor turned to his assistants. He sent one back to ward duties then instructed the nurse and the other attendant to see to the patient and left.

Sentence had been passed; the patient-prisoner found guilty, punishment was measured and delivered. When you are named mad, and the name of your madness is inscribed in that modern Book of The Dead - DM III-R, The Psychiatrist's Handbook of Mental Illness - obviously you deserve your punishment.

The tyrant and the executioner name the malady, accuse, incarcerate and punish others for their own criminal madness.

To be named schizophrenic/witch must surely be a crime. Why else would such inhumane punishment be meted out, disguised in the wretched raiment of therapy? Carve on their tombstones, 'We did it for their own good': never, R.I.P. For those who make the terrible, the unforgivable choice of being different, there is no peace before the inquisitor, or the psychiatrist.

The nurse quickly disconnected the woman's body from the instrument of her salvation, still twitching uncontrollably, and with the help of the attendant, placed her on the gurney. They wheeled her quickly into the recovery room and left the area: the attendant to the back wards and the nurse to her small office off the long hall.

Two hours later, unattended, the woman died, without protest, without a fight, alone...battered in body and spirit, without ever having been asked, What's wrong?

In the psychiatric clinic, souls do not exist, nor spirit, nor Atman, not even the elegant 'élan vital'. Such delusory ideas are hateful to the meat-body, machine-mind of psychiatric medicine. The beautiful word 'psyche' meaning spirit, unfortunate root to the word, psychiatrist, has never been recognized by that evil trade.

Chapter 2

The night was soft, darkest blue. A cuckoo's voice in the cedars called for the dawn, still an hour and a half away.

In the arid mountains of eastern Turkey, the heavy air was filled with the final gathering of the night's moisture; there drifted odors that might have delighted a wandering Phoenician a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

All around was crag and tor in shades of brown and gray, unrelieved except for a few box myrtle, stunted cedar and wild flowers. Here, lovers of desert, hills and solitude could find peace.

At 04:35 AM a man left the compound and stood quietly just outside the gate. He stared into the darkness and saw no color in the surrounding mountains, only shadows.

A modern gate, three inches of tool steel with a Lexan center, had been mounted in a stone wall that was five hundred years old and four feet thick. An alert marine sentry operated the locks. They didn't talk.

Watching him start his run down the mountain road, the Marine shook his head and muttered.

Mr. Gilbert Austin Piers the III, you are one crazy bastard. What the hell, at least you're not a limp-dick fairy like most of the weirdoes who work around here.

Because Gilbert made the run twice a week, the sentries had his routine worked out in every detail. Gilbert ran unaware that he was a topic of discussion among the Marine contingent.

The first time he went on his bi-weekly jaunt, the sergeant in charge ordered Private Nicols to go with him, make sure he didn't get in trouble. Private Nicols came back to the compound wheezing like a man with emphysema.

Among themselves they called him 'Mad Gilbert’, but there was respect. The private reported on his trek in detail.

Y'all wouldn't believe it to look at him, Staff. I mean he probably don't weigh more'n one-fifty soaking wet, and what is he, five-ten tops?

There were murmurs of agreement from the other men.

Anyhow, off we go. He's wearing them old, baggy tan pants and a sweat shirt got a picture of that French singer, Mireille Mathieu on the front and back.

If Mlle. Mathieu ever had the misfortune to hear the private pronounce her name, she wouldn't have had the slightest idea what he was talking about. His slow, singsong cadence that made every statement a question came from the hills west of Winston Salem, North Carolina.

He's got his rucksack, always got the same stuff in it, right? Nichols started to name off the contents of Gilbert's pack, ticking each item off on his fingers.

He's got his mountain climber's stove, a container of fuel, a metal tin of wax-covered matches; you know, them kind you get in a Boy Scout kit. Then there's two tins of beef stew, a half pound of goat cheese, a few pieces of fruit and two quarts of water in plastic containers.

The corporal who had gate duty that day nodded his head after each item.

"There's a few other odds and ends; a big 'ole survival knife, you know, one of them Ranger jobs with a compass in the hilt. On top is two books. Man, them suckers 'er dog-eared and bent like my Momma's Bible. One's a paperback by a guy called Montaigne (the private pronounced it, Montag-nee) and the other one looks real old, by a guy called, Emerson.

"And like...he don't say shit, he just looks at you with those puppy dog’s eyes, like my daddy's setter. I mean, it ain't like he's some kind of fag or nothin', but he's just too pretty. Do him good to get his nose broke or something, maybe he wouldn't look like them guys advertising fifty-dollar shirts in Playboy.

He's just there, patient. Like it's okay with him if you screw around that dumb gate for a week, but you know it's weird, him bein' so patient, I really felt like I better get my shit together.

Private Nicols shook his head in puzzlement, remembering.

So he sees I'm ready and just takes off running, no warm up, no nothing. I've really got to step on it to keep up and I'm in pretty good shape. Not like old Gilbert though. This guy's an iron-man! Private Nicols voice was filled with admiration.

Gilbert would have been surprised to hear the marines taking such an interest in him. Some people, even friends, accused him of monomania, of being too self-involved. He didn't mind the company of others, but his interests were singular and he seldom met anyone who shared the things he cared about.

When the gate shut behind him, he stood still for a moment, then set off running easily down a dirt track that angled northward around the face of the mountain; not fast, a steady fluid pace.

The mountain was called Supahn Dagi, thirteen thousand six hundred and ninety-seven feet at the summit. It was ninety-nine percent rock. It was located thirty miles south of Malazgirt and Patnos in the heart of what for a thousand years had been called Kurdistan, a wasteland of rugged mountains and high valleys.

Over the dry smell of decomposing rock and wind-scoured soil he caught a momentary scent of cedar and oranges, strong and sweet. It could have come north from the shores of Lake Van.

He ran for a half hour, and then turned off the dirt road at a barely discernible goat track. It continued around to the north for a mile and began climbing steeply. He ran without effort, his rhythm established, his mind centered.

The rocky outcrops and barren slopes were beginning to have definition. It was 05:30 AM: Sunrise at 05:50 AM. He'd timed the first part of his exercise to arrive at a small meadow just below eight thousand feet, at dawn.

When he arrived, the sun began to light the surrounding mountains in orange and gold. An ancient poem came unbidden to his thoughts and he whispered it to the hills in the language of the Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet, Omar Khayyam who'd written it nearly a thousand years before.

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Nearby a cuckoo sang, perfect bell tones, high and sweet. He took the pack off, stretched his arms up and bent quickly, touching his palms to the ground. He did this a dozen times, and then laid out the stove and a few items in preparation for breakfast. But food would come later.

Looking out across the lonely valleys toward the mountains beyond, he sensed the bulk of the rock rising vertically behind him.

That first time they went out, when Private Nicols finally caught up with Gilbert at the little plateau, and looked up at the pinnacles, he knew what Gilbert was going do and it sent a chill over him.

Mr. Piers?

Gilbert looked at him quietly, not interested, not ignoring him.

Y'all ain't gonna climb that thing alone, are you? I mean no back up, no rope...shit! I don't want to bring you back in a doggy bag. Everybody in the lab, including the staff sergeant is gonna be pissed at me.

Gilbert said nothing.

The private went on, "You are going to do it." He'd been looking at the thing as he talked.

Finally Piers was forced to respond to the private to get him to shut up.

Mr. Nicols, I like to do this in silence until the climb is done...

Private Nicols, relating the story, laughed ruefully. "Them puppy dog's eyes weren't soft no more, it's like I got two arrers stuck in my face. What the hell, I shut up. Besides, I was...like, beginning to believe him, you know, that he'd climb the thing without falling off.

"Well he did climb it, an' just watching made my stomach churn. I swear to God I never seen nothin' done better. Ole Gilbert, he walked around the base touching the rock, feelin' it, lookin' up at it sorta strange. Then he don't say shit, like, 'well I'm goin' now', or 'see ya later'. He has this bag of chalk or something hanging from his belt. He covers his hands with it and then just starts, and while I'm trying to keep track of him he's already thirty feet up and moving fast.

It's like stretch...lift...stretch; stop, quick look around at the rock and off he goes again. The sun was up so I could see pretty good. He's going across bits of that face that don't have no holds I can see. When he'd got up five hundred feet or so, I put the glasses on him, and I catch his face real clear in the light. It was, I don't know, like one of them painted saints in an Eyetalian church. He's serious, man, real serious.

"I was follerin' him up this crack, a little wider than his body; he's kinda wedged in, moving up inch wise, like a caterpillar. Only place he slows down is near the top, and it's a hundred feet of worse than vertical.

I wish there'd been another climber around to tell me what's going on, I mean I know he's doin' some real superior shit: Like technical stuff. It's like this thing, the private reached out and slapped the stock of his M16, I know what every part of this sucker does, but when I'm puttin' them in the ten ring, I don't think on it, I do it. I know it!

Gilbert turned and looked up at the gray rock spire. His first glance took in the whole tower as a unit, then up in a searching flow. He noted lines he'd followed in the past. His eyes moved in a series of steps, with pauses as though taking a breath before moving on.

He rated the whole structure as a variety of easy pitches of two or three in difficulty, a nasty chimney three-quarters of the way up—occasionally a four—and the backside route had a hundred feet of five mostly due to verticality and total exposure, a double overhang and bad rock.

It was approximately nine hundred feet from where he stood to the top of the pinnacle. There were four such columns on the north side of the mountain that stood menhir-like, searching for an ancient Mongol menace to the north. The bulk of the mountain loomed behind the sentinels another four thousand feet above.

Today he would take an easier route, straight up the north face. He imagined the climb in his mind as a whole event. His goal was not so much speed as economy. If possible, the climbing should be elegant. His purpose was more than just reaching the top; he knew he could do that. He climbed at a level only someone of comparable skill and attitude could judge and appreciate.

Having put his camp in order, Gilbert walked around to the north side and put his hands on the rock.

He felt a vague unease, but couldn't locate the source, so he set it aside. The ascent went fast. Two hundred feet from the top he realized he was attacking the rock, slamming his hands onto the holds, bashing his fists into cracks.

He stopped at the top of a crack beneath a difficult transition.

What is it? He felt split.

Experience demands that you climb with a clean mind. You must have a good attitude on the rock. Without rope, there can be no mistakes, only brief disappointment, perhaps terror and certainly death.

He carefully brought the environment back into focus. For a few moments the strange intentions submerged. The transition was difficult and he managed the hundred feet of pure tension moves to the top. It wasn't pretty. In a lesser climber the distraction might have killed him, but his level of technical skill took up the slack.

Dissatisfaction was not what he expected to feel as he sat atop the monolith. He tried to compose himself, but couldn't. He felt something reach out for him.

After ten minutes of it and no letup, he stood atop the thousand-foot basalt pillar and began a Tai Chi exercise. He concentrated on the moves and for the first fifteen minutes regained a kind of harmony.

The private concluded his story with the strange things he saw atop the pinnacle.

"When he got up there, I couldn't see too good, so I backed off down the road and had a look with the glasses. It was some weird shit, man. At first I didn't know what was happening. I thought it was some kind of slow-motion dance. Then it come to me. I was in 'Frisco a couple years ago, out at the Golden Gate Park with a lady friend real early one morning.

"There's this little, open, house-like thing, looks out over the ocean. Must a' been ten or fifteen oriental dudes in pajamas, men and women, doin' the same thing. The girl tells me it's Tai Chi, one of the oldest martial arts.

Then I remember ol' Gilbert’s hands." There was a pause as he looked around at the marines in the squad bay.

This guy's got hands like Sergeant Hana, my old unarmed combat instructor at Camp Pendleton. Got those same blocky knuckles, and mean-lookin' calluses down the side. Then it come to me, Sergeant. I fuss with that ol' boy and he's gonna eat my lunch and the bag I brung it in!

They'd all laughed and the Staff Sergeant nodded, You're gettin' smart, Nicols, might be you'll survive this hitch.

Gilbert took the exercise through to the end. Then he tightened his rucksack and reluctantly left the top of the tower. Months before, on his second trip, he'd brought rope, set a line onto the face and left it there. He didn't care much about how he got down, so he used the rope and rappelled: Two and a half hours up and two minutes down.

The body is good, so why am I out of sorts? He moved about the small plateau, preparing his meal; heating the two cans of stew, cutting a few hunks of cheese. He ate two handfuls of figs and a pear while he waited for the stew to get hot.

He reviewed the work he'd been doing for the past three months. Site-W, Western Turkey, another 'secret' station which everyone in the defense community, Time Magazine, Aviation Week and probably the average guy in the street knew about.

The network of similar listening posts around the world was part of a chain of electronic intelligence gathering stations. Some of the sites had the large FPS series, over-the-horizon radars to track Soviet military flights and rocket launches. Each site had a variety of receiving equipment that covered every frequency band, civilian and military.

The men and women who worked there were about equally divided between technical personnel and listener-translators. Gilbert was an expert on the systems and operations engineering side, one of that rare breed who are equally comfortable with electronic hardware and software.

This particular site hadn't been putting out good quality data for months and he'd been sent to find out why.

It was mostly people. There were still some tracking anomalies in two of the big radar dishes, but he had a handle on that.

It wasn't related to his work. A year before he ended a love affair with a dancer in Paris, but that had been amiable. Neither wanted commitment.

There'd been a long series of mild arguments, which foreshadowed the end. They couldn't get passionate enough for a full-blown row, so there wasn't even the pleasure of making up.

If anything, he was relieved.

After he finished his meal he usually sat for a while and smoked a cigar. This morning he gathered his things as soon as he finished eating and headed back to the site.

Four days later he got the notification. It was remarkable in its lack of detail.

I regret to inform you that your mother is dead: funeral on Tuesday next. As Executor of your mother's estate please advise. It was signed by a Mr. Eavers: a lawyer he didn’t know.

Chapter 3

Gilbert collapsed, like a man who all his life believes in the laws of gravity and suddenly finds himself floating off the surface of the planet.

This is wrong! It cannot be!

The site manager, a French NATO appointee, Robert Beaumanier, having read the telegram before he gave it to Gilbert, didn't know how to respond.

Since Gilbert's arrival he'd seen the work of a resolute, highly skilled engineer, one who never raised his voice.

Mr. Piers?

Gilbert looked at him for some time before Beaumanier realized Gilbert didn't see him at all. He looked at something far removed from the small office.

Finally, Beaumanier, not very bright under the best of circumstances, realized Gilbert was in shock, took his arm and gently led him to a worn couch covered with frayed damask. From a sideboard near the desk, he took a bottle of American whiskey, poured a generous amount into a heavy tumbler and placed it directly into Gilbert's hand. He led him to drink like a child.

Here, drink this, Gilbert... He pronounced his name in the French way. Drink it, mon vieux. Je suis désolé. I am very sorry.

Gilbert drank, shuddering convulsively. His expression of disbelief hadn't changed. Tears came, but his features were frozen. He