Sleight of Mind, ch 8
Taken For a Ride


“I should have seen it coming,” Mac said with a shrug. “I guess that drug you made didn’t have as much umph! as it should have.”

“It was good enough to get you here,” Clare Brooks sneered. “You have no idea… the plans you disrupted, barging into the lab like… like a bull in a china shop! Well, at least you saved me the trouble of searching for a guinea pig to test my serum on!” She thumbed back the hammer on the gun and pressed it firmly against his skull. “Drive.”

“Where to, ma’am?” Mac calmly started the engine and pulled out of the parking space.

Clare snorted. “You know where.”

“Yes, but the question is—how do you know where?”

Clare merely smiled in response.

“Ah… so I’m not the only guinea pig… you tested it on yourself.”

“Yes. So I know that it works! And I’ll know it if you try to deceive me. Don’t try to go to the cops… they’ll never believe your story!”

“Maybe not… but they might believe that gun you’ve got stuck in my ribs. Kidnapping is still illegal, you know.”

“This is just to keep you from getting funny, MacGyver. I’ve been warned about you. Now drive.”

Mac operated the car smoothly; they passed through the guard station easily, Clare kept the gun out of sight between the bucket-style seats. They merged into traffic and gained the highway. Mac held the car’s speed to just under the legal limit, letting cars and trucks pass him left and right.

“Drive faster! We don’t want to be late for the family reunion.” MacGyver tossed her a sharp look; she laughed and gloated, “We didn’t have to follow you, you idiot! We could read your mind and tell where you were going… you may as well have advertised your destination! Once we learned which airport you were going to land at—thanks for renting the car with your Phoenix Foundation ID, by the way—it was just a matter of waiting.”

“Got a mole at Phoenix, do you?” Mac asked. “Let me guess… a certain security guard at Western R&D.”

Clare stopped smiling. “How did you… oh. Well, he served his purposes and was paid. You realize by now that you weren’t the original target; if Thornton had drank the coffee, we’d have had our hands in all the Phoenix Foundation’s secret files… that was the plan from the beginning. But he wasn’t thirsty… so you got unlucky.”

“I figured that it had to be more than just the stuff in that bottle that you threw at me.” Mac sped up a little and signaled. He changed lanes, moving in and out of traffic. “I’ll bet the formula wasn’t easy to reproduce.”

“It was more than that; the serum is complicated. It must be ingested, inhaled, and absorbed subcutaneously. You have to expose the eyes and temper the aural sense; it must inundate all the senses. Eddie and I orchestrated it perfectly.” Clare preened in the rearview mirror.

Mac couldn’t conceal his amusement, “No, I meant that it must have been hard to translate everything from Russian.” He looked at Clare’s reflection; she wasn’t smiling anymore. “Don’t let me interrupt…. go ahead and expound on your ingenious plan. I’m fascinated.”

“No,” Clare pouted, changing her grip on the pistol and prodding him with the barrel in the ribs. “I don’t like people that make fun of me.” With her free hand, she reached up and began to massage her temple.

“I’m not making fun of you,” Mac said mildly. “You’re a serious scientist and you’ve taken something amazing and made it real. But I wonder about a drug that makes people psychic… how can that be practical? If anyone who takes the drug can read minds, it won’t be long before secret formula will be public… not to mention that your crimes will be well known.” Mac steered the car onto an exit and rode the curve, speeding up to merge into a new flow of traffic.

Clare laughed. “Well… we won’t give the serum to just anybody! And besides, the effects are only temporary…” Clare stopped, realizing she had just given away valuable information.

Mac pressed on. “And what about these side effects? Hemorrhages and migraines are a stiff price to pay for the illusion of telepathy.”

Clare stiffened. “Illusion? What do you mean?!”

“I mean, your drug doesn’t work, Clare. If it did, you’d have realized by now that I’ve been driving in circles while you’ve been talking your head off.” Mac signaled again and pulled to the side of the highway, then onto the smooth green swath of grass beyond the flow of traffic. He shut off the engine and half-turned in his seat to look her in the face. “But try to see the bright side; your partners won’t know that you’ve unintentionally betrayed them.”

Clare leveled the gun at Mac’s chest. “You’re lying! I know… I can read…”

“No, you can’t,” Mac said, ignoring the gun, “you know where I was going because you had a spy at the Foundation. You think you can read minds for the same reason I did… but it is a mind-trick. We see and hear a hundred times more than our brains can process, Clare. We may not realize it, but it is all in there…” he tapped his forehead with a finger, “… waiting to be retrieved. Your drug makes that retrieval a little easier, that’s all.

“I’m not saying that it isn’t and incredible scientific discovery,” Mac added as the feisty woman lunged the gun forward, “but it is not what you think it is. It is not a formula for ESP.”

“But… I …” Clare’s hand drooped as defeat settled on her; Mac took the gun from her hand, placing out of her reach.

Behind them on the grass, a car pulled out of traffic and parked; two plainclothes policemen approached Mac’s car, opened the rear door and helped the unresisting woman out.

Before she allowed them to lead her away, Clare turned to MacGyver and said, “If what you say is true, you won’t be able to save them… the woman and her child. He’ll pay any amount of money—do any unspeakable thing—to stay out of prison. He’ll kill you, Eddie… even his wife! You need to know what is in his mind… and now you don’t have the advantage that you’ll need to catch him!”

Mac started the engine and put the car in gear. “I don’t need to be able to read another person’s mind, Clare; I just need to read my own.” He tapped his forehead again, and then made a salute to her. “And maybe some luck.”

Clare looked at him earnestly. “Good luck, MacGyver,” she said, and then she turned and walked away with the policemen.

Mac’s Voice-over:
One down… two to go.

My head is killing me.


~~~tbc

This I like.

Nice one. MacGyver got her figured out perfectly!

Wow, I can't wait for the next chapter. I'm enjoy reading this so don't take too long to write the next part. Good job by the way.