Free Chronic Fear by Scott Nicholson

dedicated devices, but anything sent over a network is fair game for anybody to steal.”
    Haleema drew back, cowering a little. Alexis realized she’d better not let her rage run wild, or Haleema might start wondering about the real nature of the work.
    “Sorry,” Haleema said, lowering her gaze to the floor.
    The subjects had been assigned numbers to protect their privacy, and when the results were published, no names would be revealed. But during the analysis, Alexis was running both names and assigned numbers to avoid mistaken identities. If someone had hacked the records, that would have led them to take a closer look.
    Or raid the lab .
    “Anything particular you were correlating?” Alexis asked, more calmly.
    “I was working on the Ds,” Haleema said. “Four or five, if I remember correctly.”
    Davis.
    Alexis forced her voice to remain steady. “And you e-mailed them all?”
    “Yes.” Haleema picked up a stack of manila folders to check behind it.
    “With names and numbers assigned?”
    “Yes, the way we did all of them.”
    Alexis pretended to keep searching but she knew the laptop was gone. Whoever had been watching her must have hacked into Haleema’s e-mail. It wouldn’t even be that difficult, since the university had a large IT staff devoted solely to maintaining the networks, any of whom could have opened her e-mail.
    Or granted password access to an interested bidder.
    You’re getting as paranoid as Mark. Nobody cares about the brain chemistry of college students besides the Miller Brewing Company. I’ve been very careful.
    Still, the Donnie Davis files couldn’t be a coincidence. She’d lumped Mark’s scans in with the others so they wouldn’t be identified as anomalies, and Haleema was too inexperienced to notice the tiny lesions that only a skilled eye could detect.
    “I don’t think it’s here, Dr. Morgan,” Haleema said, worried and depressed.
    “Maybe you left it in your dorm room, or your boyfriend’s apartment. Have you checked with Lost and Found?”
    “No,” Haleema said. “Should we call the campus police?”
    “Let’s not do that yet,” Alexis said. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”
    She said the words vacantly and automatically, knowing it had walked out of the room yesterday afternoon under the arm of one of the intruders.
    But why didn’t they steal the vector machines or my desktop? Sure, those would be much harder to carry away without attracting notice, but then they would have had a better chance of tracking my digital footprints.
    Whatever the reason, Mark’s brain scans were now in somebody else’s hands, and whether they knew what they were looking at or not, the covert thieves held the early evidence of how her husband had changed since the Monkey House exposure.
    Evidence of how she had changed him.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    National Clandestine Service Officer B.H. Gundersson had spent all his life trying to make up for being born with the name “Byron.” Back before he was old enough to know it was a dorky name, he liked it. Then in the sixth grade, some wiseass kid had called him “Lord Byron,” and one of the teachers said it was the name of a Romantic poet, and the boys rode his case until high school, when he got big enough to crack a few skulls if necessary.
    And he’d found it necessary.
    To make matters worse, he kind of liked poetry, although he preferred Shelley to Byron. Even worse than that, he was a little chubby and squishy, and girls often thought he was gay. Maybe the boys, too, but he was big enough to keep their mouths shut. Then one day he’d made the mistake of wearing a gold T-shirt and a black leather jacket, and some girl had called him “Bumblebee,” and that drew a few laughs and caught on for a while.
    Finally, he’d settled on “Bee,” even writing it on all his homework until that’s how it appeared in the football program, which his dad thought sounded tough and his mom said she could live with, though