Someone's In My Head (WATTYS AWARD WINNER 2015)

Chapter Thirty

Naturally, upon hearing the threat, Phil's first reaction was to strangle Royce right there and then, but luckily Lenny pumped some sense into him before he could actually do that.

"Get a hold of yourself, man!" Lenny urged. "Killing him doesn't change the equation. I know it sounds depressing, but if what he said was true, by taking him out, you're basically signing your own wife's death warrant."

Making sure that Phil wasn't going to try anything rash, Lenny turned to Royce. "How do I know that you're not lying?"

"There are agents posted inside the room where they're being held." Royce spat. "If they see you walk out of this room before me, they'll shoot them straightaway, no questions asked."

"Not if we get to them first." Phil countered.

Royce smiled thinly. "Well, if you think you can travel faster than a bullet, then go ahead; be my guest. Kill me."

Shit. This guy had every possibility covered. No wonder he'd kept both Tanya and Layla alive instead of killing them; they were his bargaining chip. His trump card to get out of here, scot-free.

Bastard.

"What are we gonna do?" I asked. Me? I was out of ideas.

Nobody said anything for a long while. All I heard was the ragged breaths coming out of my mouth. Royce had already stopped struggling altogether; he knew he'd won this time. Honestly, I believe we knew that too. There was no way we could arrest or kill him without inflicting any harm to Tanya and Layla. His hostage strategy had worked out perfectly.

And that sucked, big time.

Finally, Lenny broke the awful silence. "And how do I know you'll keep your word once I give you what you want?"

Royce didn't even hesitate. "That's the thing. You don't." He admitted.

"You seriously gonna let him go?" Phil demanded, his voice pained. "Didn't this guy like, murder hundreds of innocent people in cold blood or something?"

I could tell that Lenny wasn't very happy with this idea either. "What other choice do we have?"

"I don't know...drag him to the room where Tanya's being held and threaten him to release them at gunpoint."

"I think we both know how risky that is." Lenny disagreed. "There are countless of possibilities that could happen, and in most of those possibilities, death is an unavoidable factor."

"So you're telling me that we should give him what he wants?" The words sounded like acid in my mouth; the taste of defeat was definitely not good.

"Yeah," Lenny muttered. "At least for the meantime. We'll see how things work out and improvise if possible."

"Well, I'm not the one who's gonna be divulging information that might potentially lead to the destruction of the world." Phil shrugged.

Lenny ignored Phil's remark, but it was visible that he was getting antsy about the decision he was about to make. Then, although it was clear that knew exactly what information Royce wanted, he asked, "What do you wanna know?"

"The optogenetics Kristoff used to restrain Jarod and allow Phil to have full and unrestricted control over his body." Royce stated. As he was still facing away from me, he sounded like he was just making a casual statement, but I knew that wasn't the case at all.

Lenny inhaled sharply. Oh, man. Sudden, sharp intakes of breath spell trouble.

"It's actually a sub-phase of Phase Two." He began. "The main concept is to utilize the functioning mechanism of the light-sensitive protein in algae called Halorhodopsin to silence specific neurons in the subject's brain."